Goodbye to a dear friend and deepest condolences to his family. Mike was truly lit from within. #MikeAtta
Was very sad to hear about the passing of Mike Atta this morning. He was a good friend of some of my good friends, and I was fortunate enough to spend an evening with him, his wife and son about eight years ago.
His blitzkrieg SoCal punk rock band The Middle Class were landmark pioneers in the evolution of UK-influenced punk into a brilliant brand of US steamroller punk, and then again into a haunting, wiry postpunk sound as The Middle Class themselves evolved.
My 2006 interview with Mr. Atta is here. Dynamite Hemorrhage sends its best wishes to Mike Atta’s family and friends.
THE EYES, early LA circus punks who featured David Brown (Dangerhouse founder) and, for part of their life, Charlotte Caffey (later to shuffle over to the Go-Gos and achieve much fame).
This scan is taken from the Dangerhouse 2xCD of all the label’s 45s, which is available on Munster Records.
SKID was an early-80s Milwaukee-based fanzine published by one Jon Hope, who later published a great music blog called Underneathica during the 00s. SKID was put together whilst he was a teenager, and this one, issue #5, even has a “thanks to Dad” in it, which is pretty great.
Jon’s taste at age 15 or 16 was quite stellar, ranging from hardcore to experimental post-punk to Flipper to some happy English new wave. He recently wrote liner notes to the AMA-DOTS reissue, having been a fiendish devotee of the band in their time. I’ll be posting a few other scans from Skid #5 as the week progresses.
This bit of learning-to-play DIY jangle from Vancouver went over my head in 2011, yet now this song’s earwormed itself into my cranium for good, three years later.
“Hi Smile Wave” from the LOVE CUTS’ first 45 sounds like 60s garage knockout “We All Love Peanut Butter” turned inside out and backward. Band may even still be active and have released records as recently as last year.
SEX TIDE live in Austin, Texas this week. Photo courtesy A Wicked Company & Can’t Stop The Bleeding.
In case you might be interested, I’ve been posting stuff to a magical place called The Hedonist Jive for over 4 years now. I’m trying to re-energize it w/ new content, reviews and whatnot. Generally this is where I hide my book reviews, film analysis, non-rocknroll music stuff, sports blather and inward navel-gazing.
I hope ya like it!
Every other week I seek to give unto the people a 60/90-minute streaming/downloadable pretend radio show, recorded on my laptop at the back of my house. This happens to be one of those fortnights. DYNAMITE HEMORRHAGE RADIO #35 is 85 minutes of new underground & independent noise, garage pop & obscurities from the last five decades. This show’s marked itself as having a particularly annoying string of commentary from the know-it-all mushmouth host, who speaks before he thinks, flubs discographical information and can’t even get the name of the current computer virus wreaking havoc on the internet correct.
At least the music is gnarly. New stuff this time from Pang, Sex Tide, Girl One and the Grease Guns, The Spies, Nun, Trick Mammoth, Animals & Men, Witching Waves and Slum of Legs is pockmarked by older stuff from the likes of Simple Saucer, The Puddle, Howard Werth, the Meat Puppets, Pussy Galore and Blast Off Country Style. See what you think by downloading it to your computer, tablet or phone, streaming it via Soundcloud or subscribing to the show (and getting some of the older episodes) on iTunes.
Track listing:
SUBTLE TURNHIPS – Can Can
PUNCTURE – Mucky Pup
SEX TIDE – Boarded Up
FREE KITTEN – John Stark’s Blues
INTERNATIONAL STRIKE FORCE – Invasion of the Boyscout Clubhouse
PUSSY GALORE – White People
MEAT PUPPETS – Teenager(s)
TRICK MAMMOTH – Week End
IRREPARABLES – Release The Hounds
THE SPIES – Collided and Collected
THE PUDDLE – Lacksydaisical
SIMPLY SAUCER – Here Comes The Cyborgs, Pt. II
PANG – So It Goes
LOVE CUTS – Hi Smile Wave
BLAST OFF COUNTRY STYLE – Giggles and Gloom
NUN – Uri Geller
GIRL ONE AND THE GREASE GUNS – (Here Come The) Catastrophe Machines
ANIMALS AND MEN – I Never Worry
HOWARD WERTH – Mango Man
LOVE IS ALL – Make Out Fall Out Make Up
MICRAGIRLS – Saturday
WITCHING WAVES – Concrete
MORBID OPERA – Liar
SLUM OF LEGS – Benetint and Malevolence
DEATH OF SAMANTHA – Yellow Fever
Past Shows:
Dynamite Hemorrhage #34 (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #33 (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #32 (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #31 (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #30 (playlist)
I gushed about PANG in MRR and someone scanned it so here it is.
you can get their records here:
Saw PANG play their record release party last night in San Francisco, and all was good. It’s hard to reconcile “they’ve broken up” with “I saw them play 24 hours ago”. That must have been a helluva backstage kerfuffle.
Originally posted on my Hedonist Jive blog a few years ago:
I was going through a mementos box that I’ve been keeping for a while, and came across this flyer for an exceptionally memorable rocknroll show I went to in early 1987. I drove five people up from Santa Barbara in my 4-person 1980 Mustang to go see Scratch Acid, but they, mind-melting as they were, were not the real story of the night. The real story was the opening band GROUP SEX, from Nipomo, CA, and their jaw-dropping 3-minute set. In it those of us in attendance witnessed a lifetime’s worth of frustration, rage, love, disco dancing, little people, and the negation of the human spirit.
I recounted this evening in 2005 on my old blog Agony Shorthand, but figured it needed to be told again, since I found the flyer and all:
“I think even back in March 1987, I knew I was pretty lucky to have seen SCRATCH ACID play live, not simply because I could sense that they’d break up soon (which they did), but because they seemed fairly groundbreaking in their way even at the time. The show was at a dumpy club in small college town San Luis Obispo, California with two bands I’ll have a hard time forgetting: ”GROUP SEX“ and the ”WIMPY DICKS“. The latter were some dumb-ass local favorite funnypunk band with songs that ragged on their town, but the former were just on fire the night I saw them.
Whenever someone asks me about memorable shows I’ve seen – which, truth be told, never actually happens – I tell them about Group Sex in SLO, CA. The band came on stage with two identical-twin bearded drummers with full kits, the sort of beer doggie dudes you’d expect to find sucking down Coronas at the Cabo Wabo Cantina, and this boyfriend/girlfriend pair on guitar and bass respectively. (I later learned that their names were "Ron E. Fast” and “Janey”). The two drummers started in together with this ripping-fast hardcore-tempo pattern, and the guitarist started to hiss and feed back and play some generic HC riff. After about 10 seconds, though, someone – it appeared to be the bass player – screwed up, with unleashed a torrent of filthy invective from Ron E. Fast (“You motherfucker goddamn sonofabitch whythefuckcan’tyouplay etc.”). Janey actually started to blubber and cry right into her mic, and profusely apologized to the crowd.
So the two goofball drummers started up their hardcore beats again, but this time “Fast”’s guitar shorted out or something, and everything ground to a quick halt. He immediately hefted his guitar, and shattered it into a bazillion pieces with one swing against the brick back wall behind the stage. The shocked whole crowd let out a collective “whoooa….”,and then Janey just started crying again. She stood there at the mic bawling and shaking,“You don’t understand you guys, he’s really a nice guy, he really is, we’re really a lot better than this, please don’t hate us you guys….”. Just then, the house lights came up, and the soundman quickly threw on some 1976 vintage disco music, “I Love The Nightlife” or something, and in seconds, Ron E. Fast and Janey jumped from the stage and immediately started disco-dancing together on the now-cleared floor. As everyone stood watching them in total awe, a “little person”, also bearded, scampered out from behind the sound board and started picking up the guitar pieces from the floor. It was beyond belief, and they were only the opening band! We ran out to the car immediately to relive and retell the moment over a 6-pack of Mickey Bigmouths. W-o-w.“
So thanks for letting me get that tale off my chest; it has only lived on via the oral tradition thusfar, and of course, it was far more weird and ridiculous than it likely reads to you on the screen.
This post received a comment from Ron E. Fast himself in 2008, saying “and i was pissed that the guitar was fuckin up not at janie……were married 25 yrs now”. So in other words, it wasn’t the bass player – his wife – who was having the problems, it was Fast’s guitar, and the “filthy invective” that I remember hearing was entirely self-directed. A magical evening, one that I hope I was able to recreate at some level.
Magisterial panic rock from San Francisco, 2001. NUMBERS’ wild 20-minute album “Numbers Life” from which this comes is a guaranteed yearly play for me.
AGONY SHORTHAND 