My nostalgia-drenched post about my early record store shopping experiences has just been posted to my Hedonist Jive blog.
Tag: punk
I got this book in the mail yesterday, and totally immersed myself in it for an hour before being called away for more important duties, like parenting and husbanding and being responsible & all that. It’s a fantastic look/read so far – capturing the early 80s LA suburbs and punk’s surreal explosion there better than anything I’ve ever seen, thanks to photographs of participants as opposed to solely of bands. More to come on this one.
Here’s a photo of NOH MERCY playing live in 1979.
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Back in the early 80s I’d hear the storming, shrieking “Caucasian Guilt” by San Francisco minimalist art-punk duo NOH MERCY on KFJC, and it would scare the hell out of me. “I didn’t put no JAP in a CAMP!!!”. An enigmatic song and band to say the least, I’d only been able to gather bits & pieces about them over the years. They were a 2-female duo, and two of their tracks were put on one of the Earcom 7"EP comps put out by Fast Records in the UK. I believe there’s a lone photo of them in the “Hardcore California” book which I read and read again at least 1,000 times in the 1980s. Found a photo or two on internet message boards nearly 10 years ago when I was writing something about Noh Mercy for my original music blog Agony Shorthand. That’s about it.
Now there’s this. A complete-works CD, all from 1979 – ten studio songs, plus four August 1979 live tracks from the Catalyst in Santa Cruz (which is still there, hosting shows to this day). I bought a copy, and immersed myself in it this past week. While not an “easy listen”, its sharp-edged experimentation marks it as something weird and wholly original & of its time.
The San Francisco of 1979 wasn’t just slamtastic punk rock bands – there was a dark, often synth-laden underground both on the Ralph Records side of the fence (Residents, Tuxedomoon) and more punk-friendly acts like Chrome, Factrix and many others. I fit Noh Mercy in with the latter, along with gay/political cabaret a la The Cockettes, spoken word attack-acts, revolutionary pre-Reagan-era doomsday rhetoric, and a general theater of the absurd.
With only two women playing, one of whom (Esmerelda) who just loses herself in her vocals, it’s bound to be pretty minimal. Most are just drums and vocals; some guitar scrape and vocals; a couple are analog synth & vocals. All are biting, angry and a bit obtuse. The liner notes confirm art-drenched damaged souls at the helm; women who came to San Francisco as an escape from a previous life and found it to be a place where they could be whatever they wanted to be, and even find an audience for it. Great stuff. I’m posting “Pay The Devil” from the CD here.
Come live in SF 1993 on Flickr.
COME, playing at the Kennel Club in San Francisco in April 1993. One of the best live shows I ever saw. Photo taken by Nicole Penegor. The 25th anniversary release of “11:11” is set for launch later this year.
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I’d have to put this track in my Top 20 songs of all time, to be honest. I didn’t hear THE DESPERATE BICYCLES until the ‘00s, I don’t think – not until the internet age was in full bloom. They were only a legend before then – “the ultimate ramshackle UK DIY band”; “agitprop aggressors for taking control of the means of music production & distribution” etc.
The band’s first two singles, from 1977 and 1978, are so unique and special that despite the explosion of amazing punk and deep-underground sounds at that time, their clattering, homebound, bass-driven songs truly have no equal or even imitators.
SOUTH BAY RIPPER was an early incarnation of the San Jose-based fanzine RIPPER that took hardcore punk’s reigns around 1981 and ran with ‘em, hard. This issue came out in early 1980, a pre-HC era in which the editors of this magazine were pontificating about Nick Lowe & Elvis Costello while arguing about what was “new wave” vs. what was “punk”.
There’s even a column in here in which a writer argues that he’s come up with an even better term for the paradigm-busting sounds of the day: “modern music”!
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Here’s a great stupid 45 from from earlier this year – FERAL BEAT’s “Canned Heat”. Absolutely love this thing. Here’s what I wrote about it on my Hedonist Jive blog back in March:
When I was a younger man I definitely went through a very pronounced “dumb is good” phase with regard to punk-inspired music. The whole “KBD” thing was in full swing in the early 90s, and 70s/80s bands like The Mentally Ill, The Mad and The Authorities proved that having absurd lyrics and retardo riffs were no hindrance to creating transcendent punk rock art. So it was with current bands of the era as well. I loved simple, minimalist garage punk as long as it captured that Urinals/Desperate Bicycles sense of barely knowing how to play but still succeeding to bash out something brilliant anyway. So bands like The Motards, The Inhalants and even The Red Aunts (!) were on my cool radar at the time. A lot of it didn’t age too well – one could argue that I haven’t either – and I’ve been a lot of more skeptical of dumb-ass rock and roll for at least a decade or two of quote-unquote adulthood ever since.
Until FERAL BEAT, that is. Feral Beat are an active two-person guitar/drum, boy/girl act from Memphis. The fella is from a punk band called The Useless Eaters, which is a great name for those of you who’ve studied your Bloodlands history and such, but not a band I can say has moved me to date. When I first heard their new 45, “Canned Heat/Cold Lover”, I thought it was maybe the stupidest thing I’ve heard in a coon’s age. Like something a 24-year-old would like! Then I listened to it again. And again. And then that feeling showed up again, that one in which you know that the band you’re listening to has moved beyond lyrical ineptitude and musical ineptitude and into an otherworldly, godlike level of calculated primitive, raw and savage ineptitude that’s somehow absolute genius. They made me into a philistine again, one who loves dumb riffs, faggy vocals, awful lyrics and the like. And all was then good. And one of my favorite records in the world right now was so enshrined. And now I tell everyone who asks me what’s good, I say, I tell ‘em, "Feral Beat is what’s good". And now you shall know as well.
Since we’re posting fanzine scans, why not take a gander at the last one I made? This is SUPERDOPE #8, which came out in 1998. I have plenty of extra copies, for what it’s worth, and will mail one anywhere in the world if you’ve got $3 to Paypal me at jayhinman@hotmail.com. $4 for Canada, $6 everywhere else.
It contains a long article called “45 45s That Moved Heaven and Earth” and is exactly what it sounds like. There are reviews of more current records of the era as well.
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Here’s a spasmodic track by tempo-shifting, post-hardcore noisemakers HONEYSUCK that caught my eardrums. Remember a San Francisco band called So So Many White White Tigers? I didn’t think so, but let me tell ya, this band sounds like ‘em, female vocals and all! Crazed stuff from Western Massachusetts.
AGONY SHORTHAND 