HIGH RISE from Japan and LIQUOR BALL, live in San Jose (!) in 2000. Thanks to Grady Runyan for the scan/photo.
Images
I’ve told you about the eye-popping, mind-jarring collection of images, videos and music available over on the RIBBON AROUND A BOMB site, curated by La Lengua and devoted to female-fronted punk, no wave and all manner of related cultural artifacts. She’s got a terrific radio show as well on San Francisco pseudo-pirate radio station Radio Valencia with her partner “DJ Ashtray” that’s remarkable in its breadth of femme-punk from the 70s, 80s & (rarely) beyond.
You gotta download the podcast of Show #23, which I just listened to. Mr. and Mrs. Lengua are in the studio with their daughter as she plays a variety of scorching, blinding and ear-throttling punk and postpunk (Slits, Au Pairs and Delta 5 all within a 10-minute block). Mrs. Lengua even gets a shout-out for turning her daughter onto punk rock, having been an original recipe X and Clash fan back in the proverbial day.
These two young women, who normally curse like the merchant marine on shore leave, are on what must be their best behavior, and tone down their filthy toilet talk down to parentally-approved levels. It’s a great listen that even made me ponder whether I should have ignored Girlschool these past thirty years. Listen here.
CRYPT RECORDS ad, 1980s, right around the time the life-changing, musical-taste-rearranging “Back From The Grave” comps started coming out.
Anyone remember RAT AT RAT R? Totally great and mostly unheralded NYC post-no wave group with one very good album on Neutral Records from 1985, commonly known as “Rock & Roll Is Dead, Long Live Rat At Rat R”. (There was another release as well, and I’ve never heard it).
This photo’s from around the time of that album. From the looks of it, they were totally walking the walk. Big Rock Joke Doll!
DIVINE HORSEMEN advertisement from Forced Exposure, 1987. Features some fantastic Chris D collage/layout/lettering artwork, very familiar to Flesh Eaters, Divine Horsemen & Stone By Stone fans 1979 and beyond.
Jon Wahl from CLAW HAMMER, live in what I believe to be Baltimore, MD on their 1993 tour – the one they let me tag along for.
I’ve been acquainted with and a moderate fan of the records from Tim Presley’s WHITE FENCE, who records and resides in Los Angeles, but it’s only this past few weeks that I’ve crossed over from White Fence “enthusiast” to “fan”. What did the trick for me was multiple listenings to his/their first record from 2010, the eponymous “White Fence” on Make-A-Mess Records. If you haven’t heard this one yet and have spent more time w/ the Ty Segall collaboration and/or “Is Growing Faith” – or the even newer ones – I implore you to get going on this one posthaste.
“White Fence” is a trippy, warbly amalgam of Syd Barrett, Bill Direen & The Bilders and variety of 1960s thematic compilations, all set to crackle and fade and weird tape loops that sputter & cough many songs to premature ends. If you’re familiar with these comps, imagine a combination of deep 60s influences from “Highs In The Mid-Sixties”, “Chocolate Soup for Diabetics” and “Soft Sounds for Gentle People”. This modern flower child isn’t all throwback, though – it gets rough and raucous at times, most notably on a killer track called “Baxter’s Corner” that is full-on barking noise/panic rock fully of this era.
Turns out Presley’s so talented he’s even toured as a member of The Fall. I’d just retire right there, but this guy’s amazingly multi-talented and a far cut above most modern indie pretenders. Totally ready to call White Fence one of my favorite “bands”, a couple of years after everyone else started to.
FLYING NUN RECORDS advertisement from 1980s fanzines.
Going to guess at this being a 1978 show, as by 1979 I don’t think you’d have seen The Germs fourth on the bill, playing just after Arthur J and The Gold Cups. Any Masque vets in the audience who were pogoing their brains out at this show?
This is a photo of ARTHUR J & THE GOLD CUPS live in Los Angeles at the Masque 1978, taken from a very early issue of Flipside. They never recorded, but they frequently turn up in descriptions of wild Masque life.
Description of the band, courtesy of Stompbeast blog:
Depending on who you talk to this was a pioneering “punk rock big band” who was 20 years ahead of its time or a “godawful” absurdist joke. Name came from an amalgam of infamous local haunts for male hustlers: Arthur J.’s was a “big chicken hawk hangout” on the corner of Highland and Santa Monica Boulevard; The Gold Cup was “a sleazy coffee shop” located on Hollywood Boulevard and Las Palmas near the punk club THE MASQUE and its attendant squatter’s tenement THE CANTERBURY and was the subject of the scum-punk song “Trouble at the Cup” by DANGERHOUSE RECORDS chairman Black Randy. Considered by some to be the house band for The Masque, as it first emerged out of jam sessions at the club. The club’s owner BRENDAN MULLEN played drums. Quasi-Gold Digger backup singers wearing cowboy hats and toy pistol holsters dubbed The Cupcakes. Aptly named frontman Spazz Attack (a.k.a., “Craig Allen Rothwell”) was known for successfully executing 360 degree flips in the middle of a song. He playing Devo’s famed Booji Boy mascot (“a bizarre adult infant freak with pre-adolescent sexuality and Yoda-like wisdom”) in the band’s videos for “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” and “Peek-a-boo” and later was a dancer on David Bowie’s 1987 Glass Spider tour. (Rumor was he was coached by dance guru Toni “Mickey” Basil.) Lead guitarist Geza X known for his art-damaged surf guitar and trumpeter Hal Negro known for being a trumpeter in a punk band. Famed for its Cuisinarty mixing of influences: name-checking ORNETTE COLEMAN (whose song “Themes from a Symphony” they covered), Sun Ra, George Clinton and James Brown along with the New York Dolls, T.Rex and The Sex Pistols. Also may have pioneered the hipster practice of the Ironic Cover Song: from the Green Acres theme to the “Cal” Worthington used car commericals. Evolved into the pioneering LOUNGECORE band Hal Negro and the Satin Tones, with the Cupcakes evolving into the Playboy Martinet-aping Punk Bunnies.
AGONY SHORTHAND 