lamestain

Historia del la Musica Tad pt. V

2009-07-13T06:18:00.000-07:00

We want you to take 30 seconds to watch some of this video by 2008 Pitchfork-approved “it band” Vampire Weekend.

I’m sure the weekend vampires are all nice chaps, polite to a fault, and respectful of everyone they meet. And that, to me, represents everything wrong with their music. It’s so damned polite, so academy-approved, that it makes my stomach ache. Now, for the antidote:

Some thoughtful person captured TAD in its heyday, bulldozing their way through “Daisy.” We’ve mentioned here in the past that the attribute that we most miss with today’s Hot Young Bands is menace, and although the members of TAD were all apparently friendly to a fault, they packed their music full of menace. How we miss TAD!

Anyway, we’re going to keep this post short, because we’ve been slacking on the posts and because Tom is heading out to England for a couple of weeks. This entry’s contributions to our ongoing Historia del la Musica Tad are . . .

(1) The “Wood Goblins” single. “Wood Goblins” and “Cooking With Gas” date from the Salt Lick era (1989); both were recorded by Steve Albini. “Cooking” also appeared as b-side to “Loser.” “Daisy” dates back to the period when TAD-the-band was simply Tad-the-man. We also posted “Daisy” years ago here.

God damn, this record turned 20 years old this year.

(2) The “Jack Pepsi” single. This record resulted in one of TAD’s many legal troubles, as the Pepsi Corporation didn’t cotton to seeing its logo appropriated for something that rocks this hard. “Jack Pepsi” ranks high in our grunge canon—we definitely put it in the top ten. The b-sides, “Pig Iron” and “Eddie Hook,” come from expanded version of the single. Both rock.

Wood Goblins

"Wood Goblins"
"Cooking with Gas"
"Daisy"

The zip file for this EP is here.

Jack Pepsi

"Jack Pepsi"

"Eddie Hook"

"Pig Iron"

. . . and the zip file for this EP is here.

Sorry to keep this so brief, but we’re busy, busy men. We’re planning to follow this up with a piece about some of pre-TAD bands featuring TAD members, so stay tuned!

--Wm

A post about Stymie that's really about Seattle

2009-05-20T09:33:00.000-07:00

As I write this post—longhand, in a spiral notebook—I’m 20,000 feet above eastern Washington, having just crossed above the Cascades on my return flight to Chicago. I visited Seattle for the weekend to attend my friends Steve and Eliza’s wedding. Steve and I have known each other for 20 years now. They had a lovely ceremony, and the trip in general was fantastic.

In the 13 years since I left Seattle, I’ve visited six or seven times, and I always return to wherever has become home with mixed feelings about the place. It both alarms and pleases me to see how neighborhoods have changed, to the point that once-familiar areas seem almost foreign. For instance, on the south ridge of Capitol Hill, near Seattle University, where I lived in 1991, charming street-side cafes have proliferated where warehouses formerly existed—as have cookie-cutter, here-today-and-gone-tomorrow nightclubs that cater to the shiny shirt crowd.

The Comet Tavern, however, still stands, with its familiar dilapidated neon sign still serving as a beacon for the young, thirsty, and skuzzy. It comforted me to walk past it, to see its resilience to gentrification. It comforted me to see the original Vivace coffee bar on Broadway, to see young people sporting long hair (a rarity in Chicago), and to see Showgirls across from Pike Place Market, even if I was patronizing Pike Place on this trip to buy gifts for my wife and kids and not to buy produce or to hit the comic book shop on a grade-school field trip.

The constants—these harbingers to the glory years of local music—vacillated between the back and the front of my mind as I considered what to write about Stymie, a long-defunct grunge band featuring occasional Lamestain comment-writer Adem Tepedelen. Saturday afternoon, I hung out with Tom and his girlfriend, Emma, at their home (and Dirty Knobby headquarters) in Ballard. As we sat in the living room, Tom spun singles from the A-B box from his enormous, alphabetized collection of singles. We revisited Big Satan Inc. and Alcohol Funnycar (Stymie’s New Rage labelmates)—bands that, if we can be honest here, few people have considered over the past decade, decent bands that were extinguished in the shadow cast by Nirvana, Mudhoney, Sub Pop, etc.

This will sound disparaging, but I don’t intend it to be: in the late 80s and early 90s, bands like Stymie and Big Satan Inc. were almost like wallpaper. They filled out the bills at the Vogue and Moe’s and the Croc. They played music that locals would recognize as grunge because it was grunge and that Spin might classify as grunge because it came from Seattle. Moreover, I believe that, if these bands didn’t specifically set out to make grunge, they certainly didn’t set out to avoid making it.

Stymie also played the brand of grunge that we here at Lamestain HQ most appreciate: the original kind, the kind grown from the same waters that nourished TAD and Dickless. Even this single’s packaging—a recycled grocery bag—recalls the thrift store chic of the time. “Willy’s Gone” reminds me of the no-hope music made when Seattle bands had no realistic expectation of $2 million advances, before Los Angeles diaspora like Candlebox followed the trail of eager, naïve A&R reps up I-5. Somehow, they achieved this in 1993; like the Comet, they resisted gentrification.

In a sense, bands like Stymie were a paradox: bands like this were common; bands like this were unique.

Here are some of the basics. Membership at the time that they released this single was Patrick Barber on bass, Shane Bastian on vocals, James Halada on drums, Jeff Kleinsmith on guitar and vocals, Brian Taylor on guitar and bass, and Adem Tepedelen on guitar. (That’s a lot of guitar!). New Rage released the record in 1993. Nick Sherman and the band produced the record, which was recorded by Phil Ek at Word of Mouth Recording Studios. “Willy’s Gone” has elements of Skin Yard, and the two B-sides remind me a tiny bit of Seaweed. I’m sure that not even Styme would claim that this single is as essential as, I dunno, “Touch Me I’m Sick,” but you can’t really complete the picture of that era without accounting for Stymie, the New Rage roster, and the dozens of really, really good bands that were obscured by the giants.

I’m now about midway through the flight, and the landscape below has flattened and browned. A few closing notes:

While there’s good coffee in Chicago, I was reminded this weekend of what great coffee tastes like. Seattle, you can’t match us in pizza, but the cappuccino I quaffed at Vivace last Friday morning was heavenly, and it beat anything that Chicago has to offer.

We saw a pair of shows: Deranged Diction w/ the Suck Machine at the Crocodile on Friday (sadly, we arrived too late to catch Police Teeth, who I wanted to see) and Obits w/ the Lights and the Unnatural Helpers at Neumo’s on Saturday. The best band of the bunch, by a country mile, was the Unnatural Helpers. Deranged Diction were also good. As ridiculous and, frankly, banal as their music was—this was, after all, a reunited high school band—the guys played with an infectious giddiness. I smiled throughout their set.

One of the wedding guests was Franklin Foer, editor of The New Republic. A minute after Steve pointed him out, I made some cracks to Steve about Stephen Glass, only to realize that Foer had vacated his seat and was now within earshot. His facial expression fell somewhere between a smirk and a cringe. So, if you’re wondering why you’re reading this in Lamestain and not The New Republic . . .

Willy's Gone

Pretty Now

Frogs

They're also available in the zip file here. Adem, if you're reading, I hope it's okay to post these tracks! Let me know if you'd like us to remove them.

--Wm

A Super Electro Sampler

2009-03-26T20:50:00.000-07:00

Not long ago, we proudly declared ourselves to be Mark Arm fanbois. We still stand by that pronouncement, but we would like to add that we also really like Mark’s Mudhoney cohort, Steve Turner. Not only do we dig his Big Muff to Mark’s Super Fuzz, we also think he has pretty cool musical taste. Case in point: his rather awesome record label, Super Electro Records. Not really a Sub Pop subsidiary, Super Electro was manufactured and distributed by the label in the Nineties and released 11 full-lengths and 17 singles, mostly by Northwest garage bands. Obviously, not everything on the label was a smash, but overall, their hit-to-miss ratio was pretty damn high. We already gushed about back-from-the-grave Regal Select, and we’ll eventually get to Bag of Hammers, but right now, we’d like to add Super Electro to Seattle’s great trifecta of Garage Rock Labels.

And since we already hyped up their first bunch of Wellwater Conspiracy singles (read about them here, listen to them here), we’ll give you a Super Electro 7” Sampler.

The Statics - As well as being a cool band in their own right, the Statics attainted legendary status for having the first record release on Greg Lowry’s infamous Rip Off Records. This single was the 2nd Super Electro release. The band paid tribute to Mr. Lowry by covering a Supercharger classic. Besides those ace records, the band also released worthy records on Estrus, Empty, and Rat City. Not sure what their old rhythm section is doing now, but Zack Static now fronts the Zack Static Sect, which features ex-Green River drummer Father Alex.

The Calabros – A Super Electro super-group! Featuring bassist/singer Javad (Night Kings), guitarist Dave (The Fall-Outs, and drummer Steve (Wiretaps), this was the lone release by the band. I’m not sure if they ever played any shows, and while I prefer the guys’ main bands, this record is worth hearing if you are a fan of the aforementioned bands. We can also only assume that their name was in tribute to Seattle Supersonics announcer, Kevin Calabro.

And if you are wondering what Kevin Calabro is doing now that the Sonics have moved to Oklahoma (current record 21-51. Eat it, Clay Bennett!), he’s the voice of Seattle’s new Major League Soccer team, the Sounders.

Eddie and the Back Nine – Okay, so this record isn’t too hot. If you ever wondered what Flop would sound like if they were a straight-up punk band with an Australian singer, then here is your answer. Featuring Thrown Up and famous illustrator Ed Fotheringham on vocals, this four song “golf concept” EP is one of the stranger artifacts from the era.

The Fall-Outs – As they once sang, the Fall-Outs might be one of the least ambitious bands in Seattle. For a band that has been around for 20 some years, they don’t have a gigantic, impossible-to-navigate back catalog, which says to me that they care more about quality than quantity. While Rock Ambition might not be their forte, they are pretty damn consistent and have written some gawddamn classic songs, like the a-side on this single, “Sleep.” They still play around town every so often, and you owe it to yourself to buy their records. For the CD-phobic, you can download their two Super Electro full-lengths here.

Flop – We already declared Flop was the Best Pop Band of the 90’s, and this single is further proof. The a-side comes courtesy of their third record, World of Today, and the b-side features Devo and The Jam covers. The Devo cover isn’t that hot (to be fair, “I’m a Potato” isn’t my favorite Devo song), but their version of the Jam’s “The Place I Love” is great and caused this putz to track down every Jam record . . . as well as any over-priced and over-rated third-tier mod-revival record. So indirectly I blame Rusty Willoughby for me dropping major coin for those limp Merton Parkas records. Thanks, dudes.

The Statics – Hey, Hey EP 7”
SE702
Hey Hey
Don’t Mess with Us
Rhino Chaser
Sooprize Package for Mr Mieno

The Calabros – Problems and Others EP 7”
1993, recorded at Egg, SE703
Problems
In My Room
Stupid
Gonna Eat Me

Eddie and the Back Nine – Improving Our Lie EP 7”
1994, SE704, 2000 pressed
Under 10 Handicap
Pin High
Dishes
Titleist Too

The Fall-Outs – Sleep 7”
1994, SE705, recorded by Conrad Uno at Egg
Sleep
It’s a Shame
Talk

Flop – Act 1, Scene 1 7”
1000 pressed
Act 1, Scene 1
The Place I Love (the Jam)
I’m a Potato (Devo)

Supercharger – “Sooprize Package for Mr Mieno”

Get the Super Electro Party Pack Here.

- MC Tom

More re-posted songs!

2009-02-20T06:02:00.000-08:00

Here's the last batch of requested re-posts.

64 Spiders -- single

Thrown-Ups -- misc. songs

The U-Men -- Step on a Bug

Les Thugs -- "Chess and Crime" 7"

Bundle of Hiss -- misc. tracks

Vexed -- misc. tracks

H-Hour -- misc. tracks

Dickless -- "All Stars" 7," I'm a Man EP, and "Sweet Teeth"

Cat Butt -- Journey to the Center of Cat Butt EP and "64 Funnycars" 7"

I hope this just about covers everything. At some point in the future, we may re-post some more material.

I'll also note that it really pleases us that somebody requested the Dickless songs. Those were seminal records from the pre-Nevermind grunge era, and if you don't download anything else, man, by all means download those!

--Wm

Requested reposts

2009-02-16T06:22:00.000-08:00

Greetings,

Here is the first batch of requested re-posts. We'll add more either later today or sometime later this week. I'll start with the original list of requests that I posted last week, and we'll add recent requests from the comments section over time.

Bloodloss -- The Truth Is Marching In

Bloodloss -- "Broke" 7"

Bloodloss -- "Face Down in Mud" 7"

Tad -- "Tuna Car," "Hollow Man," and "Nipple Belt" from the God's Balls LP

Screaming Trees -- Time Speaks Her Golden Tongue EP (this one may have two copies of each song, for some reason)

Wellwater Conspiracy -- singles

Room Nine -- Voices of a Summer's Day

The Freewheelin' Mark Arm -- "Masters of War" 7"

Malfunkshun -- Misc. tracks from Deep Six and Another Pyrrhic Victory

(Note: the links above are only for the Malfunkshun tracks and not for the entire records.)

Green River -- demos (make sure you peek at the comments from lamestain's original 2007 posting of the demos, as ex-Green River drummer Alex Shumway corrected us about some of the track labeling)

We'll be back later with more.

--Wm

Reposted songs

2009-02-11T06:57:00.000-08:00

Several people have requested that we re-post some dead links. Here are some of the requests we've received:

Bloodloss The Truth Is Marching In
Wellwater Conspiracy singles
Screaming Trees "Time Speaks Her Golden Tongue" ep
Room Nine Voices of a Summer's Day
Mark Arm "Masters of War"
Malfunkshun misc. tracks
Green River demos

TAD was also requested, but the requester didn't specify which TAD was meant.

Anyway, before we re-post anything, we thought we'd see what else people would like us to offer again. We'll do what we can to oblige.

Oh, and several people have requested that we post a record by SGM. Sorry, but we don't have anything by SGM. If anyone does have this record, we may be able to forward it on, but no promises here.

--Wm

1989 turns 20!

2009-01-27T09:57:00.000-08:00

Let’s start with a list of Northwest and/or grunge records born in 1989: Nirvana’s Bleach, Soundgarden’s Louder Than Love, TAD’s God’s Balls, Mudhoney, Gas Huffer’s “Firebug,” Love Battery’s “Between the Eyes,” Blood Circus’ Primal Rock Therapy, Fastbacks’ “Wrong, Wrong, Wrong,” Journey to the Center of Cat Butt, Screaming Trees’ Buzz Factory, The Melvins’ Ozma, Mother Love Bone’s Shine, Beat Happening’s Black Candy, Skin Yard’s “Start at the Top,” The Young Fresh Fellows’ This One’s For the Ladies, Swallow, and Coffin Break’s Psychosis and Rupture.

If you want to argue that other years produced better music in the Northwest, but you may fail to convince me. And while critics remember 1991 as the year that grunge and Seattle broke, in my mind, 1989 ranks higher in importance. You have Nirvana’s debut. You have the first major label output (Louder Than Love and Shine, which Mother Love Bone released on a fake indie). You have seminal releases by Gas Huffer, The Fastbacks, Skin Yard, etc. You have the cavernous, cramped original Cellophane Square and the OK Hotel and the Central Tavern and a fair amount of attention from the music press. You don’t yet have Tabitha Soren interviewing Tad Doyle for MTV or the new, spacious Cellophane Square or Candlebox or a distressing increase in the number of heroin casualties.

Nirvana at the HUB Ballroom

(Okay, fine, you could also make a solid argument in favor of 1988 based around “Touch Me, I’m Sick,” Ultramega:OK, and Sub Pop 200. . . . )

1989 also marks the year that Seattle became SEATTLE in the larger cultural sense--the year that it transformed from a rainy backwater city, where people channeled their boredom into sludgy rock, into home for California diaspora. Our housing prices started increasing, our sports teams started sucking a little less, and the hippest hipsters on the planet began declaring that grunge was, like, yesterday’s news, maaaaan.

It was also in 1989 that I began working at the A206 copy center at the University of Washington Medical Center and where I photocopied medical texts with long-time lamestain friend Steve Mandich, who educated me about the still nascent grunge scene via mix tapes. Those tapes, some of which I may still have, featured Mudhoney, the Stooges, Gas Huffer, the Clash, and tons of other pieces of greatness.

But, of course, more happened in Seattle than just grunge.

Sports

In the mid-80s, our parents used to reward Tom and me with periodic trips to the gone-but-forgotten Kingdome to watch the perennial basement-dwelling Seattle Mariners. Whoever managed the M’s back in the mid-80s hadn’t yet gotten the hang of running a baseball team, so although they fielded a handful of decent players (Richie Zisk, Alvin Davis, Mark Langston, Spike Owen), they also had a tendency to acquire novelty players, like former Seattle Pilot Gorman Thomas (Mariner career batting average, .194) and geriatric spit-baller Gaylord Perry for the final season of his fine career.

In 1989, things finally started looking up: Ken Griffey, Jr., made his big league debut. Omar Vizquel made his big league debut. The Mariners acquired Randy Johnson (and lost Mark Langston) via a trade with the Montreal Expos. Manager Jim Lefebvre took over the reigns that year (“I’m a Lefebvre Believer” bumper stickers were all the rage.) This line-up (plus Edgar Martinez, who had already been a Mariner for a couple of seasons) didn’t produce fireworks immediately--the Mariners still had a losing season--but they did finally start breaking .500 in 1990.

The novelty disease hadn’t worn off entirely by this point. Around this time, the Ms acquired Ken Griffey, Sr., and attempted to speed Griffey’s younger brother up through the minors to create a Griffey hat-trick. This didn’t pay off. Furthermore, who can forget the Ken Griffey chocolate bar? If you have, well, eBay can help you remember.

But 1980s retro is fashionable right now, and the Mariners are doing their part by sucking again.

In other sports news, Brian Bosworth ended his disastrous tenure as the Seahawks’ designated bulldozer target in 1989. The Sonics were in their Xavier McDaniel and Nate McMillan phase and played pretty decently. And in the 1989 Apple Cup game between the Huskies and Wazoo, security maced the shit out of fans who stormed the field to ransack the goalposts and toss them into Lake Washington. And we, at this point in time, largely hated sports.

Media

Two game-changing articles were published in 1989.

First, Money Magazine ranked Seattle as the country’s #1 most livable city in 1989 (revisited here). This praise--which actually was major news, in the days before blogs and magazines ranked everything, all of the time--came as a bit of a surprise to those of us who loved our hometown but thought that, you know, it might be a bit damp for most people. Local mossbacks shook their fists in outrage that such attention would soon spoil our fair city. Whether this article, and the deluge of Californians that moved north after its publication, really spoiled the city can be debated, but the culture really did change radically in the span of a few short years. The biggest changes were that housing prices skyrocketed, traffic grew worse, and Emmet Watson got hot under the collar.

Second, Everett True wrote the infamous Sub Pop article for Melody Maker. (You can find a cool pdf of it here). The article appeared after Bruce and Jon at Sub Pop flew True out to Seattle and wined and dined him--it was basically Sub Pop’s first major marketing ploy. With the exception of Beat Happening and Screaming Trees, all of the reported bands were on Sub Pop (Screaming Trees would release an EP on Sub Pop in the following year, and Beat Happening would later co-release their last two LPs on K and Sub Pop). There’s nothing about, say, Skin Yard.

It’s amusing to note that, in the opening sentence, True describes Mudhoney as “thrash metal merchants.” Thrash metal?

But in spite of my best intentions, I keep falling back on music-related events from 1989. I should stop this blog entry here, before I get into 4 Bands for 4 Bucks at the HUB Ballroom, etc. For your listening pleasure is a mix of notable songs from 1989.

Here's your awesome 1989 mix tape: Gas Huffer -- "Firebug" The Fastbacks -- "Wrong, Wrong, Wrong" Screaming Trees -- "Where the Twain Shall Meet" Mother Love Bone -- "Thru Fade Away" Skin Yard -- "Start at the Top" Tad -- "Nipple Belt" Blood Circus -- "White Dress" Love Battery -- "Between the Eyes" The Melvins -- "Eyes Flies"

Saying Goodbye to 2008 with Crackerbash

2008-12-14T15:52:00.001-08:00

If there is a musical genre that has been more bastardized by amazingly wretched bands than grunge, it’s probably Emo. While we never flew the Emo flag or anything, we will proudly stand by some of the earlier, landmark emo bands. Rites of Spring? Still love them. Moss Icon? Sure, they had their moments. Antioch Arrow? Um, actually those guys were a bit ridiculous. And then there was Portland’s Crackerbash. Easily one of the greatest live bands to come out of Portland during the early 90s, Crackerbash obviously owed part of their abrasive pop-punk sound to the Revolutionary Summer bands (and the Wipers and SST bands), but they shouldn’t be seen as a precursor to today’s truly bizarre "emo" scene. But we are not here to knock the youth of today, ladies and germs. No, if they want to do this sorta shit, that’s fine with us. Instead, we are here to raise our glasses to Crackerbash and say, "Those guys were pretty good! You should check them out!"

Formed in 1989 by Hellcows guitarist Sean Croghan, bassist Scott Fox, and drummer Doug Nash, the band made their vinyl debut a year later with the sorta poorly mixed "Bike" b/w "Laughing Song" 7” on Audio Addict Records. Moving to Imp Records (Calamity Jane, Jackie O-Motherfucker) and handing over the drum stool to Ted Miller and the recording responsibility to Drew Canulette at Dog Fish Studios, their second single, "Holiday," sounded much, much better and showcased better songs.

By then, word on the street was that Crackerbash was a shit-hot live band, and Seattle’s Empty Records snapped them up for a couple records. Like Chapel Hill, Portland was set to become the next Seattle, and Crackerbash, Hazel, Sprinkler, Pond, and Heatmiser led the way. Of course, history can be a huge, unruly asshole, and the fact that Everclear was the sole platinum seller from that bunch is further proof.

The self-titled full-length and "Jasper" 7” came out around 1992, and while good, they didn’t fully capture the band’s live energy. Sub Pop made the band’s "Nov 1" b/w "Halloween Candy" (a Spinanes cover) the August 1992 Single of the Month, sandwiching Crackerbash between Codeine and the Mono Men. (Hopefully, you didn’t snooze when it was time to subscribe to Sub Pop's current series.)

Now for my money, the records that Crackerbash recorded with Kurt Bloch were their best. The Working Holidays September split single with Jawbox on Simple Machines Records and the Tin Top EP might be their loudest records and sound closest to their live show. Like all good punk bands, the band burned out early and broke up around 1994. Humble Records released a live 7” of their last show at La Luna; it may or may not be a boot.

Since this is the Holiday Season and we are crunk on spiked eggnog, we are including some odds and ends in the download file. “Your Gate” came from the Empty Sampler 2, and “Head Like A Weedeater” came from C/Z’s Teriyaki Asthma Vol 9, which also featured Trashcan School, Stymie, and Canada’s Superconductor. We should probably add that Superconductor contributed a decent version of the La’s “There She Goes” to this record that should (we hope) help you erase the horrid memory of the Sixpence None the Richer version. Sixpence None the Richer, if you are reading this, we are still waiting for your apology.

Anyhow, “The World According to Nouns" is a Minutemen cover that you can find on Little Brother's Our Band Can Be Your Life tribute compilation. Hazel, Treepeople, Unwound, Thurston Moore (of course), and a ton of other cool names also appeared on this record, so go track it down.

After Crackerbash exploded, Sean fronted the short-lived Jr High, who recorded a single and full-length for Empty Records before calling it a day. He did some solo stuff, which I don’t remember ever hearing, and now sings for Rapids. Scott joined up with Calamity Jane singer Gilly Anne Hammer for Starpower before reuniting with Ted in the cool instrumental band, Satan’s Pilgrims. Crackerbash did a few reunion shows over the years, and you can visit here to buy their live DVD.

And with this, we bid adieu with 2008. We hope your year was filled with grunge goodness and that St Nick left you those Cat Butt and Dickless All-Stars singles in your flannel stockings. Happy Holidays!

Get the zip of these tunes here.

"Bike" b/w "Laughing Song"

Holiday 7"

"Walk Back" b/w "Holiday" "All Work"

Jasper 7"

"Jasper" b/w "Aluminum Siding" "Leaving"

"Nov 1" b/w "Halloween Candy"

Working Holidays September

"Back to School"b/w Jawbox "Falk"

"Your Gate"

"Head Like a Weedeater"

"The World According to Nouns"

- Santa Tom

Outta Our Caves! The Young Fresh Fellows

2008-11-07T07:05:00.000-08:00

The record we’ve posted here is perhaps the worst possible introduction to the Young Fresh Fellows. But it’s also the best introduction.

Bassist Scott McCaughey formed the band in 1982 with Tad Hutchinson on drums and Chuck Carroll on guitar. Jim Sangster took over bass duties after their debut, The Fabulous Sounds of the Pacific Northwest, allowing McCaughey to switch to rhythm guitar. The band released Beans & Tolerance (the “official bootleg”)--the record we're posting--under the name 3 Young Fresh Fellows 3 (an homage to 3 Mustaphas 3) during the period after Carroll left but before Fastback Kurt Bloch joined.

The Young Fresh Fellows were, in some ways, both an Everytown kind of band and also the quintessential Seattle band. They played a slightly amateur-ish, brisk, self-effacing power pop; we used to call this kind of music “college rock,” and they had a decent enough college campus following that a friend of mine informed me of a tribute band (The Empty Set, I believe) formed among undergrads at the University of Chicago.

But they also grounded their pop in the classic Seattle/Tacoma garage fuzz of the 60s: the Wailers, the Sonics, the Raiders. But millions of bands farm this same garden without really embodying the region that grew it, and this is what set the Young Fresh Fellows apart. It’s not just the northwest of Rockin’ Robbin Roberts and Paul Revere, but also that of Spud Goodman, Stan Boreson, and Bill Nye: The Science Guy. In fact, they based the cover of their debut on a record put out by Pacific Northwest Bell of the same name that featured literal sounds from the northwest (ferries, that kind of thing; samples can be found here. Hell, they even name-drop Alderwood Mall in the lyrics to “Searchin’ USA.”

(That same song also references Pauline’s Cafe in Bellingham, but I’ll be damned if I can remember a place by that name from my time in the ‘Ham. Readers?)

Anyway, back to Beans & Tolerance (or Simply Wonderful, Wonderfully Simple). Trouser Press writes this about it: “Recorded quickly with more enthusiasm than care, the twelve cavalier tunes — most in a gritty and/or psychedelic '60sish vein — add up to a joyous, rock'n'rolling studio party with massed backing vocals, one-take chaos, meandering guitar solos, bum notes and everything else that such great undertakings require.” Is this true? Yes and no. My feeling on the record is that it’s a fun diversion if you already know about the band. Otherwise, I’d start building your collection with just about any other of their records. But we do take delight in posting this, because it was rather rare even in its day and is way, way out of print, never to return.

McCaughey has been busy lately with the much more earnest, jangly Minus 5 and the Baseball Project. I confess that I haven’t kept up with what he’s been up to, but I like what I hear here. Worth your time is Universal Trendsetter, a website devoted to McCaughey’s many projects. Some young, fresh person also posted an entire 80-minute concert from 1991 on youtube here.

Tracklist
Rock and Roll Guitars
Fruitbasket Blues
Vacation Rock
NF in Trouble
Stop Breathing, You’re Foggin’ Up My Mind
Gorilla
Shake Your Love
Silhouette
I Wanna Die in a Woman’s Prison
After Eggs
Tell It to the Raven
Whole Lotta Pappies

Here's the zip file.

Sadly, the mp3-hosting sites we've used are cracking down on people who use them to, um, host mp3s. Some idiots must be exploiting such sites to distribute the new Metallica for free instead of for the right reason, which is to ensure that you're able to hear "I Wanna Die in the Woman's Prison." So we'll likely just use zip files from here on out.

Mo' Wipers Covers

2008-10-19T19:19:00.000-07:00

Tom Lamestain is back in the hizzouse! Before we get to more Wipers’ covers, we would like to say that we aren’t the only peeps back in action after a long hiatus. Yes friends, the rumors are true, and the legendary Regal Select record label has returned from the dead. As far as we know they are set to release a Leaders 7” (whom we know nothing about) and - most exciting to us - the Puget Power Vol. 5 compilation 7”. We previously posted the first three Puget Power compilations, but we lost most of our download files when Mediamax went tits up, but luckily for you, you can still get the songs over at the very fine Head Veins blog. Volume 5, our little birdie has told us, will contain exclusive and most likely awesome tracks by Spits-side project, Spider, Love Tan (formerly the Pyramids – buy their great single on Sweet Rot records here), the Intelligence (ex-HRDR!), and AFCGT (A-Frames Climax Golden Twins), who coincidentally enough, also have a forthcoming 10” on our very own Dirty Knobby Records. Regal Select doesn’t have any web presence that we can find, but we suggest checking Goner Records for availability in the next few weeks or so.

And now, back to the Wipers covers!

Mono Men – Besides being the best rock band to ever come out of Bellingham, the Mono Men were also Kings of the Cover songs (ahem – runners-up to KILLDOZER!). Pick up any Mono Men record and chances are there is at least one bad ass cover song on it. A short list of covered bands would include El Vez’s original punk band the Zeros, The (Dutch) Outsiders, Radio Birdman, Dead Moon, the Sonics, Nomads, Link Wray, and of course, the Wipers. For my money they did the best cover of “Over the Edge,” which was on the Estrus records Bent Pages compilation LP. There is also a live version of “Over the Edge” on the Lucky records, Live in Europe 7”

Nirvana might have done a slightly better version of “Return of the Rat” on the T/K tribute compilation, but the Mono Men were a close second on the Scat records’ 10 Big Ones LP. We are big Mono Men fans over here, so expect more Lamestain coverage sometime in the future.

Melvins – You can find ‘Youth of America’ on the out of print, Electroretard CD, which was released by the now defunct Man’s Ruin label. Melvins also cover the Cows and redo some of their own classics on the record, though I think the Wipers song is the best cover they have ever recorded. If you saw them close out the Velvet Elvis in Pioneer Square, you might remember them tearing this song apart.

A few years ago, we also saw Mission of Burma close out their Neumo’s show with ‘Youth of America,’ and, as luck would have it, a studio version also exists. You can find it on itunes, and while you are in the mood, go to your local shop and buy all of the Mission of Burma records on Matador right now.

Portland’s Jackpot Records also did amazing vinyl reissues of Is this Real and Youth of America, and there is really no reason why you don’t own multiple copies of them.

The Mono Men - "Return of the Rat" "Over the Edge"
The Melvins - "Youth of America"

-- MC Tom

Sorry for the lack of recent updates!

2008-10-16T13:11:00.000-07:00

Our lives have been ridiculously busy lately. Here's the number one reason why:

Leni Elizabeth, my beautiful baby daughter, born on Rocktober 1st.

More Wipers and some Young Fresh Fellows to come soon!

______ vs. The Wipers

2008-08-29T09:06:00.000-07:00

In the post I wrote about the Wipers from December 2006, I mentioned that, someday, we planned to post some of the excellent covers of Wipers’/Greg Sage’s material. Well, patient reader, we’re finally making good on our promise. In the next week or two, Tom will write about covers by Nirvana, the Mono Men, and the Melvins, but I’m going to start with the much-lauded 8 Songs for Greg Sage and the Wipers, which Tim/Kerr Records released in 1992.

(Tim/Kerr Records, also called T/K at points, deserves a blog entry of its own, simply to emphasize (a) they have no affiliation with former Big Boy/Poison 13-er/Monkeywrecher Tim Kerr; (b) they have no affiliation with TK Records, home of KC and the Sunshine Band; (c) they released tons of great records by bands like Pond, the Wipers, Calamity Jane, Pere Ubu, Kurt Cobain-William Burroughs, Smegma, the Hellcows, and the Raincoats; and (d) they also released records by the god-damned Dandy Warhols and god-damned Everclear.)

(Jesus Christ. Everclear. No, god damn it. No, no, no.)

T/K expanded this compilation a year later, adding an additional six tracks by Nation of Ulysses, Calamity Jane, and others. We only have the original eight-song collection, which largely features other bands from the region, many of whom have a legitimate connection with the band. The label released the original as a set of singles, packaged in a silvery gray box. Now, for the track-by-track commentary.

Napalm Beach formed in 1980, and drummer Sam Henry had briefly played with the Wipers. They offer a grunged-out cover of “Potential Suicide.” Although Napalm Beach records were a constant presence in the bins at Cellophane Square in the late 80s, I don’t know much about the band itself. I like the songs on their myspace page. Good cover here.

M99’s cover of “Astro Cloud,” from Sage's 1985 solo record Straight Ahead, does little for me. Sage produced M99’s full-length Medicine, also released on T/K.

Nirvana had already become famous by the time this cover of “Return of the Rat” appeared. My assumption is that Nirvana’s fame allowed them to pick which song to cover, as I’d venture that everyone wanted to take a stab at the Wipers’ most well-known track. It’s not bad, but the Mono Men do it better.

Poison Idea almost reduces “Up Front” to a straightforward hardcore slam, but the song resists this treatment. Overall, I’ve never been a big fan of this band.

The Dharma Bums offer a countrified take on “On the Run,” also from the solo record. The Bums sound more like Counting Crows here than was generally the case in the late 80s/early 90s, but it’s still a decent cover.

Crackerbash do the debut’s “I Don’t Know What I Am” and “Mystery.” They make these songs their own, adding a Rites of Spring-like breathlessness to both tracks. We really need to write about these guys sometime.

Perhaps the best cover on this compilation is Hole’s shambolic take on “Over the Edge,” one of the best Wipers songs period and one that’s especially well suited to Courtney Love’s caterwauling (I mean that as a compliment). It sounds as if the engineer didn't properly mix the multiple tracks of vocals together, but this only adds to the appeal. Sloppy, angry, and despairing. I'll even go as far as to suggest that it's every bit as good as the original.

The Whirlees reimagine “Land of the Lost” as a butt-rocking fist-pumper. The vocals remind me of Trey Parker’s fake hard rock growl, but despite of this cover’s problems, I like it. I even rather like the changes they made to the chord progression. Tom hates it. It’s the Icky vs. Stumpy Joe battle revisited! The Whirlees released an eponymous record on Schizophrenic Records in 2003, recorded by Drew Canulette, who also produced Ultramega:OK; that’s all I know about them.

Here are the tracks:
Napalm Beach -- "Potential Suicide"
M99 -- "Astro Cloud"
Nirvana -- "Return of the Rat"
Poison Idea -- "Up Front"
The Dharma Bums -- "On the Run"
Crackerbash -- "I Don't Know What I Am"/"Mystery"
Hole -- "Over the Edge"
The Whirlees -- "Land of the Lost"

And the songs are also on the zip file here.

--Wm

Battle of the Joes: Icky versus Stumpy

2008-08-12T18:33:00.000-07:00

Before we get to this week’s Smackdown, we should give mad props to Sub Pop for hosting such a great anniversary party last month. Bands were enjoyed, beer (more specifically, Elysian Loser Ale) was chugged, and dudes wearing House of Large Sizes t-shirts were spotted. The Vaselines and Green River were the obvious highlights, but Mudhoney, Les Thugs, and Comets on Fire also tore shit up.

Sadly, record exec obligations prevented us from seeing the Fluid reunion show, but according to those in the know, the band sounded as great as ever. You can watch a video here. And what excuse could we have had to miss the legendary Fluid? Why the debut (and hopefully not last) live performance of the Drills! Patrick McCabe and Patrick Thomes played a smashing set at Drills headquarters and sounded amazing and nutty. The closest band I could compare them to would be Harry Pussy. McCabe recorded their performance, and we’ll hopefully be able to distribute it to the Drillamaniacs sometime.

Now back to the action in the ring.

Like the Civil War, the Icky Joey versus Stumpy Joe rivalry has pitted brother against brother. . . . Well, at least it has in our family. I am strongly in the pro-Stumpy camp, whereas William belongs to the pro-Icky camp. While blood has yet to be shed, online taunts have been thrown, and feelings have been hurt. Why is there such animosity between camps? Probably because we are bored and easily amused.

In the grunge corner, you have Icky Joey. Made up of Love Battery rhythm tag-team members Jason Finn and Jason Tillman, Icky Joey also featured vocalist David Lipe, guitarist David Rott, and guitarist/artist/Thrown-Up Ed Fotheringham. Icky Joey didn’t last too long, but they were signed to C/Z and left behind the Marron, Marron 7” EP, Pooh LP, and a song on Teriyaki Asthma Volume Four. Plus they opened for Madison, Wisconsin’s, all-time greatest band, Killdozer. Really, that’s quite a pedigree.

Musically and stylistically, Icky Joey was Grunge with a capital G. They had all the benchmarks: Jack Endino production, Charles Peterson photography, wah-wah solos, and that snotty-and-proud punk rock irreverence that quickly went away once the Seattle Sound went national. Hell, Steve Turner even made a guest appearance on their record!

Now in the pop corner, you have Stumpy Joe. Named after Spinal Tap’s second drummer (who tragically died after choking on somebody else’s vomit), Stumpy Joe released records on Conrad Uno’s Popllama, Sicko’s Top Drawer, and Bellingham’s gone-but-not-forgotten Estrus Records. The band consisted of John Ramburg (vocals/guitar), Mark Hoyt (guitar), Christian Wilson (bass), and Scott Russell (drums), and most of their songs were about beer. “Drunk Idea” is their hit and has enjoyed a steady rotation in my head after I first heard it at a Popllama Picnic in the Park many battles ago.

John later formed the very fine Model Rockets, who didn’t sing about beer nearly enough, in my humble opinion.

The lines have been drawn and now it’s your turn to pick a side. Let the battle begin!

Icky Joey

Marron, Marron EP
Marron, Marron
Liberace
Zara
I Love You There

Teriyaki Asthma V4
Josephine

Pooh
Bone of Contention
Smokin' the Devil's Bud

Stumpy Joe

Love Plumbin' 7"
Love Plumbin
I Want Some Bud

Sugar and Glue 7" Top Drawer Records 1993
Sugar and Glue
Welcome Back (Kotter's Theme)

Drunk Idea

Get 'em all in a zip file here.

--MC Tom

Live! Tonight! Sold Out!

2008-07-29T06:23:00.000-07:00

In my office, we can access our co-workers’ iTunes folders through the network. Every now and then, I peruse some of these folders to see what’s new. Much to my surprise, a coworker named Brendan, who I hadn’t met before, had some Nirvana bootlegs, including a 1991 show at the Paramount Theater in Seattle. My eyes practically popped out of their sockets. Goddamn! I attended that show!!! Brendan was kind enough to let me copy the sound files.

Here’s what I remember from that show. When tickets went on sale, Nirvana had already started ascending in popularity--clearly, since the Paramount seats a few thousand people. I went with a few friends--Gray, Carolyn, and I think Joe. Bikini Kill and Mudhoney opened. We missed every note of Bikini Kill’s twenty-minute set, because hundreds of people still packed the Paramount’s small lobby, preventing us from reaching our seats, which were well in the upper tier of the venue. Mudhoney played a fine if somewhat subdued set, most of which consisted of tracks from Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge. A couple of people filmed the Nirvana show, and bits subsequently popped up in the video for “Lithium” and elsewhere. I’ve remembered some of these and other details--the mundane details--over the 15+ years since that show.

But some of the specific details came flooding back to me when I started listening to this bootleg, and I soon remembered the show as if it had happened a week ago. I think this is the exact feeling that middle-aged people like me crave when we listen to a live record: that shudder of youth that winds through you, that chance to be reminded not just of the concert but of the conflicting desires and nervous energy that drove you. It’s strange, because I’ve heard other live tracks from shows I attended, but none of them really *worked* in the way that this Paramount show did. And it started working as soon as I heard Cobain’s explanation of the Vaselines cover in the opening seconds, which I remembered distinctly as soon as I was reminded of it. But I also remembered what it was like to be 17 or 18 years old, being swept up in something that made me feel undeniably cool, even if it was only by association.

"Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam"

While researching this particular post, I realized that this bootleg has been very well circulated, so it’s not quite the awesome rarity that is, I dunno, 64 Spiders’ lone single. The recent Sub Pop birthday bash put me in kind of a reflective mood, though, so I felt like procuring this boot and passing it on. If you don’t already have it, I highly recommend giving it a listen: as a document of Nirvana’s live show, it’s a vastly better than the official live record. It’s worth it for the takes on “Breed,” “Been a Son,” and “Negative Creep” alone.

The show occurred on Halloween night, 1991. Nevermind had attained gold record status only a few days before the show.

Track listing:

Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam
Aneurysm
Drain You
Floyd the Barber
Smells Like Teen Spirit
About a Girl
Polly
Breed
Sliver
Love Buzz
Lithium
Been a Son
Negative Creep
On a Plain
Blew
Rape Me
Territorial Pissings
Endless Nameless

Zip file is here.

--Wm

Sub Pop Rock, Comedy, and Acoustic Guitar City

2008-07-11T09:52:00.001-07:00

It goes without saying that a lamestain representative will be attending the most awesome event in the history of mankind (i.e., the Green River reunion). Look for Tom out there: he'll be the guy with long hair, a flannel shirt, torn jeans, and a leather jacket, throwing beer cans at Iron & Wine.

As for me? Lucky me, I'll be stuck in Chicago, doing marketing and investments homework. In honor of the event, I will be extra angst-y as I calculate CAPM models.

Dan at 10 Things has photos of last night's surprise Green River show at the Sunset.

Tom wrote a Grunge 101 piece in The Seattle Weekly that's worth a read, although you already own all of these records, of course. The Weekly also has other features about the big bash.

Pitchfork has devoted the entire week to Sub Pop-related features, some of which are really quite good. I take issue with their list of 20 essential releases, however, because it doesn't include Salt Lick. How do you accidentally omit Salt Lick?

Have fun at this thing, and take lots of photos.

-Wm

P.S. MediaMax, our old host for mp3s, went tits up a couple of weeks ago, so you'll find that you can't link to those mp3s anymore. We'll still use zip files and box.net and, I hope, not have that problem any more.

Engine Kid: What Life Was Like Before Sunn O)))

2008-07-07T19:56:00.000-07:00

If you ever wondered what Greg Anderson did between stints with False Liberty, Inner Strength, Brotherhood, Amenity, Statement, Galleons Lap and Thorr’s Hammer, Goatsnake, Teeth of Lions Rule the Divine, Sunn O))), Burial Chamber Trio, Ascend, and Pentemple, the answer would be Engine Kid. Like Louisville’s Rodan, Engine Kid were dogged with the "sounds like Slint" tag, and while it might be true for their early releases, the band moved beyond the quiet/loud dynamics toward the end of their career. By the time the band had signed to New York hardcore label Revelation, Engine Kid flirted more with metal and experimental music than just post-rock.

Bands like Engine Kid could also be seen as a sort of rejection against the grunge scene. While the grunge acts in the early 90’s either tried their luck with major labels or broke up, a crop of younger bands formed that had nothing to do with greasy hair, thrift store flannel shirts, or 70s arena rock riffs. A lot of the younger bands came from the straight-edge scene, which, of course, was pretty much the polar opposite of the grunge scene.

Their first single came out in 1992 on Greg’s own Battery Records and, uh, kinda sounds like Slint. Recorded by Stuart Hallerman, the band featured Greg on vocals and guitar, Art Behrman on bass, and Chris Vanderbrooke on drums. Their cover of “The Needle and the Damage Done” was also released on the Excursion Records compilation tape This is My World, which featured Greg’s other bands, Galleon’s Lap and Brotherhood (both bands also featured future Sunny Day Real Estate/Foo Fighter Nate Mendel). The tape also had songs by straight-edge acts like Undertow, Resolution, and Strain; pop acts like Olympia’s Lync and 10:07; and a ton of Bellingham bands, such as Grien Cow, Fat, and Outside.

“Thigh with a Desolate Thorn” came out on the 1994 C/Z records, Three on a Tree 7” compilation. Lamestain alumni Vexed and Die Kreuzen spin-off band Wreck also contributed songs. (The record was second in a compilation series; the first record was Four on the Floor with Treepeople, Gnome, Dirt Fisherman, and Alcohol Funnycar, and I don’t think the third part of the series was ever released.)

Chris eventually left the band was replaced by drummer Jade Devitt and by 1995, Engine Kid was starting to sound pretty damn evil. They released their last single on New Jersey’s still-going-strong Troubleman Unlimited Records (2000 were pressed). “Heater Sweats Nails” has a Melvins-worthy riff, while “Husk” is a minor-key instrumental, post-rock jam. After this record, it was no big shock that Greg’s next few bands would lean even more towards the metal-side of things.

Novacaine
1/4 Mile Thunder
Needle and the Damage Done

Thigh with a Desolate Thorn

Heater Sweater Nails
Husk

How do you like 'dem apples?

2008-06-13T10:56:00.000-07:00

First, sorry about the French holiday between posts. Sub Pop has been gearing up the 20th Birthday celebrations with aplomb, and Tom and I were, traveling to England or trudging away on a project for a class. No doubt, you’ve all picked up the reissue of Mudhoney’s Superfuzz Bigmuff by now (unless you already have all of the tracks).

A few weeks ago, my friend Blake burned me a CD of the Cats Are Neat EP by Apple Maggot Quarantine Area (that’s AMQA, for those in the know), a hardcore band from Puyallup who banged around for a few years in the late 80s. It amazed me when he first asked me about AMQA, as they never exactly hit it big at that time. You’d see their name around town from time to time, but they lasted only a short while, didn’t release much material, and morphed into a speed metal band just as everyone else was exchanging their BC Riches for Fender Jaguars.

If you didn’t grow up or travel through the Northwest, their name seems like a non sequitur, like a splattercore version of, say, Stoney Bone Child. Not so! Apple maggots actually infest apples in parts of Western Washington, such that the local government forbids people from transporting homegrown/non-commercially grown apples across state lines, if they had been harvested in a quarantine area. You can learn more about it--and I’m certain you do, in fact, want to learn more--here.

As far as the band goes, I can’t tell you much about them. Members included Snostrebla, Mike Crum, Kevin Johnson, Kevin Ladas, Paul Kimball, Flash, Dirk Bennet, and Bob Bulgrien, but not all at once. Bob later joined Seaweed, Mike Crum and Paul Kimball later formed HellTrout, Kevin Johnson played in Leaded and ScatterBuzz, and Flash was in Portrait of Poverty. I don’t know much about any of these bands other than Seaweed, although Helltrout shared bills with Soundgarden, Tad, Skin Yard, and Fitz of Depression. They followed Cats Are Neat (Subcore Records) with a full-length, Mutant Cats Are Hell (I’m sensing a theme here) on Ever Rat Records in 1988. By this point, they’d become more of a metal band. They also recorded an unreleased split with The Dehumanizers. Perhaps our friend Mort could tell us more about them.

I wouldn’t call this record essential by a long shot. It’s mostly interesting as a document of what else was happening in the area at the time. Also, I’ll note that they were regulars at the Community World Theater, a brief-lived venue in Tacoma that hosted shows that will make the eyeballs pop out of your head. Example: Killdozer with opening band . . . Beat Happening?

The Cats Are Neat EP is on this zip file.

Our old file-sharing site, MediaMax, appears to have changed a bit, and I haven't had a chance to figure it out yet. So for the time being, we'll just use zip files and Sendspace.

A Subvert Post That’s Also About Me.

2008-05-07T19:33:00.000-07:00

So it’s 2000, and my admittedly crap band, the Recordbreakers, broke up after our drummer Brian quit to join an emo band and our bassist Kevin left to help form the much, much better Popular Shapes. After some shuffling around and twiddling our thumbs, the remaining Recordbreakers regrouped as the Catahoula Hounds with Jed on vocals/guitars, Andres on bass, and me on guitar. We kicked around for a few months without a drummer until Andres ran into Shawn, the shred-tastic guitarist from Portrait of Poverty, at a Valentine Killers show who said he was interested in playing drums with us. I think my first thought was, “the dude from Subvert wants to jam with us? Awesome!”

And why was I excited to jam with a member from Subvert? Because they were goddamn Northwest Hardcore legends! Kings of Tacoma’s Community World Theater and Rulers of KCMU’s Sunday night metal show, Brain Pain, Subvert stirred massive mosh pits from 1986 until 1991. They played fast, metal-tinged hardcore, which placed them in company with other Northwest bands like Poison idea and the Accused, but were more political than a lot of their crossover contemporaries. Think Amebix or Battalion of Saints-style thrash rather than Stormtroopers of Death or Excel.

Arizona’s Hippycore released The Madness Must End EP around 1988, which was recorded at Reciprocal Studios by Chris Hanzek. Germany’s Sellout Activities also did a pressing with different artwork and insert. Septic Death singer and Metallica shirt-designer Pushead also listed this record at 98 in the Top 100 of the 1980s – beating out the Dead Kennedys and Leeway! This record features Eric Greenwalt on vocals, Shawn Durand on screamin’ lead guitar, John Grant on guitar, Marc Brown on bass, and John Purkey on drums.

Subvert also appeared on the Hippycore Metal Gives Us a Headache compilation along with Dead Silence, Cringer (featuring the late Lance Hahn from J Church), Dissent, and a few other bands. You can check it out here.

They also released the Free Your Mind LP on the UK label, Raging Records. Produced by the band and Jerry Rejector (check out the Rejectors Thoughts of War EP here), the band thrashes so hard that your stinky dreads will stand up. You can find all of the band’s recordings on the self-titled CD on Selfless records, which came out sometime in the mid-90s.

After the band split, singer Eric Greenwalt played in Christdriver, who cut a record on the legendary crusty hardcore label, Profane Existence; he currently plays in Black Noise Cannon. Our man of the hour, Shawn, then hooked up with Flash from Apple Maggot Quarantine Area and formed Portrait of Poverty. He currently plays in Infect.

Now back to me.

The Catahoula Hounds songs are from an aborted Dirtnap records release around 2002 and were recorded in, I think, 3 days by Chris Hanzek at Hanzek Audio in Ballard. We previously recorded a demo with Chris, but it’s pretty bad and should be left forgotten.

The first song is an attempt to marry the Faces with the Lazy Cowgirls and features an attempt by me to channel the dexterity of Ross the Boss in the guitar solo, but instead I conjured a 14-year-old kid hanging out at Guitar Center. I don’t remember much about the 2nd song, but the 3rd song is noteworthy because it is probably the only garage punk song to include the phrase, “Drink from the Golden Chalice.” I believe Jed was trying to imagine a drunken David Lee Roth fronting a fantasy metal band during the ad-libbed bridge section, and in retrospect, we probably should have taken away his Magic: the Gathering gaming cards before he stepped foot in the vocal booth. Lesson learned. The last song was kind of an attempt at doing a Husker Du/Wipers sort of thing and appeared on the Dirtnap across the Northwest compilation. I don’t think we were happy with the performances or something, and we pretty much broke up during mixing and scrapped the record.

Thanks for taking a trip down memory lane with me and we’ll be back with some grunge stuff next time!

Subvert - Madness Must End
Stand Up
The Madness
Psychopath
For Who For What
We All Fall Down

Catahoula Hounds EP
Back Home
She Never Sleeps
I don't remember the title for this one
All My Friends Are In Bands

Get them all in a zip file here.

-- mc tom

Seaweed's foggy eyes

2008-04-25T07:32:00.000-07:00

In the past, I’ve written about my first encounter with Seaweed: opening up for Gas Huffer at the Columbia Center in Seattle’s central district. The room--the bottom floor of a building--lacked a stage or even proper lighting. I went with my friend Mira. Neither of us had heard of Seaweed by this point, who had only released a single or two. A few songs into their set, someone kicked a cable with his foot and cut off all of the power--the sound, the lighting, everything. If you’ve ever seen this happen, you know it’s a pretty funny experience: you get a few seconds of drums and the faint sounds of nonamplified electric guitar. After a few minutes, someone managed to find the affected socket and get things running again. It didn’t take long before a band or audience member again knocked out the sound.

“Well, that’s punk rock,” said singer Aaron Stauffer.

Seaweed sounded great that night, as they did at each of the four or five times I saw them. They had a youthful, punk rock spirit and enthusiasm that many bands from that era (as awesome as they were) lacked. Not long after the first show, I bought some of their singles, as well as the Sub Pop Despised EP when it first came out. We later bought their first proper full-length, Weak, and the follow up Four (both on Sub Pop). I have pretty good memories of those records.

. . . which is why it was such a shock to hear the early singles and EPs again after so many years and to feel an undeniable sense of disappointment. I’m guessing that, as a teenager, I liked those early records because they served as mementos of Seaweed’s fantastic live shows. Listening to them now, I’m not moved at all. They lumber where they should sizzle, and the songs all kind of sound the same--a common criticism of the band at the time. “Star Girl” (from the self-titled EP) reminds me a bit of early Screaming Trees, and “Love Gut” has some Bleach-ish riffage, although the song sounds little like early Nirvana otherwise. Only “Foggy Eyes” (from the Estrus Half-Rack compilation) really rises above the pack, and that’s a Beat Happening cover. The remaining songs are basically mid-tempo punk, with dashes of emo and hardcore. Tom compares them to Dag Nasty and early Bad Religion. That seems reasonable to me, but I haven’t delved too deeply into either of those bands’ catalogs.

One bit of trivia I find kind of cool about Seaweed: they released songs both on K Records (motto: “Let’s hold hands and eat candy”) and Estrus Records (motto: “I’m gonna fuck you on the back of my El Camino”). I honestly can’t think of another band that had a foot in both camps.

The fellas likely recognized their own limitations. I can remember liking Despised more than these EPs and the full-lengths more than Despised. We likely have Despised kicking around somewhere; however, Sub Pop still sells it via their website, so we likely won’t post it. But hey, now you know where to find it! (They’re also selling an mp3 version of Four, but the CD isn’t in print; Weak remains out of print in all formats.)

The band’s lineup remained pretty consistent throughout their career (Aaron Stauffer, vocals; Clint Werner and Wade Neal, guitars; Bob Bulgrien, drums; and John Atkins, bass). Alan Cage took over on drums in 1999, as the band wound down. Jesse Fox has taken over on drums recently. Recently? Yep, recently: the band has been active again. They’re slated to play at Sub Pop’s 20th Birthday Bash, so make sure to catch ‘em. More can be found via their myspace page.

Seaweed EP (1990; Leopard Gecko Records)

Inside
Stargirl
Re-Think
Love Gut

"Just a Smirk" 7" (1990; Leopard Gecko Records)

Just a Smirk
Installing

"Deertrap" 7" (1991; K Records)

Deertrap
Carousel

From the Estrus Half-Rack compilation (1991; Estrus)

Foggy Eyes

The songs are all on this dandy-as-candy zip file.
--Wm

Lamestains Across the U.S. (and France)

2008-04-13T20:49:00.000-07:00

If Sub Pop was to become a World-dominating label rather than just a Seattle-boutique one, it needed to look for bands outside the Northwest. Sure, signing Soundgarden, Mudhoney, and Nirvana was cool and all, but if the label really wanted to be put on the global rock and roll map, they needed to add a Mad Daddies or a Lonely Moans to their line-up. Or something like that. Really, their first 100 records are pretty much a who’s-who of late-eighties/early-nineties underground rock. Everybody and their mommies know and love Rapeman, Fugazi, and the Dwarves, but here are some other less-talked about, non-Seattle bands.

Stooges and 60’s garage punk-inspired band The Fluid was the first non-local band on Sub Pop and recently announced that they will be reforming for some shows, including a spot at the big Sub Pop 20^th Anniversary Party this July. Formed in Denver, Colorado, after the demise of hardcore legends, Frantix, the Fluid signed to Sub Pop in time for their second LP, Clear Black Paper. The Glue EP is certainly has the best sounding of all their early records, as well as being our personal favorite, but this week we are giving you the rarer, 1989 “Tin Top Toy” and “Tomorrow” (SP57) single. Remembered as a top-dog live band, the Fluid eventually signed to Hollywood Records, released their major label debut, Purplemetalflakemusic, and then called it a day. Members also went on to Seattle bands The Press Corp and Alta May.

Les Thugs were the first non-US band to record on Sub Pop, and if I remember my 2-years of French lessons correctlly, their name roughly translates to “The Thugs.” The 1500-pressed “Chess and Crime” b/w “Sunday Time” single (SP29) was their first Sub Pop record, and the band went to have around a ten-year relationship with the label. This single was released in between records by the Flaming Lips and former Chrome member Helios Creed, and it was a bit more melodic and punk rock than a lot of the other Sub Pop bands. Actually, everything the band did was pretty cool, and hopefully people will think of them more than just "that French Sub Pop band." They also announced on their website that they will be playing the Anniversary party as well as some shows in France.

I know pretty much zilch about the Lonely Moans outside that they might have been from Boston and were one of the few bands who had records on Sub Pop and Amphetamine Reptile. For years, I also judged the record by their covers and assumed that they were a 60’s garage rock revival act like the Chesterfield Kings or Cynics. Wrong-o, daddy-o. Instead, they were pretty much as grunge as you could get: sludgy riffs, plenty of feedback, and an irreverent snotty attitude. The 2000-pressed “Shoot the Cool” b/w “Texas Love Goat” (SP46) might be one of the least remembered early Sub Pop releases, and it certainly doesn’t command collectorscum prices, but it’s a pretty good, underrated grunge gem.

In an attempt to increase public awareness, we are also posting the uber-rare 1988 “Rockinerd” b/w “Welcome Home” single on Amphetamine Reptile (Scale 14). We are hoping that Lamestain exposure will encourage Sub Pop to invite the Lonely Moans to reunite at the Anniversary party. For the record, though, AmRep pressed 600 of these babies in between hot-ass singles by the Halo of Flies and the Killdozer and HoF-side project, Pogo the Clown.

"Tin Top Toy"
"Tomorrow"

"Chess and Crime"
"Sunday Time"

"Shoot the Cool"
"Texas Love Goat"

"Rockinerd"
"Welcome Home"

EDITED to add the tracks in a handy, dandy .zip file.
-- MC Tom

Lamestain may hate the Posies sometimes

2008-03-24T09:43:00.000-07:00

Although the Posies sometimes get lumped in with the rest of the Seattle bands from the late 80s and early 90s, in truth, the only factors that connect the Posies with grunge, Sub Pop, etc. were geography and time period. They sprouted up 90 miles north of Seatttle, at Sehome High School in Bellingham, having almost nothing to do with the nascent grunge scene down south. In fact, they had even less to do with the garage rock/Estrus Records scene in their home town. While everyone else bashed out fuzzed-out, three-chord rock at the Central and while their bands formed, disbanded, and interbred, Jon Auer and Ken Stringfellow were crafting pop songs in their bedrooms and overdubbing bass and drum tracks on demo tapes. In fact, the record Failure,

later released by Pop Llama Records, had been well circulated as a demo tape in1988 before the Posies had added bassist Mike Musbeger and drummer Rick Roberts and started gigging regularly as a four-piece.

The common reference point for the Posies these days is Big Star, at least in part because Ken and Jon joined the reactivated Big Star in the late 90s. (It’s even mentioned in the first sentence of Trouser Press’s entry on the Posies.) At a certain point (specifically, “Apology” on Dear 23), the influence of Alex Chilton and co. started creeping into their music, but Failure doesn’t contain even the slightest hint of Big Star. Rather—as all of the press and even my dad noted at the time—the Posies resembled the Hollies, with a significant dash of early 80s English pop, like XTC.

In fact, for Dear 23, they even recruited former XTC producer Jon Leckie to man the boards. (Leckie also worked with the Fall, the Stone Roses, New Order, and, erm, Gene Loves Jezebel.) It’s awfully difficult to listen to this record (or even Failure) objectively anymore, as everything about it reminds me of high school. Some of Leckie’s lush soundscapes and effects (e.g., song endings fade into the sound of falling rain) layer a bit too much melodrama on the music; this, combined with the Posies sometimes corny lyrics, makes it a perfect soundtrack for high school’s melodramas but perhaps not for older listening. Don’t get me wrong—it’s a great record, but one that must be accepted with its limitations in mind. I don’t think it’s an accident that my absolute favorite track from this era is the completely unadorned b-side to “Suddenly Mary,” “Spite and Malice.”

"Solar Sister" live.

The wikipedia entry has a brief explanation of the nasty label pressure put on the Posies after Dear 23 (which was actually fairly successful!). In short: they started recording a follow-up, dumped/lost their bassist, scrapped the follow-up, started a new follow-up with Don Fleming, received a thumbs down from the label, added a few “hits,” got the thumbs up, replaced the rhythm section, yadda yadda yadda. The follow-up, Frosting on the Beater, has without a doubt aged the best of all their records; the harder edge that Fleming emphasized always existed in their live shows but not on their records, and it compliments the sugary harmonies wonderfully. I won’t talk about it much here, as I’m already rambling on like an old man. Failure came out when I was in high school? Christ, I should start sprinkling No Salt on my supper. Then again, if I’m making jokes about being old, it means I’m not old yet: unfortunately, it means I’m middle aged and unfunny.

We got off the train around this time. I never cottoned to the fourth record, Amazing Disgrace, and we kind of burned out on seeing them live. (We saw them around a dozen times, as they played frequently in Bellingham and Seattle. A few shows were terrible, but others were fantastic.) They had attracted a considerable cult following by this point—I remember reading an old email mailing list ages ago and learning that some fans had seen them fifty and even 75 times before Amazing Disgrace was even released! The Posies soon broke up, somehow managed to become extremely prolific while inactive, and then reformed. The new songs I’ve heard from their myspace page aren’t bad at all—in fact, I quite like some of them. What’s notable is that sounds remarkably different than their previous eras, and I commend any band that exists for 20 years while both maintaining their strengths and exploring new grounds.

Burning Sky Records will release a tribute record this spring. The band’s homepage is here. A good discography can be found here, and if you’re burning to download live shows via bittorrent, check out the message board on their homepage.

From Failure:
“I May Hate You Sometimes”
“Ironing Tuesdays”

From Dear 23:
“You Avoid Parties”
“Apology”

Suddenly Mary ep

“Suddenly Mary”
“Feel” (Big Star cover)
“Spite & Malice”

From Frosting on the Beater:

“Solar Sister”
“When Mute Tongues Speak”

And all of them are handily collected on this .zip file.

--Wm

Saying Goodbye to Empty with the Derelicts

2008-03-18T21:12:00.000-07:00

February 8^th 2008 marked a sad day for us Lamestain grunts as the northwest’s premier punk label, Empty Records, shut its door after 20 some years. Empty USA, as it became known as after a bizarre lawsuit over the eMpTy name and logo, released great records by legendary bands, such as the Fartz, Gas Huffer, and the Supersuckers, as well as more current and certainly worthwhile acts like Pure Country Gold and King Louie and the Loose Diamonds. To read more about their history, go here and read Blake Wright and Dan Halligan’s musings.

To celebrate Empty’s long run, we thought it would be cool to post the first ever Empty USA 7” release, the Accused/Morphius split. Unfortunately, I was unable to find a copy of it before deadline, which is really too bad, because if memory serves me right, Morphius were a cool local thrash band that sung a lot about drinking beer. So instead we will bring you another early Empty Seattle band, the Derelicts.

Dan once again beat us to the punch and posted about the Derelicts a few months ago, so instead of rehashing something that was better said on 10 Things, we’ll just blab about the posted songs. And while not all of the below songs were originally released on Empty Records, they were all compiled on the now out-of-print Empty CD Going Out of Style in mid- 90s.

“I Wanna Get Out” is from their Time to Get Fucked Up 7”, which was released on Empty Records in 1990. Recorded by Jack Endino at Reciprocal Studios, it featured a cool record cover drawing by Gas Huffer’s Joe Newton; the Derelicts were singer Duane Bodenheimer, guitarist Neil Rogers, bassist Ian Dunsmore, and drummer Rick Bilotti.

Of all the great Seattle comps, one of the lesser known records was 1991’s Bobbing for Pavement on Rat House Records. Showcasing the punk rock scene centered on the East Denny house, the record also features songs by Gas Huffer, the Gits, D.C. Beggars, Bay of Pigs, Big Brown House (featuring Ben London, later of Alcohol Funnycar and Sanford Arms), Hammerbox, and My Name. The Derelicts’ song “Dirty City Rotten Life” is one of the better songs on the comp, and once again, was recorded by Jack Endino. Broken Rekids reissued Bobbing for Pavement on CD in 1994.

One thing certain about the band is that they had great choice in cover songs. We already posted their version of Fleetwood Mac-by-way-of the Rezillos “Somebody’s Gonna Get Their Head Kicked In Tonight” during our Regal Select Appreciation Month a while back, and now we are going to give you their versions of the Frantix’ Flipper-esque classic “My Dad’s A Fucking Alcoholic” and the Cosmic Psychos’ “Lost Cause.”

“My Dad’s a Fucking Alcoholic” comes from their 1989 Love Machine LP, which was released by early Empty co-founder Vocker Stewart’s label, Penultimate records (PEN010). Recorded by Jack Endino at Reciprocal and guided by “2 cases of beer and a fifth of cheap whiskey,” the Derelicts do a great version of the Frantix song a few years before everybody else learned about the original version from its appearance on Killed by Death Volume 6. Members of the Frantix later went on to the Fluid, and you can hear the original version on the just-released Local Anesthetic compilation. Joe Kilbourne also played bass for this cover song.

“Lost Cause” was originally released on the 1991 Estrus Half-Rack 3x7 box (ES715-717), which also included songs by the Fastbacks, Mummies, Mudhoney, Phantom Surfers, Untamed Youth, Prisonshake, Gorilla, Seaweed, and the Mono Men. It might seem strange now that bands like the Derelicts or Seaweed (who covers Beat Happening) would be on a garage punk compilation, but at the time, nobody thought of it. Estrus pressed 2000 of these and even included a drink coaster in the box. The original version comes from Cosmic Psychos’ 1989 Sub Pop release, Go the Hack. We are also going to post it because we love that crazy gang of drunken Aussies. L7 also used to do a version of “Lost Cause,” but we favor the Derelicts’ version.

Goodbye, Empty!

"I Wanna Get Out"
"Dirty City Rotten Life"
"My Dad's a Fucking Alcoholic"
"Lost Cause"

Cosmic Psychos "Lost Cause"

-- MC Tom

Historia de la Musica Tad, vol. IV

2008-03-10T06:01:00.000-07:00

In some regards, it’s not so amazing that Salt Lick is no longer in print. TAD probably experienced more bad luck than any other band from that era: they faced two enormous lawsuits (relating to the original scandalizing cover of 8-Way Santa and to appropriation of Pepsi’s logo for the “Jack Pepsi” single) and endured being dropped by two different labels (Giant/Warner Brothers and EastWest/Elektra), with the second of the label-losses happening a mere week into a tour. In other regards, it is amazing that Salt Lick fell out of print: we consider it among the greatest and most important records from that era, and now that indie rock has become a certifiable genre and has substituted wimpiness and affectation for genuine menace, it sounds fresher and more vibrant to my ears than it has for any time since Sub Pop released it in 1990.

The line-up on Salt Lick doesn’t differ from that on TAD’s debut, God’s Balls (Tad Doyle on guitar and vocals, Kurt Danielson on bass, Gary Thorstensen on guitar, and Steve Wied on drums), but the sounds differ quite a bit. God’s Balls sounds sludgier, slower, and more lumbering (in a good way), whereas Salt Lick has a slightly more industrial sound. If God’s Balls sounds like grave-digging, then Salt Lick sounds like demolition work. To put it better, Salt Lick sounds like Tad has been laying some cable, in both senses of the term. This is not to imply that I prefer the sound of one record over another; both were recorded appropriately. The recordings largely reflect the trademark sounds of their engineers—Jack Endino and Steve Albini.

"High on the Hog," w/ Kurt Cobain on vocals

I contacted both Doyle and Albini for comments. Doyle has been too busy to get back to me, which is fine. Albini mentioned that he doesn’t remember the sessions too well—they were 20 years ago, after all—but gracefully attempted to answer some questions anyway.

Lamestain: Did the band indicate why they wanted to record with you? (Meaning, were there any past recordings that they especially liked or referenced?)

Steve Albini: I liked God's Balls and mentioned it to Tad when I met him. That may have influenced his decision, but he never mentioned it.

Lamestain: What was the recording process like? The record was recorded well before you opened Electrical Audio. Where did you record it? Did the band use their own instruments or instruments at the studio?

Albini: Everything was recorded and mixed at CRC. They used their own guitars, I don't remember about the rest.

Lamestain: The bass sound--which is fantastic--recalls Big Black a little. Was this planned in advance or did it relate to the recording process (for example, as a result of the instruments used)?

Albini: Don't remember doing anything special. Sorry.

Lamestain: Were there any leftovers from the sessions? Any songs that appeared in different versions on later albums?

Albini: I think everything they recorded ended up on the EP.

Lamestain: Is there anything you especially love or dislike about how that record turned out?

Albini: I have mixed feelings about it. I remember some songs sounding more ass-kicking than others but not being able to put my finger on why.

Lamestain: Finally, I've been curious about the provenance of a song called "Habit & Necessity," which appeared on an early Dope, Guns, and Fucking comp. It doesn't exactly sound like anything from either the sessions with you or those with Jack Endino while at the same time sounding a little like each of those sessions. Did you record this?

Albini: Doesn't sound familiar. Sorry. That was pretty lame, sorry. I don't have that many vivid memories about those sessions.

"Wood Goblins"--too "ugly" for MTV

We’ve been happy to see TAD finally getting their due, even if it’s coming nearly two decades too late. One of Seattle Weekly’s blogs claimed that “Wood Goblin” was the best Northwest music video ever made. We’ve heard rumors of the possibility of TAD reissues. The Busted Circuits and Ringing Ears DVD came out a little more than a month ago (it’s highly recommended); it's reviewed here, indicating that we’re not the only people feeling nostalgia for TAD. Doyle has insisted that his heart isn’t in to the possibility of the reunion, so this will probably be the closest we get. As much as we would leap at the chance to see TAD again, we would like it more if some of you young whipper-snappers reading this blog would finally quit being such pussies and pick up the mantle where TAD left it.

Because of the possibility, however remote, that these records will see reissue, we’re only posting a couple of mp3s. Really, you have no excuse for not owning it already—none whatsoever! We also found a live show from this era via the computernet that we’ve added below. The sound quality is surprisingly good.

Axe to Grind
Loser

Live December 1st, 1989

Helot
Pork Chop
Wood Goblins
Boiler Room
Behemoth
(Unkown track)
Hibernation
Nipple Belt

-Wm

Celebrate President’s Day with the Thrown Ups

2008-02-18T08:13:00.000-08:00

Regardless of what anybody tries to tell you, songs about bodily fluids are funny. In 1980s Seattle, the go-to band for songs about bowel movements was The Thrown Ups. Self-described “barf music,” the band crapped out three singles and a full-length and stained several compilations before breaking up in 1991. While Seattle prides itself today with its cosmopolitan tastes, we will never forget that she also gave birth to a band of filthy miscreants who once recorded a song called “Eat My Dump.”

Formed in 1984, the band was originally made up of bassist/mastermind Leighton Beezer (ex-Blunt Objects), guitarist Mike Faulhaber (what happened to him?), singer Steve Mack, and drummer Scott Schikler (ex-Limp Richerds). This line-up didn’t last long, as Steve quit, moved to the UK, and joined up with some ex-Undertones in the very-different-sounding That Petrol Emotion, and Scott joined the since-reformed Swallow. Leighton then recruited new band members Ed Fotheringham (vocals), Steve Turner (guitar), and Mark Arm (drums), and this is the version of the band that, according to Trouser Press, recorded some of “the most willfully inept objet de f’art ever knowingly committed to tape.”

The band convinced Tom Hazelmeyer to sign them to his new label, Amphetamine Reptile, who previously only did singles by his own band, the very cool and underrated, Halo of Flies. They debuted in 1987 with the 500-pressed Felch EP. They soon followed with the Smiling Panties (1987; 600-pressed) and Eat My Dump (1988; 600-pressed) EPs and appeared on the first Dope, Guns , and Fucking in the Street EP (with the U-Men, Mudhoney, and Halo of Flies) and the notorious Sub Pop 200 compilation record.

Some songs from the Felch sessions were also included on the 1990 Melancholy Girlhole full-length, but everything else was recorded by Jack Endino at Reciprocal in 1989. Amphetamine Reptile originally released this as a 1000-pressed 3x7 box set, while German label Glitterhouse released it on 12’ vinyl. AmRep also lovingly reissued nearly everything by the band on the 7 Golden Years CD, which you can buy here.

Leighton went on to play in Stomach Pump, whose single on Penultimate records we are still trying to find, and is also behind the official Thrown Ups webpage (there is also a great “unofficial” page here). He also played in El Grande Conquistador, although I am unsure whether they are still around or have released any records. Before Ed gave up the rock ‘n roll life for illustration, he also played in the Sad and Lonelys, Love and Respect, Icky Joey, Eddie and the Back Nine (w/ Flop), and Bushpig (w/ King Snake Roost members). Ed was only on the Bushpig AmRep single, while Steve Turner and Mark Arm were on the record. We’ll eventually post stuff by all of those bands, so sit tight, kids.

For now, though, take some time to reflect on the meaning of President’s Day and enjoy “Person in My Bowels (is Very Sad).”

"Person In My Bowels"
“Hot Lunch”
“Fleshy Web Pit”
“Sloppy Pud Love”

The songs are on a .zip file here.

-- MC Tom

Fill the Hammerbox

2008-02-11T10:15:00.000-08:00

Perhaps the worst thing that can be said about Hammerbox is that they recognized the star-making possibilities inherent in a major label contract and that they were perhaps overeager to move their band onto a bigger stage. Most of the bands from that era (save Soundgarden) lacked a traditional, extroverted frontman. Hammerbox’s Carrie Akre, on the other hand, aimed to own the stage: she danced wildly, and she sang as if her throat had been coated in brass.

Now was this an entirely good thing? I vacillate on the matter. During their heyday, I considered Hammerbox to be among the cream of the crop as far as local bands went. I played their self-titled debut on C/Z Records (1991) a ton on my home stereo toward the end of high school and start of college. I saw them several times in small clubs and theaters and enjoyed them every time. A&R reps were apparently as common as mosquitoes, and a major label snapped up Hammerbox almost immediately. But the band’s sophomore album and major label debut, Numb (1993; A&M Records), let me down deeply upon first hearing it. At the time, it sounded polished to the point of blindness, and Akre’s voice was mixed above everything else. I already knew the songs from live shows, where they sounded much more exciting. (In retrospect, I hadn’t been fair. I’ve revisited Numb lately, and it’s a much better record that I thought initially. The rest of the band—Harris Thurmond on guitar, James Atkins on bass, and Dave Bosch on drums—make the meatiest contributions to the record, but I still think Akre’s yarling vocals get a little too much emphasis. But that’s a discussion for another day.)

“Size of the World”

We’re posting their first single: “Kept House”/“After All” (Big Flaming Ego Records). I’m not positive which year this was released but I suspect it preceded the debut by a year, so let’s say 1990. It’s a good single, and the band liked “Kept House” enough to put it on their debut. The B-side captures Hammerbox still learning their strengths but also falling into the same trap that ensnared many bands from that era. What was the trap, you ask? Funk. Yes, in 1990, too many of us thought that it was wise and fun to funk-ify our rock. Geez, what in the world were we thinking?

(It would be fun to write a Hall of Shame post that recounts the misguided forays by Northwest bands into funk.)

Revisiting the band, it’s now much clearer which part of the grunge spectrum they occupied: somewhere between the genuine article (think Nirvana’s “Sliver” single) and the stuff made by more commercial bands—that is, somewhere between grunge and “grunge.” Thus, I can identify where A&M found potential, but I can also identify the limits of their mainstream appeal. A&M clearly lost interest in the band sometime between inking a deal and releasing a record, because Numb received no promotion.

Although the band attracted a pretty large local following—enough to merit a spot in Hype!—they didn’t last long. After A&M dropped them in 1994, Hammerbox broke up. Carrie Akre has probably kept the highest profile of the former band members, but her follow-up project, Goodness, never interested me in the slightest, and we haven’t followed any the members’ subsequent projects, although the songs from Thurmond’s myspace page, linked earlier, aren’t bad at all. The band played a reunion gig at the EMP in 2004; YouTube clips are here and here, although I don’t care for these particular songs.

Kept House
After All

Both are on the .zip file here.

--Wm

Some updates and some sad news

2008-02-07T10:53:00.000-08:00

First, we'll start with the happier stuff.

If you haven't skimmed through the comments, you missed former Rocket scribe Adem Tepedelen's comment in which he linked to an article he wrote ("Long Live Grunge") for Backfire Magazine. He makes the case for grunge much more eloquently than we've been able to do. It's a terrific read.

Also worth reading is "R.I.P.: Dead Nightclubs of Seattle," a stroll down memory lane by Seattle Times writer Tom Scanlon in which he revisits the sites of long-gone nightclubs and bars. We came across this link while reading Clark Humphrey's excellent Seattle-focused blog MISCMedia.

* * * * *

Now for the sad news: Former Skin Yard and Gruntruck vocalist Ben McMillan died recently of complications related to diabetes. He was 46 years old. We've mentioned before that one of our biggest musical regrets is that we never had the chance to see Skin Yard while they were still active (although we did see Gruntruck at the OK Hotel with Unsane and a couple of other bands), but frankly, that regret seems quite small in light of the fact that this talented, awesome man died at such a young age. Requiescat in Pace, Mr. McMillan.

Monroe's Fur

2008-01-28T21:17:00.000-08:00

As every kid knows now, Seattle wasn’t the only place on the Earth where long-haired dudes abused fuzz pedals and played skuzzy, heavy garage-fueled punk rock in the 80s. Australia also had her fair share of grungy punk bands, and quite a few of them released records in the States. Yes, before Silverchair and the Vines, Australian bands like Grong Grong, Feedtime, King Snake Roost, and Lubricated Goat were performing some of the ugliest music this side of Drunks With Guns. With US labels like Alternative Tentacles, Amphetamine Reptile, Sympathy for the Record Industry, and Sub Pop releasing their records, the Aussies began crossing the Atlantic and settling in the Evergreen State.

One of the lesser known Aussie to Seattle imports was Monroe’s Fur, who arose out of the ashes of Lubricated Goat. Lubricated Goat released 1989’s “Meating My Head” and 1992’s “Play Dead” singles on Sub Pop. Group leader and former Salamander Jim member Stu Spasm eventually moved to the Midwest, married Babe in Toyland’s Kat Bjelland, and formed the band Crunt. Monroe’s Fur was then formed in Sydney by drummer Peter Hartley after he was kicked out of Lubricated Goat and originally featured Paul Gill (guitar), Guy Madison (bass), and Paul Kidney (vocals). This version of the band recorded the 1989 New World Order Catalogue LP; and you can find a sample song on the incredible website site, Black Eye Records Jukebox.

Founder Peter Hartley never made it to the U.S., and fellow Lubricated Goat/Bloodloss member Martin Bland joined on drums. The Seattle version also featured Bloodloss/Primevils member Renestair E.J., Guy, Paul, Ben Cahill, and Jason Fitzgerald.

The “Fire” b/w “Green Horn” single came out in 1994 on Brad Gaub’s Carving Knife Records. Musically, it’s sort of similar to Bloodloss, who also reformed in Seattle with Martin, Renestair, Guy, and Mark Arm around the same time. The band also released “Coming into Land” 7” on IFA Records--who put out records by Bottle of Smoke, Zeke, Texass, and Bloodloss--and the self-released full-length, Sadistfactory. You can also hear a song from that record on the Black Eye blog.

Martin, Guy, members of the Thrown Ups and King Snake Roost, and Mudhoney’s Mark Arm and Steve Turner also recorded under the name Bushpig for a 1990 self-titled LP on PGK, which we will eventually post. Martin was also in the Monkeywrench and currently plays in Tom Price’s Desert Classic and leads the experimental/improv band Randomized Control Trials. Guy is now in Mudhoney, and Renestair EJ has since returned to Australia and plays in Peterhead.

“Fire”
“Green Horn”

As an added bonus, here’s Lubricated Goat’s censored-but-not-entirely-work-safe ‘In the Raw’ video.

-- MC Tom

Early Screaming Trees: A Primer

2008-01-22T09:03:00.000-08:00

First, sorry about the infrequent posts. We’ve been busy as hell these past few weeks and haven’t had much time to do anything, let alone digitize our Sick & Wrong singles.

Several months ago, I picked up a used copy of SST’s anthology of Screaming Trees, which covers their first five records: Other Worlds and Clairvoyance, which Velvetone Records released in 1985 and 1987, respectively; and Even If and Especially When, Invisible Lantern, and Buzz Factory, which SST released in 1987, 1988, and 1989, respectively. (The compilation does not represent the EP they recorded with Beat Happening. It’s been pretty fun to listen to this material again, although I wasn’t terribly familiar with it the first time around. Although I always had intended to pick up a copy of Buzz Factory as a teenager on the basis of the Trees’ reputation, it wasn’t until they released the Change Has Come double-single on Sub Pop that I actually spilled money on the band.

Change Has Come appealed to me immediately; when I heard a friend’s copy of some older Trees material, however, I lost interest in picking it up. My first impression was that it was too clean, too basic.

The reason I had this negative reaction is that I’d delved into their back catalog chronologically. When I revisited the stuff recently, it’s clear that Screaming Trees’ oldest material sounds like music by a high school band. It did not surprise me to learn that, in fact, the youngest member—Van Conner—hadn’t yet reached his 20^th birthday when the band formed in 1984. But like Guided by Voices, it took a few years for the band to hit their stride. The earliest songs are, for the most part, better than I remember them being but still don’t set the world aflame; the songs from those later SST records are excellent.

"Transfiguration" live in Chicago in 1989.

I won’t delve deeply into the band’s history or the former members’ current projects, as the good reader-users of Wikipedia cover those subjects with greater authority than I can. I culled almost all of these tracks from the SST anthology, but for those who are interest in greater detail: “Barriers” is from Other Worlds, “Orange Airplane” is from Clairvoyance, “Transfiguration” and “In the Forest” are from Even If and Especially When, “Walk Through to This Side” and “Night Comes Creeping” are from Invisible Lantern, and “Subtle Poison” and “Where the Twain Shall Meet” come from Buzz Factory.

Note: we're having problems (surprise, surprise) with our archiving site, so we'll add the individual links later. Everything is on the zip file, and hey, that's easier anyway!

Barriers
Orange Airplane
Transfiguration
In the Forest
Walk Through to This Side
Night Comes Creeping
Subtle Poison
Where the Twain Shall Meet

And the .zip file is right here.

--Wm

Giving the Gift of the U-Men

2007-12-25T21:08:00.000-08:00

Christmas is always a busy time at the Lamestain household. Our Yuletide tradition of dressing up like Michael Anderson of Blood Circus (dressed up like Santa, of course) and handing out Yummy singles to the neighborhood children brought much joy and laughter, and we can’t wait to do it again next year. Plenty of eggnog was consumed, holiday ham was enjoyed, gay grunge apparel was donned, and Tad songs were caroled. Plus there were gifts! And we are saving your gift, which is also the best gift, for last: the U-Men Step on a Bug: The Red Toad Speaks record.

Produced by John Nelson and the U-Men at Crow Studios, Step on a Bug was released by Black Label records in 1988. Also released on cassette tape, this and the Hellcows LP were the only full-lengths on Black Label. Tupelo Recording Company also released this on vinyl, though I think they mostly handled overseas pressings. You can check out our earlier U-Men posting for more info and junk here.

We were also lucky enough to see the debut performance of the Tom Price Desert Classic a few weeks back at Fantagraphics Bookstore’s 1-year anniversary party. Tom fronted the band, and was joined by ex-Huffers, Don Blackstone and Matt Wright, Joe Kilbourne (the Derelicts), and Martin Bland (Bloodloss, Lubricated Goat, Monkeywrench, and our recent record discovery, Bushpig!) The band sounded great, and a great time was had by all.

We can't wait to open your gifts now.

Whistlin’ Pete
2 x 4
A Three Year Old Could Do That
Juice Party
Flea Circus

Too Good to be Food
Willie Dong Hurts Dogs
Papa Doesn’t Love His Children Anymore
Pay the Bubba

-- tom the xmas elf

Steel Wool Bring the Luck

2007-12-11T10:05:00.000-08:00

My first experience seeing Steel Wool live was in the living room of some house in Seattle. I can’t even remember which neighborhood it was. They played with the punk-pop band Sicko, and the sole attempt at soundproofing the room consisted of an old mattress, which someone had leaned in front of the windows on the side of the room. Within 20 minutes, the cops had arrived, and everything went quiet until the police left. Then, the rock continued.

Steel Wool never achieved, even locally, the plaudits heaped on other bands at that time. They formed in the early 90s, just after the national attention on Seattle had reached its fever pitch, playing a style they called “grange” (grunge with a little Hank Williams in the mix). They owe their biggest stylistic debt to Mudhoney—or, to be more accurate, Mark Arm and Steve Turner’s side project, The Monkey Wrench. I don’t mean to imply that they sound derivative. They took those influences sound of their own. Had they formed just a year or two earlier, I suspect that they would have attracted a much larger following.

The vitals: Steel Wool was Jon Wright on guitar and Rhodes, Sean Hollowell on guitar, Dave Pelo on drums, and Steve Dukich on bass. Wright, Hollowell, and Dukich all shared the microphone, and Pelo also sang back-up. From what I can find, they released two LPs (Simple Men Who Like Working with Their Hands and Lucky Boy, both on eMpTy) and two singles (“Ian” on eMpTy [1992] and “Devil’s Night” [1994] on Bag of Hammers).

The mp3s are all from Lucky Boy, which appears to be out of print. (If someone can correct me, we’ll remove ‘em.) The entire record is at least pretty good, and a couple of tracks are completely excellent. The instrumental “60 Pound Wharf Rat” was, I suppose, their “hit”; they played it every time I saw them, and I even witness the aforementioned Sicko cover it once. “Pagan Baby” is a Creedence cover. I consider “Dog That Bites” to be their crowning achievement. It’s an utterly ferocious, garage-y song that would reduce Jon Spencer to a quivering little Kleenex-eater. If you’re only curious enough to download one mp3, well, there it is for ya’.

Jon Wright’s name has popped up on a few other records as a photographer; he also engineered Black Madonna by the Austerity Program. Steve Dukich briefly filled the bass slot in Mudhoney after Matt Lukin retired in 2001. Dukich played on Mudhoney’s Brazilian tour in 2001 and appears on one released song (“Who Will Be the Next in Line” on the Kinks tribute Give The People What They Want [Sub Pop]). I can’t find any information on Hollowell or Pelo, and internet searches haven’t yielded any information regarding current projects for the former members of Steel Wool.

Scratch Your Ass and Bark at the Moon
Combine
Four Winds
Candy Man
I’m Strong
Dog That Bites
I Don’t Want One
Pagan Baby
Flog That Horse
60 Pound Wharf Rat
Lost
Stop Touching Me!
Lucky Boy

. . . all on this handy .zip file.

--Wm

Karp – Punk in My Vitamins Tape

2007-12-03T21:20:00.000-08:00

While we are all mourning the end of the compact disc era, we would
like to take a moment to reflect on the tragic demise of the cassette tape. Sure, mass-produced cassettes sounded awful compared to vinyl, were prone to jam or get eaten by your tape player, and would wear out quickly, but their affordability and the ease of copying made them a goddamn blessing to the underground community. Of course, now with cd-rs, cheap cd burners, and mp3s, it’s even easier to distribute your tunes, but we still feel a bit sentimental toward the oft-maligned cassette tape. From the UK Do-It-Yourself labels (like Fuck Off/Street Level, Deleted, and New Crimes Tapes), to the early K Records and Sub Pop compilations, to the 90s lo-fi bedroom labels (like Shrimper, Elsinor, and Union Pole), the cassette has had a rich, though largely obscure past. Outside of one-man, lo-fi black metal bands and harsh noise artists, it doesn’t seem like anybody manufactures them anymore, and few stores bother to carry them.

And that brings us to this week’s hot pick: the almighty Karp and their self-titled tape. Released in 1992 by Unwound bassist Vern Rumsey’s Punk In My Vitamins label, the tape is eight songs of Karp at their earliest and rawest. Featuring Jared on bass/vocals, Chris on guitar, and Scott on drums, the band’s line-up remained the same until they broke up in the late 1990s. Vern also recorded the band in Olympia’s State Theater, and several songs were later re-recorded for various releases. Some of these songs were also included on the Action Chemistry compilation CD.

The label–-also the name of Vern’s fanzine--released split tapes by Long Hind Legs and Kicking Giant and by Long Hind Legs and Mundt, a short-lived duo featuring Mukilteo Fairy/Tight Bro Quitty and Crimpshire drummer/zinester Aaron Cometbus; they later moved on to releasing vinyl. Sadly, I lost all of my old fanzines during a move, but if memory serves me right, Vern would often include a cassette tape with his ‘zine. Also, if I remember correctly, there might have also been some Thrones and Dub Narcotic tapes.

I’m not sure if Chris did much after Karp, but Jared later fronted the Tight Bros From Way Back When and then reunited with Scott in the great band, The Whip. Sadly, Scott died in a boating accident in 2003. Jared now does double time in Big Business and the Melvins.

The very fine blog Strange Reaction also did a Karp post here, and you can find a complete discography here.

The Falling Under
Me Big Mouth
Handsome Traveler
Blu Blud
30 Ton Press
Propane Activist
Rocky Mountain Rescue
Nine Lives

Get them via zip here.

As a bonus, here's a live Karp show that our friend Jay recorded in Portland:

Live at Reed 10/23/94

-- MC Tom

Coffin Break fanatic

2007-11-19T06:18:00.000-08:00

While doing some research on Coffin Break, I noticed that a few different web sites note that they held close to their punk rock roots while everyone else in Seatown was growing out their hair, dressing in flannel, and playing grunge. It’s interesting to read this assessment now, because back in the day, Coffin Break sounded like a prototypical grunge band. In fact, they still sound that way to me now, at least with regard to their early singles.

I don’t say this in derision. As you know, “grunge” isn’t a bad word in the Lamestain offices. In fact, we’d love to someday compose a thoughtful history of the term and how quickly it became co-opted by the mainstream media to refer to all sorts of polished, radio-friendly, clean-sounding music (played by guys with long hair in flannel shirts, of course). We all knew what grunge really was, and it wasn’t Candlebox.

But the stuff about punk rock roots--that is certainly true when it comes to Coffin Break. If Skin Yard, for example, arrived at grunge via art rock, and if Mudhoney came to it via the Stooges and the MC5, then Coffin Break came to it from punk rock--specifically, the early to mid-80s punk rock like the Circle Jerks and Gang Green. (That is, the stuff that has some melody and a pretty good sense of humor.) But when you pop on “Noise Patch,” yes, dear reader, what you hear is grunge. Good grunge!

The band revolved around Pete Litwin on guitar and Rob Skinner on bass, who split vocal duties, and David Brooks on drums; second guitarist Jeff Lorien joined the band a bit later. Litwin’s vocals have a 70s arena rock quality to them, whereas Skinner’s vocals share more in common with the aforementioned melodic punk bands from the early 80s (Skinner sang on “Kill the President,” the Coffin Break song you’re most likely to know). Come to think of it, even their hair reflects this difference (Litwin’s = long, Skinner’s = shaved off).

Coffin Break recorded their debut 7” (“Noise Patch” w/ “Boxes and Boxes” and “Obsession”; 1988; C/Z Records) at the OK Hotel in 1988. The reason you don’t hear any crowd noise is because a change in the zoning status for the OK Hotel meant that the venue had to cancel the show, and the audience shivered outside before heading home in the rain (and in flannel). The venue still permitted the band to record. Of the three songs, “Noise Patch” is my favorite; it reminds me a bit of Bundle of Hiss.

“Just Say No (To Religion)” is closer to straightforward punk. This was on the 1988 C/Z Records compilation, Secretions.

“Pop Fanatic” (1990; C/Z Records) ranked among my favorite singles during my teenage years. I bought it at Cellophane Square after having admired the cover for weeks and weeks; it served as my introduction to the band. It was refreshing to hear it again when we unearthed it after more than a decade, as it’s lively and fun. Skinner’s bass and Brooks’s drums own the song. In a way, it sounds as if it came out of a really lucky jam session. Sadly, they didn’t perform this song the one time I saw them live. Rumor has it that the lyrics take a dig at Sub Pop, although that doesn’t seem likely, as they released a single (“Pray”/“Lies”) on Sub Pop in 1990. I can verify, however, that the cover of “Free Bird” on the b-side isn’t funny or interesting in the slightest; we recommend that you pretend that both sides of the vinyl contained “Pop Fanatic” by listening to that song twice.

Coffin Break released three full-lengths (Rupture, on C/Z Records, and Crawl and Thirteen, both on Epitaph) before parting ways in 1994. Not long thereafter, Litwin formed Softy, who appear to have played more straightforward grunge, although I confess I only know what I’ve heard on that website. Skinner formed a poppier band called Popsickle, who I recall seeing once or twice. Brooks pounded the traps for a number of bands, including the RC5. Coffin Break, of course, reunited for Geezerfest not long ago.

Noise Patch
Boxes and Boxes
Obsession

Just Say No (To Religion)

Pop Fanatic
Free Bird

And the songs are, as usual, also available via zip file.

The Drills - A Conflict of Interest Post!

2007-11-04T19:59:00.000-08:00

When Lamestain was wearing diapers, we wrote a very moving piece about the early hardcore band, Deranged Diction. In the post, we mentioned how Seattle had a pretty healthy early 80s punk scene, but sadly, few of the bands ever got around to releasing any records. The Fartz, Solger, the Silly Killers, Fastbacks, and the Rejecters, of course, all released great records, but there were countless other bands that never made it wax. However, some bands at least appeared on a various compilations, so they weren't completely lost to time. It was actually through a reissue of tape compilation that we were introduced to this week's star band, the Drills.

A few years ago, San Francisco label Enterruption moved up to Seattle and opened up a fantastic record store in Wallingford called Electric Heavyland. Named after one of the best Acid Mothers Temple records, the store carried everything from the latest Wolf Eyes' spin-off cassette tape to some UK crust band. They also continued their label and, along with Borderless Countries Tapes and Schizophrenic records, reissued the BTC compilation tapes I'm Buck Naked and Eat Me as the Hardcore Amerika compact disc. Most of the bands played standard hardcore, but there was one band that stood out from everybody else: Seattle's The Drills.

Since the best hardcore, in my humble opinion, is the noisiest, craziest, and most obnoxious, the Drills were like a godsend to me. Immediately after hearing their tracks, I had to learn more about the band. Not only that, but after playing the songs to my girlfriend, we decided that we should finally start our much-talked about record label, Dirty Knobby, and reissue the Drills for the masses. Unfortunately for us, though, the CD listed no information about the band except that they were from Seattle, so we had to put on our Columbo outfits and start investigating.

The first thing we did was email the labels and ask them if they had any Drills contact information; sadly, they didn't. Then we used our Lamestain press credentials and asked various Seattle rock gods, but nobody seemed to remember much about the band. Next we emailed Clark Humphrey--whose book Loser is pretty much the Funk & Wagnalls of northwest music--but once again, nothing. At this point, it seemed like we were going nowhere and we might as well give up on our dream.

To make matters more complicated, the band's name is not very Google friendly. But then Lady Luck smiled in our direction. After going through countless useless links, we found this 1993 Goldmine Pearl Jam article and finally had our first clue:

"The following year, Mr. Epp's "Out Of Control" featured on the Seattle Syndrome Volume Two compilation (Engram 012); Epp also joined the Limp Richerds (again without Arm) on the What Syndrome cassette compilation (Deux Machina CSD 4), a response of sorts to the better known Seattle Syndrome series. The Epp tracks were "Strong Arms Of The Law" and "Keep On Smiling Til The End."

A who's-who of current Seattle talent, "What Syndrome also features Silly Killers, 10 Minute Warning and Hobo Skank, all of which feature future Guns N' Roses guitarist Duff McKagan on drums; Big Machine, the Rejectors, Firing Squad, the Accused, Solger and the Drills."

I have never seen or even heard of the 1983 What Syndrome tape, but now we learned that the Drills were, in fact, from Seattle, and we had their record label name. Searching for "What Syndrome" and "Deux Ex Machina" uncovered this amazing webpage and a scan of the tape's insert.

Tracking down Deux Es Machina turned out to be pretty easy. Once we found contact information, we figured what the hell; we'll email him and ask if he remembers the Drills. It turns out that not only did Deux Es Machina head James Banner remember the band, but he played bass on some of their sessions and still had the recording tapes. He told me that the band was the brainchild of one Patrick McCabe, who lived with him and other punks in Renton at the Death House. The Death House was also home to future members of Skin Yard, Vexed, and, if I remember correctly, the U-Men.

I told James that we would love to release the Drills on vinyl, and he graciously transferred his old tapes to cd-r and mailed them to me. He also contacted Patrick McCabe, ran the idea with him, and gave me his contact information. Patrick, it turns out, did not have anything from the Drills days, but luckily, he was interested in the project and gave us some background information.

I met up with Patrick at the Blue Moon around April, and he gave me the rundown. The band was formed by him and Patrick Thomes when they were both 30-year-old ex-hippies living in the Death House in the early 80s. As he put it, they were tired of "being accused of being boring and worthless old men," so they got some distortion pedals (they always hooked up 2 in a row for maximum distortion--3 would just be a bit too noisy) and a drum machine dubbed "Dr. Rhythm" and recruited some friends, and now they had a band. McCabe became "Detox Jones," and Thomes became "Retox Jones," and Milton Garrison (later of Vexed), Tom Price (U-Men and later Gas Huffer), James Banner (Enstruction), and Bill Warner all appear on the recordings. Milton co-wrote and performed around four songs, and guitar great Tom Price makes a rare appearance playing drums on "No More Beer."

Part of the reason why the band was so mysterious was because they never played any shows. Their Skull Death cassette was copied by themselves and was mainly passed around to friends, though some copies did make it down to San Francisco. McCabe believes that Maximum Rock & Roll reviewed the tape, and a copy might exist in their library, but I don't think anybody kept the issue. A copy also made it down to Jello Biafra, and amazingly, he still had the tape as well as the accompanying letter. The fine folks at Alternative Tentacles were also kind enough to scan and email me copies.

Outside of that, nobody has any Drills photos and, while McCabe use to put together band graphics, nobody was able to locate anything from the old days. Nor do we know the exact recording dates for the band. Since they first appeared on tape in 1983, we can guess that the recordings were made around 1981/1982. To make matters more confusing, the Drills also liked to make up fake biographies and would come up with insane stories about fictional band members.

Perhaps the reason why the band didn't sound like your typical punk band was because the two main members were older than your typical punk rocker and they were, in fact, hippies. Even though bands like Crass were made up of old hippies, there has always been that war between punks and hippies, which everybody probably knows about.

Patrick McCabe's first favorite band was the Kinks, and he used to frequent Seattle's legendary Eagle's Auditorium, which went from hosting the San Francisco psych bands in the late 60s/early 70s to the punk bands in the late 70s/early 80s. Patrick mentioned that the next rock band that gave him a true rush was the Sex Pistols, which makes sense, because there are two unreleased songs on Banner's tape that swipe riffs from the Kinks and Sex Pistols. Patrick Thomes was originally from Michigan and would go see all the Detroit bands at the Grandee Ballroom.

For the record, we went through the recordings and picked out our favorite songs. They recorded their signature song, "I'm Normal," at least a dozen times, and we bookended the record with the version that also appears on the What Syndrome tape and a more hardcore version sung by Milton. "Great Thrash Great Trash" and "Blind Dog" are both 20-second monsters on which McCabe sounds like a possessed animal, and slightly different versions of these songs appear on the I'm Buck Naked tape. "No More Beer" and "Skate Tough" were also on the original Skull Death tape. The cover drawing was done by McCabe, and we think it fits the music perfectly. McCabe also wrote the band bio on the back sleeve, though the typos are our fault. Sorry about that. We have since learned to never approve artworks after a night of drinking beer at the Sloop. Lesson learned. McCabe also provided us a personnel list, which became the insert.

McCabe also had a noise project called VCN, but he mostly concentrates on writing and performing poetry. During our investigation, we also found this 1997 UW Daily article about Patrick.

If you read our Vexed post, you may have also noticed that Patrick's appeared at the Central Tavern's Valentine Show with Soundgarden, Vexed, and the late writer, Steven Jesse Bernstein. Patrick Thomes is back in Washington state, but I am unsure of his musical activities.

"I'm Normal" - alt version
I dunno the title for this song

Go here to stream more songs and here to buy the damn record.

-- MC Tom

A spooooooky post for Halloween: Mr. Epp and the Calculations

2007-10-29T05:36:00.000-07:00

Although they had a minor underground hit with their “Mohawk Man” single (reaching #1 on Rodney Bingenheimer’s show on KROQ, Rodney on the Rocks), perhaps the most (in-)famous contribution to music from this era made by Mr. Epp and the Calculations derived from a letter Mark McLaughlin (that is, Mark Arm) wrote in 1981 to the zine Desperate Times. He described Mr. Epp as “Pure grunge! Pure noise! Pure shit!” And not long after that, Kurt Cobain died.

I’ll only give a brief history of Mr. Epp and the Calculations, as that ground is well covered elsewhere (here and here). They named themselves after their math teacher at Bellevue Christian High School. While membership changed frequently during their brief existence (1981 to 1984), Mark Arm, Darren Morey, and Jo Smitty formed the core of the band, and Steve Turner played with them toward the end. Any attempt to run through the line-ups of various recordings would be redundant, as that information covered well in the links above.

In the days since they disbanded, most people who have discovered them have done so out of interest in the members’ subsequent projects. The most famous, of course, were Green River and Mudhoney, but Darren Morey later joined Steel Pole Bath Tub, who maintain a considerable cult following to this day. Smitty kept Mr. Epp’s flame alive in the 1990s, issuing the band’s records through his label Box Dog and in conjunction with Turner’s Super-Electro Records.

Some of the bits I’ve read about Mr. Epp refer to them as a hardcore band, which they’re most assuredly not. A friend of mine, who passed on these digital files, told me that he hears Flipper and the Minutemen. While I don’t believe that Mr. Epp sought to imitate either one of these bands (especially since few musicians have the chops necessary to ape the Minutemen), there’s a strange amount of truth in his description. In a way, they defy categorization. It’s easy to forget that so many punk bands from that era also defied easy categorization; the hidebound punks from the early 80s who adhered to specific ethos and appearances, in fact, serve as targets for Mark Arm in the aforementioned “Mohawk Man.”

I may be making this sound more interesting than it is. We’ll be charitable and state that these fellas went on to make better, more interesting, more exciting music later. “Spooky,” which does for goths what “Mohawk Man” did for Exploited-loving, snaggle-toothed rockers, is probably their best song. The rest? I’d download the whole thing only if you’re a completist.

The first five tracks come from Mr. Epp’s first EP Of Course I’m Happy, Why? (Pravda; 1982); “Spooky” comes from the compilation tape The Public Doesn’t Exist (Dog Tapes; 1982). Box Dog and Super Electro released Ridiculing the Apocalypse, which collects everything, in 1996. As far as I know, it’s out of print; it someone knows otherwise, kindly let me know. Their complete discography is well covered here.

The entire cd is on the .zip file here.

Mohawk Man
No Rights
Wild Youth on Money
Red Brigade
Acceptance

Spooky

--Wm

Vexed: Not Your Typical Seattle Funk-Punk Band!

2007-10-23T08:21:00.000-07:00

I’ll be honest with you, sonny: if there is one thing that makes me want to run to the hills, it’s funk-rock. Sure, I can bust a move to some of the early funk-punk bands, like Liquid Liquid, Medium Medium, and ESG, but after hearing way too many Red Hot Chili Pepper imitators and long-hair guitarist dudes who have learned the 7#9 chord (aka the Hendrix chord) and suddenly think they are Eddie Hazel, I generally find it best to avoid the genre.

With that in mind, this week’s spotlight artist is Vexed, who were described as having a “relentless funk/rock/death/groove sound” on the 1988 C/Z compilation record Secretions (CZ006). Honestly, if I wasn’t already familiar with the band, chances are I wouldn’t bother to check them out based on that description, and that would be a shame. While the band did incorporate funky bass lines, and while their guitarist played more than barre chords, I’d say that they had more in common with bands like Victims Family and Nomeansno than Psychefunkapus or Infectious Grooves. There was nothing jokey or “jock friendly” about their music; they were politically oriented and owed more to bands like Gang of Four, Dead Kennedys, and Killing Joke than your typical frat party funk rock band.

Also, unlike your typical funk party band, Vexed were made up of punk rock veterans. Bassist Alfred Butlers played in Death of Marat (with Skin Yard’s Daniel House), and singer/guitarist Milton Garrison played in In Vitro Pope, the Altered (with future Soundgarden bassist Hiro Yamamoto), and the Drills (which featured punk rock poet Patrick McCabe). As far as I can tell, though, none of the bands besides the Drills ever released anything.

Vexed formed around 1984 and made their debut on the 1985 compilation tape Pyrrhic Victory, along with Soundgarden, Skin Yard, and 10 Minute Warning. After that, the band appeared on the promo-only 1986 cassette Bands That Will Make Money, which was put together by former KCMU DJ Faith Henschel and featured Soundgarden, Green River, H-Hour (w/ Tad on drums), Skin Yard, Pure Joy, Fred (w/ Amy Denio), and Portland’s Napalm Beach. Their vinyl debut was on the 1987 Ironwood Records compilation LP Lowlife, where they contributed the song “Sixes and Seven.” That label was based in the Ironwood recording studios, which, I believe, is now Avast.

Next, they contributed the song “I Forget” to the 1988 Secretions compilation LP (CZ006). This LP was masterminded by Vertigo Bus’ Patty Herlevi and also featured songs by various Amy Denio projects, Crypt Kicker 5 (featuring Jack Endino on drums), Weather Theatre, Pure Joy, Coffin Break, Skin Yard, Capping Day, H-Hour, and a few others. Secretions came out around the same time as Sub Pop 200 but is more musically diverse and less “scene defining.”

Vexed’s first noncompilation record was the 1988 Maybe 7” EP, with the songs “Ad Nauseum” b/w “Xians” and “Resistivity of a Highly Viscous Fluid” (CZ008); those songs were also added to the CD version of their first record, The Good Fight (CZ021). The Jack Endino-produced record features a mix of instrumental and vocal tracks and is further proof that there was more to the local scene than just grunge.

Continuing with their compilation-appearing blitz, the band contributed the song “GWYM” to the Teriyaki Asthma Volume 4 7”(CZ0023), which also has Alternative Tentacle recording artists, Alice Donut, Icky Joey (Love Battery and Thrown Ups members), and God’s Acre. For fellow record nerds, please note that Milton’s other band, Yeast, also appeared on the first Teriyaki Asthma EP, along with the record debut of Nirvana, former Chrome member Helios Creed, and Coffin Break. The first five volumes were also compiled on CD in 1991; you can buy it here.

With that, the band broke up, only to reform a few years later with new drummer Buzz Crocker who was on loan from fellow C/Z recording artist, Alcohol Funnycar. This version of the band contributed to the 1994 Three on the Tree 7” EP (CZ075) alongside Chicago’s Wreck (featuring Die Kreuzen bassist Keith Brammer) and Seattle’s Engine Kid (featuring a post-False Liberty and Brotherhood and pre-Sunn 0))) and Southern Record co-honcho Greg Anderson). The 1994 Cathexis LP (CZ072) was the band’s swan song, and the members moved the lonely town of Splitzville.

Jack Endino sums up Vexed and their place in Seattle music best on this fantastic band interview:

"Vexed played some of the best shows I ever saw from a Seattle band, but the grunge crowd kept their distance. Their loss," he said. "Remember, history is written by the victors, so Seattle music history is now 100 percent grunge-centric. The 'other' bands we're speaking of here didn't 'do' much to leave a mark. No national tours, no big record deals."

"Afterwards, the grunge thing, though not yet called that by name until '89 or so, sort of separated itself out," he added. "There were the 'hip' Sub Pop bands and then there was everyone else, which was still a lot of great bands. Eventually, the 'everyone else' became sort of an anti-scene, a self-conscious 'Oh well, guess we're not a grunge band, but who cares' thing. But you had bands as diverse as the Young Fresh Fellows, Coffin Break, Gas Huffer, The Gits, heck, a million other great bands who existed. But for a few years, 'everyone else' was overshadowed by the Sub Pop hype juggernaut, to the extent that Sub Pop and 'grunge' simply became synonymous with 'Seattle' to most people who didn't live here. This actually got pretty annoying to the rather large 'everyone else' crowd, as you can imagine... So there you have the situation with Vexed: two albums, no national touring, no hype. Could apply to any of a zillion bands."

The Good Fight
Ad Nauseum
Resistivity of a Highly Viscous Fluid
Sixes and Sevens
I Forget

And the songs are also on this .zip file.

-- MC Tom

Some updates

2007-10-15T05:15:00.000-07:00

We added several links to other blogs on the sidebar. The two that I’ve been checking the most religiously lately are 10 Things Zine and Thee Head Vein. 10 Things is assembled by Dan Halligan, who used to write a punk rock zine in Seattle called Ten Things Jesus Wants You to Know. He updates the blog quite frequently—daily, from the looks of things—with most posts documenting long-gone, obscure punk bands. It’s great stuff. We anxiously await Dan’s coverage of The Recordbreakers! Thee Head Vein is devoted to old school garage rock and the stuff that it has influenced. Although the writer doesn’t focus on any particular region, there’s a fair amount of cross-over with some of the bands we discuss. It’s a great blog with tons of fantastic music.

On the post about Here Ain’t the Sonics, ex-Mono Man Mort left a message with a link to an interview he did on the radio (specifically, Pooner Clark's Locals Only show on KISM) that covers his entire career, starting with his surprisingly excellent high school band (The MPs) and going through The Dehumanizers, Game for Vultures, the Mono Men, and . . . Mort’s an interesting guy and mainstay of the local scene. Give it a listen while you’re at work.

Finally—and this is the coolest news of all—we learned a while back that Green River will be reuniting for a Sub Pop birthday bash next summer! (Actually, we heard about this through the grapevine a while back but have sat on the news, awaiting confirmation.) I can’t express how awesome I think this will be. Mark Arm and Steve Turner played at least one mini-reunion with Jeff Ament and Stone Gossard while touring with Pearl Jam (see the samples below), but this will be, from what I understand, the complete band.

The two tracks come from a one-off reunion at a Pearl Jam show in Las Vegas (November 30th,1993), albeit a reunion without Alex Vincent, who will be part of the upcoming reunion. Enjoy!

Swallow My Pride
Ain't Nothing to Do

Lamestain Answers the Age-Old Question "Who the Fuck Were My Eye?"

2007-10-08T22:45:00.000-07:00

If you were sitting on my lap right now, you would probably notice that I am wearing a Columbo-style yellow raincoat and sporting a massive smile, because I have just solved the mystery of long-lost Seattle grunge pioneers, My Eye. The mystery of My Eye’s origin and demise was so mysterious that most people didn't even know that the mystery existed. Since I fancy myself as a semi-professional sleuth, a Philip Marlowe for the grunge era, if you will, I decided to take the job and uncover the truth about My Eye. What I found was both eye-opening and shocking! Or, at least, it was interesting to me. While the band didn’t last very long and didn’t leave much of a recorded history, they did feature members from several prominent bands, and most of them are still performing music regularly.

Now with the job accepted, I donned my deerstalker hat, lit up my bubble pipe, and started looking for clues. The first and most obvious pointers come from the band's appearance on the 1989 C/Z Another Pyrrhic Victory: The Only Compilation of Dead Seattle God Bands LP (CZ012). Perusing the back sleeve with a magnifying glass, I learned that band members were vocalist Steven Van Liew, guitarist Kurtiss (spelled Curtis) Lofstrom, bassist Max Godsil, and drummer Duffy Drew. The record also offers the below information:

“Not much is known about this short-lived band. They were rumored to have lived in the underground Seattle only to come out at night to prey on young teenage girls. Previous single on C/Z is out of print.”

Perhaps sensing that a future detective might someday want to unlock My Eye’s secrets, the record’s clues are purposely misleading. Their single was out of print by 1989, but several investigations into Underground Seattle provided no evidence that the band ever resided there, and there is no proven link between the band and any missing teenage girls. While those bits have proved to be false, the band did contribute the songs "Harder Trust" and "Gets that Way" to the 3000-pressed and Jack Endino-engineered LP. The record also featured unreleased songs by Green River, 64 Spiders, Malfunksun, and H-Hour and never made it to compact disc.

Trying to prove that there was a correlation between My Eye, the Another Pyrrhic Victory LP, and the 1985 Pyrrhic Victory: A Goal Attained At Too Great a Cost cassette tape was also a dead end. The Daniel House-released tape featured early songs by Soundgarden, Skin Yard, Vexed (featuring Milton Garrison from the Drills – stay tuned for an exclusive Lamestain Drills feature!), Feedback (featuring Daniel House and Matt Cameron), the fantastic 10 Minute Warning, and many others, but no My Eye. While it was fruitful to learn about the tape, it did not help me with the My Eye investigation.

The next clue came from their lone 1987 “Empty Box” b/w “So Much Going On” single on C/Z (CZ005). This clue initially threw me off, because the band sounds like post-punkers gone grunge. This assumption ultimately turned out to be wrong. While the songs are gloomy and dark, the band members did not come from the post-punk or Goth scene. Instead, they came out of Seattle’s largely written-out-of-the-history-book hard rock scene. Most notably, Steve and Kurtiss played in early metal titans Overlord, who you can learn more about here. Steve also sang in Shadow, which featured future Rockfords guitarist Mike McCready and later members of Goodness. Duff Drew played in the glam rock band the Trids, which featured feature Zipgun/RC5 singer Rob Clarke, and shared the stage with Culprit, Shadow, and Overlord.

Next, I needed the final answer to the riddle - what happened to the band members? Following My Eye’s split up, a little birdie told me that Steve then sang in Bible Stud and currently plays in the One and Only True Messiah. I was also reliably informed that Max and Duff joined up with ex-Thrown Up John Leighton Beezer, formed Stomach Pump, and released a record on Penultimate records. This has been verified with exhaustive research. Duff has also since played in Toothpaste 2000 and Manray. Kurtiss did some time in Portland’s Crack City Rockers and his current musical whereabouts are unknown.

"Empy Box"

"So Much Going On"

"Harder Trust"

"Gets That Way"

And the .zip file is here.

-- MC Tom, Private Dick for Hire

The Fastbacks are always right

2007-10-01T05:15:00.000-07:00

My introduction to The Fastbacks happened in high school, when I went to see Beat Happening at the OK Hotel with my friends Amy and Khaela. Mecca Normal played the first slot on the bill, and I must admit that we found them a bit abrasive; none of us had heard anything quite like them and were too wet behind the ears to appreciate them. When we mentioned this to Khaela’s cousin, Bret Lunsford, he responded that we might find The Fastbacks more immediately appealing.

The Fastbacks were one of the longest-running bands from the Northwest: they formed just after the first wave of punk (in 1979) and lasted through the hardcore, hair metal, and grunge eras. But they disbanded in 2001, 22 years after their start, so if you didn’t get a chance to see them, you missed something awfully special. They completely knocked our socks off that night. I had never witnessed anything quite as spastic and invigorating as Kurt Bloch jumping around on the stage like a hyperactive child with a bellyful of sugar, somehow never missing a note. Kim Warnick and Lulu Gargiulo played with equal enthusiasm but fewer gymnastics, substituting energy where other bands might prefer precision.

I saw the band four or five times after that, both as openers and headliners, and I can’t recall a single time when they weren’t the best band of the night. They played each show as if it was their very first. I also saw Bloch several times with The Young Fresh Fellows (who we’ll write about eventually) and The Minus 5; he appears to be that excited all of the time.

That excitement and exuberance, however, doesn’t extend to the lyrics, which are usually quite melancholy. In fact, the sharp, sunny melodies create a fantastic counterpoint to the generally glum, lonely subject matter. Whatever you say about The Fastbacks, they weren’t the cool kids growing up, but they also never indulged themselves in the embarrassing, narcissistic emoting of today’s emo and punk bands. The most commonly made comparison, in terms of music, is The Buzzcocks, but The Fastbacks also carried the torch for the more arena-friendly power pop bands of the 70s, like Sweet (whose “Set Me Free” was a staple of their sets) and Cheap Trick. And people may roast me for this, but here it is anyway: I prefer The Fastbacks to The Buzzcocks. Always have.

These tracks all date from their earlier records and singles, some of which Sub Pop later collected on the compilation The Question is NO. Starting in 1992, they recorded mainly with Sub Pop; the earlier labels included No Threes (Bloch’s label), Pop Llama, and Lucky. We’ll eventually get to the Sub Pop records, which are really when the band peaked, as much as I love the older material.

I would be remiss if I failed to mention the band’s history with drummers, so here it is: they had a lot of drummers.

Early single tracks:

“Someone Else’s Room” (1981)
“It Came to Me in a Dream” (1986)

From Fastbacks . . . and His Orchestra! (1987)

“Wrong, Wrong, Wrong”
“K Street”

From Very, Very Powerful Motor (1990)

“Better than Before”
“Everything That I Don’t Need”

From Bike Toy Clock Gift (live in1988)

“Only at Night”
“In America”

The songs are also on the .zip file here.

--Wm

Lamestain Parties Like It’s 1989: Geezerfest!

2007-09-19T09:16:00.000-07:00

If you had told me 10 years ago that Blood Circus and Cat Butt would reunite for a special one-time only gig at the Crocodile Café, I would have called you a stupid, lying asshole who needs to quit toying with my heart. Well, thankfully neither you nor anybody else made that prediction, so I do not have to eat crow and apologize. As we all know now, those bands along with Swallow, Love Battery, and Coffin Break played their first shows in way too many years, and it felt like the old days again–expect minus the goofy fashion and ridiculous media hype.

Sadly, ungrunge obligations prevented me from seeing the first half of Saturday’s show and my geezer-like stamina meant that I couldn’t also go to Sunday’s show, but all the bands I did see tore it up. Lamestain salutes the Flotation Records crew for coaxing band reunions and organizing the two-day event, and hopefully they’ll do it again next year.

We arrived at the Croc just in time for Love Battery’s set, and they sounded better than ever. The band played all their hits and featured original members Ron and Kevin on guitars, Mike Musburger on drums, and a new guy whose name I can’t remember on bass. Their psychedelic light show also made me feel like I was trippin’ balls, which is a good way to start the evening. According to their Myspace page, they will be working on a new record this fall, so hopefully they will start playing regular shows again.

Coffin Break followed with a tight set and sounded like they never quit practicing. I am not too familiar with the band’s Epitaph records stuff, but I did recognize a bunch of their earlier songs like “Pop Fanatic” and “Kill the President.” Their set was pretty much split 50/50 between their pop songs and heavy songs and the crowd loved them. Look for an exclusive, sure-to-be interesting Lamestain Coffin Break feature in the next few months.

Next up was Swallow who played the classics and also some songs from their finally released 3rd record, which is out now on Flotation Records. According to those in the know, the band sounds better now then they did back in the day. They also split their set between almost-poppy garage and gnarly grunge songs, and rocked da house. Singer/guitarist Rod was also one of the Geezerfest organizers; so once again, we raise our pints and salute his hard work. Swallow have also been playing around town, so check them out, yo.

And then it was time for the triumphant return of Cat Butt. It was the Journey to the Center of Cat Butt line-up’s first show is something like 17 years, but outside of looking older and less grungy, the band sounded great. It looked like the band had a great time, and it was cool to see them back on stage. According to rumors, Journey to the Center will enjoy a lavish CD reissue sometime in 2008. We recommend that you check back on Lamestain at least 10 times a day in case there is any late-breaking news. We can also report that David Duet and Dean Gunderson are now down in Los Angeles and play in the band Hot for Chocolate.

I also can’t help but think that Michael Anderson heard my cry last year and decided to reunite Blood Circus to give Seattle show-goers a much needed asswhoppin’. Thankfully, the band did come out and whip everybody into a shape. They played their debut single, which we all know is one of the era’s classic artifacts, most of the Primal Rock Therapy EP, and Sub Pop 200’s, “The Outback.” Sure they no longer look like the skuzzy biker dudes on their EP, but dammit, they could still kick out the jams. For proof, go to their Myspace page and check out some live clips.

Blood Circus was also selling a new Blood Circus CD compilation of unreleased demo and live songs. The cd songs came from various old cassette tapes, so recording information is slim, but the sound quality is great, and it’s cool to hear all the unreleased songs. They were also selling a fab new shirt and I would have bought one if I didn’t already spend all my dough on $5 beers at the bar. Hopefully the band will be selling these items online.

Go here for photos and here to buy Geezerfest posters and shirts, bubba.

-- MC Tom

More Melvins! More Mudhoney!

2007-09-10T11:10:00.000-07:00

Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve been examining the backlog of records we digitized and trying to get through vinyl we converted months and months ago. One of the records in that backlog was this nifty little bootleg: H.I.V. Groupie Hits Pack, a split single featuring the Melvins and Mudhoney. The recordings themselves kind of suck, and this comes nowhere close to being essential (unlike Soungarden’s fantastic Peel Sessions boot), but the record represents the boots common during the late 80s and early 90s in the Northwest.

Like a lot of young losers, we’d periodically hit the record conventions that would stop by Seattle Center, often in the hopes of finding unreleased goodies. It was very, very common to stumble across dealers who sold nothing but bootlegs, often in 7” format (other booted singles we found back in day include several Nirvana demos, a live Soundgarden single, and the Misfits’ Last Caress EP). The records cost twice as much as legitimate singles and, invariably, were mislabeled. That’s the case with this single, too.

The Melvins contribution, labeled as “The Sails of Charon”/“Just Sixteen” and credited to The Professors on the sticker, is actually a cover of Kiss’s “Goin’ Blind” recorded live at the I-Beam in San Francisco in 1987. The sound quality is so-so, but the performance makes up for it. The Melvins, of course, have a well-documented love for all things Kiss. They covered “God of Thunder” for the Hard to Believe compilation and were occasionally joined by Gene Simmons onstage. Best of all, when Kiss released Alive III in 1993, the Melvins played a release party at the now defunct club RCKNDY! For the hell of it, we’re throwing in the “Goin’ Blind” cover they later released on Houdini.

Melvins “Goin’ Blind” in 1990

The Mudhoney tracks consist of, as far as I can tell, demo versions of “Here Comes Sickness” and “Sweet Young Thing Ain’t Sweet No More” and a live version of “Chain that Door.” The recording quality sucks. Furthermore, “Chain that Door” is mislabeled as “Eruption.” You can imagine the disappointment we felt upon playing this at home and failing to hear Steve Turner make mincemeat of Eddie Van Halen. I love these songs, but there’s no chance that these versions will displace the official versions. The sticker (intentionally) mislabels the band as the Psycho Surgeons, a real Aussie punk band who later morphed into the Lipstick Killers.

Mudhoney “Here Comes Sickness” in 1989.

Don’t expect anything special, but enjoy nonetheless.

Melvins -- "Goin' Blind" (live)
Mudhoney -- "Here Comes Sickness" (demo)
Mudhoney -- "Sweet Young Thing Ain't Sweet No More" (demo)
Mudhoney -- "Chain That Door" (live)

Melvins -- "Goin' Blind" (from Houdini)

And the songs are on the .zip file here.

Item! Seattle alternative weekly The Stranger recently did a piece on “the best Seattle music blogs that you might not know.” I know that sounds bad, but worst of all, they didn’t even mention lamestain! One of the “Seattle music blogs you should know about,” inexplicably, spends more time covering Fergie and Kanye West than actual Seattle music. We mention this not because we wish you to write angry letters or to burn down the offices of The Stranger, just to point out that, like Bob Pollard and The Simpsons, The Stranger was better in the 90s.

--Wm

Wellwater Conspiracy: The Early Years

2007-09-05T19:35:00.000-07:00

When it comes to Seattle supergroups, Wellwater Conspiracy was the best of the bunch. As we all sadly know from hearing the Damn Yankees and Brides of Destruction (wait, did anybody actually buy that record?), supergroups are usually pretty terrible. Seattle, of course, had Temple of the Dog and Mad Season, but Wellwater Conspiracy gets way more play time at Lamestain Headquarters than either of those bands. Unlike those other bands, Wellwater Conspiracy doesn’t sound like a supergroup, and unless you were familiar with the band members and their sometime aliases, you might not be able to guess their rock pedigree by listening to the records. Wellwater Conspiracy had their own sound, so you can’t just describe them as Monster Magnet guitars meet Soundgarden’s rhythm section. Really the only supergroup in town that could give them any competition would be the Monkeywrench.

Starting off as a side project to the already-side-project band Hater, Wellwater Conspiracy featured ex-Skin Yard/Couch of Sound drummer Matt Cameron (aka Tad Dameron), Monster Magnet guitarist John Paul McBain, and March of Crimes guitarist Ben Shepherd (aka Zeb). If we were a stoner rock-focused blog, we would mention that Monster Magnet’s Spine of God is one of the best records in the genre. But we are not, so back to Wellwater Conspiracy.

The band formed during recording sessions for the first Hater record and was originally intended as just a studio project. They eventually started playing live shows and appeared at the 2000 Terrastock festival in Seattle’s Showbox Theater along with Windy and Carl, the Monkeywrench, Ghost, Bevis Frond, Kinski, Moe Tucker, and a bunch more.

Their 1993 debut single “Sleeveless” b/w “You Do You” (SE701) came out on Steve Turner’s amazingly consistent Super Electro record label and is a huge stylistic departure from the member’s better-known bands. Fans expecting anything heavy rock sounding might have been disappointed by the Sixties-style psychedelic pop that put the band more in line with the Paisley Underground than the Flannel rock scene. The 1994 “Trowerchord” b/w “Green Undertow” and “Enebrio” (SE706)EP came complete with an Al Goldstein-approved record cover and featured more trippy guitars and hi-pitched vocals. The band expanded their repertoire to Sixties Japanese beat/psychedelic and covered the Carnabeats’ “Sandy” and the Spiders’ “Nati Bati Yi” for their sleeveless third single (SE707). (You can also find the original “Nati Bati Yi” on the Planet X record’s Monster a Go Go compilation LP, which also features great songs by the Mops, the Carnabeats, the Golden Cups, and the Beavers.)

Their Declaration of Conformity LP (Super 07) (cd on Third Gear Records) came out in 1997, which is also around the time that the modest mice-like emo-kids took over the Seattle scene. The LP features all of the first three single tracks and is one of the more underrated modern psychedelic records. Wellwater Conspiracy has since done a few more records, toured with Pearl Jam, featured guest appearances by Jack Endino, Eddie Vedder (Wes C. Addle), Kim Thayil, and Josh Homme among others, but that falls outside of Lamestain’s very strict, self-imposed timeline.

"Sleeveless"
"You Do You"

"Trowerchord"
"Green Undertow"
"Enebrio"

"Sandy"
"Nati Bati Yi"

And all of the songs are on this .zip file.

-- MC Tom

Hole were, I swear, once a very good band

2007-08-27T05:50:00.000-07:00

First of all, yes, we know that Hole technically formed outside of the Northwest—specifically, they formed in Los Angeles, although Courtney Love grew up in Oregon and, of course, lived in Seattle around the time that Live Through This broke big. Eh, close enough

And second of all, yes, I mean what I wrote: Hole’s early material rocks. Live Through This never appealed to me; I didn’t care for the slicked-up vocals or the rather obvious reference to Kurt Cobain’s suicide in the title (and probably elsewhere on the record) or the songs or the hype. And the few tracks I heard from Celebrity Skin sounded pretty dismal. Those records, however, represented Love at the peak of her mainstream fame: Courtney Love of Versace ads and Milos Foreman movies, Courtney Love of ACLU awards, affairs with Edward Norton, and Golden Globes.

A friend-of-lamestain knew guitarist Eric Erlandson in the mid-80s, before Hole, when he was “pretty shy, straight-laced . . fresh-faced and innocent.” The earliest shows sounded completely shambolic—an inept bassist (not on any of their records) who would periodically scream in the microphone, a third guitarist who generated massive amounts of feedback, etc. He reports that Hole attempted to channel “the NYC, lower east side, scuz rock kinda thing,” even to the point that they had hoped to recruit ex-Sonic Youth/Pussy Galore member Bob Bert for drums. Whatever ambitions the band may have had at the time, they certainly didn’t involve photos in Karl Lagerfeld clothes.

Their first single and LP (“Retard Girl” and Pretty on the Inside, respectively) capture the band midway through their trip from scuz rock to radio rock, when the songwriting had sharpened a bit and the band members had figured out how to play off each other. It still amazes me, however, that Love would later achieve such red-carpet success, considering how reckless and wrecked Pretty on the Inside sounded at the time—or even sounds now, for that matter. Some annoying LA-isms pop up here and there (for example, a phone message of Love saying, “Your reputation is shit in this town” gets repeated a couple of times), and I always skip the track in which the band bangs out the chords of “Cinnamon Girl” repeatedly, but overall, it’s a fine record.

(I confess that I didn’t own this record until recently. I picked it up from amazon.com after revisiting the Garbadge [sic] Man video on YouTube, although I certainly knew the music from way back when.)

Some things to clarify about Hole:

1) They were not riot grrls. They may, however, have been part of the “foxcore” movement. (I mention that only to make fun, once again, of Thurston Moore for coining that jackassed term. I mean, come on. “Foxcore”? Ha ha ha.) But riot grrls? No.

2) According to our friend in the know, Eric Erlandson deserves more credit than he often receives for shaping the band. Love may have provided the (anti-)style, the sneer, the self-hatred, and the songs, but Erlandson gave those songs texture and shape. It’s reported that he later even played all of the guitar tracks in the studio. So it’s a bit unfair to think of Hole as Courtney Love + a backup band (http://www.hipmagazine.com/courtneyletter.gif). Speaking of which, Jill Emery plays bass and Caroline Rue plays drums on these records.

3) “Retard Girl” is actually just so-so.

4) Hole released a single on Sub Pop, “Dicknail,” between “Retard Girl” and Pretty on the Inside. It’s pretty good, but we don’t own it.

Retard Girl
Phonebill Song
johnnies in the bathroom

Teenage Whore
Babydoll

And the .zip file is here.

--Wm

P.S. Coverage of Geezerfest will be up soon!

Go to Geezerfest!

2007-08-24T12:00:00.000-07:00

Here Ain’t the Sonics – The Only Tribute LP without a Sonic Youth Song

2007-08-21T08:19:00.000-07:00

Listening to the new Sonics Busy Body Live in Tacoma 1964 LP on Norton Records serves as a reminder that the band was easily one of the best Northwest bands of all time. The Sonics were still young and hadn’t quite broken out of the Wailers mold (especially on side A, which is mostly instrumental cover songs), but you can still sense the greatness that was about to happen. As far as original garage rock goes, the Sonics were one of the loudest, hardest-driving, and coolest punk bands in the land. Really, 40 years later, bands are still unsuccessfully trying to outdo the Sonics. As part of Norton’s brilliant Northwest garage rock series, the live LP--along with the Here Are the Sonics, Boom, and to a lesser extent, the Savage Young Sonics--are must-haves for thee garage rock sect.

It’s also common knowledge that great tribute records are hard as hell to pull off. Nonetheless, Bellingham’s Estrus Records and Conrad Uno’s Seattle-based, Popllama Records put in a valiant effort with the 1989 Here Ain’t the Sonics LP. The Northwest garage rock scene was pretty small at the time, so the labels searched across the US and World (well, at least, England and Sweden) and picked out some of the heavyweights. Unfortunately, the record is only so-so. While we are sure that nobody involved expected to accomplish the impossible and one-up the Sonics, we do wish that some of the bands tore it up a bit more.

The record starts off well enough with Sweden’s original garage punk rock revivalists, the Nomads, who were still a few years away from kick-starting the 90’s Swedish Punk and Roll scene with bands like the Hellacopters and Gluecifer. (The Nomads, who have impeccable taste in their cover songs, have also done the Sonics songs “Boss Hoss,” “He’s Waiting,” and “Psycho” on various other recordings.) Tacoma’s pride and joy Girl Trouble do a respectable version of “The Hustler,” but in my professional opinion, they don’t quite own the song like they do with their Elvis covers. The Mono Men also performed better Sonics covers in the later Mort-era of their career; their versions of “Boss Hoss” and “He’s Waiting” on numerous other records are looser, louder, and more in the Sonics spirit than this version of “The Witch.”

Brother JT’s phenomenal former band, The Original Sins, do a fairly good job with “Like No Other Man,” which then begs the question why this band wasn’t appreciated more. If there is ever a 90’s garage rock record that demands to be heard, it’s their Bedlam records release Turn You On, which you can finally now buy on CD here. (Ripping off the Mummies or Supercharger is old news, kids; try writing a song as good as “Just 14” or “O Misery” instead.) Brother JT also continues to make great records to this day.

Screaming Trees then take one of the punkest Sonics songs and somehow make it sound like a bummer. Obviously, Mark Lanegan wasn’t known as a screamer, but you shouldn’t cover “Psycho” unless you are willing to rip your throat out. Bellingham’s Game for Vultures featured Mort fresh out of the Dehumanizers, and Oregon’s long-running Surf Trio do a version of “Strychnine” that is missing some of the menacing quality of the Cramps’ earlier cover version.

Side two begins with Billy Childish’s legendary band Thee Headcoats, who released records on more Northwest labels than most Northwestern bands; besides this record, the band released records on Regal Select, Sub Pop, Estrus, Super Electro, and K Records, and amazingly, they are all great. Pittsburgh’s The Cynics, whose members split their time in band with running the very cool Get Hip Records, were also one first and longest running American garage rock revival bands. The Young Fresh Fellows, of course, deserve their own post someday, and this song features Kurt Bloch on shredding lead guitar.

It’s a mystery whether Pippi Eats Cherries were a one-off or a real band, but this band-featured ex-Gun Club and Pontiac Brother Ward Dotson before he formed the much better and sorely underrated Liquor Giants. (The Liquor Giants’ “Play Along” 45 on Seattle’s Lucky Records is a lost power pop gem.) The still-sounding-great Fall-Outs provide another album highlight and were able to make the song sound like their own. Marshmallow Overcoat proves that Black Sun Ensemble weren’t the only psychedelic band in Tucson in the mid-1980’s; they’re still around playing shows.

Former U-Man and part-time Drills drummer (uncovered here first, bubba!) Tom Price leads the Kings of Rock through “Boss Hoss.” (The band also covered “The Witch” on an early In the Red single.) The album then ends with San Diego’s Mojo Nixon and Skid Roper, whose claim to fame in the 1980 was celebrity parody songs. A track by the Nights and Days, the Night Kings, or whatever Rob Vasquez was doing at the time would have been cooler and more fitting, but hey, the label has got to make some money someway.

This record was also not the only local Sonics tribute. In 2000, the Experience Music Project hosted a concert by the New Strychnines, which featured Mudhoney’s Mark Arm, Steve Turner, and Dan Peters; the aforementioned Tom Price; Girl Trouble’s Big Kahuna; Young Fresh Fellow and Minus 5 head-honcho Scott McCaughey; and Craig Florey. They later changed their name to the New Original Sonic Sound and recorded a CD for Munster Records.

Cinderella - Nomads
The Hustler - Girl Trouble
The Witch - Mono Men
Love No Other Man - The Original Sins
Psycho - Screaming Trees
He's Waiting - Game for Vultures
Strychnine - Surf Trio
You've Got Your Head on Backwards - Thee Headcoats
Shot Down - The Cynics
High Time - Young Fresh Fellows
Dirty Old Man - Pippi Eats Cherries
Going Home - Fallouts
Maintaining My Cool - Marshmallow Overcoat
Boss Hoss - Kings of Rock
Have Love Will Travel - Mojo Nixon & Skid Roper

Get them all through the zip file here.

-- MC Tom

Tales of Brave Calvin Johnson

2007-08-13T05:52:00.000-07:00

Over the course of the past several weeks, I’ve started and ditched several drafts of this post about the four-song Beat Happening/Screaming Trees collaboration, which K Records/Homestead Records released in 1988. I planned jokes in some, and in others, I considered the role Beat Happening and Calvin Johnson’s K Records played in the Northwest, with consideration of the influence on everyone from Nirvana to Kill Rock Stars to Sleater-Kinney to every band in the country that eschews bass.

Then, I remembered that I’m talking about Beat Happening here. It would be more fitting to talk about, I dunno, cookies or hugs or freckles or something.

Which is why, even to this day, it strikes me as odd that hard-psych grungers the Screaming Trees ever collaborated with Olympia’s most famous twee-pop stars Beat Happening.

In hindsight, I shouldn’t be so surprised. The Trees Gary Lee Conner and Mark Lanegan co-produced Beat Happening’s seminal Jamboree (the one with “Indian Summer”) with Steve Fisk. And Fisk, who also produced this EP, sat behind the boards for the first few Screaming Trees records (Other Worlds, Even If and Especially When, and Invisible Lantern). Those early Screaming Trees records certainly didn’t sound like Beat Happening, but they aren’t so radically different either. The two bands would diverge sonically even more not long after they released this EP. Trouser Press notes, accurately, that Beat Happening runs the show here.

Lanegan would later release a few very well-regarded records of country death songs and also serve as a sideman with Queens of the Stone Age. Johnson, among other projects, made basement funk jams with Dub Narcotic Sound System. Let’s consider ourselves lucky that the two worked together in 1988 and not 2007.

Anyway, while nobody would argue that this EP attains the heights reached by the respective bands on their own, it’s still worth a listen. Also, if you can find it, hunt down Velocity Girl’s cover of “Tales of Brave Aphrodite,” which surpasses the (already good) original.

Sea Babies
Tales of Brave Aphrodite
Polly Pereguin
I Dig You

And of course, the zip file can be found here.

--Wm

By Popular Request: Room Nine!

2007-08-01T13:02:00.000-07:00

As writer Clark Humphrey noted way back in 1993, one of the biggest clichés when describing Northwest bands is that such-and-such a band "is not your typical Seattle band." Chances are you have seen everybody from Sky Cries Mary to Forced Entry to FCS North described that way. In truth, only about a handful of bands defined the “typical Northwest sound,” while the rest of them played hard rock, punk, garage, metal, new wave, or whatever. Obviously, labeling everything “grunge” or “not grunge” makes for crappy and lazy music journalism that only gives a narrow view of what happened in Seattle over the past couple of decades.

That said, Room Nine weren't your typical Seattle band (har har). If anything, their rainy day sound had more in common musically with 1980's UK post-punk bands like the Chameleons, Echo and the Bunnymen, and, at times, the Psychedelic Furs than with all the My War-era Black Flag meet Black Sabbath influenced punk bands. They played mid-tempo songs with plenty of reverb and chorus, which would probably sound a bit dated today if it weren’t for such a renewed interest in that sound among so many modern bands. Seattle, of course, had its fair share of other UK-influenced pop bands, such as early Pure Joy or Weather Theatre, which goes to show it wasn’t just stinky guys in flannel shirts abusing their Big Muff fuzz pedals in the club scene.

Room Nine was formed in the early 80s by singer/guitarist Ron Rudzitis (or Ron Nine), bassist/keyboardist Scott Boggan, and drummer Scott Vanderpool and was probably one of the few local bands that had their own lightman, Michael Laton. They made their live debut opening for Student Nurse and were signed to C’est La Mort records, which might have been Louisiana’s only independent label that specialized in synth pop, goth, and post-punk. Scott Vanderpool eventually moved to Olympia and showed up in bands like the Young Pioneers and Chemistry Set and was replaced by Shawn Allen, who stuck with the band until their break-up in the late eighties.

Room Nine contributed “Angel Sings” to the 1986 C’est La Mort compilation record, Doctor Death's Volume I, and “A Thousand Years” to the 1987 Ironwood Records compilation, Lowlife. The Lowlife compilation, which features a photo of Chris Cornell on the cover, was recorded Jay Follette and Paul Scoles and also featured songs by Vexed, Walkabouts, Pure Joy, Feast (featuring a pre-Mudhoney Dan Peters), Bundle of Hiss, Terry Lee Hale, Melting Fish, Clay Alien, and 5 Sides Collide. (Incidentally, Ironwood studio is also where Chris Hanzsek recorded Soundgarden, Melvins, Skin Yard, etc. for the 1985 C/Z records debut, the Deep Six compilation.) Room Nine then released their only full-length, the Voices….. of a Summer’s Day in 1987, played around town a lot, and then broke up around the turn of the decade.

Ron went on to form Love Battery and has since reunited with Scott Boggan and Vanderpool as the band, Down with People. Both Love Battery and Down with People will be playing the Geezerfest at the Crocodile on August 25th and 26th.

Circus Floor
Revolving Door
Mirage
Seas Without a Shore
White Summer
Don't Look Back
Red Dog

For some reason, mediamax won't upload the last couple songs, but you can get them all in a .zip file here.

- MC Tom

Love Battery's Dayglo

2007-07-23T05:11:00.000-07:00

Love Battery is best appreciated in specific conditions. Two examples.

Example one: The first time I attempted to see Love Battery happened a little before they released Dayglo at an outdoor concert at Seattle Center’s Mural Amphitheater. I went with a friend of mine who had heard me sing Love Battery’s praises. Love Battery cancelled for reasons I can’t remember, but opening act Flop played a set of their anxious, loud, delightful pop. The weather that day was extremely sunny and warm, and we sat on the grass most of the afternoon enjoying the day. Love Battery’s cancellation seemed like less of a disappointment.

Example two: I brought Dayglo with me on a trip my wife, son, and I took to a Babies R’ Us outside of Chicago (as you can see, we still live the grunge life). Traffic stunk, as it always does on the way to Chicago’s suburbs, but at least we had bright, sunny weather. My wife didn’t care much for the CD; she considered it pretty average. Strangely, Dayglo also sounded distinctly average to me at that point. This struck me as odd, because I love it otherwise.

Because you are discerning enough to read this blog, you’ve already noticed the connection: the sun shone brightly on both days, and if there’s one thing Love Battery wasn’t (at least during that period), it’s sunny weather music.

“Out of Focus” video that, for some reason, cuts off at the 2:30 mark.

Love Battery’s home page notes, “This record sounds best on headphones,” and I agree. Especially about the “great” part. It’s been a favorite of mine during several autumn and winter mornings at work.

We finally saw Love Battery a year or two later at Western Washington University, around the time that Green River/Mother Love Bone alumnus Bruce Fairweather started playing bass, right before they released Dayglo’s follow-up, Far Gone. I recall that the stage was washed with purple and pink lights, with no spotlights. The dark stage lighting gave the show a brooding quality that complemented the echo-heavy guitars of Ron Nine and Kevin Whitworth (ex-Crisis Party) and provided a nice contrast to the shimmering melodies that ice the songs.

Some specs on the record: Jason Finn (future President of the United States of America; drums) and Jim Tillman (ex-U-Men; bass) round out the lineup for this record. Conrad Uno recorded the record at Egg with some help by Posie Jon Auer, who, incidentally, produced the similarly dark, psychedelic debut EP by Truly. I’m told that some editions of Dayglo include the bands cover of Buffalo Springfield’s “Mr. Soul,” but I can’t verify this; my version doesn’t include this track. The record appears to be completely out of print, and I can’t find any indication that the band has copies to sell.

MediaMax has been inoperable for nearly a month now, so we’re using the (less user-friendly) box.net to host the mp3s. If you only have the patience to download a couple of tracks, I recommend “Out of Focus” and “Cool School (Trane of Thought).”

Out of Focus
Foot
Damaged
See Your Mind
Side (with You)
Cool School (Trane of Thought)
Sometimes
Blonde
Dayglo
23 Modern Stories

. . . and of course, the .zip file is available here.

--Wm

Flop: 2 Degrees Separated from Cat Butt

2007-07-17T08:37:00.000-07:00

Our computers have crunched the data and the results have been calculated, and we here at Lamestain Research Institute have now determined that, between 1990 and 1995, Seattle’s Flop were the Greatest Power Pop Band in the World. True, those years weren’t exactly considered the height of the power pop movement, and competition wasn’t too stiff, but still, Flop gets the Blue Ribbon. Sadly, the band was grossly overlooked in the grunge and alternative-era. While bands like the Rembrandts and Velvet Crush ended up on various Best of the 1990’s cds, Flop’s discography has gone out of print.

Former Pure Joy head honcho Rusty Willoughby formed the band in 1989 with guitarist Bill Campbell, formally of Chemistry Set, which also featured future KZOK DJ Scott Vanderpool on drums; drummer Nate Johnson, formally of the Fastbacks; and bassist-background singer, Paul Schurr, formally of Seers of Bavaria. Their 1990 debut EP, The Losing End, was the first Lucky Records release and was recorded by C/Z Records co-founder Chris Hanzek at Reciprocal Studios in Ballard. Lucky went on to release great records by the Supersuckers, the Mono Men, Bum, the Fastbacks, Man or Astroman, Ward Dotson’s post-Gun Club and Pontiac Brothers band the Liquor Giants, and Japan’s brilliant Teengenerate before vanishing in the mid-90’s.

Flop followed the EP with the “Drugs” b/w “Action” (Sweet cover) single on their manager’s label, Dashboard Hula Girl Records, in 1991. Later that year, Dashboard Hula Girl also released one of the better tribute records, the Another Damned Seattle Compilation, which included Flop’s cover of “Disco Man” along with Damned covers by the Young Fresh Fellows, Fastbacks, Mudhoney, Gas Huffer, Skin Yard, the Derelicts, the Accused, and a handful of others. We’ll eventually get to that record when we do a Northwest Tribute Record Month sometime in 2011.

The band soon signed with Los Angeles-based Frontier Records, which went from releasing early records by bands like Suicidal Tendencies, the Adolescents, Circle Jerks, Christian Death, and Redd Kross to the less hardcore and much underrated Thin White Rope, Young Fresh Fellows, Dharma Bums, and Heatmiser (featuring Elliot Smith). They debuted with the Flop and the Fall of the Mopsqueezer record in 1992. Trouser Press rightfully wrote that it was “one of the ‘90s’ finest debuts,” and the record also featured a great version of the Kinks’ “Big Sky.” Following their first full length, they released the 1992 We Are You EP on the Spanish label, Munster Records. The tracks “Told a Lie,” “Hello,” “Anne,” and “Tomato Paste” were taken from the record, while the non-album track, “Doll” came from a 1990 recording session. A thousand were pressed.

Flop’s Wikipedia entry gives a great detailed band history and also does a good job talking about their second and third records, Whenever You Are Ready and World of Today, so we’ll skip them and cover some odds and ends. In 1994, Flop contributed their versions of the Zombies’ “She Does Everything for Me” and “Girl Help Me” to the Popllama record, World of the Zombies compilation, which also featured covers by the Young Fresh Fellows, Fastbacks, the Posies, the Model Rockets, and Carl Newman’s pre-New Pornographers band, Zumpano and we’ll also cover that record during Northwest Tribute Record Month.

Their last release was the 1000-pressed, “Scene 1 Act 1” b/w “”I am a Potato” (Devo) and “The Place I Love” (The Jam) single on Super Electro (SE 709). Flop also backed up Thrown Ups vocalist/Love and Respect and Sad and Lonelys member/illustrator Ed Fotheringham for a 1993 golf-themed EP, which was credited to Eddie and the Back Nine (Super Electro Records SE704).

After Flop broke up in 1995, Rusty re-formed Pure Joy for a couple of records, recorded a self-titled solo record for Kurt Bloch’s Book Records, released a solo 1999 Sub Pop single of the month, and now fronts Llama. Paul quit the band after Whenever You Are Ready and joined Best Kissers in the World for a bit. Best Kissers also featured Danny Bland, formally of Cat Butt. Ta-Da!

“The Losing End”
“Somehow”
“Dissipate”
“Fucking”

“Drugs”
“Action”

Mediamax is still down so get them all from the .zip file here.
Check out their video here.

-- MC Tom

This Just In! Geezerfest 2007!

2007-07-16T08:04:00.000-07:00

Late Breaking News courtesy of Swallow's Rod Moody!

Rod and Rob Daily from Flotation Records will be hosting Geezerfest 2007 at the Crocodile Cafe, August 25th and 26th.

Bands scheduled to appear include: Blood Circus, Catbutt, Coffin Break, Love Battery, Swallow, Snowbud and the Flower People, RC5, Lamar (Chad Channing), Sister Psychic, Valis, Down With People, Green Pajamas, Bug Nasties, Robert Roth, From the North(ex-Malfunkshun) and MORE!

Hot Damn!

Louder than Live

2007-07-09T05:10:00.000-07:00

Because it takes time and effort to digitize old vinyl, we’ve been tending lately to favor some of the more obscure records in our collection. Thus, we admit that we’ve been sitting on this one for a while: Soundgarden’s Louder Than Live, which I digitized late last year and which I’ve been wanting to post for quite some time. Because bootleggers seized on this one almost immediately upon its (very limited) release, one used to be able to find it reasonably easy at less scrupulous record stores and mail order vendors.

The Unofficial Soundgarden homepage gives the record’s history. In brief, A&M released the video of the same title to promote Louder Than Love, Soundgarden’s (fantastic) major label debut. The video contained five live songs plus the regular videos for “Hands All Over” and “Loud Love.” A&M simultaneously released a 12” vinyl version that added “Beyond the Wheel” and a CD that added “Beyond the Wheel” and “Hunted Down.” I have a booted version of the CD, although the bootleggers clearly used the 12” version to reference the track listing, as it contains an uncredited “Hunted Down.”

I owned the video at one point, too, and to be honest, I didn’t love it. The performances—from December 7^th and 10^th 1989 at the Whisky A Go-Go in Los Angeles, with short-term member Jason Everman on bass—are fine enough, but the camera fades in and out constantly and never stays at a single perspective for more than a few seconds. I think I would have preferred a straightforward video of the band over this collage. Perhaps its best appreciated as background viewing while you shirtlessly dust your furniture.

Performance of "Loud Love" from the same era but a different source.

As far as the songs? The performance epitomizes Soundgarden at their shambolic, pasty, sludgy, heavy best. The guitars don’t stay in tune, and Chris Cornell struggles to hit the high notes (especially when he’s also playing guitar). Somehow, though, they seem titanic, forcing their disparate elements (Led Zeppelin, the Melvins, a philosophy degree, rainy weather, shirtlessness, Sabbath, duct tape) to cohere by virtue of volume and carnal energy. Cornell later became a bona fide, mainstream sex symbol and rock star, and I have mixed (generally negative) feelings about his output since the early 90s, but at the time? As the t-shirt said, Total. Fucking. Godhead.

Beyond the Wheel
Get on the Snake
Hunted Down
I Awake
Gun
Big Dumb Sex
Big Bottom/Earache My Eye

For some reason, MediaMax is taking an eternity to process the invidual mp3s, so for the time being, you'll have to download the .zip file to hear 'em.

Taking a week off

2007-07-02T05:44:00.000-07:00

We're taking a week off to celebrate Independence Day in true lamestain fashion: by grilling up some Gardenburgers, washing 'em down with a couple cans of OK Soda, and blowing off a finger or two with some M-80s we bought at Boom City.

We'll return next week.

Lamestain Celebrates Issaquah and Regal Select, Part 3: The Return of Rob Vasquez

2007-06-24T21:52:00.001-07:00

Well, we are reaching the end of our amazing 3-part series celebrating Issaquah, Washington and one of our favorite garage rock labels of all time, Regal Select, and we are going out with a bang: the Puget Power Act III EP (RS-14). Released in 1991, this EP is a split between Seattle and Portland bands and features Mudhoney, the Nights Kings, Calamity Jane, and Rancid Vat.

The Portland side begins with Calamity Jane, which featured singer/guitarist Gilly Anne Hanner, bassist Megan Hanner, and drummer Lisa Koenig. The band also did some singles on Tim/Kerr records, Sympathy for the Record Industry, Imp, and a few other labels before breaking up in the early-nineties soon after opening for Nirvana in Buenos Aires, Argentin a. Gilly Ann later joined Starpower (with ex-Crackerbash bassist, Scott Fox), No 2 (with ex-Heatmiser, Neil Gust), and Braille Stars and performed as a solo artist.

Following Calamity Jane is now Texas-based, wrestling maniacs Rancid Vat, or the 2^nd greatest band with “Rancid” in their name (#1 is Rancid Hell Spawn, of course). Rancid Vat contributed their version of wrestling star Adrian Street’s “Breakin’ Bones,” which is about how they are only happy when they break people’s bones. Awesomely enough, Rancid Vat weren’t the only Portland punk band made up of wresting fans. Greg Sage of the Wipers might have been the highest profile Portland punk musician/wrestling fan and even made his 1971 recording debut by backing up Portland wrestler Beauregarde for a now-reissued LP; he also posed in front of a bunch of wrestling photos, fliers, and articles for the back cover of his very fine 1985 solo debut record, Straight Ahead. For those of you taking notes, some of Rancid Vat’s members were also in Alcoholics Unanimous, who appeared on Puget Power 2.

The Seattle side starts off with one of my favorite Mudhoney songs, “Bush Pusherman,” which was recorded by Conrad Uno at Egg Studios and can also be found on the brilliant March to Fuzz retrospective double-CD. Following Mudhoney, Rob Vasquez makes a re-appearance on the series with the Night Kings’ song “Black Fluid.” Recorded at Vinyl Manor, the song is another reminder that Rob is the garage rock maestro and is sorely under-appreciated in Seattle. Once again, you can still buy copies of their great full length, Increasing our High, through Sub Pop.

Well, for now that’s it for Regal Select and Issaquah and we can safely say that we have put the town back on the map. Despite hometown boys Modest Mice People’s best efforts, Issaquah is a Rock and Roll Town, and Regal Selects reminds us of that (even if they didn’t release anything by any Issaquah bands). We’ll eventually get to the Puget Power 4 comp, the Kings of Rock, and a few other punk rock chestnuts on Regal Select, but until then enjoy the tunes.

Calamity Jane - "Shark"
Rancid Vat - "Breakin' Bones"
Mudhoney - "Bush Pusherman"
Night Kings - "Black Fluid"

Get them all via a handy zip file here.

--MC Tom

Listen to Grunge Live on Record

2007-06-19T10:53:00.002-07:00

A short break between our regular posts to further pimp the following:

Brought to you by the fine readers Kegan and Shirilla.

Lamestain Celebrates Issaquah and Regal Select, Part II

2007-06-18T05:08:00.000-07:00

After reading last week’s entry, you’ve no doubt already booked a flight to Seattle, rented a car, and driven 19 miles on I-90 out to Issaquah. However, the temperature in Issaquah today is a cool 59ºF (15ºC), with 54% humidity and a mild 8 MPH breeze; having flown in from Ibiza, you’re no doubt a little chilly. You’re in luck! While doing research on this beautiful city, we learned of not one, but two wireless hotspots that also serve coffee! It’s a small town, so just look at the photos we’ve included and walk around until you find a building that matches them. Once inside, you can write about the adventures you had while hunting down Regal Select Records’ founder Michael Goodall.

Speaking of which . . .

Gas Huffer opens volume two of Puget Power with the decent, if not brilliant, “Spinnin’ Disc O’Fire.” The Derelects have the record’s high point: a cover of Fleetwood Mac’s late-60s jab at Elvis, “Somebody’s Gonna Get Their Head Kicked in Tonight.” (Really, it’s more of a cover of The Rezillos’ earlier take on the song.) We already wrote about Gas Huffer, and someday we’ll cover The Derelicts, who merit a post of their own. During the heyday of grunge, they played unabashed, hedonistic punk. While their music was hardly consequential, it was fun.

Yummy starts side two, and Alcoholics Unanimous closes it. I don’t know a thing about Alcoholics Unanimous. Yummy was one of James Burdyshaw’s post-Cat Butt projects; like 64 Spiders, he handles the vocals. I checked to see if somebody had posted a myspace page for Yummy, only to see that my search yielded dozens of pages. Probably wise of Bro James to have dropped that name.

Gas Huffer “Spinnin’ Disc O’ Fire”
The Derelicts “Somebody’s Gonna Get Their Head Kicked In Tonight”
Yummy “Super Dyke”
Alcoholics Unanimous “You Can’t Hurt a Drunk”

The songs are also on this easier-to-download .zip file.

On a different subject, if you didn’t read the comments for the Mudhoney/Sonic Youth, etc. splits below, one of our readers (DJ Kegan) will be DJ-ing a set of grunge at Chicago’s Continental (on California and Chicago) on June 20th. Kegan writes, “Sure you'll get to hear some Nirvana, Soundgarden, and yer Mudhoney, but these boys will be DIGGING DEEP. How 'bout some Cat Butt and Blood Circus?! Ever listen to the lonely moans or daddy hate box? you will soon...”

Daddy Hate Box? The Lonely Moans? I’m stunned! Regrettably, our six-month-old son keeps us at home and in bed on weekday nights, but other Windy City residents have no excuse. Go check this out! And please, let me know how it was.

--Wm

Lamestain Celebrates Issaquah and Regal Select, Part I

2007-06-11T23:13:00.000-07:00

While doing research for this week's installment, our college intern came across the below three paragraphs from a 1993 'Enjoy Issaquah' tourist pamphlet.

"From its humble beginnings as a mining town to its current, booming hi-tech industry, Issaquah, which is only seventeen miles east of downtown Seattle, has seen tremendous changes since it was incorporated in 1892. While the businesses on Main Street and the local economy may have changed, the town has retained its strong sense of community and down home heartedness. The townsfolk, most of whom have long ago traded their logger overalls for Khaki's and flip flops, are welcoming and good natured in a classic, Small Town American way. Walk down any street, pop into any business and you will be greeted with a warm smile by any one of our 11,000 local residents....

Perhaps visit Sherman's Feed Store and you might encounter Judy Lozano, whose unequaled knowledge of local bird-life might help you identify the small, red-winged flying bird that is nesting in your garage. Or perhaps you may meet Jeffery Bobbins at the Ole Barbershop on 25th and Lake Street and listen to his fascinating stories about how hairstyles have changed in his 35 plus years as a barber. If Gridiron is your passion, check out the Issaquah Eagles try for yet another victory while you cheer for Junior College bound Chip Darren so he might throw for 100 yards and two touchdowns in front of a cheering home stand.... Or maybe, you can talk about obscure garage rock with Regal Select Record's founder, Michael Goodall, at the summer record swap."

Not surprisingly, the pamphlet went on to further talk about Regal Select:

“Debuting with Tom Price’s post-U-Men band, the Kings of Rock, Regal Select has released singles by the Nights and Days, the Fall-Outs, the Mummies, Girl Trouble, 64 Spiders, Gorilla, Thee Headcoats, Yummy, and four Puget Power compilation EPs. The first Puget Power (catalog #008) single was recorded at Reciprocal Studios in 1989 and released in 1990 and featured otherwise unreleased songs by Rob Vasquez’s The Nights and Days, the Fall-Outs, Bellingham’s the Mono Men, and Sugar Sugar.”

We originally planned on doing a never-ending Regal Select retrospective series, but certain constraints (such as them not doing very many records) forced us to narrow it down to three parts so we will just focus on the first three Puget Power singles. The fourth EP, which features Flathead, the Statics, Sinister Six, and Head, was lost in transit when we sent it to our outsourced office in India to be digitalized. We will eventually come back to it at a later date.

As far as the EP, The Mono Men song features an early, pre-Mort line up; the still-going-strong Fall-Outs feature the classic lineup of Dave, Shannon, and Dino; Sugar Sugar featured Tim Hayes of Kings of Rock, Helldorado, Hormones fame and also used to take ¾ of my paycheck when he owned the much missed Fallout Records. He’s about to open a new bar on 65th in Ballard later this summer and will once again be taking most of my money. You can also learn more about the genius of Rob Vasquez and the Nights and Days here.

The Nights and Days – “Ya”
The Fall-Outs – “Greed”
The Mono Men – “Pete’s Pango”

Sugar Sugar – “Living Daylights"

Get them all via a handy .zip file here.

-- MC Tom

Mudhoney, Melvins, Sonic Youth, Steel Pole Bathtub

2007-06-04T05:15:00.000-07:00

As we’ve mentioned here before, we fondly recall the days when each new Sub Pop release spent a few weeks in the singles section at Cellophane Square before the managers “promoted” it to the wall behind the cash register and raised the price ten-fold. We can’t accuse Cellophane of fleecing the customers (well, I suppose we can), because they were dealing with simple supply and demand issues. People wanted these records, and they became scarce almost immediately upon release. Among the most coveted of those early records was the famous Sonic Youth/Mudhoney “Touch Me I’m Sick”/“Halloween” split. At one time—I’m not making this up—I read that it could fetch $400. (Apparently the demand still exists: somebody on eBay has a copy available for a mere $75).

This single (we have the 12”) still makes me feel warm with nostalgia. Mudhoney sneers and drones through the Sonic Youth song, and Kim Gordon completely embodies the sickness of the Mudhoney track: she vomits, not sings, the lyrics. It’s great stuff. Sub Pop released it in 1988, before Mudhoney had even celebrated its first birthday and just after Sonic Youth cemented their reputation with Daydream Nation. It was the second single in Sub Pop’s deeply lamented Singles of the Month Club.

Less than a year later, Matt Lukin’s ex-bandmates, the Melvins, responded in 1989 with a Mudhoney/Sonic Youth split of their own: the Melvins tackle the B-side to “Touch Me I’m Sick” (“Sweet Young Thing Ain’t Sweet No More”), and Bay Area noisemakers Steel Pole Bathtub cover Sonic Youths “I Dreamed, I Dream.” Boner Records parodied the “Touch Me I’m Sick” cover and Sub Pop logo for the Melvins side and Sonic Youth’s Death Valley 69 EP for their side. Interestingly, Steel Pole Bathtub’s drummer, Darren Morey, formerly played in Mr. Epp and the Calculations with Mudhoney’s Mark Arm.

One web site claims that the Melvins recorded this record as a “diss” of Lukin’s new band. Although a Maximum Rock & Roll interview with Mudhoney indicates some tension between the two bands, I have a hard time believing that there was some Suge Knight/2-Pac shit goin’ down here. The Melvins seethe out the song, emphasizing how the song’s sinister undercurrent. Clearly, this is no pisstake.

We like Steel Pole Bathtub’s cover, too.

Mudhoney “Halloween”
Sonic Youth “Touch Me I’m Sick”
Melvins “Sweet Young Thing Ain’t Sweet No More”
Steel Pole Bathtub “I Dreamed I Dream”

The tracks can also be obtained via .zip file here. Also, for your reading pleasure, here's an article from late 80s/early 90s NW music rag Backlash about early Mudhoney.

--Wm

The Treepeople Make it Okay for Young Punks to Practice Guitar Scales

2007-05-28T21:55:00.000-07:00

A few years ago some friends and I went to see a garage band called King Khan and the BBQ Show at one of our favorite hangouts, the Funhouse in Seattle, and in between songs, one of the members made some tired joke about Mother Love Bone and another crack about C/Z records. If I wasn’t already in a deep conversation with a friend about how the Bassholes and Flat Duo Jets did the stripped down, garage-rock duo thing way better 15 years ago, I would have yelled out something about how C/Z put out the first Melvins EP and that’s way cooler than playing garage-rock in 2007. Sure C/Z might have put out some duds, but really, what long-running label hasn’t? Every label from Stax to Touch & Go to In the Red has put out some clunkers. Anyhow, besides the aforementioned Melvins’ record, C/Z also put out several great records by Seattle-by-way-of-Boise punkers, the Treepeople. Treepeople were also one of the few local bands that bridged the gaps between the straight edge kids, the grunge scenesters, the Olympia indie rocks, and the garage rock crowd. You could find them abusing fuzz boxes and laying down dual guitar solos with everyone from Aspirin Feast to Gorilla to Subvert to Resolution to Hammerbox to Gas Huffer to Tad to Moral Crux, etc…

Formed after Boise-based hardcore band State of Confusion broke up, Treepeople moved to Seattle around 1988–a good few years before the influx of crappy wannabe rock star bands. The band originally comprised Scott Schmaljohn (guitar/vocals), Doug Martsch (guitar/vocals), Pat Brown (bass), and Wayne Rhino Flower (drums); they first released the No Mouth Pipetting cassette in 1988 and made their vinyl debut in 1989 with the Jack Endino-produced “Important Things” 7” on Silence Records (SEP 002). Silence also released the Time Whore EP (SVP 03) in 1990 and added the song “Cartoon Brew” to the 1990 Silence Sampler 1 EP (SVP 05), which also included songs by Dirt Fishermen and Caustic Resin. They then released the “Makin’ the D” b/w “PG” 7” in 1990 on Battery Records and the “Mistake” b/w “Ballard Bitter” 7” on Sonic Bubblegum Record (GUM002) in 1991. Also in 1991, Arizona-based Toxic Shock Records released the Treepeople/House of Large Sides split single and their debut LP, Guilt, Regret, and Embarrassment (since reissued by K Records – minus the bonus tracks).

C/Z then decided to nut up and release the Steve Fisk and Stuart Hallerman-produced Something Vicious for Tomorrow EP (CZ040) in 1991. Featuring new drummer, Tony Dallas Reed, the record also included the Time Whore EP, and according to the 1991-1992 C/Z catalog, it sounded like “Sonic crust from J. Mascis’ wet dreams. These guys were friends with Tad before he developed an eating disorder.” Former Christ on A Crutch drummer Erik Akre then joined the band, and they released the great “Outside In” b/w “Hide and Find Out” 45 (CZ050) in 1992. T. Dallas Reed rejoined the band on bass for the Just Kidding LP (CZ054) in 1993. Produced by John Goodmanson, the record features re-recorded versions of “Cartoon Brew,” “Ballard Bitter,” “Neil’s Down,” and a slowed down version of “Outside In.” The band contributed “Drawing Lessons” to the Teriyaki Asthma Vol. 8 (CZ049), which also featured songs by MX-80, Ween, and Dose;, and “Boiled Bird” to the Four on the Floor EP (CZ055) along with Dirt Fishermen, Gnome, and Alcohol Funnycar.

The Treepeople also recorded “More than a Feeling” for the completely unnecessary Boston tribute double 7”, Bostonot, on Face the Music Records, which also featured covers by Karp, Paste, Fitz of Depression, Witchy Poo, Cog, Roger Nusic, Ketchup & Mayonnaise. They also did a split double 7” with like-minded band, Archers of Loaf, where they did “Meet at the End” and Archers’ cover “Web in Front” while Archers of Loaf did ‘Quinnbeast” and covered “Funnelhead.” Doug and T. Dallas split the band, and John Polle and Eric Carnell replaced them for their final record, Actual Re-Enactment in 1994. The band lasted a while longer before Scott and John formed Stuntman for a couple records and moved back to Idaho. Scott now plays in a band called The Treatment.

Doug, of course, formed Built to Spill and gave birth to Modest Mouse and a million other bands that learned it was okay for guitarists to noodle every so often, T. Dallas joined former All singer Scott Reynolds' band, Goodbye Harry, for a couple records, Eric played in Kill Sybil and then joined his sister’s band, Goodness, while Wayne Rhino Flower started Violent Green.

King Khan and other garage rockers who can’t appreciate anything unless Tim Warren of Crypt Records gives it thumbs up might not dig this band or C/Z Records, but here are some songs and you can judge them yourself.

Important Things
In My Head
Handcuffs
Outside In

Get them all in a .zip file here.

Buy C/Z stuff here.

-- MC Tom

More on the Green River demos

2007-05-24T08:28:00.000-07:00

The email problems were somehow resolved, and I was finally able to receive Alex Shumway's (i.e., Alex Vincent's) responses to some questions I asked him about the demos. These have been combined and edited from a few different emails. Enjoy!

On "Leech" and the demos:
"Leech" was part of the first demo session we did in the summer of 1984, in a studio run by Chris Hanzek (which was sweltering). It was in the same session of songs that you can find on the green 7” bootleg of “33 RPMs” and “10,000 Things.” The only reason we didn’t record it for Come On Down was because we were probably just so tired of it by that time–-and we had so many more songs. (You can always check out the differences of “10,000 Things” on the bootleg and on the Deep Six comp. They sound like two completely different songs–-so I’m pretty sure that "Leech" got tossed by the wayside like that one did.)

The Melvins had a copy of the first demo tape and I know they liked it, so they did a cover of it. (Better than we did it…)

Also, not on the demo that you have is the song "Take Me," which was
part of the same session.

Oh, and - I don't know if it is marked on the 1984 demos but it's all pre-Stone.

[He also pointed out that the .zip file contains a track called "New God II," which is actually an early demo version "Alive" by Pearl Jam. "God knows that wasn't us," he said of it.]

On touring with Big Black:
As for the Big Black shows, we only did a few with them on the first tour. It actually turned out to be the majority of shows thanks to the major screw up of Homestead Records (from around 16 shows to about 7 or 8 at most). Steve Albini, from what I remember, is a really nice guy. We did a show with them in Cincinnati where hardly anybody showed up–-the Red Hot Chili Peppers stole away the whole crowd from across town. While we played to almost nobody, the power went out. We thought they cut the power off on us and Mark got pissed! He unplugged all the mics and chucked them into the crowd (or what there was of a crowd). It turned out to be a blown fuse, so we gathered up all the mics and put them all in place–-except one was missing, and it turned out to be the $500 mic. Needless to say, we didn’t get paid, but Steve was nice enough to help us out with a few bucks from their payout. (As a side note, the guy who ran the club was gunning around town trying to find us. There were some girls who were at the show who knew that he was not a good fellow. So they hid us out of town in one of their father’s cabins until we could get to our next show. Nothing happened, except that Jeff learned to properly tease his hair.)

Other tour stuff:
Other disastrous things that happened on that tour… The record didn’t come out until about a month after the tour; we were almost killed in Detroit playing at a Danzig show; the best show was playing last at CBGBs on a Monday night to six Japanese business men and the staff. (It actually was a great show. The staff liked us enough to give us anything we wanted – aside from cash because there was no one there.)

* * * * *
So there it is. Alex recently played the skins for The Repeat Offenders and now pounds the drums for a terrific garage-ish band called the Zack Static Sect. While neither sounds like Green River, both are definitely worth your time.

The Green River demos

2007-05-20T19:02:00.000-07:00

One of the coolest things to have happened since we started this blog (after Tad’s comment a week or two ago) was when one of the readers, Casey, sent me mp3s of Green River’s first demo tapes. This juice has fermented in the bottle long enough, so we’re posting those mp3s.

Casey sent a couple of batches of mp3s, one of which was labeled “1984 demos” and the other of which was labeled “1985 demos.” The two selections had quite a bit of cross-over (not just the same songs, but the same recordings of songs), and as happens with demo tapes that have been circulated over many years, the labels didn’t always agree with each other. However, judging from some of the performances, it does appear that they recorded some songs in 1984 and one or two others in 1985. I went through the demos as carefully as I could and removed redundant material. To keep things clear, I’ll refer to them as “the 1984 demos” and “the 1985 demos,” even though most of the material clearly came from the earlier session.

“New God” and “Tunnel of Love” were the only songs from the 1984 demo to later appear (in different recordings) on Come on Down; the 1985 demo erroneously labels these same recordings as “Personality Meltdown” and “Leech,” respectively. The untitled track, which cuts off after about 20 seconds, appears only on the 1984 demo. The same recordings of “Leech,” “Fear,” “Baby Help Me,” and “33 rps” also appear on both demos (as “33 RPM” [which makes more sense than “33 rps”], “Against the Grain,” “Baby Help Me Forget,” and “New God,” respectively). Finally, an early and radically different version of “10,000 Things” (from the Deep Six compilation) appears here as “Twist.”

The 1985 demo contains a version of “Bazaar” that doesn’t appear on the 1984 demo and differs from the version on Another Pyrrhic Victory. Finally, “Together We’ll Never” sounds to like it came from another source; perhaps this version appeared on the Tasque Force Records “Together We’ll Never”/ “Ain’t Nothing to Do” single (which I never owned), as it’s not the version on Rehab Doll; the mp3 has loads and loads of hiss, as if it were a tenth-generation tape.

I emailed former drummer Alex Vincent to ask about the demos, and he wrote a long response that, for some reason, fails to get delivered into my in box. I’ll post it when I finally receive it.

Also, for the hell of it, I’m throwing in the Melvins’ cover of “Leech,” from Gluey Porch Treatments. The mp3’s tag mislabels the song, but rest assured, it’s the right track.

New God
Tunnel of Love
Untitled
Leech
Twist
Fear
Baby, Help Me
33 RPS
Together We'll Never
Bazaar

Melvins -- "Leeech"

All of the songs can be accessed via .zip file here. Considering the bandwidth used by all of these tracks, I highly recommend that you download the .zip file and not each track individually.

--Wm

Teaching the Kids About The Night Kings

2007-05-13T22:30:00.000-07:00

If your life is based around garage punk blogs, you might think that Rob Vasquez enjoys Saint-like status in his hometown of Seattle, Washington. As many garage rock aficionados know, Rob has been in some of the best garage rock bands since the hey-days of the 60s. Along with Mick Collins' Gories, Tacoma’s Girl Trouble, Seattle’s the Fall-Outs, and a small handful of others, Rob’s the Nights and Days kept the garage rock flame burning brightly throughout the 80s. You would think that would be enough for him to get some decent coverage around town, but nope, the weekly rags would rather report on what some ex-Murder City Devil guy had for lunch on Tuesday or which one of them stunk up the Cha-Cha’s bathroom than write anything about Rob’s latest music endeavor. But the bloggers understand: 90’s underground punk specialists, Static Party, seem to post (and sadly, take down) a different Rob-related single each month, and Detailed Twang has posted the first couple Nights and Days singles here and here. Eventually the In-Crowd will discover Rob and shower him with their parent’s money, but until then, we’ll just raise our glasses to the under-appreciated 3-chord genius.

Rob, whose music background stretches back to the late seventies and who played in some of Seattle earliest punk bands like the Feelings and the Look, formed the Night Kings after the Nights and Days broke up around the turn of the decade. (Supposedly, there is an unreleased Nights and Days LP sitting in somebody’s closet, and until Lamestain turns a profit and starts a record label, it will sadly continue to gather dust.) Featuring Kings of Rock drummer, Dan Ryan and a rotating list of bassists (Javad S, Dylan Maiden, and Jarett O’Bryan), the band released singles on Sub Pop, In the Red, and Dope Records; did split singles with Yummy (ex-Cat Butt) and the Fall-Outs; and appeared on Estrus’ Tales from Estrus Compilation 7” and Regal Select’s Puget Power 3 7”. The Night Kings’ lone full length, Increasing Our High, came out in 1992 on Steve Turner’s incredibly underrated and sorely missed label, Super Electro Records, which amazingly you can still buy here. As well as that record, Super Electro released Lamestain-approved records by the Wellwater Conspiracy, the Fall-Outs, Thee Headcoats, the Kent 3, the Sad and Lonelys, the Wiretaps, and great singles by the Statics, Flop, Mudhoney, Holly Golightly, the Braineaters reissue (which somebody should mail to us), and a few others.

After the Night Kings broke up in the early nineties, Rob has played in Ape Lost, the Chintz Devils, the Gorls (also featuring Dylan Maiden), Man Tee Mans, Pissed Off Zombies, Right On, and currently, Nice Smile. Since we care about your future, we recommend that you track down all of his records now so you can eventually sell them at a huge profit to pay for your retirement home.

Night Kings Theme
Mid-Night
Old Dick

Lickity Split
The Fall-Outs - Your Body but Not Your Soul

Get them all in a .zip file here.

-- MC Tom

A fool and his heart are soon parted: Hazel

2007-05-07T05:52:00.000-07:00

The always excellent Something I Learned Today blog recently posted several songs from Hazel’s two LPs, Toreador of Love (which features one of the most atrocious cover photos ever) and Are You Going to Eat That?, and their Ariana EP. This led us to dig out two early Hazel singles and to bring ‘em to you people.

First, the basics: the band consisted of Pete Krebs (guitar, vox), Jody Bleyle (drums, vocals), Brady Smith (bass), and Fred Nemo (dancing, old person-ness). They formed in Portland, Oregon, and played their first show (w/ Bedspins, Joybuzzer, and the awesome Crackerbash) at some venue called Handprints on Valentine’s Day in 1992. Hazel ceased to function as a full-time band back in 1997, although they still play live once every year or two. Fred Nemo’s homepage is worth perusing, as it includes a complete list of every show they played. A bit more of their history can be learned from a UW Daily article from 1998.

Bleyle’s label, Candy-Ass Records, released the “Heida”/“Pop Uncle” in 1992. For better or worse, it has the usual attributes of a punk record: a simple, hand-drawn sleeve; very raw recording; and only a semblance of competence. Although the songs themselves are okay, it’s easy to tell that the band played their first show only a week before they hit Smegma Studios to record this. We don’t consider “Heida” to be essential.

Their first Sub Pop single, “Jilted”/”Truly,” on the other hand, is fantastic. Hazel recorded these songs again at Smegma and again with Mike Lastra behind the boards, but six months of constant playing and the presence of Kurt Bloch near the studio’s console helped measurably. Strangely, the b-side became the bigger “hit,” although I’ve always preferred “Jilted.”

And for as awful as the cover of Toreador of Love was, the cover to this single rules.

Heida
Pop Uncle

Jilted
Truly

The songs can be found in the .zip file here.

--Wm

The Melvins' Song that Launched 1000 Boris Riffs

2007-05-01T21:56:00.000-07:00

This has been a hectic week over here at Lamestain LLC, as profits have plummeted this quarter, and we were forced to lay off our research staff. Because of the revenue shortfall, this week's installment will be brief. We hope to hire a crew of unpaid college interns so we will be able to provide our normal, in-depth, scholastic analysis of 20-year-old records that nobody but you care about shortly.

Along with “Easy As it Was,” “Now a Limo,” “Grinding Process,” “#2 Pencil,” “At a Crawl,” “Disinvite,” “Snake Appeal,” “Show Off Your Red Hands,” “Over the Underground,” “Crayfish,” “Eye Flys,” “Echo Head,” “Don't Piece Me,” “Heater Moves and Eyes,” “Steve Instant Newman,” “Influence Of Atmosphere,” “Exact Paperbacks,” “Happy Grey or Black,” “Leech,” “Glow God,” “Big as a Mountain,” “Heaviness of the Load,” “Flex With You,” “Bitten Into Sympathy,” “Gluey Porch Treatments,” “Clipping Roses,” “As Was It,” “Over From Under The Excrement,” “Vile,” “Oven,” “At A Crawl,” “Let God Be Your Gardener,” “Creepy Smell,” “Kool Legged,” “Green Honey, Agonizer,” “Raise A Paw,” “Love Thing,” “Ever Since My Accident,” “Revulsion / We Reach,” “Dead Dressed,” “Cranky Messiah,” “Claude,” “My Small Percent Shows Most,” “Boris,” “Anaconda,” “Ligature,” “It's Shoved,” “Zodiac,” “If I Had An Exorcism,” “Your Blessened,” “Cow,” “Wispy,” “Antitoxidote,” “Hog Leg,” “Charmicarmicat,” “Hung Bunny,” “Roman Bird Dog,” “Hooch,” “Lizzy,” “Honey Bucket,” “Hag Me,” “Set Me Straight,” “Sky Pup,” “Joan of Arc,” “Teet,” “Copache,” “Pearl Bomb,” “Spread Eagle Beagle,” “How About,” “Rickets,” “Pick it n' Flick it,” “Montreal,” “Chief Ten Beers,” “Underground,” “Chalk People,” “Punch the Lion,” “Pure Digital Silence,” “Larry,” “Roll Another One,” “Skweetis,” “Queen,” “Sweet Willy Rollbar,” “Revolve,” “Goose Freight Train,” “Roadbull,” “At the Stake,” “Magic Pig Detective,” “Shevil,” “June Bug,” “Lividity,” “The Bit,” “Hide,” “Bar-X-The Rocking M,” “Yacob’s Lab, “The Bloat,” “Tipping the Lion,” “Black Bock,” “Goggles,” “Soup,” “Buck Owens,” “Sterilized,” “Lacrimosa,” “Skin Horse,” “Captain Pungent,” “Berthas,” “Cottonmouth,” “They All Must Be Slaughtered,” “Mombius Hibachi,” “Lovely Butterfly,” “Pitfalls in Serving Warrants,” “Air Breather Deep in the Arms of Morphius,” “Laughing with Lucifer at Satan’s Sideshow,” “How ----,” “Harry Lauders Walking Stick Tree,” “Grin,” “In the Freaktose the Bugs are Dying,” “Night Goat” is one of the Best Melvins' Songs of all Time.

Melvins + David Yow performing "Night Goat"

Luckily for me, the Melvins' have released three versions of the song. The first--and, in my professional opinion, best--was on a 1992 Amphetamine Reptile single (Scale #44). Featuring Salty Green (or Joe Preston) on bass, and recorded by Jonathan Burnside and stoner/doom metal go-to engineer, Billy Anderson, the 1500-pressed single also has a great cover of Pussy Galore’s “Adolescent Wet Dream.” The second version was on 1993’s Houdini record; it has Lori Black on bass and was also engineered and recorded by Jonathan Burnside and Billy Anderson. Their last version was then on 2005’s Houdini Live record with Mr. Bungle's/Fantomas’ Trevor Dunn on bass; it was recorded by Toshi Kasai. If we were a more profitable venture, and also not afraid of getting sued by the RIAA, we’d post all three versions of the song, but since Houdini and Houdini Live are still in print, you can just go to the store and buy them, you cheap-ass. Here’s the single version:

"Night Goat"
"Adolescent Wet Dream"

-- MC Tom

Historia de la Musica Tad, vol. III

2007-04-23T05:47:00.000-07:00

“Being a part of the TAD experience is like waking up in the middle of a train wreck, or like turning over to slap the button on your snooze bar and realizing you have no arms. Look around you; nothing but ashes and molten slag; you’re in the hypercenter of something big. Something that thinks, moves, and destroys.” --Sub Pop

Even though we’ve already written two chapters in what will surely be the definitive history of TAD, we’re only now getting to TAD’s first full-length, God’s Balls, which Sub Pop released on vinyl all the way back in 1989. I would love to write that this fantastic record completely changed the landscape of music, relegating the glitzy pop of New Kids on the Block and glitzy metal of Motley Crue to the rubbish heap of history, but history didn’t cooperate. Sure, a different Seattle band tried to achieve that goal two years later, but it’s hard not be cynical about the reversion of popular music back to pap and crap. Somehow, Justin Timberlake duped the so-called “alternative” press into thinking that he and his team of A-list producers and songwriters make respectable music, and the emo bands have more in common with hair metal than they do with the Dictators or the Dead Kennedys even the Ramones. Loser, indeed.

But hey, we’re preaching to the choir here, babe. So back to TAD.

By this point, Tad Doyle had built a proper band around himself with Kurt Danielson on bass, Gary Thorstensen on guitar, and Steve Wied on drums. (The one exception was “Tuna Car,” a slightly older track on which Doyle played all of the instruments.) It also bears all of the classic Sub Pop hallmarks from the time: Jack Endino recorded it, Charles Peterson shot the cover photos, and not very many copies were pressed (2500, from what I can tell). Although the small pressing may suggest to some that Sub Pop aimed to bestow immediate collector status on the record, in truth, Sub Pop was a young label at the time, and 2500 copies seems to have been a reasonably sized pressing. All copies of the original LP were on vinyl; Glitterhouse apparently released a CD version of the record for the European market, but I’ve never seen a copy.

Sub Pop’s later released most of God’s Balls on a Salt Lick/God’s Balls combo CD, but they shaved three songs (“Tuna Car,” “Hollow Man,” and the extraordinary “Nipple Belt”) from the original record to make it all fit; those three songs are available here, you lucky, lucky people. I pulled the other two songs from the CD, so you may notice a difference in sound quality.

Reviews for God’s Balls are proving difficult to come by. Only a pair of people reviewed this record—which I consider a classic—on Amazon, and if anybody has archived old reviews from Backlash or The Rocket (or perhaps The Stranger), then I can’t find them. Sub Pop’s history page reprinted Bruce Pavitt’s original Sub Pop USA columns for the Rocket, and although the May 1988 column had good stuff to say about TAD in general, it predates God’s Balls by quite some time. I would compare God’s Balls to the original, grainy Texas Chainsaw Massacre, if the Texas Chainsaw Massacre had been funnier and more literate.

We were on the fence about whether to post the entire record. Even though God’s Balls long ago fell out of print, Sub Pop has linked to our blog a couple of times, and it seems like it would be in poor taste to give away an entire record that may one day return to print. In the mean time, search around eBay for the entire record if you don’t own it already. But you do own it already, right? Right?!?!

Behemoth
Helot
Tuna Car
Hollow Man
Nipple Belt

And the songs can also be downloaded via .zip file here.

--Wm

How to Chat Up Foxy Record Store Clerks By Casually Namedropping the Crows

2007-04-17T22:19:00.000-07:00

Besides the great Big Chief diss controversy, the biggest criticism we get here at Lamestain LLC. is that we are out of touch thirtysomethings whose musical tastes haven’t developed past high school age. While all the other bloggers are hyping up Regina Spektor, LCD Soundsystem, or whatever the latest band that gets the Fall/Joy Division/XTC totally wrong, we spend valuable hours talking about the lost 64 Spiders single or wondering whatever happened to the Blood Circus dudes. But the truth is we also like to keep our fingers on the pulse of today’s rock and roll music. While we find most new stuff to be crap, we also like to be able to impress foxy record store clerks with our hip tastes and vast knowledge of yesteryear’s records. For instance, when we buy the recent Pissed Jeans’ single, we might say something like this: “We totally dig how these guys are doing an Amphetamine Reptile records thing for today’s post-emo generation.” Then, usually, the clerks’ ears will perk up and we’ll start naming dropping as many Amphetamine Reptile bands as possible. After that, we’ll tie in everything by saying something like “Hey, I noticed that you are playing Nick Cave’s new Grinderman project, which kind of reminds me of the Crows, who were a great, dead Amphetamine Reptile band.” Then I would start droppin’ some real mad knowledge like this:

“Well, after the U-Men broke up in the late 1980’s and Tom Price left to form the Kings of Rock and Gas Huffer, former U-Men singer John Bigley and drummer Charlie Ryan partnered up with guitarist Garth Brandenburg and bassist Greg Stumph to form the Crows. The band debuted with the “Crow Bar” b/w “Low Brow” picture disc single in 1991 and contributed the songs “Capital Hillbillies” to Dope, Guns, and Fucking in the Street volume 6 and “Go Look In The Crisper” to the Ugly American Overkill compilation LP. Their s/t record came out in 1994, but by then, the band was pretty much history. John soon went on to open up some Seattle bars, while Charlie and Greg went on to Bottle of Smoke with Tom Price and former Cat Butt singer David Duet. Charlie eventually left that band and joined up with Robert Vasquez to form the Right On. The Right On recorded a cool single, but not much else before they broke up and Rob started yet another cool band. Garth played in the Nitecaps and Lushy and probably some other bands around town. Yeah, if you like Nick Cave or the Birthday Party, the U-Men, and bands with crazy-sounding singers, I totally recommend the Crows LP. The cd is still in print, and I think you could find the LP fairly cheaply in the used bins.”

After a spiel like that, the foxy record clerks are usually totally impressed by my wisdom and will often give a 10% discount on my purchases. Also, go to the very cool Last Days of Man blog to check out the first, long-out-of-print Crows single.

The Crows -- "I Know Where You Live"
The Crows-- "Land of the Blind"
The Crows -- "Side Show"

The songs can also be obtained via .zip file here.
-- MC Tom

One last bit about 1987

2007-04-13T09:48:00.000-07:00

The Telly

Righteous indignation. Though he had an avuncular presence and spoke carefully and calmly, Lou Guzzo reigned as the king of televised indignation. His two-minute commentaries on KIRO’s local news program generally covered two topics: (1) “If it was good enough for me, then it’s good enough for young people”; and (2) “There ought to be a law.” Tom wrote about his most famous commentary—his condemnation of “teenage punk rockers,” in which he stated that it was time “to put our foot down” on punk rock, and that these teenagers “should try the real world for a change”—a couple of weeks ago. Guzzo maintains a blog now with the subtitle “Whatever [sic] happened to common sense.” That’s “what ever,” Lou, not “whatever.” But I understand how somebody with a mere fifty years’ experience in journalism could make such a dunderheaded mistake.

Slightly less indignant was Ken Schram’s Town Meeting (which apparently aired well into the 90s—who knew?), a Donohue-esque talk show set in a dark KOMO studio that covered local issues. I had been prepared to dismiss this show for its tone and subject matter (e.g., the menace that is naughty public access programming), but in truth, shows such have this have largely vanished, only to be replaced with syndicated reruns and Oprah. For example, Chicago still has a couple of local issue chat shows, but they’ve been shunted off to cable and PBS; if a local network airs a regional show like this, they air it well past my bedtime. The death knell for regional programming hasn’t sounded as loudly in Seattle, I suppose: even though Almost Live and Town Meeting are gone, Northwest Afternoon (KOMO) and Evening (KING) still air. Still, Evening favored puff pieces over substance, and I remember Northwest Afternoon mostly for Cindi Rinehardt’s recaps of soap opera developments. (I’d actually like to add more details about Town Meeting, but even though it aired for more than a decade, I can hardly find anything at all about it online.)

Almost Live. Almost Live began in 1984 as a one-hour Tonight Show-esque talk show hosted by Ross Schafer and featuring perhaps the worst band in talk show history. As I recall it, the topics were almost entirely specific to Seattle, with references to Seattle’s (then predominant) Scandinavian population and to long-gone local TV personalities like JP Patches and Stan Boreson. Schafer achieved national notoriety when he led a half-serious campaign to replace Washington’s state song, “Washington My Home.” Why? Nobody knows it, if they’ve even heard it at all. The replacement candidate? “Louie Louie.” It was actually a pretty funny stunt, and he almost succeeded. In the end, the state government feared hurting the feelings of heirs to the “Washington My Home” legacy and designated “Louie Louie” as the state rock song. Way to kill a good joke, Mr. Congressman.

Local Rocket scribe and bald man John Keister replaced Schafer sometime around 1988, and Almost Live dumped the interview segments and band and halved its length. The 30-minute version of the show aired until 1999. Although Almost Live remained very popular to the end, KING’s parent companies thought that the show’s profits didn’t justify the substantial production costs and finally killed it. A relative of mine described the show as “almost funny,” and he wasn’t really that far off the mark. Still, the show had its moments: the half-earnest campaign to change Washington’s state song to “Louie, Louie,” “High-Fivin’ White Guys,” “Ballard Driving Academy,” etc. “The Lame List” sketches even featured Kim Thayil of Soundgarden and members of local metal band Forced Entry. Schafer also gave Bill Nye the Science Guy his first TV exposure, and Bill Nye rules. Most of those skits came much, much later, however, and although KING’s website has several clips from the show, none date from Schafer’s era.

Bombshelter Videos. No 1987 TV retrospective would be complete without a bit about the awesome Bombshelter Videos, which premiered in November of that year. Bombshelter originally aired on KSTW in the middle of the night. The theme music was Naked Raygun’s fuzzy “Bombshelter.” At the start of each episode, host Bill Bored (Frank Harlan) descended into the bombshelter, which was a small room plastered with concert fliers, spray paint, and fallout shelter signs and littered with all sorts of junk. Early episodes leaned heavily on non-Northwest punk and college rock from that time (e.g., Black Flag, Mojo Nixon, Dead Milkmen, Sister-era Sonic Youth). In fact, it wasn’t until the 12th and 13th episodes that Northwest bands like Popdefect, the Young Fresh Fellows, Room Nine, and the Accoustinauts started appearing regularly. This is not a slight on the show; it ruled regardless of whether Bored showed videos by the Minutemen or the U-Men.

The original Bombshelter aired until 1992. Bored later produced a NorthWest Rock show from 1992 to 1994, as well as trading cards featuring the bands from that era. (I’ll swap your Mudhoney and Tiny Hat Orchestra cards for a mint Kid Sensation card and two Gruntruck cards.) Frank Harlan now works as an emcee, stand-up comic, and host of corporate roasts and team-building events.