Disaster Averted

 For some reason I had the thought that I'd loaded up the queue for here at the same time I'd done the SSC Mn one.
I hadn't and we were very close to not having a timely post of nonsense and musical shenanigans for this day.

Phew!

Anyway. I'm making Portuguese Bean Soup tonight.

It's Portuguese Bean Soup weather.

Even more so as a one pot, boil and serve meal.
I'm not feeling very ambitious.

However for some folks I will proceed with some bad news.

My free file space ran out and since I'm generally a cheap fucking bastard who does this out of a general desire to share some really cool stuff that's Out of Print with people and not as a means of wringing a meager profit for my troubles, I've started deleting old files from Mediafire to make space for new stuff.

So far, I've freed up another gig or so by taking out the files originally posted in 2014.
That will hopefully tide us over for a bit before the next purge needs to occur.
I have no plans to reup any of it. Seven years is an eon on internet terms.
Sorry latecomers. 

the Mgmt

Can't Stand Still (1977)

Headache were from London.

This is their only blurt out into the world at large which is huge fucking shame.

"Can't Stand Still" is an earworm of the most insidious kind. It will drill itself deep in your skull and will require some strenuous pogoing to dislodge it like some kind of leather and spike clad tarantella. I was forced to buy this single as a form of exorcism.

Use only with proper supervision and sedation available as a precaution.

Hungry, So Angry (1981)

Medium Medium

Long before the word "hangry" had entered the popular lexicon (It wasn't entered into Merriam- Webster's until 2018) there was this single.

It usually is an apt description of my state of being whenever I start typing up these posts since it seems like way too many of them revolve around what I'm eating or going to eat or want to be eating with much more in depth descriptions of that than the music.

This some bass popping funky New Wave action for anyone not familiar.
So I got that out of the way at least.

Keep on dancing.

I've Been Obsessing Again

 

For tonight I'm doing up more records while I type.

I've been obsessing over Duke Ellington radio transcription bootlegs of programs from the 40s.
Some fucking brilliant stuff. Lots of hits of the day that didn't get recorded otherwise as well as great performances in front of a live audience.

So in the past month or so I've picked up about another dozen.
It's like the Duke was recorded almost as much as the fucking Dead. (But I can listen to him without wanting to punch a hippie in the throat so I enjoy it much more.)

I even went so far as to pick up an extra shift with an extremely desperate bonus for picking up just so I could justify spending a shit ton of money getting a hard copy of the 24 disc Ellington Centennial Collection of his complete recordings for RCA Victor.

You can never have enough Duke Ellington. Never.

So that's where my head's at lately and at some point may end up here.

But in the meantime have some Punk/New Wave nonsense...

Chronic Alkie (1981)

Wilma & the Wilbers. From Minneapolis, MN (or maybe St. Paul, I don't know)

A blink and you missed it band that really should have been comped more.

"Chronic Alkie" is a fine tune but the other two are also worthy.

Tiger Beat (1982)

Yeah, this one's even better.

The hit for me is "I Like It Thick" about a girl's love for milkshakes. 

She likes them thick when she's hot and wet on a summer's night.

Absolutely about milkshakes.Nothing else implied. No sir. She just loves those cold dairy products. Yep yep yep. Milkshakes.

This too needs to have been comped more.

Planning Ahead.

 

Ok, if you were to actually know me you'd be more than aware that besides the Fall, I really love the Everly Brothers and Duke Ellington. (I'll also go to great lengths to defend Elvis against the endless tide of bullshit there is out there about him. Dude deserves better.)

Anyway. Today as I type this I've found out Don Everly has passed. R.I.P. People get so stuck on the stuff he and his brother did as teenagers that they completely overlook the really fabulous things they recorded through the 60s. Really good stuff. I highly recommend diving in on some of that shit.

Anyway also. I've been binging again on Duke Ellington semi-bootleg records of radio transcriptions from the 70s and early 80s. He had a weekly radio show so there's tons of them. Plus when he toured Europe in the 50s & 60s he was always being broadcast. I got lots of these things already and have more than a dozen more coming in the next few weeks.
Right now I'm digitizing an Lp of the soundtracks for the Duke's film appearances starting with a twenty minute short he made in 1929.
Fucking brilliant stuff and the way the band plays in front of a paying audience of listeners and dancers is enlightening. Plus there's arrangements and tunes that never got studio recordings. (mostly popular numbers the Duke didn't write.)

So I've been toying with the idea of some future time devoting a few months to throwing these up on this or another blog. Shit needs to be heard.

But that's beside the point.

Here's the Judy's

Washarama (1981)

Yeah, this skirts that nebulous edge of New Wave and Punk -ish in terms of the time period as well as the fine and cynical line between joke and serious. It's very geeky and literate.

It's essential listening. I can well imagine the boys in They Might Be Giants spending hours poring over these songs with intent glee.

I think I posted Tullycraft doing a version of "She's Got the Beat" a while back. They would also go on to toss off a version of "Guyana Punch" on a food centric compilation that I'll get around to posting one day.

This is the good shit, baby.

Another Bite of the Big Apple

 

Yeah, I'm going to toss off another quick one.

I need to be awake for another hour.

TV Sex Star (1981)

Ok, I couldn't find anything concrete about this band in the scant five minutes of google searching I did and the actual record is still in packed a box in the other room so I can't refer to that either.

The band's name is also really easy to miss on the cover so a lot of times you the actual name, the Agents (one of over a dozen bands that have used the name) gets lost and they're called TV Sex Star.

But it's a perfect storm of 1981.

You have Ronald Reagan on the cover and the presumed subject of the song "TV Sex Star". A bit of white boy reggae that gets mixed up in the NYC punk pop of the rest of it. A whiny synth that makes an appearance. The last three songs are all recorded live.

And it's all surprisingly good. 

It feels like one of those records that just never fell into the orbit of the right people who are interested in and reissue these kinds of things. I mean, the song "No Name" about an L.A. acid casualty with it's super cheesy synth hook is a stone cold classic that ought to be rescued from the ash heap of musical history and brought into the light.

 I originally stumbled across it on somebody else's music blog years ago and liked it enough to track down my own surprisingly cheap as fuck copy.

Perhaps this will inspire you to do the same

Triple Play

 

Listening to records. Typing about other records.

I still have a pile of nearly 50 singles in the "New Arrivals" pile in front of the turntable going back to last Fall. There was a solid couple of months when I was sick that crap like that took a back seat to convalescence.
Then I went on a couple of stress buying binges and found a lot of NOS copies of local stuff for the other blog (Swinging Singles Club MN) which I've been concentrating on mostly because this one was queued up so far in advance that there wasn't any sense of urgency to add to it.

Then there's the obsessive collector problem of things being incomplete which has started plaguing me more in my heightened stress levels from the past few years. I've had stuff sitting around waiting until I found those last few items that would make complete discographies. As a consequence there's a bunch of good stuff waiting around for that other single or the sole Lp.

Tonight's a "Fuck it" night.

These have been sitting around and it's all I've got, I can't find copies in the US and UK imports are much more than they're worth. And I'm not going to sit on them any longer. If I eventually find the rest, I'll post it then.

So here's three out of five singles by the Mo-Dettes.

 

 White Mice (1979)

Their first single was an indie chart hit right out of the gate with a cheap video made and everything.

There is nothing to dislike about that

Paint It Black (1980)

Third single was a stab at the Rolling Stones chestnut which was nice.

(Especially since the Stones themselves were in the first stages of what would become a slow descent into the pits of suck that would eventually culminate in horrors like "Harlem Shuffle" (which in itself is a cover) and that bane of dollar bins everywhere "Bridges to Babylon")

I like this better than anything on the contemporary "Emotional Rescue".
Suck it, Mick.

Tonight (1981)

Their penultimate single, though it was the last of new music and just following their sole Lp release. There'd be a live single as a last hurrah.

They're very 1981 fashionable on the cover though.
I dunno.
I got nothing.

You'd never know it but this whole post has taken well over an hour to get together to even this point because I'm digitizing singles at the same time and have to get up every few minutes to flip a record and run it through the restoration software so future posts don't sound as shit as previous ones like this one.

Plus I'm getting hungry.

I think I'm going to finish up the Spectres "This Strange Effect"(featuring former Sex Pistol Glen Matlock covering the Kinks) and call it a night knowing that now that I have both Spectres 45s they can finally be posted at some point in the future I feel like it and get back to the bulk of the 45s where it lies in state in "Sp". (I last left off at "Mo" and need to catch the 12" side up to it as well and that's a lot of Mancini records in between.)

Minimalism

 We're out of ice cream and I really want some ice cream.

Pictish (1982)

 Rent Boys Inc. Toronto, Canada

The Still Reflex (1981)


Repetition. London, England

Mysteries for the Mists of Obscurity.

Or something like that.

I actually had to do some internet sleuthing for this one.

And in the end you have to wonder if it was worth it.

I suppose. It's some useless facts that can roll around in your head when you listen.

So there's that, I suppose.

 Indicate Your Love (1981)

Sensible Shoes. This one was from L.A.

There is fuck all for information about this particular band anywhere on the sleeve. Just a few names and a date on the back.

I found something anyway.

It's trivial but puts some kind of context on it, I suppose.

 The singer on this little seven inch of New Wave Pop is David Baerwald who would achieve a decent paycheck briefly in the middle of the 80's as part of  David & David when they had a Top 100 release with a major contender for all-time most 80's production sound "Welcome to the Boomtown"

Not exactly my cup of poison, but hey, they hopefully got paid for it.
So there's that.
I doubt that DB saw any sort of money out of Sensible Shoes.

Good on him for having a song that peaked even at #37.
That's still better than you or I have ever done.

Red Balune (1979)


Red Balune. There's a bunch of Henry Cow connections which should give the savvy listener some expectation of the Avant Garde scratchy artsy damage that will be contained within.

You have been warned.

Rounding Out the Month with More New Wave

So back in the day there was a local access TV show called "Boston Live!" on Channel 68 that featured local bands playing live in the studio. I watched it as much as I could and taped a bunch of stuff off it onto Betamax and watched that tape quite a bit back in the day.

Now most of that stuff is up and available on YouTube.

Like this band.

Q: What.... Ans: Nothing... (1981)

Orbits.
This is some really fucking catchy Bubblegum New Wave Pop you could ever want.

It's like sonic cotton candy.
You just have to tap your foot and nod along so that even when the dude with the serious hair is singing "Big Tits/They make me giggle" in "Rear View Mirror" you just kind of let it slide by you without noticing.

And that's what makes this so fucking special.


This is what they looked like when they were doing just that on the aforementioned "Boston Live!"

The 80s sure were a different time, man. (But I do totally dig that Dan Armstrong plexi guitar though)

Seeing Red

Blah blah blah
Words and other nonsense.
Etc.
Etc.
Etc...

Survival (1981)

Red Beat  were from London best I can gather from following a few convoluted threads.

Very much in the vein of contemporary Killing Joke but not nearly so deliciously brutal.
Let's just say "heavily influenced by" instead.

The Motions (1981)

Redline were from Providence, RI best I can gather without following or looking up diddly squat besides the address on the back of the sleeve.

Very much in the vein of contemporary AOR Nu Wave but not so nearly so delicious.

Let's just say "Band most likely to have frosted hair and wear tight sleeveless t-shirts while the bass player plays his instrument at nearly throat level"

Nothing and Nothing in Common But Origin

I got nothing in the tank.

Just pictures and a quick link for you tonight.

Forever and Ever (1981)

State of the Art Nu Wave from the UK.

Seems to have been a one off and there's not fuck all of information I turned up.
Not that it's essential to enjoy the record.
It lives in its own space.
You can almost dance there.

Difference of Opinion (1968)

The actual A-side is kind of lame, so I'm marking the flip as the front so I remember why I came.

The Montanas were from Wolverhampton.

Not sure if the "Flower Tower" is something that could actually have been found in Wolverhampton, but apparently it's not about the finding so much as the searching.

But that very short fuzz burst in the bridge does my soul some good.

That is all.

4 Sides. No Shit.

As per usual I'm typing this up months and months previous to it posting.

I might not normally even be doing this tonight but unfortunately for me the television I would otherwise be occupying my time with wasting my life playing some worthless video game on suddenly crapped out on me in the middle of watching something on Netflix. (Well, not exactly "watching" so much as it was on while I fiddled around with a guitar which is my personal form of "practice")

So here we are. I have to wait it out until such time as I can get to a store and replace the fucking thing that I probably depend too much on for my personal entertainment.

In the meantime I've decided that for the sake of my own personal karma I'd drop a post of the most wonderful old school punk rock shit I had in the SSC folder.

Here's some fucking lemonade.

Achin' (1981)

The Plugz.

I could blather on about the importance of this band in terms of who they were and what they accomplished and became and all that crap. But you can read up on the Wiki if you need. I don't really care.

What I do care about is how fucking great a song "Achin'" is.

And that's really all that matters.
Trust me.

The flip is a nod to their Hispanic heritage and where they fit in as young punks and thus perfect in its own way.

This was a present to myself for working some long ass overtime. It wasn't exactly cheap for what I usually am willing to spend, but I have zero regrets.

The band would later rerecord a version of "Achin" for their second Lp "Better Luck" but it really lacks the raw immediateness and passion of the original.

Accept no substitutes.

White Stains (1979)

The Molls.

I'm pretty sure this has been comped multiple upon multiple times. Deservedly so.

They were from Boston and were led by Tristam Lozaw who would go onto lead Someone and the Somebodies that I posted a while back.

This is much better.

It's loud, crass, funny and punk fucking rock.

The flip on this is a song about the famous 70s exotic dancer known as Chesty Morgan who was endowed with an extremely large bosom. (And if you're wondering is still in fact alive as far as the internet tells me.)

Also fortunately for me, I didn't have to pay a premium for this one. I got it for a couple of bucks in the 90s because it was from Boston and Peter Prescott from Mission of Burma played drums on it.

Pitter Panter Pooter

Not to be confused with the Duke Ellington tune "Pitter Panther Patter"

That's a duet between the Duke and his ace bassist Jimmy Blanton.

That goes something like this:

This post is about something very different.

Very.

 Italian Sunglasses Movie (1981)

Gary Panter is better known as an artist and illustrator who is long involved in the Residents/Ralph Records sphere. So it will come as little or no surprise that the Residents ably abet Mr. Panter in this particular seven inches of avant wonderment.

You, dear record enthusiast, may also recognize quite a bit of Panter's commercial album artwork

The other cool as fuck thing about it is that the sleeve is actually a large foldout poster.
(I couldn't find an online picture of the actual poster, but trust me.)
I have plans on getting myself a second copy someday to have one I can frame and hang proudly on my wall. It's of a robot playing a guitar.

 I'd make space for that.

Action (2000)

I suppose if I hadn't wanted to class this place up with a bit of Duke Ellington I could have alternately named this post:

"Panter, Paul & Lara"

that's probably a much better play on words.




 Oh Well.
Choices were made and we must live with them.

As it is, I'm simply biding my time while some bolognese simmers for an appropriate amount of delicious time and random play on the music player thinks this is a good night to sort through the terabytes of material to play multiple tracks by the Brian Jonestown Massacre and Wanda Jackson.

Oh yeah, this single. Hunger has me kind of mentally wandering off into the woods.

It's on Kitteridge records (1999-2006) which was label that I'm looking to pick up everything on because I haven't been disappointed yet.  They've been gone so long all the links on the website point to Myspace. Sad. (though I may have to poke around and see if I can score some NOS titles on the cheap direct from them.)

I also actually have two copies of this because I found a cheap copy and had forgotten I already had one. But at least I have both the green and the blue unreadable covers now.

Apparently this sibling duo also released a full length as Layton.

My wantlist grows one full length compact disc longer.

Another Classic Compilation

Here's a compilation that really needs no introduction.

Let Them Eat Jellybeans (1981)

Yeah, it's hard this far away from it's original release to overestimate how important this one was. A revelation to a world of sounds that you didn't know existed because the radio didn't play it and there was no internet and you had to meet people and read magazines to learn about music and buy stuff blind and hope for the best.

Plus this has that one version of "Pay to Cum" that is the best fucking thing ever.

Ever.


Side One:

1. "Ha Ha Ha" - performed by Flipper
2. "The Prisoner" - performed by D.O.A.
3. "Police Story" - performed by Black Flag
4. "Pay to Cum" - performed by Bad Brains
5. "Nazi Punks Fuck Off!" - performed by Dead Kennedys
6. "Paid Vacation" - performed by Circle Jerks
7. "Prostitution" - performed by Really Red
8. "Jesus Entering from the Rear" - performed by The Feederz
9. "Slave to My Dick" - performed by Subhumans

Side Two:

1. "Isotope Soap" - performed by Geza X
2. "Persecution-That's My Song" - performed by BPeople
3. "An Object" - performed by Wounds
4. "Everyone's A Bigot" - performed by The Offs
5. "Corporate Food" - performed by Anonymous (Steve Fisk)
6. "Fun Again" - performed by Half Japanese
7. "Joke's On You" - performed by Christian Lunch
8. "Sleep" - performed by Voice Farm

Testing One Two

I suppose my laziness is your bonus since something just posted yesterday.

But a consistent pattern is a consistent pattern

And today is a 13th of the month.

This is a test.

Perhaps even...

Test Patterns (1981)

A compilation of various independent and punk-ish, Nu Wave-ish bands in and around the St. Louis, MO area. Not exactly the first location that comes to mind when considering such things, but here we are.

I clipped a jpg of the tracklist for you because I'm too fucking lazy to type that shit out.

This fine archival recording of a scene that, unless you were there, you probably didn't even know existed until you clicked on this page (and I will admit that I was unaware of it until I purchased this record) was reissued in 2010 by the fine folks at Rerun Records.

If you're not a cheapskate you can purchase your very own pristine digital compact disc version of it on their website. It's only $3 brand spanking new direct from the label!

Consider this post a lo-fi preview.

Buy it already!

More Mor Mor's

I'm doing other records.

Don't expect much.

3D Sound (1982)

Seriously there's not fucking diddly squat I could find about this band in a short search. Moroccos appear to be from Philadelphia and everybody was in a couple of other bands.

A side is some seriously nice catchy danceable Nu Wave. B side is an instrumental.

Does it matter?
Fuck No.

Is it good?
Hell Yes.

Suburbanite (1981)

The Morons were from Albany, NY.

This and a compilation appearance are the only evidence of their existence except in memories.


And today, a special bonus.
Just because...

The Girl Next Door (1979)

Another blink and you missed it Minneapolis group that cluttered up the Break'er Records catalog. Kind of almost Power Pop. Probably considered a "punk" band at the time.

I think I have actually less than a dollar invested in this one if I remember correctly.
Total score on my end.

Low Energy Posting.

Blah blah blah

Time of my Life (1980)

Manufactured Romance

Round World (1981)

Method Actors