It's the First day of Autumn

Or as it is colloquially known, Fall

To celebrate the end of Summer and our inevitable slippage into near eternal cold and darkness for the next six months I going to fill the Fall with the Fall.

Singles, rarities and Eps galore.
Because I can. And I really like the Fall.
A lot.

By my honest estimation there are really two types of music fans.
Those that love the Fall
and tasteless boors that are not worth talking to about music.

If you're one of those boorish types you'll want to be peddling your papers elsewhere until the Winter Equinox because there's going to be nothing but Fall here for a good long while. Doled out slowly and deliberately over the course of the long Autumn for your Winter stockpiling needs.

As always, pretty much all of this stuff has been included as bonus tracks on various issues and reissues of the Lps. Do yourself a favor, bud. Buy the damn albums. You will not regret it and beer and cigarettes aren't free. Mark E. Smith could always use the money.

1977 - Dresden Dolls

It's hard to believe in this day and age that the Fall were once well thought of enough that somebody thought they could make a buck on bootlegging some rehearsal tapes of the original incarnation of the group. This appeared sometime in the middle of that dark era colloquially known as "the 80's"

 I can't really fault them. "Dresden Dolls" was a lost classic that would in part inspire Amanda Palmer's cabaret outfit at the beginning of this century.  The other two songs would eventually appear as a b-side for the first single and on the UK version of the first proper Lp "Live at the Witch Trials" respectively. Here they're played essentially similar and are as good a representation of that earliest Fall sound as you're going to get with these recordings likely preceding any studio versions.

The only song you need to listen to today.

I had some other 60's garage stuff that I thought I was going to post, but it just didn't seem up to snuff after I got to this one. So it's going it alone here today.







Sonny Flaharty & the Mark V (1965)



The song "Hey Conductor" is what the kids and record store clerks like to refer to as a "motherfuckin' Fuzz Monster" from Dayton, Oh. (Just like Guided by Voices.)

It's a zippy little number about a boy who wants to  go on a train ride and is seeking out the conductor in order to purchase a ticket because he needs that slip of paper in order to go on this trip he really wants to go on.

There is absolutely no subtext in that.


I will also add that there is another side to this record. It is precisely as terrible as the one side is awesome. Not a whit more, nor a whit less.

Flirting with Detroit

Don't Push Me (1978)

Flirt were from Detroit and featured the husband and wife duo of Skid and Rockee Marx. 

I think the cover pretty much makes the record self explanatory. It sounds like you think it will based on that sleeve.

 

Rockee was clearly pregnant when they made this in 1978. That kid is now almost 40.

I feel old now.

 

Faster Than You (1980)

This is a bit slicker and also sounds more than a little bit like you would expect from the cover.

 

 

You know, I really thought that 10" vinyl would be a bigger thing back in the early part of the 80's. It just never took off. Didn't need to, I suppose. So there you have it.

And for a complete change of pace....Some Jazz

I really love 20's and 30's Jazz along with the other fucking millions of things that float my personal sonic boat. I like sounds and different things for different times of day/year/states of mind/etc...

Thesaurus of Classic Jazz (1959)

So there's this 4 lp set of recordings from NYC done between 1926 & 1928 featuring a whole host of folks who have been more or less forgotten and left by the wayside. The most famous of which are perhaps the Dorsey Brothers who went onto some renown later on with their big bands and discovered a singer named Frank Sinatra. But for the most part Jazz recording in New York seemed to be based around different combos of the same 15 or so main guys. The Discogs listing gives the player breakdown track by track for anybody who's actually interested.

For my money the player that appears most frequently here and who gets just about zero credit for his contribution to the history of early Jazz is Miff Mole. He played on shit tons of dates and pretty much invented jazz trombone and was a fucking killer player, but time hasn't been kind to his legacy.

But for most people these days, this kind of stuff is really specialized listening. Few people have much interest in 90 year old recordings of music that was almost already old fashioned before the decade that spawned was over. But it's still some killer shit. 

These recordings were done live. There were no overdubs. Not nets. You had three minutes to get your glory onto the wax and you'd better be ready the first time. This was what you'd hear when you went out to a club and what you'd dance and drink to in whatever dingy speakeasy you managed to find your way into for a some hootch during Prohibition. This is the real deal red hot jazz.

Another reason that I wanted to post this is that the transfers here are actually really pretty fucking good. The recordings sound better than you'd expect. Sure they've filtered a bunch of high end noise off and added a shit ton of reverb to help fill things out, but they did manage to make the music sound much more present than a lot of other versions of these recordings I've heard. Maybe it's that in 1959 when they made their transfers the source material was only 20 or so years old. I don't know. I'm pleased with it.

I also don't expect that this will be a popular post amongst the folks who frequent this little corner of the internet, but I'm posting it mostly for myself.  You can choose or not choose to see what all the hubbub is about.

F You

Part of the problem of doing this stupid thing I do is that sometimes shit gets overlooked or misplaced because you're disorganized and have way too much shit to begin with.

These two almost got lost in the shuffle.

F-Models (1981)

From the great state of Akron or Kent or somewhere thereabouts in the Mythic Land of Ohio. Another in a long line of Cold War ditties. Yeah, Russia was pretty awesome.

For me though the money shot is on the other side with their Oedipal Complex raging away at the sad fact that nobody loves them with the exception of their Mom. At least for them, they are as dubious about her loyalties as BB King had reason to be.

And the seemed like such well adjusted young men.

F-Systems (1980)

From  the state of Texas, which doesn't need me to tell you it's great. Texas is like the Vegan at the BBQ. It's going to let you know it's there and morally superior to you in every way imaginable. (And you let it because it's probably packing and you don't want to rile it up after its had a couple of belts.)

They looked like this when they were playing a song that isn't on this single.

F-Systems hailed from Austin, TX. So they were living in the artsy bubble in the middle of all those cows and oil wells and other Texas stereotypes.  "People" is the synth driven winner. Cold and with a lot of flange on the guitar. It sounds like the future as imagined in 1980 and cobbled together from available parts. It's where you are right now. Don't turn around. It startles easily.