Nerve Ends In Power Lines

I’ve not peeped hype nor commentary on this 2018 release, but I did stumble across a copy in the bins at Goner Records this summer.  Nocturnal Projections were a four-piece NZ combo fronted by Graeme and Peter Jeffries, later of This Kind of Punishment.  This release compiles their prohibitively expensive singles released in ’82-’83 and is pretty damned essential, to put it mildly.  Definitely some Joy Division damage going on here, but I’d have to say I found it more user-friendly, and nearly as singular.  10 tracks, each one deftly carving out a few MBs of space on the iPod.  Don’t sleep on this one.

The 60s Compilation Reduction Act of 2019: Part One of a series.

I probably have 100 compilation albums of rare garage, freakbeat, psych, etc. on the shelf.  And I almost never listen to any of them.

You know what I’m talking about.  Back From the Grave.  Teenage Shutdown.  Digging For Gold.  Rubble.  Ugly Things.  Pebbles.  And so very many others.

When I was but a wee lad in my sponge phase, I was smitten with the excitement and energy of these albums.  The problem is, paradoxically, the more of them you hear, the more mediocre each individual volume becomes, as the bulk of the tracks begin to sound alike and only the cream is worth skimming off.

Let’s face it: These things were made for the iPod, or in an earlier time, a mix tape.

I have decided to very seriously think about possibly, at some point next year, perhaps during the summer when I am off work and could use the money to go on a nice vacation, selling them off, unless some other financial windfall of I-can’t-imagine-what nature shows up.

It’s hard to let them go.  They look cool on my shelf.  All of the back from the Graves and Teenage Shutdowns with their nearly-identical spines sitting together.  The 20 volumes of Rubble and their beautiful jackets.

Still, life grows shorter every day, and I am losing my desire to keep bowling trophies around the house.  Hence, I have decided to listen to each of these over the rest of the school year, make a decision about whether or not I will likely ever want to play them again, and let the chips fall via Discogs.

This whole thing started when I was goofing around on the G45 website, where the most knowledgeable garage collectors in the world hang out, including Mark Markesich, whose book Teenbeat Mayhem was the subject of an earlier post.  Markesich and another contributor both mentioned that “Short Time” by the Noblemen was very high up on their list of the all-time best of the genre.  I had no idea which compilation it was on, but I figured I had it somewhere, and I was right.  Here it is on BFTG Vol. 7.

Sexist and occasionally homophobic artwork aside, there is a lot to like about the Back From the Grave albums.  It’s definitely the most crude, ugly, dirty series out there, and inclusion of a 45 on one of the volumes automatically makes it legendary among the weirdoes who throw down big dollars for this stuff.  Also, they allow folks like myself to hear literally thousands of dollars worth of rare singles for pennies on the C-note.  (The aforementioned Noblemen single rang up $4K on eBay last year.)

A listen today to all four sides (34 tracks) of this double-LP drove the paradox home.  There were already a handful of tracks from the album on iPod;  I added a few more for a total of 11.  Thing is, the worst track here isn’t that much worse than the best track here.  If you’re into this sound, the quality of the material is very impressive.  If you’re not, there is absolutely nothing to break up the monotony.

Some folks have claimed that BFTG is nothing but inept frat-rock played by teenagers whose very competence is dubious.  I don’t think this is true.  Most of it is crudely recorded, and most of the playing is single-minded, but a lot of this stuff is powerful, if basic, rock and roll played with confidence and authority, and a pissed-off joy akin to what you’ll find on “We Got the Neutron Bomb” or “Neat Neat Neat.”

These were selected:

• The Egyptian Thing – The Syndicate (This one was on a major label, Dot)
• Another Day – The Moguls
• Now You Say We’re Through – The Puddin’ heads
• Elizabeth – Jim Whelan and the Beatnicks
• I Love You – the Worlocks
• Slide – The Bugs
• Short Time – The Noblemen
• Don’t Want Your Lovin – It’s Us
• Don’t Blow Your Mind – The Spiders (early Alice Cooper!)
• No Price Tag – The Spiders
• Black Mona Lisa – The Retreds (Amazing teen-Dylan lyrics)

As you might expect, the “garage” singles I love most are from the poppier end of the spectrum, but I admit I quite enjoyed sitting through all four sides of this.  I guess I have a while to think about it.

 

 

 

 

Listening notes

A revisit to Robyn Hitchcock’s  Ole! Tarantula (1996) reveals it to be one of his most user-friendly efforts; four more tracks added brings the total to nine, leaving only the six-plus minute Belltown Rumble off the roster.  It works OK on the album, but I just don’t think I need to hear it in any other context.  By the way, Hitchcock is one of the all-time greats, showing 108 tracks on the iPod, not counting Soft Boys stuff.

 

I was very pleased to grab a couple of very cheap, very beaten-up country 45s out of a dollar bin, and find all four sides podworthy.  I was aware that Skeeter Davis’s early 50s recordings with sister Betty Jack might be of some interest (specifically that NRBQ were fans), and so a G+ copy of I Forgot More Than You’ll Ever Know b/w Rock–a-bye Boogie piqued my interest.  The flip of this 1953 disc is particularly prescient, using a silly amount of echo on the chorus to create an effect not unlike that heard on a number of choice rockabilly sides from a year or two later.

Speaking of Rockabilly, if you’re a fan, you know Warren Smith from stone classics he cut for Sun:  Stuff like Ubangi Stomp and Uranium Rock.  Well here he is in 1962 doing a pair of very strong Bakersfield-by-the-books country sides entitled Five Minutes of the Latest Blues and Bad News Gets Around.  A fantastic double-sider, one that almost justifies dropping the needle on every one of the 10,000 obscure country 45s you will run across as a digger.  Almost.  But I think I’ll leave that particular headache to Franklin Fantini.  Check out his Dollar Country podcast.

See you later this weekend, I hope.

C8x

I would have thought this series was a done deal, but to some surprise, I find myself confronted with Cherry Red’s new 3-CD box set of UK indies from 1989.  If you’ll take a butcher’s at a recent CiC entry, you’ll see that I am precisely the target audience for this nonsense, so I lined up and purchased it at my local vinyl and CD emporium. It’s certainly no chore to sit through C89, although almost all traces of weirdness (think the Ron Johnson stuff from C86, for example), are gone in favor of what is mostly indie pop of varying levels of raggedness.  Anyway, I’m going through the set one disc at a time, and the results from the first extended go at Disc One are in:

Already represented on iPod:

• Inside Out – Brighter
• Jane Pow – That’s My Girl

Added to iPod

• The La’s – Come In Come Out (a cracking good number that was the B-side of the first press of the There She Goes single.  This was in the iTunes, but I had never heard it.)
• The Family Cat – Tom Verlaine
• The Milltown Brothers – Which Way Should I Jump
• New Fast Automatic Daffodils – Lions
• Red Chair Fadeaway – let It Happen
• Korova Milk Bar – Do It Again
• The Sun and the Moon – Adam’s Song
• The Rainkings – Break the Strain
• Po! – Confidence
• The Bardots – Sad Anne (This was definitely the undiscovered gem here.)
• The Onsets – Sun and Moon
• The Ammonites – Days In the Sun
• Rorshach – Captain Elastic
• Kit – Cheatin’ My Heart

It seems possible, but not likely that more tracks could be added by the Veteran’s Committee.  Disc two is much heavier in tracks that have already been enshrined.  Stay tuned.

 

 

 

Redoubling My Efforts

Recently an eBay seller by the handle of gadgetsandgaming took my old, dead iPod classic into his gentle and skilled hands and returned it to me with a shiny new 512 GB flash drive in it.  So clearly, trying to fill this thing is going to take some work, and might even prove impossible.  But, what the heck, let’s try it.

I have struggled with keeping this blog current, because I wanted it to be writerly, and it seemed like therefore there had to be some kind of conceit for each entry.  I’m going to give up that approach in the hope that if I write something in it almost every day, no matter how brief, occasionally I will stumble on an angle that allows for a bit more rumination.  So while this will often just look like a log of my listening habits, it will be updated more frequently (Really Jon?  More frequently than once every eight months?  How will you find the time?) and I hope getting in the habit will inspire more substantial musings.

When I first heard about the Goon Sax, I was terribly curious and equally prepared to be disappointed.  If you haven’t heard the story, they are three teenagers from Brisbane, one whom happens to be the son of Robert Forster of the Go-Betweens.  Louis Forster and Bassist James Harrison were mooting a rock ‘n’ roll outfit, so their pal Riley Jones learned drums so she could join them.  The combination of the pedigree, the timeless sweetness of the backstory, and their adorable appearance are just perfect in a way that you know is never going to amount to any substantial music.

On my first listen to their debut Up to Anything, my head exploded.  It was sooooo good.  So honest, so charming, so touching, so funny.  It just wasn’t possible.  Every song rang with some sort of gorgeous sentiment or off-kilter hook, and their world view was a perfect mixture of lovesickness and the primacy of appearing cool.  It’s one of the most teenage things I’ve ever heard, and I’ve played it over and over.

I have spent some time with the new LP from The Goon Sax, We’re Not Talking, and I can report that it is a very satisfying follow-up to their near-perfect debut.  They have moved away from the Postcard meets K Records sound of the first LP, and gone for strings, percussion, and other enhancements; as a result this sounds even more like Louis Forster’s dad’s band.  The first single, Make Time 4 Love is a triumph.  Forster gives us two long verses and then brings the lone chorus at the end of the (very brief) song.  When the strings burst through it is hard not to think of the Go-Betweens ca. Talulah.  It really is a glorious thing.  Meanwhile, on James Harrison’s half of the album, you’ll be happy to know that he remains as charmingly befuddled about love as he was on the first album.

Except for two short piano-and-vocal interludes, I put the whole (very brief) album on iPod, giving The Goon Sax a total of 22 songs in just two albums.  Can’t wait to see them live in November.