various artists - Mojo Buried Treasures (15 Key Tracks From The Greatest Albums You Never Heard)

It's a late evening drop for this week's Mojo Monday. So for those of you waking up Tuesday to see this fresh in your feed: my apologies. I've reached that stage in life where I can't read without my cheaters. Nor can I type with any sort of accuracy. And I couldn't find my reading glasses Sunday; hence, no midnight Monday AM post.

But enough of that. This one is about the ability of music to still surprise you. This one landed in my lap earlier this year. I'm sure I didn't pay more than a buck or two for it, and I snagged it on the basis of completion, more so than any other factor. I have the Third World War and Creation Rebel records from which their tracks here originate. And, at the time, other than Joe Meek, there was nothing here that piqued my interest. But it's a buck, and I like sharing and writing about Mojo comps, so why not splash out? It arrives, I rip it, it goes in a box, and I move on.

At some point between then and now, I decide I'm going to load a bunch of comps I've yet to write about onto my phone. It''s the way these things go for me; I'm at work, I want to hear something new, I put one on, I write about it later on. Onto the phone goes "Mojo Buried Treasures". I hit Shuffle. The phone plays me a ton of different stuff: Augustus Pablo, Masshysteri, Stiv Bators, LeeHi. Y'all should know by now that there's little I won't give a shot to. A song settles in on my headphones. It reminds me of Richard Thompson, Bert Jansch, the British folk music that I used to shelf at my first record store job a million years ago, back when I thought it was all dusty tea sippers with long beards. There's a percussive nature to the way the guitar's being played, like m'dude is beating the hell out of his acoustic while singing a tale about a drowned miner. I gotta say, I was enthralled. So I played it again. And again. And one more time on the way home, as I drove north into the gray Washington fall.

And that's how I discovered Nic Jones. Off a Mojo comp that I barely even paid attention to.

I ended up ordering the Shanachie reissue of "Penguin Eggs" a few weeks ago. I've not really dug into yet. But I'm taken aback that I've discovered this 30 years after I probably first grudgingly placed the same recording between Sandy Denny and Iain Matthews solo records. These things can still sneak up on your ears and grab hold of your brain and make you seek out more. What an amazing thing.

Discogs

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Post #500 - Primitive Offerings Official Mixtape #2: Mary Monday

(Well, technically, it's post #501, due to a lost Jackie Gleason post that got pulled by Blogger for some reason.)

Five hundred is a big round number. And at a time when bloggers keep packing up shop (Shiny Grey Monotone and Themes From Great Cities both called it a day this year) or straight up dying, I just keep on swinging with moderate consistency. Call it kicking against the pricks, or tilting at windmills, or just dry humping the equine's corpse. I don't know when to quit.

So it is that I do something a little special, though still in theme with the current layout of the blog. I've been wanting to do another mixtape, even though the last one I made got the fewest views of any post I made in the past twelve months. This one's in honor of the late Mythkoz over at Old, Weak But Always A Wanker, whose passing over the summer I discovered a few weeks ago. I have a slowly-shrinking list of blogs I visit daily, and discovering OWBAAW shortly after they launched in 2017 was one of the inspirations to pick up the keyboard again in earnest back in April 2020. Finding a record I've listened to for 30 years posted (in French) next to one I'd never heard before made me want to do the same, albeit on a different scale, Whether I wrote a new record that I was falling in love with, or a movie coming out on Blu-ray that I wanted to rewatch, or even a collectible, I sought to bring the same joy of discovery that Mythkoz and countless others had done over the past 15+ years.

What we have hear is a punk mix of my own creation. S/O to Jonder and Stinky for providing constant inspiriation to do these from time to time.. 30 tracks, 85 minutes, all songs culled from 7" releases. Everything came out between 1975 & 1983. Don't get me wrong; I'm no purist. There are luminaries in the mix next to obscurities. But I wanted to stay in that sweet spot of proto punk into punk/new wave/power pop into the first sounds of hardcore. Each recording is still also available over at OWBAAW for your sampling pleasure.

As for the cover model: it's Mary Monday, early punk goddess of the Bay Area scene. She was born in the Midwest during the waning days of World War II. She died in 1988, far north of me in Anchorage. In between, she released a single, ungodly great 45. She seems like a real character, one of those folks who touch you in a remarkable way. She'll never be forgotten.

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Primitive Offerings Official Mixtape #1: Tawny Kitaen

I've been wanting to consistently put together a monthly mixtape for quite a while now, coming at the top of the new month. But I couldn't really come up with a theme to tie it all together. If nothing else, use this as a good jumping off point for Bandcamp Friday this week.

So let's let creatively come with what's in the mix, yeah? Here's what I listened to a lot in April. A number of thoughts:

• There's a fair amount of late 70s/early 80s punk & post-punk present here. That's an expected result, to be fair. Nothing weird about returning to the same things you've listened to since you were 15, although I wish I had heard the Slits, Crime, or the Maids in 1992.
• Related: I really wish the Beeb would revisit the Strange Fruit concept and make all the Peel Sessions recordings available again. It's a damned shame that some of the more obscure tracks aren't available for a generation that wasn't around while John was still broadcasting.
• In terms of new stuff, I really like that new boygenius record. That Top Drawer track reminds me of Blitz in the best possible ways; it has one of the best football-style choruses I've ever heard, the kind that I wake up thinking about.
• The gang at Twilight Zone has been slowly rolling out the colossal Chronological Classics discography over the past few months. It's the source of that Louis Jordan track. If you ever wanted to dive into the early days of jazz, you might want to dig into their daily "...and now for something completely different" posts and start snagging those.
• I'm kind of surprised that I didn't have any reggae in this mix; it's probably what I listen to the most on a hour-to-hour basis during the day. But it could be that all that Trojan and Front Line bleeds together, without a single standout track? Just an endless riddim to which to conduct my little piece of the bureaucracy every day.
• The one thing I did hit on? Cover art. I'm going to start naming these collections after these formative images from adolescence. Up first: the former Mrs. Chuck Finley herself, writhing on a hood. What was David Coverdale to do? 

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