I got a couple hundred words into writing this one last week, then forgot to hit post. By the time I came back to it, the sentiments I shared had passed. It was time for a rewrite.
When I was a kid, I'd hear folks in my southwestern Virginia town talk about being anywhere than where they were. "I wish I lived in Seattle/Athens/Chapel Hill/Minneapolis/DC/London." All completely understandable sentiments, when you're 16 and the closest college town is an hour plus away. It felt like there was so much coolness going on...just not where we lived.
For me, along with DC, the Bay Area was the place I dreamed of. It was where Lookout Records was, 924 Gilman (even tho Jello Biafra got beat up there), Epicenter, Maximum Rock 'n' Roll, Amoeba, Bottom of the Hill. So much coolness, and what a mix! Neurosis and Operation Ivy and Jawbreaker and Steel Pole Bathtub and Tribe 8 and the Mr. T Experience! Sometimes playing together!! This wasn't the 60s, when San Francisco was one of THE big stops for every band worth seeing. This was the 90s, right before punk broke, and the freaks had carved out their little niche.
"The Thing That Ate Floyd" captures the front end of that wave. A proper monster of a comp, assembled by Lookout co-operator David Hayes and recorded in large part by Alex Sergay, Lookout! No. 11 is an amazing scene report. The iconic artwork by Hayes immediately evokes for me Crimpshrine tapes and punk rock dorkiness. There are some hall of famers present: OpIv, Neurosis, Crimpshrine, MTX, and SPBT all provide tracks from early in their respective catalogs. A number of folks who would later record for Lookout and Very Small also make early appearances. The comp wasn't limited to bands from the Bay Area, either; Fresno, Chico, Chula Vista, Stockton, San Jose were the places they came from, all trekking into the big city to make a little noise to sympathetic conspirators.
I'm pleased to be able to direct folks over to Lavasocks Records, who brought this one back into print in 2021 with a handsome repress with a wonderful yellow cover and one of four colors of wax. If you download this one and dig it, pay them a visit over on Bandcamp and kick them some bux.
There's a dude in my NAMIConnection group who started attenting a couple of sessions ago. And of course I noticed him because dude showed up in a denim vest with no less than 40 metal pins and patches affixed. This is not Maryland Death Fest, bullet belt, crusty/grind/doom vest either; it's a pretty straightforward reckoning of the past 40 or so years of metal. Everything from Nuclear Assault and Venom to Motorhead (fuck it, I'm not looking up the hotkey for umlats) and Anthrax. Nothing super cvlt, which I respect.
So, of course, we've started chatting a bit about music, and I think I want to bring him a flash drive with Void and Septic Death and Excel and Hirax on it, just so he can get where I'm coming from. In the course, he asked me what I was listening to recently. So I told him about this.
In short, "A Slice Of Lemon" was a two-disc compilation co-released by Kill Rock Stars and Lookout! Records back in '95. I'm pretty certain I snagged it in my first mailorder from KRS, along with "Pussy Whipped" and (maybe) "These Monsters Are Real". If you want a sample of where things were on the West Coast of North America (with some exceptions, obvs), then look right here. The stand outs on this back when I got it were my first exposures to Elliott Smith, Pansy Division, Excuse 17, and the Peechees; all of which I still listen to 27 (!) years later. There are a few cool one-offs here, too. Gashly Snub is a Melvins spin-off band featuring Dale Crover. Shaken 69 is 3/4 of Operation Ivy along with members of Skankin' Pickle and the Uptones. Even the most obscure bands contribute memorable cuts.
To be perfectly honest, I typically skip the Mary Lou Lord track at the end of disc 2. She just never did much for me.
Juuuuuussssstttt clearing out the decks here, folks.
"Letterkenny" plays in the background, and my thoughts go to this tasty slab of circa 1993 from the good folks at Lookout! and Willja. The internets tell me that Raooul was a quintet of East Bay pre-teens making a racket, two of whom went on to playing Tourettes and Out Hud. Nice pedigree. Skinned Teen was a real solid UK contemporary of Huggy Bear and Pussycat Trash, two of my fav British riot grrrl bands from that era. Layla from S.T. would go on to write a shitton of excellent columns for MRR...a real reason for yours truly to pick up the esteemed zine for its last ten years of so in existence.
File under: teenagers making a racket. This is never not thrilling to me. I would definitely bootleg this onto a cassette to get it in front of people in 2021.
Now here's a record that I was completely smitten with when it came out, and somehow managed to set aside for nearly 20 years afterwards.
Like most collectors in 2021, I have a list of wants on Discogs. Nothing too fancy (excepting some Septic Death releases that'll cost me my stimulus check), but a lot of $5 to $50 records, CDs, and tapes that I want to own a copy of. Every few weeks, when the ol' Paypal account grows thick, or I've paid all the home bills and have a few shekels left over, I'll go through the list looking for deals. So it was that I ended up a seller's list that had a couple of items from said wantlist for sale. They were asking a price too dear for the specific Devo reissue I wanted, but they also had a couple of Lookout! releases for cheap that caught my eye. I also saw this here 5" aluminum slab, cried foul that it didn't even live on my hard drive, much less that I still owned a hard copy, and plunked down a mere $4 for a pre-owned copy. A week later, it was in my hands again.
Much of my music listening takes place digitally these days. I don't stream, per se; I load up my phone with a few hundred interesting records from my collection, or play directly off my hard drive. But when "Rogue's March" came in, I made an excuse to go for a drive, to pick up coffee and lunch for the missus and I, and slid it into the CD player in the car. It remains a really powerful, maybe under-heard, punk rock record from the end of the century. American Steel's second LP, like Hot Water Music's "No Division" and Small Brown Bike's "Our Own Wars" from the same year, plays like heartfelt punk rock from the Stiff Little Fingers/Leatherface tradition, adding in the intensity of growing up in a scene where grindcore bands played on the same bill as pop punk and anarcho punx. At first blush, it might seem weird that Lookout put this one out; their run as the home to American pop punk royalty was ending, and their embrace of punk-rooted indie rock would lead to their last hurrah over the following 5 years. This was a vanguard for the likes of Ted Leo and Pretty Girls Make Graves within the next couple of years.
Is this still good? All I can say is, I still remembered every word from "Every New Morning" and the title track the minute they came on, and I hollered them like I was 21 all over again. Felt good, dude.
Here's a story about the first time I met Ted Leo. It's the spring of 1995. A friend from my drama class invites me to join him and a couple other classmates to skip school on a Monday and trek from HarCo down to DC to see the Cranberries play a free show at the Sylvan Theater, down by the Washington Monument. The 'Berries were mid-tour in support of "No Need to Argue", and while I wasn't a big fan, that record was ubiquitous. And it was a perfect day in DC: sunny, not too hot, just really nice. We had arrived in time for an opener none of us had ever heard of, a local band called Chisel. They were just great, to the point where I remember asking aloud, "Why doesn't 'HFS play these guys?" They were punk in the same way Jawbox or Shudder to Think were punk, yet tuneful, with enough pop flavor to cross over easily.
They wrap up their set, and, by this point, it's a pretty big crowd. No one watching the show knew it at the time, but there were about three times as many people in attendance than had been expected. The Cranberries take forever to come out, and when they finally do, they play "Linger". I've seen more restrained pits during Cro-Mags show. People were flying off the stage. It was wholly inappropriate for the show and I was probably one of a handful of people reveling in it. Dolores O'Riordan sat her acoustic guitar on a stand behind her, and the 'Berries began their second song. I remember noticing half a dozen mounted police had appeared on either side the stage...then the song cut out. The Park Police had ended the show, and, suddenly, we're all in a riot. Our brave quartet was a Mekons song come to life. We darted between a pair of horses to stage right, watched as a drunk college guy took a swing at a cop, and beat feet to Union Station.
We're earlier than we expected to be, so we have no clue which train to take towards home, or when said train will leave. We're trying to interpret the big schedule; after all, we're four high school kids from the northern suburbs of Baltimore. What do WE know about the Metro system? I turn to my left, and who do I see, but the band we'd just seen, pre-riot. One of the women in our group whispered, "Oh my god, are those the guys from that band?" They hear us talking about them, turn and look. I wave and say, "Hey. You guys were great today." And we all start talking. I had no idea that they hadn't released an LP yet, just a few singles to that point. Or that they were barely a few years older than us, fresh out of Notre Dame. Here were some fellas just an hour after opening for the biggest band on the planet (at that moment). They actually wanted to talk to us. It was an amazing feeling.
I told Ted that story a number of years later before a show at the Ottobar, thinking he'd have no clue what I was babbling about. Instead, he recalled parts of the day I hadn't been familiar with; that Chisel was at Union Station because they'd gotten the gig last minute and hadn't driven their van, that the Cranberries had been pissed off because Chisel had to share a backline, that they'd had a giggle after we left because they couldn't understand why we were treating them like rock stars. We clinked glasses of Jameson and toasted each other for surviving the great WHFS Riot of 1995.
I was already a fan of Ted Leo and the Pharmacists before that night, but that encounter really sealed my love for the man and his music. It bums me out that they had such shitty luck with labels: Lookout going out of business, Touch & Go almost completely ending release of new records, Matador just abandoning support of the band. That 10 year run, between "The Tyranny of Distance" and "The Brutalist Bricks", remains one of my favorite series of records from a single band. I feel like they were a contender for the best indie rock band around during that time, as well as one of the last links to the indie scenes of the 80s and 90s.
"Tell Balgeary, Balgury Is Dead" came out in 2003, between the TL/Rx's third and fourth albums. It was both a throwback to their early dub recordings, as well as the record that best reflects Ted's Irish Catholic heritage. There are a trio of covers, interpreting The Jam, Split Enz, and Ewan McColl. Dan Littleton (the Hated, Ida) makes an appearance on "Bleeding Powers", as well as handles producer duties on much of the record. I'll even argue that the title track might be the weakest part of the release. It all reminds me of the Joe Strummer solo records, or something you'd hear played from the corner of an Irish pub in an East Coast city.
The "Sharkbite Sessions" was recorded and released 2 years later, and shares two songs in common with "Balgeary". But this is a tighter, more raucous affair. The trio of Leo/Lerner/Wilson had been playing out live for three years at that point, and it shows up in this recording. I bought this mainly because TL/Rx covered "Suspect Device" by Stiff Little Fingers, but I think it serves as the flipside of the coin from "Balgeary". At any rate, I have no clue if these are streamable, but I think they're hella great summer records. So plunk 'em on a tape and drive around, enjoying the fresh air at least six feet away from everyone.
I don't want to get in that old fart mode of "I've done so many things I forget most of them", but I'm at the point where the random shit I've done is starting to blur more than a little.
I'm fairly certain I saw Servotron once, although the particulars escape me somewhat. I know this because the timeline for seeing them play Reptilian Records on a Sunday afternoon lines up. Any AmRep band on tour in the late 90s at least stopped in to say hi to Chris X. And if you were in or around town on Sunday, you probably played a free gig at 5pm in the back of the store, after Chris and Johnny Riggs and Gene had moved the videos and iguana out of the way. This was the first time I'd seen anything we'd now describe as synth-punk, although I'm sure my only frame of reference was Devo.
A bunch of college aged kids, leaning into kayfabe, dressed up like cyborgs, making punk rock about robot revolution is about as peak 90s as it can get. Throw in some cover art by Shag, and how pissed off the audience would get over a pro-robot message, and you have a package that's is sadly lacking these days. How stoked would you be where you can afford to get angry over such a silly thing? It'd mean life was pretty good, right? Bring back something like this as the soundtrack to freeing yourself from organic tyranny.
