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Final Rites
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Hello, everyone. This is my first time out. It’s hard for me to stand here and admit this, but I have been a record addict for almost nine years now, and I think I’ve finally hit rock bottom. Sure, there were signs before. I’ve bought several vinyl copies of records that I’d already owned on CD, I know the differences between the European and Japanese imports of the Manic Street Preacher’s Holy Bible (which wasn’t officially issued in the US until almost ten years later), and I prefer The Fall’s Country On The Click to The Real New Fall LP, even though they’re pretty much the exact same record. No, this isn’t cool. I thought it was when I started this addiction, but I now recognize it as a sickness.
I won’t bore you with my story of how I sank so low. Instead, I offer up my treasure trove of LPs and 7-inches as a cautionary tale. Some of you, nerds like myself, will find solace here. Others will turn away from us in disgust. Never fear. This is a safe place where we can discuss the hidden tracks and obscure albums that drive our addictions away from the prying eyes of normal people. This column is for my fellow record nerds only. Again, it’s an addiction that’s only cool for assholes like us. So, like drunks who order five shots for themselves at a time, let’s celebrate our bad habit openly for once. This is Nerdilinger.
I want to start with something that’s not painfully hard to track down, The Minutemen’s Double Nickels On The Dime. To old-school punks with discerning tastes, this is a pretty well-known album, but hardly anyone my age seems to know about it. Which is a fucking travesty. I can’t say that Double Nickels is my favorite record, but it serves as one of my best friends. Whenever I want something to tell me about myself, I go back to these four sides of vinyl that D. Boon, Mike Watt, and George Hurley released back in 1983. No matter my mood, Double Nickels has numerous gifts to give.
Whether or not they realize it, almost everybody knows at least one guitar riff off Double Nickels. The opening strands of “Corona” served as the Jackass theme, which is iconic to nearly everyone of my generation. It’s a shame that Johnny Knoxville and his gang didn’t choose to include the lyrics in their theme song, because they’re fucking spectacular. Like all Minutemen songs, they deal with greed, inherited suffering, and the question of what it means to be a participant in modern society. Okay, I guess it’s kinda obvious why Jackass left those out, but they should still be regarded as some of the best political spiels from any band from the “Fuck Reagan” era.
But to call Double Nickels a punk record is to do it a great disservice. Sure, songs like “Vietnow”, “This Ain’t No Picnic”, and “It’s Expected I’m Gone” brim with punk fury, but there’s a lot else going on here. Take “Shit From An Old Notebook,” which is another obviously punk song. But check out these lyrics: “Let the products sell themselves/Fuck advertising, commercial technologies/Psychological methods of self should be destroyed.” My god. It’s hard to imagine even Minor Threat or Crass singing lines like that. The Minutemen trafficked in socialist poetry hidden behind funky basslines, jittering guitars, and the vocal barkings of an overweight intellectual who might as well have been a longshoremen. Would Henry Rollins have ever asked, “If I was a word could my letters number 100”? Would Jello Biafra ever said, “I stand for language/I stand for truth/I shout for history/I am a cesspool”? Would HR from Bad Brains ask you to consider who made the shoes that you wear to your job everyday and to consider their tears? There aren’t any other punk records that so immediately reject the idea of punk rock orthodoxy as completely as this one. It’s a populist album that dabbles in edgy experimentation. The times just never caught up to it.
The genius of The Minutemen was that they never deferred to being strictly a punk band. There is prog rock on this record, and folk and jazz and soul as well. Sure, it’s a fast-paced album, but that only equals immediacy. And how about “History Lesson Part II”, their most inspiring song? Over a breezy jaunt D. Boon smiles as he spouts lines like “Our band could be your life,” and “My stories could be (Bob Dylan’s) songs.” Double Nickels On The Dime is the only record that has ever demanded me to consider every aspect of who I am as a person while I listen to it, and that’s why it’s a better friend to me than any of the guys that I’ve spent every weekend with since I was in high school.
After D. Boon died Steve Albini wrote, “So there’s nobody left who’s been doing it since the beginning and doing it all the way right. Sure it’s kind of pathetic to get worked up over it but hell, they meant it, and that means something to me.” For someone as anti-sentimental as Albini, those words should speak volumes. The Minutemen were easily the best band of the 1980s. Double Nickels is the album to buy. The vinyl version has 45 songs, the CD edition only 43. You know which one you need.
Michael Azzerad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life has a fantastic chapter about The Minutemen. If you haven’t read it yet, you should. It’s undoubtedly my favorite book, and I’ve read Proust and Nabokov.
Now on to the really obscure classics.
Anything Goes When You Go Girl Crazy is a compilation vinyl that I bought at Reckless Records in Chicago a few years ago for 7 bucks, and it’s one of the best records that I own. The slab was pushed out by Remedial Records in 1998, and it’s an all girl band mixer that can turn any party into the biggest beach ball blowout this side of those in Gidget or Psycho Beach Party. What’s perhaps most interesting is that Remedial Records was based out of Spring, Texas at the time. I’ve been to Spring numerous times, and it’s the last place other than Tehran that you’d expect to put out such a radical celebration of ecstatic girl power. When I lived in Chicago a ton of people would make fun of how backwards my precious Texas was, and my only retort was to play them this record. Bloodshot or Touch & Go never put out anything that showcased the power of playful girl punk in 17 songs as fantastically as this record does. Fuck abortion rights. Texas one-upped the north in understanding women simply by distributing this record.
AGWYGGC leads off with “Not In Love” by Catfight. It’s a simple run-down of all the loser guys that these girls have ever dated with a chorus that proclaims, “I’m not in love but I wish I was.” The backing track is a simple surfs-up blast of good times, and it’s the perfect opening song for a record such as this. Junior Varsity’s “Party Tonight” achieves the same sentiment, what with their lyrics about eating cake and dancing at a really fun party, but Catfight is by far the better band. A Google search for Catfight brought nothing but a bunch of stupid Youtube videos of drunk teenagers yelling at each other, so I don’t think they ever issued a full-length or any easy to find singles, and that’s a shame. Catfight deserved much more than the mild acclaim that The All Girl Summer Fan Band received for their undercooked records.
There are three songs on side 1 that rival “Not In Love.” The first is “The Vegas Song” by The Chubbies, which is a slow-burner in which the singer assures us that, “I can break your heart.” It’s a stellar song with a shitty title, combining a summery bassline with pre-Pixies dynamic guitar flourishes. The Chubbies still seem to be an active band, but they’ve gone through about a million lineup changes in the past eleven years and by all accounts aren’t even the same band these days. At least they gave us “The Vegas Song”, which remains a stone-cold classic. Just as good is “Tinklebee” by Budget Girls, a track that parades its insolence proudly and dares you not to think about blowjobs while listening to it. Budget Girls released an album, On A Tight Budget, in 1999, and it’s a fantastic record. Fans of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs that wish they were less poppy would be wise to pick it up. Amazon.com has a few copies left for sale. However, the true treasure is Me First’s “Drunk and Walking Home Alone.” It’s the most immediate song on side 1, and you can just hear the band killing it live as the needle works its way through the track. Me First should have done the Josie and the Pussy Cats soundtrack. That shit would have sold a million copies if they had. The song is a true testament to everyday girlhood, and has two killer leads to boot.
Side 2 is no slouch itself. It starts off a little waveringly, but Red #9’s “Dependecy” outdoes Bikini Kill by being catchy as fuck. They plow the same standard hardcore riff as many Jenny-come-lately bands of their era did, but Red #9 knew how to spit venom on all the boys who done them wrong, and when they sing their fuck yous I buy them completely. There’s also a really nice guitar breakdown right before the final verse. And Bombshell’s “Condescending Boy” sports fantastic lyrics under a gritty guitar track that surprisingly turns into a truly tubular vamp halfway through the song. It’s amazing that The Butchies never covered it.
There are a few clunkers on side 2. The Beauty’s present nothing special, Kitty Bad Ass covers a Guided By Voices song without providing anything other than irony, and Swoons’ “My Grandpa Is Joey Ramone” is half the song that Sleater Kinney’s “I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone” is. But East Coast Panic’s “All You” is a fucking masterpiece of angry precision. Mika Miko basically stole their dynamics from this track, whether they know it or not, and East Coast Panic deserves to be recognized as the visionaries that they were. They supposedly released a split with Gobbled Morphine (a terrible band with a great name) in 1997 that is impossible to track down. Finding that record would be worth a million in prizes.
That’s it for this time out. I have a few records pulled for the next issue, but I’d be interested to see what secret records our readers have hidden up their sleeves. Any/all suggestions should be sent directly to god@loconunca.com.