High Rise-BLACK BOX VOLUMES 1 and 2 10-CD set (Illegal Alien/La Musica, Germany)

Remember a good five or so years back when some enterprising souls were releasing their own Les Rallizes Denudes box sets? They came in quantities of ten disques per "title", and as far as I can tell all of them were being sold on ebay. You couldn't miss 'em if you were a fan of that group like I am. True the cover art on these boxes was dippy home computer stilted cheapo crankout, but despite the low budget these sets featured a wide variety of tracks spanning that epochal Japanese group's three decade career. And the material that was used was, true, at times picked from previously-released offerings (which had almost instantly gone o.p.) but these sets covered a lotta ground especially for those of us who were just then discovering this purposefully obscure entity. I've lost count as to how many of these CD-R sets there were (frankly I pretty much skipped on most of the latterday releases other'n the one recorded in France that was rumored to have Maureen Tucker sitting in on drums), but there were at least seven, and even at the seemingly whopping price of $75 a smack for ten discs they were a pretty good bargain. Of course I had loads of money to toss out back then, and thankfully I dished out for the more important ones because it's old items like these that keep me going through times of no money than no money keeps me going through times of these old items! Or something like that, I think.

All kidding aside, the krauts who released those Denudes sets also put forth a few boxes worth of Japanese underground rock of a decidedly non-Rallizes bent. One was a collection of a number of Japanese underground groups of a more modern variety barnstorming their way across Europe and the United States with their total distorted, clipped and cropped sound that was akin to sticking one's head in the mixmaster. The other featured tracks exclusively by one of the groups from that tour, High Rise. They're a still-functioning trio that had wormed their way into the already wormy hearts of many a nineties underground rock aficionado with their extreme overdrive sound and heck, I even remember reviewing what I believe was their debut US of Whoa album in the pages of some underground crud read way back in those dank days of alternative-to-what? confusion. I'm still searching for that record which is languishing somewhere in about 35 years of albums gathering dust in my basement, but until I do find the darned thing I'll just spin this collection which I'm sure will help resensify my already-ailing brain synapses and just might help YOU TOO live a fulfilling, healthier lifestyle.

Nanjo Asahito might not exactly be another Mizutani Takashi (he of Rallizes fame), but he's sure boss enough as the ringleader of this group which, like LSD March and a slew of other Nipponese underground entities, seems to feed off of the psychedelic madness that Les Rallizes Denudes inflicted on the few who were lucky enough to experience their music throughout their sporadic existence. Not that High Rise are some carbon copy of Rallizes and the vast array of Japanese groups who claim undying homage...far from it, for where Takashi and the Rallizes guys would intersperse their atonal feedback howls with ballads and even updated fifties riffage to do Peter Laughner proud High Rise takes it to you with total overload atonal thrust with no break in sight. Kinda like Blue Cheer with an even more feral ideal, or Motorhead taken overboard to the sonic disembowelment of "Sister Ray". No quarters asked or given here brother! You may shake, you may shudder, but High Rise are the facts of (rockism) life!!!

And you can bet that it's all HARD AND HEAVY and without the marshmallow as High Rise singlehandedly bring back the Golden Age of Heavy Metal (not the simplistic fluff that has posed as metal these past thirty-five years) with their high energy sound and inspiration that draws from everyone from Blue Cheer and the Velvet Underground to all of those sadistic Japanese performance artists who like to shove thin slivers of steel into their veins. The guitar riffs are straight out of FUNHOUSE's musical college of metallic knowledge (that is, if you still consider that platter to be the ultimate in bared-knuckle HM that made Ted Nugent wet his loincloth in jealousy) destroyed even more by Asahito's up and down the scales loose goose playing. And really, I can't think of anything noisier, gratier and downright earwig-bending as High Rise unless you want to count some mad Japanese free jazz record by some guy who sepuku'd himself outta existence only a few short days afterwards.

For the sake of brevity let's just say that these ten disques are the perfect distillation of the Japanese underground rock infatuation with the Velvet Underground at their most psychic ("not" emotional, as Wayne McGuire once wrote) coupled with that strange ideal of violent lifesexdeath that permeates their culture all rolled up into a pretty noisy package. Whatever, it's bound to knock off frilly Velvets-pretenders like J. Neo Marvin at ten paces, and we know we could sure use a lot more music like that these days!

MORE ON GURLEY

Before we begin with today's typically weekendish schpiel I thought it'd be a nice gesture to inject a little more regarding former Big Brother and the Holding Company guitarist James Gurley, who as you probably have found out by now passed away last December. I'm absolutely positive that many a devout followers of the rock as scronk form are already hanging their heads in misery, for Gurley was definitely one of the first and perhaps best of the high energy outta-control players to have emerged from the late-sixties rock scene. His primitive and atonal stylings definitely being some of the best to have been heard throughout the late sixties, and considering that this was an era which produced more than a few guitarists who were stretching the bounds of what was and wasn't acceptable in an ever-twisting rock scene that is no mere feat. And while most other musicians were making the transition into the "new rock" by making their sound "clearer" and studying jazz guitar in an attempt to look mature and perhaps even "break new ground", Gurley was acting the cromagnon that he truly was cranking out a total maddening fashion of guitar playing that combined not only his self-taught fretwork but feedback, amp noise and an overall sway that could be akin to the scraping of fingernails on a blackboard or the shattering of glass.

Like the best of the late-sixties rock mavericks, Gurley was a fan of avant garde jazz with the energy play of Ayler and Coleman easily heard in his far-from-smooth lines that vastly differed from fellow Haight denizen Jerry Garcia, who also approached the free jazz idiom yet from a totally different mindset. (In some ways it is startling that people who were using avant garde jazz as a rock [& roll] influence could come up with extremely varying approaches to basically the same music, but once you get down to it there just hadda have been some other cozmik forces at work. I mean, why else would groups like the Dead and Airplane be playing their particularly commercial brand of music while Big Brother, the MC5 and the Velvet Underground would soar for the outer reaches?)

No wonder Gurley's playing compares to what people like Lou Reed had been doing at the exact same time not to mention the antics of other hard-edged guitarists like Leigh Stephens and Ron Asheton. It does make me wonder why Gurley was never ranked with them or with any of the other "guitar heroes" of the sixties even though you might have read something here or there, like in the letter pages of BACK DOOR MAN where some astute reader would make the connection with ease. One can only imagine on what tangent rock in general would have headed had the likes of Gurley been taken to heart instead of that of Garcia and his technoproficient ilk, and the simple fact that he's not mentioned or honored in any wayshapeform only goes to prove that rock & roll's "success" (meaning a world where Journey rules while Lou Rone starves) was pretty much due to its stupider, more "proficient" aspects appealing to a load of braindead idiots these past four or so decades.

A man ahead of his time, Gurley is but one and perhaps the ONLY reason you should give a listen to Big Brother because if anyone can make you wanna sit through Janis Joplin wailing her dog-in-heat trashcan yammer (which I have come to love in my own peculiar fashion) it is he.

Oddly enough, if one were to have told me a good thirty earthspins back that I'd ever give this guy any sort of thumbs up I'd've cussed the man out in a way to make a Marine drill sergeant blush! Really, I could stand looking at mangled bodies that Larry Flynt published as the "real" pornography and all sorts of genetic and atomic bomb mutations while merely yawning, but back then even the mere sight of James Gurley with a feather in his long hair was enough to send me into unbridled fits of hippie-hating rage! It wasn't until after I read Lester Bangs' various articles mentioning Gurley's exemplary guitar work in the pages of NEW WAVE ROCK and even that whore-y old ROLLING STONE (a mag that pretty much ignored Big Brother throughout the group's life because they were too raw and aggressive for the peace-loving denizens of Marin County) that I came to think differently not only of Big Brother, but the early San Francisco scene no matter how kaftan and tinkle bell it might've gotten right before the switchover to 1970. Yeah, Gurley and the rest of the Holding Company were the epitome of hippie excess, but his prowess (as Bangs had mentioned) was clearly marinated in his Motor City roots and who knows, perhaps if Gurley hadn't skedaddled to San Francisco when he did the guy might have ended up in some boss outta-the-way local Detroit act that nobody would have ever heard of! Well, at least we'd have fun discovering some obscure single of his a good four decades after the fact!!!

If you still harbor any doubts you might find some halfway decent downloads on the web. First off, try getting an earfulla "Light is Faster Than Sound" from the group's Mainstream album which not only features Gurley's spider-y guitar line but this solo which sounds like a veg-o-matic shredding electrified bared wires. Even better is "Oh Sweet Mary" from CHEAP THRILLS which has this particularly good Stacy Sutherland-ish line circa EASTER EVERYWHERE. Come to think of it, this song wouldn't've sounded out of place on that epochal longplayer but whatever you do, don't listen to Gurley's "aww shucks" vocalizing on "Easy Rider" from that aforementioned Mainstream disc until after you've listened to the variety of exemplary solos throughout his career (including his playing on "Ball and Chain", even the one from the MONTEREY POP soundtrack where he can be seen tuning up mid solo!). It's total amateur hour (third-place at that!), and it just might lead you to believe that his voice box might be anything like his effects box.

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The Grateful Dead-CREAM PUFF WAR CD (Red Robin bootleg)

Speaking of San Fran, everybody knows that the Dead were the winners in a scene where Big Brother, Moby Grape and even Blue Cheer were considered the losers! It only goes to show you the entire unjustness of it all...I guess being in the right place at the right time with all of the right "connections" (hint hint!) can make or break a group, and if any group's necks deserved to have been broken it was these guys!

All kidding aside, it's no big secret that I never did cozy up to the Dead even though when I was first buying records and reading rock mags during my mid-teens I was tempted to give 'em a serious try. If you must know, I was even under the impression around that time that these guys were yet another freakout Mothers of Invention avant garde over-the-edge aggregation from the vast uncharted late-sixties that would have pleased me the way those early Mothers albums had. Perhaps I was buying into the history, the influences (Cage, Sun Ra...) and the hype whole heartedly. A few television appearances on DON KIRSHNER and SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE quickly changed my opinion before I could plunk down any money, which only proves that I had some discerning tastes even back then.

But that didn't mean that the Grateful Dead were totally out of my life even though I had certainly hoped so. For years people who should have known better were telling me that I should pay more attention to 'em and that their early records would really appeal to me if I only gave 'em that much desired chance. Of course a few trotted out that old argument that, being a fan of NUGGETS garage band ideals and all, I really would like the first side of their debut and maybe even some of their more extreme early material back when they were treading all of that territory that was bubbling under the youth movement scene even that early in the game. These same people were also telling me that I'd really enjoy Bruce Springsteen's early sides as well, so really just how much could I trust any of these pongos in the first place?

(Come to think of it, I did "plunk down" at least some spare change for that SEASTONES album when it hit the cutout circuit back in '79 after I read that this Grateful Dead in all but name album was not the hippie excess swill that the band had become famous for by the late-seventies! According to the write-up [in the WKSU-FM program guide of all places!] SEASTONES was a really engrossing, deep listening experience that even rabid Dead haters would enjoy and how could I pass a bargain like that up! Naturally I found that one to be more boring than an anal cavity seminar only going to show that if something is "avant garde" it doesn't mean it has to be good! The presence of David Crosby and Grace Slick sure didn't help much, and besides wouldn't you way that the Dead and their hippie friends taking a trek into experimental music were nothing but mere slumming, right?)

In preparation for a number of Dead bootlegs that Eddie Flowers sold me over a year ago (but hasn't sent out yet probably due to his using up all of his spare time house hunting) I decided to drag this particular one out of the compost heap to hone myself for what's to come more sooner than later (I hope). It's a live at the Fillmore November '66 offering that I had the sneakin' suspicion would have retained some West Coast garage aesthetics a la the Chocolate Watchband or at least some of those suburban groups who were on the way out while the Dead were truckin' on in. And maybe, on some higher plateau, it does. But mostly it's the Grateful Dead before they became the great spokesmen for a generation I never really wanted to bother with and all these years later all I can muster up to say is, so what else is old?

Overall it's got good enough sound and a performance that I must admit is...OK. Far from spectacular, on this disc maybe the Dead do sound like your typical mid-sixties punks that might have put up a good show at any local battle of the bands, but they would've lost to one of those BACK FROM THE GRAVE thudmongers hands down. That is, if they weren't laughed off the stage because Pigpen looked like an insane gypsy even then.

The West Coast trend of the day (folky post-garage) can easily be discerned, at least to the point where you can hear echoes of the likes of the Mystery Trend and Vejtables in the Dead's early oeuvre. However, in no way are these guys their equals. The Dead, from the lackluster vocals on all parts to Garcia's frankly bland playing and Pigpen's sub-sub-? and the Mysterians organ (actually sub-sub-Augie Myers, no slight meant to anyone), come off as if they're stuck in a genre-warp between the 1965 garage-punk scene and the Ralph Gleason-approved "San Francisco Sound" (TM) a few years before that fell into hack city. Yes it is pretty, pleasant enough at even driving in spots, but it was all done ten times better by groups who weren't exactly getting hyped up by Gleason as well as other out to overtake him on the old fogey hipster front. I dunno, there's just this dinge to it that doesn't sit quite too well even with their rip of Love's "My Flash on You" otherwise known as the title track.

Maybe the image of the Dead as what they became dance o' ecstasy and all still lingers on in my mind. Maybe they always were a buncha overrated hacks who just happened to appeal to some of the wimpiest, most anti-rock & roll people who only pretended to like it once it became respectable amongst the pseudo-intellectuals to do so. Maybe the boots Flowers sold me will suit me better? Only time will tell.

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The Electric Eels-AGITATED: 1975 LP (no label bootleg?, Germany???)

In his tirade against your humble writer back in 2004, famed somethingorother Jay Hinman criticized me for what he perceived was my incessant repetitive praise o a variety of musical acts, some he claims he even liked. such as the Electric Eels amongst a few others whose names escape me at the moment. Kind of a foolhardy thing for the noted free thinker to say, especially since he's a guy who used to repeatedly namedrop his top notch amerindie heroes like Mission of Burma at the drop of a hat. The surprising thing about Mr. Hinman's smear was that frankly, at the time of his character assassination I hadn't written a word about the Eels for nigh on five or so years let alone given them a listen which only goes to show you that if you're gonna go out and ruin an upstanding guy's reputation and his chances at selling a stiff of a fanzine it don't matter what you say as long as you have an eager beaver audience out there to eat it up! Ketchup anyone?

But soldier on I must, and while I am doing just that I thought I'd clue you in on this strange affair, an Electric Eels album which I never even knew existed. It claims to be of kraut origin, supposedly only 1000 were pressed up, and all of the numbuhs here were taken from legit Electric Eels CDs which were in print at the time this was released and are probably easy enough to latch onto even now. There's even an enclosure with Michael Weldon's liner notes from the old HAVING A PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATION WITH THE ELECTRIC EELS album which only adds up to a great hunkerin' mass of redundancy in our collections. And with a lotta unreleased Eels material waiting to be released, especially some rehearsal tracks from the late-'76 version of the group going under the Eclectic Eels moniker featuring such stellar rockers as a cover of the Sonics' "Strychnine" as well as John Morton's "China Pig"-styled "In a Pig's Eye" why were/are we getting these reruns anyway?

Well, I'd rather have more Electric Eels in my collection than say, the repackaging of the Rolling Stones' greatest hits in fifty different variations and three formats t'boot, and although this is probably a bootleg consisting of previously and easily-enough available recordings I ought to admit that AGITATED 1975's a fitting homage that will at least give devout fans something to ponder about if not some newcomer wanting to hear a sweet taste. Even the more jaded amongst you must admit that tracks such as "Cyclotron", "Giganto" and "Refrigerator" are top notch high energy mid-seventies punk rock classics, and few have been able to capture the Eels' energy and snarl no matter how hard they tried being offensive and confrontational in their own acidic ways. And many, from the Dead Boys on through the Crummy Fags and Silver Daggers, have attempted to duplicate the Eels' prowess with all their might and even though I think none of 'em totally succeeded you must admit that they were pretty spot on in their attempts. You can't do wrong with picking up any of the easily-available CDs that are out but if you can latch onto this you'll really have a nice treasure in your stack o' wax, Jay Hinman's cries of redundancy to the contrary.

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The Rats-"Don't Let Go"/"Dragon Child" 45 rpm (MAM England)

One thing about discovering various flotsam and jetsam dealing with the punk rock scene of the seventies is that more and more shards of information and pieces to the puzzle seem to be making themselves evident to people like myself as the years go by. Instead of seeing a past dying out before our eyes and rapidly disintegrating before we can save it like some shards of old nitrate film it looks as if more magazines, myspace pages, recollections and general ephemera regarding groups both well known and obscure is being revealed right in front of our very eyes. Really, for a guy who spent a whole lotta time combing whatever resources were available just so's I could discover whatever about my favorite obscurities, I sure know a whole lot more about this music and what it doth represented now than I did then even to the point where I wish I could take all of my seventies punkism knowledge and somehow inject it into my 14-year-old bean so I could have enjoyed it right as it was happening rather than latch onto the bulk of this underground swing of things a long time after it was all dead and gone only to be replaced by this corporate conglomeration that went under the moniker of "new wave".

I ain't exactly sure which Rats these guys are out of many sporting the same name, but they do typify what a good portion of punk rock groups, or at least those who kinda got shoved under the weight of the Ramones and Dead Boys, sounded like in the mid-to-late-seventies. And these Rats put up and really good hard rocking bomp here even if the vocalist tends to sound like Jon Anderson about midway through puberty. "Don't Let Go" is a boogie-ish yet steady enough rocker that, with the Anderson-ish vocals, might have sounded like what Yes coulda had they gone punk around '70 after repeated spins of FUNHOUSE and a few personal lessons courtesy the Pink Fairies. In some ways this reminds me of the English group Mustard whose "Good Time Comin'" was a snat hard crunch punker with some boogie tossed in though don't let that scare you away. "Don't Let Go" even features a strange solo from what could be a saxophone or a melodica, or even a synthesizer going to show us all that a $2000 instrument can do what a cheap ten buck one can do just as easily!

"Dragon Child"'s equally bone-crunching with a weird sound that could be any of the above instruments filtered through each other for all I know! Hopped up rock & roll which Robin Wills said sounded like Van Der Graaf Generator at 78 but I kinda think it comes off like some 1975 punkers at CBGB who never went anywhere but they still did a good job sorta bridging the old and new guard with their metallic glam slam style.

It's not that funny that EMI-subsidiary MAM released this, because even though they had such outright wimps as Gilbert O'Sullivan and Julio Iglesias on their roster they also sported Dave Edmunds and Slowload going from one extreme to the other! And the Rats fit in with it all just beautifully. Hopefully this will end up on one of those mid-seventies punk collections that have been all the rage, but until then you'll just have to gnash your teeth like I've been all these years!

MR. A. #1, SECOND EDITION (published by Robin Snyder and Steve Ditko, 3745 Canterbury Lane #81, Bellingham WA 98225-1186)

There have made a few superficial dabs on my part with regards to writing about or perhaps even critiquing if you will the fanzine/self-published works of SPIDER-MAN co-creator Steve Ditko; you can click here and here for two measly examples of my thin attempts. And, for some not quite-so-odd reason (like maybe there is a market for Ditko's art despite him being treated like a pariah by the same comic book industry that he helped rescue from a post-Comic Code miasma), it seems as if more and more examples of Ditko's most recent comic work have been coming out via longtime publisher Robin Snyder. Despite the comparatively simple art and story lines perhaps due to Ditko's advanced age, I find a good portion of these various titles to be pretty readable and, perhaps due to the less cluttered art, pleasing to the eye. At least I believe it to be a whole lot better than the over-ambitious dross that has plagued the comic book industry for the past three and a half decades.

Now that the eighties-vintage Fantagraphics collections of Ditko's fanzine work are long out-of-print it's definitely time for a repro of the first MR. A. title to enlighten yet another comic book generation as to, as the Amish say, "what good is." Some of you readers who were in on comic fandom in the early-seventies might remember this particular issue being advertised all over the fanzine world back in '73; I guess just about every big name fanzine of the day had an ad for this 'un at the time and, considering just how much Ditko's "Moral Avenger" was appearing in the fanzines of the day I'll bet this issue was a pretty hot seller in itself. I sure recall spotting an ad in an issue of THE MENOMONEE FALLS GAZETTE (that being a tabloid which published a wide range of comic strips that probably didn't appear in most newspapers world-wide) seriously considering sending away for a copy, me being a huge fan of Ditko's fantasy and early SPIDER-MAN artwork and definitely wanting to see what the guy was up to all those years later. I thought this MR. A. title was perhaps some new and innovative twist on all of that SPIDER-MAN brouahaha that comic wonks were still talking about almost ten years after Ditko left that title for good, and it sure was nice to know that Ditko was continuing to draw comics even if it was for some small publisher I never heard of. (This was long before I knew he was still drawing for Charlton, a company that I gotta say I never did bother with in all my years of picking these titles up!) I didn't send for my copy like I should've because y'see, 75 cents was WAY too much for me to "squander" on a comic book especially when the 20-cent cover price of the day was considered, at least by the old folks, to be pretty ritzy in itself! And lemme tell you that not getting this magazine was perhaps one of the biggest mistakes I made in my life because when I was 13 I sure could have used a lot more Steve Ditko and a lot less Barry Smith I'll tell ya! Besides, the philosophical bent of these sagas would have suited me a lot better'n the peace and love jive that was still permeating not only the left-leaning comic book fodder of the day but the wishy-washy humanist drivel being injected into all of my school lessons ad nauseum!

Well, thirtysome years later long after I re-arranged/honed my own political/philosophical bent a few times over I get this new edition of that very first MR. A. title, something that tingles my nerve-nodes even though I already have THREE originals wallowing somewhere in the abode! If six-bits was bad enough in 1973 then I wonder what the family would think of me dishing out five smackers for this reprint! It ain't exactly a carbon copy of the original tho...while that one looked like one of the classier comic book/sci-fi fanzines of the day with its color cover and larger dimension this is more or less like a flimsier comic book with a glossy b&w cover which I'm sure suits Ditko because he once groused to Bill Schelly for printing a Mr. A. cover for Schelly's SENSE OF WONDER fanzine on colored paper saying it defeated the whole purpose and credo of his message!

The innards have been changed around a bit, with the stories now presented in a different order while the inside front merely lists the contents as well as the other Snyder-published Ditko titles. Originally there appeared a nice essay on Ditko written by then-publisher Bruce Hershenson who, amidst criticizing the then-current revivals of Captain Marvel, Wonder Woman and Doc Savage as being symptomatic of a comic book industry stuck in neutral, also waxed on about Ditko's philosophical beliefs stating that the libertarianism of not only Ditko but Ayn Rand and Robert Heinlein was destined to become a major strain of political thought in the near future. Obviously that particular prediction turned out to be yet another misguided missile that is probably still wavering on in space which is undoubtedly one good reason that schpiel was axed for this "revised" edition. Well, at least it might have seemed like the way things were heading sometime during the late Nixon/Gerald Ford era, but as we all know it's been the same old etcetera ever since and here in the teens I see little change comin' across the horizon.

Lousy predictions aside the stories in MR. A. #1 were and remain loads better than most of the competition on the pro and fanzine levels even with Ditko's messages permeating everything from fight scenes to brutal deaths. Mind you, there's nothing here as good as the sagas in the second MR. A. let alone the magazine-length Question story (he being Ditko's attempt at a Mr. A. for the mainstream publishers) that appeared under the Charlton imprint back in the late-sixties, but compared with the drivel that at times was being passed off as "precocious" and "innovative" this does smell all the more like roses. Hokay, perhaps a good portion of the writing was in need of at least a little structural development, but since Ditko was doing in seven or so pages what he should have done in three times the number of pages should any of us really be complaining?

You get the four original stories (some even previously published in fanzines!) plus a repro of the wraparound cover that graced the 26th issue of THE COLLECTOR back in '72 as a centerspread of sorts. The first tale, "When is a Man to be Judged Evil?" features the saga of an ex-con out to get Mr. A.'s alter-ego, avenging journalist Rex Graine, whose seething, murderous rage against Graine totally dissipates by page five for some strange reason as we suddenly and without warning find out in a scene where a hitman tricks the former crime boss into knocking Mr. A. unconscious. Maybe I should quibble about the storyline development but the art's so durn good and if I can overlook the lack of logic in an East Side Kids film why not here?

"What Happens to a Man Who Refuses to Uphold the Good?" has a committee of respectable and well-to-do men hiring Graine to investigate crime in their un-named megalopolis. Naturally Graine does his job with with typical unerring accuracy and all is well and good until Our Hero starts getting hold of some damning information regarding some less-threatening yet still corrupt members of the local social/industrial scene thereby hitting a little too close to home. Y'see, at first it was OK when Graine was naming local known criminal elements but the people now being indicted are businessmen and politicians who have connections with the men who've hired Graine. Predictably the Men of Standing turn against Graine with a vengeance after he continues on his crusade without their backing, "sicking" everthing from a hired thug to an ACLU-styled organization humorously called "The Committee To Protect Criminals From Justice" on him all to no avail. The surprising thing about this tale is that there is no conclusive ending...after Graine is more or less hounded by these leading businessmen to the point where just about any normal person would go insane, up springs Mr. A. who grabs the group's ringleader and shows him point by point the errors of his way. It's all interesting enough I guess, but I would have preferred a standard comic book ending where Mr. A./Graine triumphs and the well-dressed captains of industry end up buried for their wretchedness. I guess that would eventually come to be in later MR. A. sagas, but not today.

The following, untitled story at least has a conclusive ending even if we're still bombarded by Mr. A.'s lessons of good and evil (and remember, you can't have it both ways like the characters who permeate Ditko's world always tend to assume!). In this one, a juvenile delinquent named Ken swipes a car, kills a pedestrian in a hit and run and crashes the vehicle into a street lamp before taking it on the lam. In a replay of the Kitty Genovese murder all of the witnesses to the crime plead ignorance and, as the early seventies canard went, "don't want to get involved" except for who else but Graine. Despite Graine's testimony the kid goes free thanks to his lawyer who comes off like a cross between William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow in his early-twentieth century socially-redeeming ways. (This conjecture is really not that surprising since both men were playing off different sides of the pre-McGovern-era liberal/populist equation even if they were bitter rivals throughout the Scopes Trial, the true paleoconservative/libertarian in that episode of Amerigan History being none other than H. L. Mencken.) If you think this kid's acquittal's the end of this saga you are sadly mistaken, for Graine won't let the case die much to the chagrin of the bleeding heart lawyer who has since taken Ken in as his "benefactor". Meanwhile Ken hooks up with a local hood while playing his lawyer guardian like a violin, tugging on his emotions just as bad as when you'd see these street-smart kids being poured pity and empathy all over 'em by Bill Moyers and Phil Donahue, who then would recoil in shock and disbelief when these kids end up knocking somebody up, or is that off??? Before long Ken gets his guardian in just as deep into his treachery as he is leading to both of them murdering the local hood and dumping his body into the local pier at which point Mr. A. suddenly appears outta nowhere, dishing up some justice or better yet acting like a nagging conscience with Ken madly running away into the abyss still wanting his way while the lawyer does the only reasonable thing he can at this point in the story and blows his own head off! (I know, at least Flattop Jr. went mad with the ghost of the girlfriend he murdered clinging to him until he eventually did himself in, but I'll take this over having the kid "rehabilitated" by even more do-gooder types like he would've had say...Denny O'Neill written this story!)

Closing out the mag is "Right to Kill" which I must admit is the weakest of the bunch but's at least worth reading to see Mr. A. shoot some flipped-out chick who looks like Grace Slick through the head. Basically about a kidnapping, this story has less of a punch and more philosophy crammed into it than the others, and if you're looking for some interesting plot changes and story development ferget it! All that happens is some little girl dressed as if it were still 1957 gets snatched by some hotcha twentysomething swingers (come to think of it, everything looks 1957 in a Ditko comic 'cept for the evil youth who of course are all swinging mod "hippie" types!), then Mr. A. rescues her while killing the female of the bunch as she's about to slit the girl's throat! The other two kill each other while quibbling over the ransom as Mr. A. walks away with the kidnap victim as the two thugs cry for mercy with their final breath. OK, that's it...no wonder they put this one right at the end. At least there are some nice touches here like when Mr. A. explains to the freed child just why he doesn't rescue evil people who wanted to kill the child while they're writhing in agony begging for forgiveness. I really like that attitude, it's almost as good as the things Ted Nugent used to say in his prime but then again what has he done lately?

In all, a great piece of work from Ditko, a downright classic which I believe just might rank as one of the top 100 comic books of all time if I would dare to take on a task such as compiling one. BLOG TO COMM readers who have some serious cravings for early self-produced underground/alternative comic works, or readers who just have some serious problems, might want to give this one a try if only to readjust your own personal focus on life and how you loathe it! But watch out, the next one in line is gonna be THE AVENGING WORLD and that made MR. A. look like pea soup!

SHOCKING LATE-BREAKING NEWS (or at least I just found out...)

RIP Big Brother and the Holding Company guitarist James Gurley, done in by a heart attack. More information as it comes in. (OK, this just in...he died December 20th at his home...complete obit info can be readily found out there but just why it took so long for me to find out will remain a mystery.)

AS WILLIAM BURROUGHS ONCE SAID, "A PARANOID IS SOMEONE WITH ALL THE FACTS!"

And if that's the case I'm the most aware person in the galaxy, or at least I do get the feeling that Random Insect Death is but a moment's notice! (Thanx be to Brad Kohler for the timely quote.) Quite a change from the way I was feeling last week at this time. Therefore this particular post ain't gonna be as char-broiled as previous ones, a major disappointment on your part true but sometimes even Superman has to cool his heels a bit. Besides, after those eye-openers from the past two weekends were you expecting yet another topper to tingle your frazzled nerve-endings? I thought so. Glutton!

***

Superdude-POTHEAD PUNK CD (Superdude)

Over the past few years I gotta admit to having a passing interest in some of those outta-nowhere sixties/seventie vintage New York City rockin' outsider types who somehow seemed to weather the storm and continued on their own perhaps-uncharted courses long after you'd have thought their shelf lives would've worn out for good. First there was David Peel who dealt us two very good slabs of street-trash before John Lennon boosted his stock a few points in the early seventies; later on there was "quirky" folksinger David Roter who hung around the Stoneybrook/Meltzer/Dictators axis before finally recording a number of albums (plus a single) on the Unknown Tongue label, none of which featured his original folk stylings. I'm sure we could add a few more people to the list like perhaps Von Lmo and Sandy Bull as well as Ruby Lynn Reyner if you wanna get female about it. And of course, as if you haven't figured it out by now, there's this Superdude guy who has been performing his maybe not-so-particular brand of underground rock funzies for an audience that I guess has been appreciative enough or why else would this relatively new (2007) Cee-Dee exist in the first place?

From what else I can discern Superdude has been around much longer than the seedy late-seventies, even being a part of the 1968-vintage Andy Warhol Family as you can easily enough find out from his myspace bio (just click the highlighted link above for this and more to-the-core-of-it-all information). This must make him either a pretty "with-it" sexagenarian or a guy who hasn't given two whits about the growth and development of music over the past three decades to which I say it's all the better! Y'see, POTHEAD PUNK's what anyone in on the under-the sheets lower Manhattan game'd call pure late-seventies/early-eighties cusp New York Rock, or at least something from the remnants of that era that seemed so outta place on one hand yet around 1985 you wanted more and more of it!

Beware, the vast majority of BLOG TO COMM readers will writhe in agony upon hearing this album since it will not settle well with nervous systems honed by repeated exposure to Lexicon Devil CD releases. However, to people like myself who find that intellectual residue and class/social/Marcusian consciousnesses in rock to be totally irrelevant with regards to what the music meant will love it the same was we go for such other peripheral punkisms as, say, Luther Thomas's YO MAMMA. Fake punk, fake rap, fake jazz...these were what the last days of En Why See's first punk generation was all about and if you don't still shed a tear over the demise of the original Max's or the cancellation of GLENN O'BRIEN'S TV PARTY you just wouldn't understand.

Typical cheap New York exploito sound here...in fact I woulda thought this to be some early-eighties release that, like FUTURE LANGUAGE, got lost in the shuffle of various Clash and B-52 albums. Only it came out years later which makes the references to early-eighties new wave, reggae and rap seem even more "dated" but I like it perhaps because it does recall past outta-the-way musical movements done in what seems like a pretty flybynight way. It adds to the "charm" and surprisingly enough, most of the time this sounds a lot more interesting than the "real" dabblers in the form who by the early eighties began releasing some pretty duff albums!

Most of POTHEAD PUNK does come off like quickie new wave crank out, kinda like a budget disc which some cigar-chomping manager woulda dumped on an already oversaturated market during the very early eighties. If they still sold albums in supermarkets back then you might have found this one snuggled somewhere in the bins. It also wouldn't be hard to imagine Superdude gigging amidst the budding hardcore, leftover glam and fifties revivalists who were playing at Max's during their final days and, come to think of it, I think he did mingle with a number of the seventies leftover crowd (like Another Pretty Face) there until the bitter end.

Good cross-section ya got there Superdude. In fact, "Superman" is even typical early-eighties pre hiphop-generation rap back when the Sugarhill Gang were getting hefty NEW YORK ROCKER space after all of those innerlectual clubhoppers began snuggling up to that particular style. "Step to the Music" maybe not-so-surprisingly sounds a whole lot like Von Lmo's "Nobody Plays With Rose" with its spoken vocals (and don't you note a similarity between his and Lmo's very hotcha shades? Could it be a coincidence by any chance???). And if "African Herbsman" wasn't about that pungent illegal substance then I'd wonder just why Superdude won the marijuana music awards for 2006 because this reggae raver ain't exactly your typical "having tea with Mary Jane" snicker snicker hide hide! The rest ranges from 1981 new wave the kind that was used to plug dish soap to cranky pseudo-punk and it's so wonderfully disposable that even that hipster nerk on SQUARE PEGS woulda puked over it with a vengeance!

Sure brings back a lotta memories of the leap twixt the underground seventies and the thud eighties, many of the same sentiments which can be found in a whole load of recent reviews on my part that you can easily sort out for yourself. But with all of the utter ridiculousness of these numbers Superdude does earn a strange place in my collection reserved for the crazier amongst us. Too bad his association with Warhol wasn't played on like Peel's was with Lennon or Roter's was with Meltzer or else we'd've been reading more about this guy in CREEM.

***

STEPSON LP (ABC)

Naturally I was hoping for another under-the-radar punk masterpiece outta this especially after reading that rave-on article UGLY THINGS dared publish in their latest. However, despite all of the promise and hope that I had for these guys being at least a more palatable for the massholes Stooges knock off I found STEPSON to be pretty mid-energy light metal. Not bad, but not exactly the hard-edged offering that I was expecting. Think of a less cocksure Jukin' Bone or maybe One Dog Night without the teenybop (Chuck Negron is thanked on the cover if there's any doubt) and you might have a good idea of where Stepson were coming from. But if you were expecting the ephiphany of RAW POWER ferget it!...frankly the Imperial Dogs coulda whipped 'em w/one ball tied behind their backs in a 1974 punk rock battle of the bands, and that's with Jymn Parrett refereeing the thing as well!

***

The Jimi Hendrix Experience-SMASHING AMPS LP (Dragonfly bootleg)

Not sure exactly what the source of this 'un is...HOT WACKS is vague and besides they don't even mention this version on the Dragonfly label adding up to even more mystery across the boards! (And yeah, I know that I can just dial up my favorite search engine and find out for myself, but I'll leave that up to you if you really so desire because I'm too lazy.) The sound is at least AM-radio quality excellent, much better than the "VG" that WACKS gives the TMOQ version while the performance is on-par with an instrumental "Sunshine of Your Love" starting side one off and a raging climax of the national anthem closing out the proceedings. Where the smashed amps come in I don't know...perhaps right at the finale but given how Hendrix played his guitar who could tell? In between ain't that bad either. Only real beef is that "Wild Thing" and "Waiting For That Train", both listed on the insert sleeve, are nowhere to be found. I hope Don Fellman doesn't read this or he'll never talk to me again (y'see, he hates Hendrix and for more reasons than Jimi's vulgar stage routine)!

KIPPLE #'s 157, 161, 163 and 166 (fanzines published by Ted Pauls during the year 1969)

You can tell that I'm getting hard up for my fanzine fixes when I have to rely on old outta-nowhere "genzines" that were more or less soapboxes for whatever flavor of the month ideals the contributors wanted to espouse! Right now I so hungry for any classic fanzine energies to tingle my nerve endings to the point where I feel like some skid row denizen guzzling antifreeze or straining shoe polish through some old nylons, but get my kicks I will and oddly enough I can still find 'em in the most outta the way placess possible! Like take this publication entitled KIPPLE,a political/cultural scene fanzine that, judging from the impressive numerical run, must have been cranked out a number of times a month by this Ted Pauls guy. Pauls used KIPPLE as a vehicle to voice a variety of concerns/ideals/beefs that he had re. the World Situation during the late-sixties, and the KIPPLEs I've read remind me of many of the lower budgeted fanzines of the day whether they be of a Sci Fi, comic strip/book or even rock orientation only without some nice photos or perhaps a cutting enough cartoon or even some reproduction from an art book used to fill up space. Kinda plain in fact, certainly not eye candy enough for the fanzine gobblers of the sixties/seventies and come to think of it rather dry on the insides as well.

I mean yeah, the concept of a fanzine like the concept of a weblog is to get some ideas out into that public of yours as fast as humanly possible, but some of the ideas spouted off in KIPPLE might have been better had they been left in the fridge to gel a bit. Maybe it's because I'm way out of the target area that Pauls and his contributors are aiming at, but some of the flotsam to be found in KIPPLE brings forth a whole number of questions regarding the political/youth situation of the day like...was it really this boring? One contributor, a John Boardman, has his own running column entitled "Matter In Motion" which details his own personal spur-of-the-moment opines regarding everything from the Vatican and Galileo (which was an issue that has always been akin to whipping that dead horse until it could be sold for ground round at Kroger's) to an admittedly interesting assessment of Henry Kissinger as an "Establishment Liberal", but even if he does make the bright observation here or there the end results are quite staid and perhaps downright sophisticated in their own strange way. Nothing I would particularly pick up a fanzine for, even if many of the ones I've read these past thirty years have come off quite the superficial crudzine of legend and lore.

So why did I snatch up copies of this long-forgotten read? Certainly not for the observations of political or societal development as it was seen through people I assume came up out of science fiction or comic book fandom. As you might guess it was because of my forever undying devotion to rock & roll fandom, a glimmer of which can be found in these pages thanks to a rock column entitled "The Fnork Speaks" which was penned by none other than longtime fandom standby Jay Kinney. Those of you who have been following Kinney's career from comic book fanzine contributor and fanzine publisher (NOPE!) up through his underground comix work throughout the seventies until his present day stint as the editor of GNOSIS should remember him a very talented individual with regards not only to his artistry but his writing on a vast array of comic-oriented subjects (such as his positive assessment of the old PANIC comic book in the pages of ODD). Along with Bill Griffith, a man who shares some stylistic and intellectual traits, Kinney was one of the top artists of the original underground comix era and his various cartoons dealing with everything from rock & roll groupies to the Detroit White Panther scene ("Armed Love" from YOUNG LUST) to punk rock ("Anarchie" in ANARCHY) proves that the man was just as tuned into rock & roll as a form of bared-wire intensity as he was of comics as a means to express pretty much the same set of anarchistic/nihilistic values (for wont of a better term I guess!).

Some of Kinney's musings are par for the course 1969 rock observations such as his take on the latterday Yardbirds and their relationship to Led Zeppelin (a group he expresses great fervor for) or how THE WHITE ALBUM was doing everything from surpassing the Fugs and the Students for a Democratic Society with its unabashed revolutionary/social upheaval tone. That's all well and good I guess, but what really surprised me about Kinney's "Fnork" column was one that, now get this, appeared in the June 12 1969 issue highlighting his opinions regarding the Velvet Underground. This particular piece, given the low-budget fanzine nature of this publication, was naturally missed by just about everybody who was on the lookout for interesting writings on the group, and undoubtedly that list includes the various writers and editors of the recent Velvets histories who come to think of it left out willingly or not a lot of pertinent information regarding the Velvet Underground's influence in the late-sixties. Not that they'd particularly care to reprint any of Kinney's ideas and projections regarding the band but, it woulda been nice if they at least said something positive about the guy!

The column begins typically enough as a commentary on the then-hotcha subject of drug references in teenage popular/rock music. Y'know, the big brouhaha that started in '63 when some people found "Puff The Magic Dragon" to be a little too "nudge nudge" for their own sense of propriety. From those humble beginnings Kinney works his way into a discussion of the Velvets who obviously transcended the usual druggie double entendre and anagrams and dove into the hard opiate stuff head first.

As I halfheartedly expected there are no major epiphanies in the piece, but it is sure nice reading something about the Velvet Underground that was written back when they were still alive than to endure the heaps o' goo that have been thrust at them (sometimes by myself!) ever since usually in typically dulcet tones that always belie the group's rough New York street rock image. (This is a trait that unfortunately has even carried on into the group's influence on the vast majority of Velvets acolytes over the past three decades, bands who find the pleasant poppier tones of "Sweet Jane" to their liking but who could never create a monument to the true power of the VU as was heard on "Sweet Sister Ray".) And Kinney, to coin a phrase, "lays it on the line" with just how the Velvets stood with many of the music listening public of the very-late sixties. "The Velvet Underground's thing is smack. Part of their mystique is probably due to everyone's amazement that the group makes the most of its habit and even turns it into strangely compelling songs."

From there Kinney goes on to describe the group's first two albums rather enthusiastically and track-by-track, something which I guess might have taken the fun out of chemistry like Elliot Murphy said but probably lays it down on the line for the readership of KIPPLE whom I'll bet were your typical late-sixties teen/college-aged fandom freaks with more than a few toes dangling in the budding rock fanzine world. These two albums (Kinney had yet to hear the third, though he is aware of how much of a stark change it is from the others) are chronicled in a matter-of-factly way by Kinney and for the most part described positively. I particularly got a chuckle out of his description of "I Heard Her Call My Name" where Kinney wrote that he thought the needle was skipping across the vinyl! (Kinney also draws comparisons between Lou Reed's lead guitar on that track and the fuzz-drive of Blue Cheer.) "If you are looking for a genuine 'underground' experience, give (the) Velvet Underground a try. They are not very delicate, but they do put down some good music." In all, a piece that shows that yet another mover and shaker of the late-sixties (albeit in the comix/fanzine world) was a solid Velvet Underground fan, and one can wonder just what other interesting pieces of Velvets-related "ephemera" there might be lurking in the fanzines and music columns of the late-sixties just waiting to shed more light on my all-time favorite rock & roll group.

Oh, and another little outta-the-way aside on the part of Kinney...in the March 17 1969 issue the esteemed fanzinemongerer even puts in a plug for good friend Greg Shaw's latest fanzine endeavor MOJO ENTMOOTER. "This is darned good Rock criticism of the old MOJO NAVIGATOR variety and there is even a picture of Led Zeppelin on the back cover." I'm not sure is this is the same MOJO ENTMOOTER that has Shaw's review of the Deviants' PTOOFF! but its existence goes to prove that there certainly were more rock fanzines being produced in the late-sixties than any of us would have believed even a few short years ago.

IT AIN'T NOSTALGIA...DON'T EVEN THINK IT!

It's almost like 1975 here at BLOG TO COMM central and no, I don't mean that I'm wearing a "WIN" button or tuning in to DON ADAMS SCREEN TEST either! I'm talking moozically, which might come as a shock if you're one of those kinda people who believe that thirty-five years ago was a pretty duff time for sounds whether they be pre-recorded or not. Well, of course I will admit that those mid-seventies days were rather sordid on a mainstream AMERICAN BANDSTAND AM/FM radio level, but I'm naturally talkin' 'bout the seedy avant garde punk rock-y underbelly of it all which, although poo-poo'd by the vast majority of drivel-infused music listening putzes out there in record-buying land, certainly made a big splash with the high energy people who wanted their mad rush and wanted it NOW! And you can bet that all of those great high energy punkist memories were undoubtedly heightened by a disque that I have received (thanks to Laughner box set compiler Andrew Russ) containing a vast number of pertinent PLAIN DEALER newspaper clippings that relate to the birth and growth of the Cleveland "first wave" of underground bands! Sometimes one forgets just how knock-out-drag-down intense and interesting those post-psychedelic dayze were, so the refresher course that Mr. Russ sent sure stirred up a lotta old ghosties in me and made me remember just why the years 1974-1979 were pretty special in various rockism terms and how no matter how hard we try those days will never come back! But that doesn't mean you have to settle for Matador Records.

Naturally it was a hoot (re)reading these classic PLAIN DEALER pieces mostly if not all written by longtime teenager Jane Scott, and eyeballing the history of groups such as Rocket From The Tombs and the rest of the first wavers like Mirrors and the Electric Eels written as it really happened does bring back that inexplicable rush as to just why underground rock was so exciting even for a thud like me so far removed from it all. Really, it does bring a thrill to the ol' jelly-filled spine catching things like Scott's ever-so-clever detailing of each and every Rocket From The Tombs personnel change worthy of a Pete Frame family tree (now I know where Dick Korn fit in on the drum seat!) not to mention finally getting to read that "interview" twixt Laughner, John "Regular" Morton and Michael Weldon regarding the Cleveland groups and their lofty hopes of "making it" (sounding maybe too serious on one level yet so intensely driven on another even if they actually thought their bands would be well-known and respected amongst the music fans of Cleveland by the time 1976 rolled around!). Of course it was a real chill thrill to discover all of that minutae ephemeria I never knew such as that Eel/Mirrors member Paul Marotta actually used to go by the nom-de-key "Poli Styrene" as in "Jass Band," and given what else was going on in Cleveland at the time these little shards only make the day and time all the more engrossing

Reading Scott's article heralding the debut Rocket gig at the Viking on June 16 1974 was a gas as well reminding me of a lotta little things I had pretty much forgotten in the thirty years since first reading the thing like how Crocus was planning to watch tee-vee onstage while relaxing in his "easy chair" when he wasn't singing (shades of the Hampton Grease Band!) and that he pretty much considered Rocket to be a cross between the early Mothers of Invention and glam punk (shades of the Deviants?) and that amidst the comedy and fifties rockers they were spoofing they were also doing to do songs by Spirit and Mountain (shades of every other band in the area?!?!?). Well, dunno about you but I sure would have loved to have heard Crocus wrap his tonsils around "Mississippi Queen"! Also of importance re. the original "comedy" version of Rocket From The Tombs is that the three other members, Charlie Weiner, Thunderhand Hach and Tom Foolery, were still playing as the Funn Bunns at folk clubs city-wide during their stay in Rocket and in fact one Wiener number, "Loose Lips Sink Ships," was being performed (and sung) by Weiner in Rocket and the Funn Bunns simultaneously! This number might even appear on one of the early Weiner albums which does stir up the ol' cat-killing curiosity quite a bit... (And how could I neglect to tell you that they also did a country and western version of Bowie's "Moonage Daydream"!)

(By the way, did I ever tell you about the time I phoned up Weiner for some pertinent Rocket info back in '81? First time he was nice and gracious with his wife [who answered the phone] even mentioning how her forebearers came from hometown Sharon PA! Weiner regaled me in stories about his tenure with Rocket sayin' that he was a little miffed that everyone remembered the version of the group with Cheetah Chrome and Johnny Madansky but nobody seemed to recall the time that he was in the group! [Perhaps if he released those reel-to-reel rehearsal tapes he said he had wallowing in the collection somewhere...] Second time he was grumpier than Courtney Love in a chastity belt despite my ever-graciousness which doesn't prove anything other than I caught the guy at a bad time. I don't carry grudges...not me! BTW did you know that Weiner hosted a Saturday PM kid show on WAI-TV channel 29 in Akron for a short time which went under the title WEINERLAND, a gig that probably would have been heightened if only he could get his old partner Crocus in to re-do some of their old routines!)

Whatever, the original Rocket sure seemed like the ultimate trash-concept band around, perhaps one to have given the Electric Eels a run for the confrontational stage presence moolah! And really, I just can't tell you just how enriched I felt scouring these old articles absorbing the growth and development of a sound that pretty much had a stranglehold on me for a good portion of my measly life. Reminds me of when I was ten and I'd hit the local library not to do research for a science project or history essay, but to scan the microfilms for old NANCY comics so you know what kind of an event in my life this disc most certainly is!

Only bad part about all of this is that along with the articles on or even by the likes of Laughner and Crocus Behemoth (btw, the members of Rocket jokingly called his alto saxophone a "Croco-phone"!) we get stuck with a few "critical" pieces written by that wretch Anastasia Pantsios who comes off like a sour schoolmarm at an orgy with her hippie critiques of a music (actually, of rock & roll in general) that she never could fathom or comprehend let alone understand as her stodgy elitist smarm has proven over the years. I often wondered how she ever got a job as a professional "rock critic" especially when there were dozens of superior if under-the-carpet scribes who could write her off the page even without a dog-eared thesaurus, but I guess that's just one of the injustices of life that we all have to put up with. It's an even greater injustice than all of those shivs she shoved into her supposed friend Laughner's back throughout the eighties and nineties. (And if you don't believe me, just get hold of her writings for the DEALER and various other local papers of the day such as her "review" of FROM THE VELVETS TO THE VOIDOIDS in whatever low-rent free paper she was working for in the early-nineties...and as far as "other" matters went I mean can anybody really be that ignorant to take the letter pages of FLIPSIDE to be a cross section of what underground music had entailed, and was she really that naive to believe that these oft-loathed [by "true" rockers like herself I would surmise] bands weren't putting out fanzines and promoting their own shows like the heavy metallers were??? What an ignoramus, or at least a person who distorts and prefabricates the words and actions of others for her own occult purposes! Frank Secich should have killed her when he had the chance!)

Anyway, if all of this first wave frenzy wasn't enough I just happened to stumble across a pretty interesting ref. to one of my favorite Cleveland underground groups and in the pages of none other than CREEM magazine (the March 1976 issue in case you want to drag this one out and see for yourself!). No wonder it took so long for me to locate this little bit o' esoterica for it appears in an article on Kiss that was written by whateverhappenedtohim? Robert Duncan. In this typically classic-CREEM piece dealing with Kiss and the concept of rock outrage Duncan and his un-named friend were talking about...well, in order to make this post a lot more easier to read let's just take it from the top:

"As the conversation progressed, we got around to the subject of the proliferating New York punk bands, and I relate to him the apocryphal tale of a certain Cleveland punk band who shall go nameless (a spin-off from another band there called Rocket From The Tombs). It seems that this band is having a tremendous amount of trouble getting club work these days - even more than usual (their sound comes out of the threshold of pain school of music). You see, I explain to my friend, they feature a lawn mower in the act. One night, just after they had yanked on the ol' chop machine, the club owner's dog wandered by the front of the stage. Inspiration apparently struck and the band members waylaid the pup onstage ostensibly - and now I'm in-ter-pol-ating in the interest of humanity - to give him a haircut with their power mower. As one can imagine, it is a delicate procedure to shave a dog with a lawn mower, a procedure easily botched. Well, botch it they did and exit one canine in a spew of blood and guts and fur. (They got fired from the gig.)

My friend laughs hysterically (good sense of humor, no?) and allows as how the Blue Oyster Cult/Kiss New Year's Eve show at Nassau Coliseum is strictly 'pussy stuff' relative to the stage atrocities of the Cleveland group. My friend says to me: 'Now that would be the way to bring in the New Year! Some dog spraying out of a lawnmower all over the audience!' And you know, in concept, I really have to agree with him. And I'll tell you what (if I really have to wrap this whole thing up) I've figured it all out. I HAVE UNLOADED THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE!"

Historical to say the least even if the "unnamed" Electric Eels are construed as being somehow directly related in lineage to Rocket From The Tombs and that the lawnmower never even started up! Of course that doesn't make for good copy but it sure fuels them punkism fires! I guess this is how rumors get started, and who could think of a bigger national platform to start such a rumor than in the pages of the soon-to-capsize (in quality that is) CREEM magazine?

Too bad I didn't read this slice of ROCK RUMORMONGERING IN THE MAKING while I was an impressionable lad, because I have the sneaking suspicion that back when I was going through all of my available printed matter to read and re-read those clandestine paragraphs on the hunt for any strand of proto-punk puzzle-piece gathering this bit would have driven me up the padded cell wall!

Anyway, here are just a few items that have graced my psyche this past week. Maybe you'll be able to memorize enough of this to spout out at parties and bar mitzvahs thus making yourself look less like the dim bulb you most certainly are! Whatever, g'wan and have a ball!

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David Bowie-LITTLE TOY SOLDIER LP (Albino bootleg, England)

As well as being stoked on all of those Cleveland First Wave clippings you can tell that I'm still way under the effect of the recent double header Velvet Underground book deal or why else would I have bought this bootleg documenting Bowie at beginning of his Lou Reed homage anyway? If you read the Unterberger book you would have discovered that Bowie, like Mick Farren, had his Velvet Underground epiphany long before the rest of us and resultantly was incorporating hefty VU-refs in his music months prior to their debut elpee hitting the British shores. Unlike Farren, at least we have documentation which, if accurate, proves that the famed chameleon was not only covering Velvet Underground material during those swinging times but injecting a lotta their influences into his own sound which might make him more of a plagiarist than a prophet but I'll let history decide.

This album, released during the second big bootleg era of the eighties, features surprisingly decent if AM-radio quality sound and production besides a nice if bargain-bin sleeve and very limited playing time. Side one's the hotsy for us unrepentant Velvet Underground maniacs beginning with Bowie's first waxing of "Waiting For My Man," a rather good rendition better than his later Spiders-era takes even if Bowie does fall ever-so-slightly into that late-sixties pop rut which brought down similar VU covers. However, the Lou Reed inflection in the vocals does boost the quality quite a bit and Bowie brownie points are in store since the guy was astute enough to give this classic number a go before just about everyone else did. Bowie's homage to "Venus in Furs" entitled "Little Toy Soldier" follows, a number which starts off pleasantly enough like a typical 1967 Bowie flower-fop piece before getting Velvet sinister complete with obvious "Venus" lyrical swipe until it all ends like a big mechanical explosion right out of Pink Floyd's "Bike"! Maybe if this one got out 'stead of those other legit flitzy numbers he was also doing at the time more people would think highly of Bowie's early recording career! Closing out the side (told you this was a shortie!) is an early demo of "Space Oddity", perhaps distinguished by the fact that for being a mere acoustic guitar/stylophone duet it sounds a whole lot better than the live versions that Bowie was barnstorming the country with back when he was trying to break the US. Too bad he didn't have this arrangement in mind when he was vying for the precocious confused teenage kiddie money of the day or else some of those live shows just might sound better to these ears!

If you can believe it the other side's even shorter (as if these bootleggers are supposed to be held up to some higher moral standardsy...as we all didn't know that they have the same set of values as the major labels!). "The Supermen" demo retains the energy of the legit take despite the acoustic sound proving that when it came to early heavy metal there was no way you could tame it, even unplugged, unless it was Dust doing some pallid ballad on their second album. In contrast "Right On Mother" and "He Was Alright" are just more of the introspective Donovan-ish side of Bowie that was fighting it out with his punk inclinations and, as we all know, neither side really won which is why I have this perhaps ambivalent attitude towards Bowie which only proves I have mellowed at least in some respects! I mean, twenty years back I would have loved to have seen him murdered. Maybe these various gender/musical confusions are just why Bowie always seemed like a putz next to role models Lou and Iggy. I guess he was just hanging around them the same way Frank Sinatra hung around all those mobsters, to accrue a little class I believe.

But class or not, I found a lotta this 'un def. worth the time to discover if only to see how they fit with regards to that BIG VELVET UNDERGROUND PATCHWORK OF ROCK & ROLL INFLUENCES...maybe you can find a zip file somewhere on this internet thingie of ours and burn one for free? If you are that impatient, I did glom some youtube videos of "Waiting" and "Soldier" that will give you sweet taste.

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Kevin Ayers-ODD DITTIES cassette (Harvest, England)

Why would I buy a 1976-vintage cassette tape of an album that I've had on vinyl since 1985 anyway? Pure remembrance of product packaging past, mostly because when I was a youngster I used to have this strange obsession with the way cassette tapes differed from country to country! It was nothing but a childish curiosity on my part like, just what did cassette outer sleeves for certain labels look like in other nations anyway? Por ejemplo Capitol in the USA's cassettes looked different than EMI's did in England, and the German and Australian ones were unique in themselves as well! Ditto for Mercury across the world, though I believe that Island's cassette packaging did not vary world-wide all with all of that pink all over the place! What a crazy mixed up world we live in, and for some reason at a time when I should have been paying attention to my studies and even the rather plain-looking girls of Eastern/Southern European and Irish extraction surrounding me I WAS MORE INTERESTED IN KNOWING WHAT CASSETTE PACKAGING WAS LIKE IN OTHER NATIONS!!! And now that I know I kinda feel like Starchie in that MAD spoof bangin' his head on the brick wall in his cell 'bout how Biddy was jumping all over him but he was going nuts for Salonica who didn't give two lumps! AAARRRRGGGGH!!!!!!

But lo and behold, don't this cassette just play so sweetly next to my bedside chair late at night. This is one of two Kevin Ayers' "Harvest Heritage" releases (the other, a twofa of his first two solo albums, might get the BLOG TO COMM treatment when I dig 'em outta the Jurassic stratum) and it's one of those b-side/unreleased take collections that Harvest rushed out at a time when Ayers, back on the label after a brief Island sojurn, was perhaps at the peak of his commercial prowess. Some, especially (or should that be naturally) the earlier material, has plenty of that English experimental bright flash that made those early Eno records so appealing. The later gunch is comparatively toned down and although there are more than a few dudsters to be found (like the times Ayers gets into his South Seas and Mexican ethno-grooves) when he gets good he gets...entertaining like on his Velvets paen "Stranger in Blue Suede Shoes" or the classically-inclined "Jolie Madame." Even when the former Soft Machine bassist sings a French-language version of SHOOTING AT THE MOON's "May I?" ("Puis Je?") you ain't gonna cringe like your better nature always seeme to tell you to!

This one must be a winner because about a decade-and-a-half back I casually mentioned to someone who shall remain nameless that I had the vinyl version and was suddenly bombarded with offers to buy the thing and at a price that I might have agreed to had I been destitute! So it's gotta be the unabashed classic that it is...right???

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Dizzy and the Romilars-"Elizabeth's Lover"/"Star Time" single (Jimboco)

Typical v. late seventies En Why New Wave (not quite "Gnu" at this time) which I guess you me and the bedpost are supposed to hate with a passion, but considering the other stuff in the mainstream/"Pantsios" world that was floating around this might as well be Red Transistor! Nothing offensive even if my own recollections of what underground rock during the '79/'80 cusp was supposed to be were a lot more HARROWING. Let's just consider this the tiny first step before that second step had many of us tumbling into a bigger abyss than we could ever climb out of.

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Gary Wilson-LIVE AT CBGB'S two 7-inch (one a 33 rpm EP, the other a 45 rpm single) set (MCP)

Certified jazz schmooze nutzo's rare live set which I believe dates back to '77 despite the 1980 and 1994 copyrights to be found in various places on this package. Mystifying as usual, with more of Wilson's Michael Franks-ish seventies fluff sorta marinated in absinthe and displayed for one of those late-seventies New York audiences who'd eat anything up, as long as it had that long-gone fringe element firmly embedded in its set list. And if you liked YOU THINK YOU REALLY KNOW ME's display of seventies electronic deca-smarm these platters do compliment. Might be available on one of Wilson's recent rehash Cee-Dees but if not you might be able to scarf up an original if you search hard enough.

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WHAT BETTER WAY TO TOP OFF YET ANOTHER INFO-PACKED POST than to present the following youtube video, featuring a recording made by none other than guitar great Lou Rone with the late Joey Alexander of Koala fame (check out your old UGLY THINGs for more info on those guys!) doing a track that I gotta say I kinda sorta really like as it doesn't offend me at all even if various "pop" moves are supposed to do just that to my "rockist" sensibilitie. Nice enough as in I wish more up-and-coming En Why See rock of the early-eighties came off like this even if this was done in '90. Pretty nice slow burner if I do say so myself: