The Jim Carroll Band- Catholic Boy (1980) MP3 & FLAC

Atco ~ 1989/1980


 “Poetry can unleash a terrible fear. I suppose it is the fear of possibilities, too many possibilities, each with its own endless set of variations. It's like looking too closely and too long into a mirror; soon your features distort, then erupt. You look too closely into your poems, or listen too closely to them as they arrive in whispers, and the features inside you - call it heart, call it mind, call it soul - accelerate out of control. They distort and they erupt, and it is one strange pain. You realize, then, that you can't attempt breaking down too many barriers in too short a time, because there are as many horrors waiting to get in at you as there are parts of yourself pushing to break out, and with the same, or more, fevered determination.”   ~ Jim Carroll

Tracklist/Info

Catholic Boy  in FLAC:  Grab, Try, Then Buy!

MP3 (320kbps)

Mo-Dettes- "White Mice" Video (1979)

Not as well-known as The Slits or The Raincoats, the Mo-Dettes were founded by Kate Korus who was a veteran of both bands. In contrast to these, the Mo-Dettes featured a punky psych-pop sound that anticipated everything from The Go-Gos to The Pandoras to The Vivian Girls, but their sound also had that early Punk vibe that their followers could never hope to equal.

The Slits- "Typical Girls" Video (1979)

Dubby post-punk madness- one of my all-time favorite "girl groups"

Adam and The Ants- Dirk Wears White Sox (1979) / Kings of the Wild Frontier (1980) / Prince Charming (1981) / Peel Sessions (1991) MP3 & FLAC

"You may not like the things we say, what's the difference anyway?"

Adam Ant: "Look, I'm a punk rocker. I always was; I'm not a New Romantic. But I was a punk rocker who wanted to get more than one fuckin' album. The Pistols were great, but they only did one fuckin' album. Not enough! Sorry!"  It's easy to forget how fleeting the original U.K. Punk scene was before the media storm over The Sex Pistols' infamous appearance on Thames Today turned the whole thing into a simultaneously demonized and co-opted caricature of itself. In addition, with its prized rejection of technical proficiency as a criterion for musical expression (a philosophy that opened the scene to virtually anyone with a guitar, something to say and the bollocks to say it), few of the participants in the early Punk movement were interested in thinking about the music in careerist terms, as "no future" was more than just a catch phrase; it was an ethos. However, as many of the original Punk bands began recording albums and developing as musicians as well as song-writers, the aesthetic limitations of the basic Punk sound- three chords played really hard and really fast- became apparent; as a result, bands such as The Clash, The Damned, Siouxsie & The Banshees and Penetration (to name only a few) began experimenting with and integrating other musical elements and influences into their work.

Malcolm McLaren

The new music scene (not yet labeled "punk") began to catch fire in early 1976, and Adam Ant, then known as Stewart Goddard, had recently dropped out of prestigious Hornsby College of Art to pursue a music career, a venture that originally took the form of playing bass in a pub band called Joe and The Bazookas. However, during one of their gigs, an opening band called The Sex Pistols changed everything. Inspired by what he had seen and heard, Goddard soon adopted his famous moniker and made a number of abortive attempts to form his own band. It was during this time that Adam Ant found his way into the orbit of the burgeoning Punk scene's uber-elite, who congregated at Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood's fashion boutique SEX. Ants guitarist Marco Pirroni: "Without the shop [...] there would have been no punk, no Sex Pistols, just a load of pub bands who would have made no impact on anything. Malcolm is of course a complete liar but what is true is that he invented the punk attitude and made the Pistols act it out for him [....] To ask how important clothes were to the early scene (not called punk, not called anything in fact) is ridiculous. Clothes were the scene. It was not fashion; it was totally anti-fashion to everything that was going on at the time. The scene was tiny and totally hated the outside world [....] It was about telling the world that you weren't what it wanted you to be; you weren't anything except what you wanted to be. And what better way to tell England that you would not accept any of its upper class, lower class, middle class know your place, we are your elders and betters, fucking feudal society than wearing offensive pornographic clothes on the street?"

Adam Ant in his punk phase

Adam Ant's most important connection at SEX was Jordan (Pamela Rooke) who, in addition to being one of the original architects of the now-iconic look of the London punks, served as Ant's manager and occasional vocalist after he formed Adam and The Ants in the spring of 1977. In many ways, this early version of the Ants stood in stark contrast to their Punk scene contemporaries, as they adopted a very theatrical stage presence (something that would also characterize the band's later, more pop-oriented incarnation) and employed explicit sadomasochistic imagery both lyrically and visually. It was these tendencies and Jordan's connections that landed Ant a part in the Derek Jarman film Jubilee, which also featured the band playing a particularly chaotic version of "Plastic Surgery." Due to a number of line-up changes, work on the Jubilee soundtrack, and a dispute with their soon-to-be ex-record label Decca, Adam and The Ants didn't get around to releasing their debut album until the fall of 1979. The self-produced Dirk Wears White Sox is easily the darkest and most divisive album of Adam Ant's career, and while many portray the debut as having little relation to the more polished, energetic, chart-savvy work that followed it, the chaotic blend of Glam excess, Punk minimalism, and Post-Punk melancholy that characterizes songs such as "Cleopatra" and "Tabletalk" does occasionally hint at the direction Adam and a new set of Ants would take a year later on Kings of the Wild Frontier.

Post-Punk Pirate

Despite gaining the band a sizeable cult following, Dirk Wears White Sox was a commercial failure, which greatly disappointed Adam Ant, as chart success was something he had desired all along: "I wanted to be a graphic designer until I saw the Sex Pistols play live. This was 1975. That's when I knew I wanted to be a pop star, and that for me was like being a matador, a boxer." In an effort to change the band's commercial (mis)fortunes, Ant approached Malcolm McLaren about becoming the band's manager, the result of which was McLaren convincing the Ants to jump ship in order to form Bow Wow Wow with 14-year old lead singer Annabella Lwin. It was also around this time that McLaren had given the soon-to-be ex-Ants some world music recordings from which to gain inspiration for their next recording project, including The Royal Drummers of Burundi. When Adam Ant caught wind of his band's planned defection, he reportedly took these recordings with him to utilize with his new band, which, in addition to guitarist Marco Pirroni, also included two drummers. Once the new version of the band had been assembled, they were now in direct competition with Bow Wow Wow to record a batch of songs employing the Burundi-style percussion, a race Adam and The Ants won easily by, irony of all ironies, adopting a McLaren-style media-savvy image (Native-American pirate dandys) and releasing Kings of the Wild Frontier, an album that would make Adam Ant the pop star he so badly wanted to be. 

Simply put, Kings of the Wild Frontier sounded like nothing else at the time. Displaying the same brand of androgynous swagger that had characterized the best of the Glam scene nine years earlier, employing stripped-down Burundi beats, Duane Eddy riffs, Native American chants, and a mish-mash of historical allusions, the second incarnation of Adam and The Ants managed to tap into the ominousness of the debut album while offering up a great slab of irresistible pop that was as daring as it was derivative, as biting as it was cartoonish. Nowhere is this summed up better than on the lead track "Dog Eat Dog," a song that clearly signals a new day has dawned for Adam and The Ants, as it goes far beyond anything on Dirk Wears White Sox in terms of accessibility. Beginning with a prelude of tribal beats mixed with whistles and howls, Pirroni's dark, spaghetti western guitar twang soon kicks in to set the stage for Adam Ant's defiant opening ultimatum: "You may not like the things we do, only idiots ignore the truth." Despite the tremendous commercial success of Kings of the Wild Frontier, the band only recorded one more LP together, Prince Charming, before Adam Ant embarked on his circuitously ill-fated solo career, and while the album features a few of the Ants' best songs, such as "Stand and Deliver" and the title track, overall it lacks the consistent quality of songcraft that made the previous album so memorable. Ultimately, there is one question that always seems to linger about when trying to re-evaluate Adam and The Ants: vacuous foppish trash by a Punk sell-out hell-bent on becoming a pop star? or a masterful re-imagining of the kind of image manipulation that defined the Glam-era married to an unapologetically post-modern bricolage of disparate cultural signifiers all woven into something daring, entirely disposable and eternally delicious? Can the answer be both?

Suicide- from the documentary "Punk Attitude"

Here's a taster for an upcoming post: Alan Vega & Martin Rev's legendary proto-post/punk duo Suicide, whose collected works are the only music I keep on my iPod (for long train trips and family gatherings)

The Undertones- S/T (1979) / Hypnotized (1980) MP3 & FLAC

"I'm a little intellectual, someone who knows it all. I could be your summer special, you could be my New York Doll."

The back-story of The Undertones is the kind of thing that makes rock music so endlessly intriguing and endearing: five teenage friends (including two brothers) from Derry, Northern Ireland form a band in the mid-seventies to play Beatles and Lindisfarne covers,  but in the wake of the Ramones' legendary July, '76 British tour and its aftermath, everything changes- the Punk revolution arrives, and a few short years later, after sending a demo to John Peel requesting he play their music on his BBC radio show, the band, now called The Undertones, has a hit single called "Teenage Kicks." However, being a Punk band in Northern Ireland in 1978 was a difficult proposition, as lead guitarist Damian O'Neill recalls: "We were out on a limb [....] We felt stranded in Derry. There was a bit of a scene in Belfast, but there was nothing going on where we lived. And we were getting a lot of crap and abuse on the street for doing the music that we did [....] We wouldn't dress the way that punks did in London, but just wearing straight jeans could get your head kicked in. And having short hair [....] We were singled out a lot just for being punk rockers. On the back of the Teenage Kicks EP, there's a photo: 'The Undertones Are Shit.' That's genuine. That's the kind of feeling we got from people.'" Much like fellow early punkers the Buzzcocks, The Undertones were as deeply influenced by mid-sixties pop and Garage-Rock as they were by the vanguard of the burgeoning Punk scene, such as The Damned and The Sex Pistols. Their sound, which has been described as "punk-pop," followed, at least on their first two albums, a very similar approach to the Ramones, in the sense of marrying sixties-style pop hooks to a more aggressive style and a faster beat. However, hailing from Northern Ireland, which at the time was rife with political violence, this got them into trouble because their music refused to make overt references to the political situation. Damian O'Neill: "We loved fifties and sixties rock and roll, and girl groups like The Shirelles, and then of course The New York Dolls and MC5. We wanted to write about love and girls nor bombs and bullets." What also set The Undertones apart was their lead singer Feargal Sharkey, whose quavering vocals were equally adept at snotty sarcasm and wide-eyed vulnerability, a voice whose unconventionality in the context of the Punk scene helped give the band its unique sound.

Thanks to John Peel's tireless efforts to gain the band some radio exposure, they were signed by Sire (which made them label-mates of their idols the Ramones), and soon thereafter made their first trip to London to commence working on their debut LP, The Undertones. O'Neill: "The first time you're ever in London, your eyes are wide open. It was a great atmosphere, and the camaraderie was great. It was probably the best time, you know? The best time in the band." The album itself is a peerless piece of simple yet enduring stripped down pop that, coupled with the band's punk sensibilities, presents them as something like Northern Ireland's version of the early Kinks. A perfect example is the brilliant opening track, "Family Entertainment," which, while brimming with Punk energy, also demonstrates wry lyrics and a keen melodic sense- neither of which were exactly hallmarks of the early U.K. Punk scene. While for the most part, The Undertones, on their debut, are content to crank out unforgettable teenage anthems such as "Here Comes the Summer" and the iconic single "Teenage Kicks," they do occasionally tread upon darker territory, such as the suicide lament "Jimmy Jimmy," which has the influence of the Ramones written all over it. Despite their popularity, The Undertones were not a well-loved band in many quarters due to a perceived lack of Punk credibility, part of which was due to Sharkey's vocal style, but also the band's resistance to politicizing their work (something which led to a minor feud with fellow Irish punkers, Stiff Little Fingers from Belfast). The band would famously reference this lack of respect as well as the pressures of trying to come up with a second act after their debut in the mockingly brilliant title of the lead track from their equally accomplished second album, Hypnotised. "More Songs About Chocolate and Girls" instantly demonstrates The Undertones' growing ability as song-writers, which, throughout the album, pushes them beyond the limitations of the Punk aesthetic that defined the first album. Songs such as "My Perfect Cousin," and the Jangle-Pop masterpiece "Wednesday Week," are indicative of the artistic growth the band would continue to undergo over the course of their next two albums, though sadly, it would also spell their end, as an eroding fan-base (hugely undeserved) and internal strife led to Sharkey's exit in 1983. Sharkey: "One of the reasons I left when I did was that I wanted to preserve The Undertones for people as something special. Listening to people saying, 'I was in a bad part of my life and listening to your album helped me through it' is a great feeling. That's the biggest achievement I've ever had, to affect people's lives [....] No matter what you do, your life will eventually fall into a certain routine and its good to get released from that for three and a half minutes."

The Undertones- "It's Going to Happen!" Video (1980)

In my humble estimation, an insanely underrated Punk-Pop band who could also pen a great piece of Jangle-Pop on occasion and do it with a sense of humor! I've been on an Undertones jag all weekend. Now it's your turn...

Elvis Costello and The Attractions- "(I Don't Want to Go To) Chelsea" Video (1978)

What's better than early Elvis? (Costello that is). I really like the guy's twitchy insolence in these early clips. Why do people have to get old?

Sex Pistols- "God Save the Queen" Video (1977)

No future indeed! Seems to me this song is even more relevant now than it was 35 years ago. In a world rife with bankrupt governments and communities being overrun by the spreading cancer of corporatization, I feel this way about 90% of the time. The other 10% is pure escapism.

The Damned- "Smash It Up" Video (1979)

Possibly the most underrated band of the original UK Punk scene

Ramones- S/T (1976) MP3 & FLAC

"They're piling in the back seat, they generate steam heat, pulsating to the back beat,
the Blitzkrieg Bop."

Joey Ramone: "When we started, we were all disgusted with everything on the radio and the state of rock and all the b.s. It wasn't what we grew up with, and it wasn't what we loved and knew as rock. It wasn't Elvis and it wasn't the '60s, the revolutionary time in the history of rock 'n' roll when so many different styles and things went down and were accepted. Even The Trashmen were accepted. There was the psychedelic thing and T. Rex. In the early '70s there were The Stooges and Elevator, but after '73 or so there was nothing but disco shit, even heavy metal had a corporate sound [....] Everything was safe." While it wouldn't be accurate to say the Ramones "invented" Punk, as there were certainly precursors who had a hand in creating the template for the Punk sound such as the aforementioned Trashmen, The Stooges, MC5, The Velvet Underground, The New York Dolls and others, it is accurate to say that the Ramones were the first band to take the D.I.Y. approach of mid-sixties Garage-Rock to an entirely new level by stripping the music down to its primal components: three guitar chords, relentless tempo, a basic melody and a fuck-all attitude. Tommy Ramone: "By 1973, I knew that what was needed was some pure, stripped down, no bullshit rock 'n' roll." Hailing from a middle-class neighborhood in Queens, New York, the original members of the Ramones had dabbled in high-school garage bands for years before forming the band in 1974 and soon thereafter began playing clubs such as CBGB, which were quickly becoming a catalyst for a new underground music scene that, by the end of the decade, would change the face of rock music. Punk Magazine co-founder "Legs" McNeil: "They were all wearing these black leather jackets. And they counted off this song. And they started playing different songs, and it was just this wall of noise [...] they looked so striking. These guys were not hippies. This was something completely new." By 1975, the Ramones were the darlings of the New York underground music press, something that eventually brought them to the attention of Sire Records owner Seymour Stein: "I saw nothing punk in the Ramones. I saw a great band. To me they were a bit influenced by ABBA and Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys. Sure they were quite unique [...] they wanna be called punk that's fine, but they were a great band." After auditioning for Stein and subsequently signing with Sire, the Ramones set about recording their eponymous debut LP, which, despite being recorded in less than a week on a budget of not much more than $6000, turned out to be a game-changer. Ramones begins with the band in full throttle until Joey Ramone's voice leaps into the mix chanting the famous line, "Hey, ho, let's go!," that kick-starts the band's anthemic "call-to arms," "Blitzkrieg Bop." While it's nearly impossible to hear this song the way it must have sounded in the dire musical context of 1976, it is clear that the Ramones, by taking a basic pre-British invasion rock sound and pushing the tempo and delivery into hyper-gear, created something unprecedented. While the simplistic lyrics wouldn't be out of place in the mouths of a '50s-era frat party band, Joey Ramone's aggressive yet abbreviated delivery and the band's relentless I-IV-V thrash behind him lays down an aesthetic blueprint that would pretty much remain unchanged, even in the context of hardcore Punk. While more or less ignored commercially in the U.S., the Ramones, as a result of their July tour of England in 1976, exercised an incalculable influence on the music revolution that was beginning to take hold in the U.K. at the time. Joey Ramone: "We were attracting all this royalty and all the people who would later become The Sex Pistols and the rest. They came to the sound check and told us they formed their bands after hearing our album. When we left England, the whole British punk scene kicked off."

Ramones- Live at the Rainbow Theatre, London, UK, Dec. 31, 1977

The Ramones were a Punk band even before there was a name for such a thing, and although they weren't the only precursors to the UK Punk movement of the late seventies, few bands wielded as big of an influence on that revolutionary music scene. The following are excerpts from the Ramones' legendary UK concert on New Year's Eve 1977. Hey Ho, let's go!

Note:  For a full frontal aural assault, play all three clips simultaneously at maximum volume ;)

The Stooges- S/T (1969) Deluxe Edition (Bonus Disc) MP3 & FLAC

"Now I'm ready to close my eyes, and now I'm ready to close my mind. And now I'm ready to feel your hand and lose my heart on the burning sands."

The story has been spun endlessly but it never gets old: young James Osterberg, son of a high-school English teacher and baseball coach, raised in the trailer parks of Ypsilanti, Michigan, drummer in a string of local bands during his high-school years (one of which, The Iguanas, would yield his future moniker), University of Michigan dropout, lands in Chicago and plays drums in various blues bands before eventually forming a Garage-Rock outfit called The Psychedelic Stooges with a few former high-school buddies, inspired by Jim Morrison's theatrical antics at a Doors concert in 1967, he transforms himself into Iggy Pop, one of the most fearless and manic performers of the rock era, and his band transforms themselves into The Stooges, who end up rivaling The Velvet Underground as the most influential underground band of the late-sixties / early seventies. Forty plus years after the fact, it's hard to imagine what The Stooges must have sounded like to unsuspecting ears in 1969. While the mid-sixties Garage-Rock movement was certainly an inspiration, The Stooges pushed this movement's scruffier edges to extremes by integrating an unfiltered visceral aggression into their recordings and performances that was quite unprecedented at the time (even relative to bands such as The Who), in effect, drafting much of the blueprint for the Punk revolution that followed less than a decade later. That a former member of The Velvet Underground, John Cale, signed on to produce The Stooges' debut is a good indicator that Iggy Pop & co. were making waves on the underground music scene with their often wildly confrontational live performances (Pop pretty much invented the "stage dive" and regularly used broken glass as a stage prop for acts of self-mutilation). Reportedly, The Stooges were prepared to record five songs, all of which were to include long improvisational passages to mirror the approach of their live performances, but their record label, Elektra, balked at this, requesting that the band record additional tracks (falsely claiming they had more songs, the band had to write these practically overnight in the studio). Over the years, Cale's production has been often criticized for toning down the furor that characterized The Stooges' live performances, and his final mix was ultimately rejected by Elektra (the album was subsequently remixed before its release by Pop and Jac Holzman); however, it's hard to deny the brilliance of what the band was able to capture on tape. From the dirty, distorted wah-wah effect of the opening bars of "1969," it is clear that The Stooges are more interested in tapping into deep wells of primal rage than into pretentious utopian dreams of universal love. With its shuffling Bo Diddley beat and bluesy feel counterpoised to Pop's wonderfully cynical vocal delivery, "1969" functions as an anthemic counter-narrative to the increasingly ineffectual posturings of the psychedelic movement. The message here is "fuck you, I'm bored," and in context, it is a powerful one. And then there's "I Wanna Be Your Dog," a song which seems to drop out of the sky without precedent as if delivered via time machine from a decade into the future- this is the violently stripped-down sound of Punk-Rock being born. From the iconic opening blast of guitar-crunch to the unforgettable descending melody that would go on to influence bands such as Joy Division to Pop's innovatively perverted lyrics, "I Wanna Be Your Dog" is a timeless masterpiece that sits proudly at the side of The Velvet Underground's best work. While The Stooges does get bogged down in places by weak material, especially the strangely out of place psychedelia of "We Will Fall," Ron Asheton's fuzzed-out guitar solos usually show up to save the day. If The Stooges debut wasn't their strongest set of songs (that honor goes to their next album, Fun House), it is, nonetheless, absolutely essential for its valiant attempt to start the Punk revolution nearly a decade early.

Penetration- Moving Targets (1978) MP3 & FLAC

"I looked into the hourglass and watched the grains of sand. I wandered through the latitudes and crossed the strangest lands."

The story of Penetration's brief rise to prominence in 1977 on the back of their brilliant first single and their precipitous fall from grace a year later is the kind of thing that could have only occurred in the context of the U.K. Punk scene of the late-seventies. Inspired by The Sex Pistols (at the time, lead singer Pauline Murray was a member of the "Durham Contingent" of their fan club) and having borrowed their name from a song by Iggy and The Stooges, Penetration embodied the D.I.Y. ethos of the original Punk movement by forming and then becoming a mainstay on the scene practically overnight (their second gig was opening for The Stranglers). In retrospect, their first single, "Don't Dictate," was a stunning achievement for such an inexperienced band, and while it is often considered one of the enduring gems of the original Punk movement, even at this early stage in their development, Penetration's taste for New York Art-Rock à la Patti Smith and their proclivity for displaying musical acuity on their recordings suggested that they might not be a comfortable fit for the slam-dancing crowd. However, it wasn't until the release of their debut album, Moving Targets in 1978 that Penetration began hearing murmurs that they weren't Punk enough. In actuality, the band's second single, "Firing Squad," which preceded the album, had clearly signaled that Penetration was quickly outgrowing the aesthetic austerity of their Punk origins. And while "Stone Heroes" comes closest to echoing the unadorned fury that made "Don't Dictate" a Punk anthem, overall, the album pays very little heed to Punk orthodoxy. For example, on "Vision," a moody, atmospheric number that eventually mutates into a glammed-up rocker, Penetration seem to explore a darker, almost Post-Punk sound before lapsing into conventional hard-rock histrionics. However, on "Silent Community," perhaps the highlight of the album, Murray & co. hit on an intriguing mix of Punk aggression and New Wave atmospherics, creating a sound that is reminiscent of Blondie's work of the same period but with more grit. All questions of musical style aside, what is undeniable about Penetration's debut album are the consistently brilliant vocal performances by Murray, who, though not as self-consciously arty or experimental as Siouxsie Sioux, possessed one of the great (and incredibly under-appreciated) voices of the Punk / Post-Punk era.

Paisley Underground Series, #19: Various Artists- WarfRat Tales: Unabridged (1983) MP3 & FLAC

"The seas and the trees calling me. She's a river between day and night. I'm looking for her light, creeping coastline of lights."

At the dawn of the eighties, the L.A. underground music scene was comprised of a heady mix of bands and styles that included punk, post-punk, cow-punk, neo-psych, power-pop, jangle-pop, rockabilly, and everything in between. In addition to its quite unprecedented musical diversity, what also set this underground scene apart from others before it and those since was the genre-defying camaraderie between the various bands involved. As such, it was not unusual to see someone like Chris D. of The Flesh Eaters- ferocious purveyors of an exceedingly dark blues-punk hybrid that made them legends among the hardcore crowd- befriend and support a band such as The Dream Syndicate, who were in the process of spearheading a psych-revival that would come to be known as the Paisley Underground. Many of these relationships were forged through shared ties with the indie record labels that mushroomed in and around the scene whose rosters often reflected the amazing variety of the L.A. underground itself, a phenomenon that helped give rise to the era of the indie compilation as the best way to promote the music. A storied example of this was Warfrat Records, a tiny artist-run label, whose recordings were made in a (literally) makeshift studio called Lyceum Sound, which was actually a sound-proofed two-car garage (we're talking egg-cartons on the walls here) that had been rented out by members of The Last as a rehearsal space. The "studio" was originally conceived as a much preferred return to sonic austerity for The Last after having had their sound subjected to the sterilizing effects of the professional recording process on their debut LP, L.A. Explosion!  Eventually, Lyceum Sound played host to bands such as The Gun Club, Rain Parade, The Long Ryders and Savage Republic to name but a few, all of whom engaged in something like recorded rehearsals. As The Last's manager Gary Stewart remembers, the WarfRat record label was born out of necessity: "I didn't so much dream up the WarfRat label as I was forced to start it, as a way of releasing a single [...] that was getting some airplay on Rodney Bingenheimer's Sunday night radio show." The compilation WarfRat Tales was intended as a way to promote many of the bands who regularly passed through Lyceum Sound as well as to pay off some bills (according to Stewart, the album accomplished only one of these objectives). The album itself is one of the better comps to emanate from the L.A. underground, and has the added advantage of being primarily comprised of unique "demo" performances that are often superior to the more polished versions available elsewhere. The opener, "Try to Rise," a creepy, campy psychedelic rocker by The Last that sounds a bit like Frankenfurter of The Rocky Horror Picture Show fronting The Doors, sets the tone for this consistently great and intensely moody set of songs. Another highlight is "Stop the Clock" by the Earwigs, a strange mash-up of punk, ska and early new-wave that functions as a tension-filled time-capsule of cold war paranoia. WarfRat Tales also features some wonderfully scruffy cuts from Paisley Underground mainstays Rain Parade, including a stunning rendition of "This Can't Be Today," later re-recorded for their debut LP, Emergency Third Rail Power Trip. Perhaps the most essential track is "Creeping Coastlines of Light" by The Leaving Trains, a twangy, moody, transcendent slow-burner that is the equal of anything recorded by the scene's more well-known "roots" bands such as The Long Ryders and True West. WarfRat Tales is worth revisting because it offers a significant glimpse into an amazingly vibrant music scene long since gone; however, what makes it truly distinctive is the way its austerely-recorded tracks capture the passion and camaraderie that made the L.A. underground what it was.

Penetration- "Life's a Gamble" (1978) Live, Reading Festival

A vastly underrated Punk band featuring the amazing Pauline Murray:

Siouxsie and The Banshees- Join Hands (1979) MP3 & FLAC -For Ol' Foggy-

"You swallow the trail but still arrive in your entrails."

Join Hands is often characterized as an early misfire for Siouxsie and The Banshees, a bleak, impenetrable album containing few if any of the charms found in the band's other albums of the time. When listening to this album, I can't help but wonder what its reputation would be if it had been recorded by another band, instead of being sandwiched in between groundbreaking works such as The Scream  and Kaliedoscope. Don't get me wrong, Join Hands offers few of the Punk theatrics of the former or the powerful vocal performances of the latter, but in their place, The Banshee's sophomore album captures the band (as it was then comprised) at their most unstructured, unpolished, and experimental. This was partly due to the success of The Scream, which prompted Polydor to pressure the band for a timely follow-up; however, The Banshees were already fraying at the edges and heading toward a state of emotional disarray, something that would eventually lead to their disintegration while on tour supporting Join Hands. Undeniably, the album bears the mark of its tumultuous origins, and because of this, it is often written off as an artistic "hiccup" before putting together the classic incarnation of The Banshees that included Budgie and John McGeoch, but such critics overlook the way Join Hands ties Siouxsie's early Punk-influenced sound to her later, more overtly Goth-oriented approach. Simply put, Join Hands may not be as consistent as its predecessor, but it takes bigger chances by pushing Siouxsie's unique take on Punk minimalism to a new level. For example, on "Placebo Effect," the band marries the dark, minor-key attack that characterized the debut album to a slower, more plodding rhythm, as Siouxsie, strangely buried in the mix, contributes one of her better vocals on the album. However, it is John McKay's ominous guitar-work that really brings the song together, thus providing a valuable reminder that this early incarnation of the band was something to behold. While Join Hands is successful in pushing the Punk aesthetic into areas even further afield than the debut, on songs such as "Icon," it also anticipates the more melodic and varied sonic approach Siouxsie would take on future albums after reforming the band. Where the album (and its reputation) falters a bit is the way it ends: the fourteen minute "The Lord's Prayer," which was an integral part of their live set at the time. While impressive in theory, the song just isn't sonically compelling enough to provide a proper finale to what is otherwise one of the more inventive albums in Siouxsie and The Banshees' discography.

Billy Bragg- "Strange Things Happen" (1984) Live on The Tube

I'd have a hard time coming up with a musician I admire more than Billy Bragg. Here he is strapped into his busking gear singing to a bunch of bewildered onlookers. I love the part where he stops momentarily and sings to the girl:

Paisley Underground Series, #12: The Gun Club- Fire of Love (1981) MP3 & FLAC

"Gonna get me religion. Gonna join the Baptist church. Gonna be a Baptist preacher, 
so I don't have to work."

While The Gun Club weren't the only band effectively mining the strange but fertile intersection between Punk and the American country-blues tradition (The Birthday Party are an obvious parallel here), no one was doing it with quite as much raw immediacy (and for that matter, authenticity) as Jeffrey Lee Pierce and co. Pierce's formative years were spent in the city of El Monte in Southern California, and as a teenager, he became immersed in the underground Punk scene that was burgeoning in and around L.A. during the late seventies. One characteristic that differentiated this scene from other Punk scenes at the time was the integration of roots music into the Punk aesthetic by bands such as The Blasters, X, and The Flesh Eaters. What set The Gun Club apart from their contemporaries was Pierce's overriding interest in the Delta-Blues, which provided him with a wealth of dark themes and imagery with which to construct his "fire & brimstone" tales of sex, excess, and death. Given an appropriately bare-bones production by Chris D. (of The Flesh Eaters), The Gun Club's debut, Fire of Love is a heady concoction of Swampy Blues, Country-Goth, Rockabilly, and Punk. Pierce's singular voice, equals parts cow-punk twang and hardcore rant, lends emotional weight to these howling testimonials and wailing confessionals, simultaneously grounding these songs in well-worn traditions and recasting them in radically new contexts. An obvious example of this is the cover of Robert Johnson's "Preaching the Blues," which, while thoroughly re-imagining this apocalyptic Delta-Blues chestnut as a psycho-billy epic, manages to do justice to the creepy fatalism of the original. One of Pierce's most brilliant Country-Punk amalgamations is "She's Like Heroin to Me," which features some wonderfully dark electric slide-guitar work from Ward Dotson, relentless drumming from Terry Graham, and one of Pierce's most manic vocal performances. While legends of the L.A. underground, The Gun Club were not technically affiliated with The Paisley Underground scene; however, it is hard to overestimate the influence Fire of Love had on many of the roots-oriented Paisley bands such as Blood on the Saddle, True West, The Long Ryders and Green on Red.

Public Image Ltd.- "Rise" Video (1986)

Not off one of the better P.I.L. albums, but what a fucking great song, well, I could be wrong; I could be right