Play list Archive

Harmony in My Head #3 06-14-04
01. Black Flag – Revenge: This version is found on the Decline of Western
Civilization soundtrack. I always thought this was a cool version with Dukowski
making all that noise before Ron Reyes (Black Flag’s 2nd vocalist) calls the
song in. The Decline has some great tracks on it and is worth checking out.

02. Ramones – Sheena is a Punk Rocker: Live version from It’s Alive. I got
this record in 1979 and have been playing it ever since. I saw them a little
while after this record came out in a place called Louie’s Rock City in Falls
Church VA and it was one of the greatest live music experiences I have ever had.
What a band. This is a great record.

03. Dead Boys – Sonic Reducer: This was on the Dead Boys album Young Loud and
Snotty. The version played here is a different mix I found on a CD called
Punk Legends on Freud records. It’s a muddy mix of the song but it sounds cool to
me. There’s been some cool Dead Boys bootlegs and collector type CDs out in
the last few years. It’s good to see this stuff getting out there.

04. Germs – Manimal: Classic track off the classic G.I. Slash Records put out
a great compilation of all the Germs stuff called M.I.A. It’s in print, easy
to find and a great record. If you type the band’s name into your search
engine, you’re sure to find information on the band and its amazing singer, the
late great Darby Crash.

05. Beasts of Bourbon – Chase the Dragon: The Beasts are from Australia. I
don’t know how easy their records are to find in America or if any of their
records ever got a domestic release. I got to see them a few times in Australia
and it was strong stuff. If you check into the Beasts stuff, you will eventually
be lead to two other discographies, one of the singer, Tex Perkins who has a
whole slew of records out there under his own name as well as with his other
outfit The Cruel Sea and the other, that of guitar player Kim Salmon. Kim had a
band a long time ago called the Scientists and there’s no doubt we will be
playing some tracks off those records and he has a bunch of cool solo records
out under his own name as well as under Kim Salmon and the Surrealists.
Definitely will be playing all these bands in the future. I have been lucky enough to
see Kim and Tex perform in a few of their different versions over the years
and it’s a great night out. Oh yeah, Chase the Dragon is off my favorite Beasts
album The Low Road.

06. National Lampoon Radio Hour – Hollywood Gay Alliance: Thankfully, Rhino
has released a four CD box set of the best of the National Lampoon Radio Hour
stuff. There’s a lot of talent on those tracks. A lot of the original Saturday
Night Live Not ready for Prime Time Players are featured. Some great Bill
Murray stuff. The box set is a best of and if you want more, you will have to
chase down the LPs which are not hard to find but usually in pretty bad shape.

07. Casual Dots – Momma’s Gonna Bake Us a Cake: A relatively new release on
Kill Rock Stars. Really cool record. Three piece. Christina from Slant 6 and
Quix*o*tic, Autoclave, Kathi from Bikini Kill and Steve from Deep Lust. A lot
of Dischord Records back history there. Anyway, it’s a cool record, this is my
favorite song off it because I think Christina’s vocals on this are really
cool. The whole record’s cool and so is the Kill Rock Stars label. You can find
them: killrockstars.com.

08. Back Randy and the Metro Squad – I Slept in an Arcade. A few great
singles, a great album called Pass the Dust, I Think I’m Bowie and that was it.
It’s all been put on one CD by the same name. Completely amazing. Loner with a
Boner is one of the best songs ever.

09. JJ Starr on WOL AM – Roll Call: Washington DC AM radio. I made this tape
off the air in 1986. I don’t know what JJ Starr is up to now but he had a
really cool show back then and people would call in and leave their names. I tape
a lot of radio stuff. I was always taken by radio voices. On WETA Public Radio
in DC when I was a kid, they would sometimes play the old radio shows like
the Shadow and the Lone Ranger. I have been able to find a lot of that Shadow
stuff as it’s been re-issued on CD and tape. I have some more JJ Starr that I wil
l roll in the future.

10. Eddie and the Subtitles – American Society: A hard-to-find single for
sure. Eddie and the Subtitles were an SoCal band from the 80’s. I never saw them
but I have the records. There’s two albums and a single. I played the single
version of American Society which I like better than the version on the
Skeletons in the Closet version.

11. Dillinger – Ragnampiza: Originally I heard this at Ian MacKaye’s house
in 1983 and I played a CDR of the tape I made of it back then. I have since
found the single but have never been able to track down the LP Bionic Dread which
I think it comes from. I have a lot of Dillinger records. I think he’s most
well-known for his album Cocaine in my Brain, which is a great one. I went
online and did a little searching and found that the very cool Hip-O Records has
just done a best-of with this version on it so I got it used for four bucks. I
don’t know a great deal about reggae or dub music but I have a small stack of
stuff that Ian turned me onto over the years. Scientist’s records on Green
sleeves are cool, A lot of the CDs on the Blood and Fire label are great like If
DJ Was Your Trade and King Tabby’s Dub Like Dirt. Scientist has one on that
label called Dub in the Roots Tradition which I like a lot.

12. Eater – Outside View: Some singles and a great album. Outside View was a
single. Their records are not the easiest to find on vinyl but Andy Blade, the
singer has put together a great worth checking out 2CD set called The Eater
Chronicles which has it all plus some cool demos. Eater were one of the
original UK punk bands. Andy and I keep in touch now and then. He is working on a
biography on his days in Eater and I have read a fair chunk of it and it’s really
great. Let’s hope he gets it done if he hasn’t already.

13. Louis Jordan – Beware: There’s a lot of Louis Jordan out there. This
track, I have to think it’s one of his better known sides, I pulled from the 9 CD
box set of his Decca Recordings on Bear Family called Let the Good Times Roll
. When Miles Davis was on his way up, he often used to rip on black artists he
considered Uncle Toms. Poor Louis was a big ass target for Miles. It’s too
bad, both are great. Jordan always had good bands and was funny and cool. If you
like Jordan, you might want to check out the Treniers, good stuff. We’ll get
into all that stuff as we go.

14. Thin Lizzy – Blackmail: Such a cool song, never put on an album, it
resides on Lizzy bootlegs. Great stuff. From the same session there’s also a studio
version of Are You Ready. I have a feeling we’ll be playing that one as well.
All the Lizzy records are in print and easy to find. You might want to start
with the classic Jailbreak album. Listener Paul M wrote in and informed me that this
song was from Lizzy guitarist Brian Robertson's band, Wild Horses. I just looked it up
and apparently, the Wild Horses album titled The First Album has the track. Thanks Paul!

15. Discharge – It’s No TV Sketch: All the early Discharge singles and the
first album are great. I don’t have all their records but I remember playing
with them in 1982 in Canada and they were cool live and seemed like cool people.
I know at one point, they made a kind of metal record and it wasn’t what
people were expecting and they played New York and the legend is that while the
band was playing their new music that was not going down well with the audience,
HR from the Bad Brains ran onstage and tackled the singer guy. I would like to
state here for the record, that I wouldn’t like to get tackled by HR. The
Discharge stuff is on Clay Records. Thank you.

16. The Hoods – Jacko: From a great hard-to-find CD called The Hoods. I think
it’s one guy, sounds like one guy. His calls as Michael Jackson are great as
well as his character, a pimp named Comfort.

17. Alan Vega – Hammered: Alan Vega is one half of the great NYC band
Suicide. He’s been making great records since he started. In the early 90’s I got in
touch with him after hearing some of his solo work, in particularly Deuce
Avenue. His solo records were not available in the USA and I thought they should
be. I also thought we should do some kind of lyric/art book with him. I
tracked him down and we got to work. Eventually we got a lot of his solo stuff
released in America on a label I had on Warner Bros. called Infinite Zero. The
titles we put out were: New Raceion, Power on to Zero Hour, Deuce Avenue, Jukebox
Babe and Collision Drive. My publishing company also released Cripple Nation,
a collection of Alan’s writing and art. It’s all really cool. After all that
came out, we released two more Alan things. One, the great Dujang Prang, which
Hammered comes from and a record he did with Ben Vaughn and Alex Chilton
called Cubist Blues. Alan is one of the great ones. You can find all this stuff
cheap online.

18. Ween – The Mollusk: from 1997’s album The Mollusk. Should have won every
possible award from Andrew Weiss’s production to the lyrics and tunes. How
much better does a record have to be? Their new album is called Quebec and I am
sure we’ll be playing more Ween. By the way, a great live band.

19. Einsturzende Neubauten – Tanz Debil: This track is from their first album
called Kollaps. I think I got it on cassette when I was in Germany in 1984.
The band, from Germany, has been around a long time and has put out a lot of
records. My favorites are the first three: Kollaps, Drawings of Outpatient OT
and Halber Mensch. The rest are cool but these three are pretty insane. I have
seen them live and played shows with them and they were amazing live. The fist
time I saw them was in summer 1984. They played Perkins Palace in Pasadena CA.
During one song, they lit fire to the stage and the whole place cleared out.
Fire marshals came in, it was a mess.

20. Blind Willie McTell – This is Not the Stove to Brown Your Bread: There’s
a lot of Blind Willie comp. records around but when available, I always get
the releases on the European label Document. They are very thorough and for
some, it may be more than you need of any one artist. For instance, Rounder
records, a fine label put out several CDs of Leadbelly’s Library of Congress
recordings. It’s a lot of stuff. Document put out almost ten CDs of the stuff
Rounder didn’t. It’s like that. Anyway, the Blind Willie cut we played, I don’t
think that’s Blind Willie singing, I think he’s just playing the guitar but in
an case, I found it on the Document CD Blind Willie McTell Vol. 1 1927-1931.
McTell was a great, clean 12-string player and worth researching and checking
out. http://bluesnet.hub.org/readings/mctell.html provides some cool info.

21. Captain Beefheart – Sue Egypt: This is off Doc at the Radar Station from
1980. This album, Spotlight Kid and Trout Mask Replica are the Beefheart
records I visit the most often. I don’t think this one’s in print in America at
the moment. Worth checking out. I am not skilled enough to write about
Beefheart. He’s like Miles or Duke Ellington. He’s his own genre and is completely
without peer. If you find yourself interested in this track, I would go online
and search out information as I’m sure there’s some dedicated sites on the man.

22. Betty Davis – He Was a Big Freak: From the 1974 album They Say I’m
Different. Not available domestically. She gets the last name from being married to
Miles. They Say and Nasty Gal are the ones to find. They’re not cheap but
they’re really good. I was told that He Was a Big Freak was written about Miles.

23. The Lurkers – Cyanide: This song is from the band’s 2nd album God’s
Lonely Men. I have been into this band for about twenty-five years now. They had a
line-up change at one point and lost their singer Howard Wall. I bought a
couple of the singles after he left but couldn’t get them. They did a lot of
singles and two great albums with Howard Wall. Fulham Fallout is the first one.
Captain Oi, a really cool label in England has put out both albums on CD with
all the singles and demos. You get these two and the BBC Sessions CD and you’ve
got all the stuff by the classic line-up. I still listen to these guys all the
time.

24. Pailhead – I Will Refuse: I don’t know much about this. I know that Ian
MacKaye and Al Jorgensen got together and did some songs. I don’t know how it
came together or whose idea it was. Ian told me a long time ago and can’t
remember now. It’s been a long time since I played Pailhead’s Trait CD. I have to
think it’s in print. I checked on Amazon and it seems to be. A cool record.
It was cool to hear it again.

25. Bo Diddley – Say Man: This is off the Chess Best of CD. Dukowski used to
play this now and again I think. I like that guitar sound on this track. Bo
has done a lot of work and I have a lot of the records but the Best of is the
one I always go to when I need to hear the man. How many bands have copped that
beat. Busted!