We Never Learn

so i spent the better part of the day downing poptarts, jellybeans, and mixed nuts (less than 50% peanuts!) and plowing thru davidson's book on "gunk punk"…oddly i don't find myself energized in any way (tho' to be fair it is about 175˚ in here) - and i flat-out LOVE pretty much all of the groops he's talkin' aboot. the book doesn't really drum ya up into a frenzy of how great this supposed genre is/was supposed to be, and shit, the last third is ENTIRELY about how fucked/fucked over some of the bands were (still dunno if that's what the point is and oddly he brings some as-yet-unmentioned songsters into here that sorta dilute the focus). mebbe the significance is meant to be understood - what with there bein' this tome there an' all - but i thot that was mayhap what the point of havin' all the words was, not to show how tuff it was fer all everybody involved after awhile (to their credit lots of 'em talk aboot what a blast it was and how well they's now gots the memories even thru their grimaces) but rilly here i just wanna say one thing an' that's how fucking little i care about how much anything sucked for a band or how the industry didn't care or absolutely any mention of any of that. rock'n'roll - and ESPECIALLY the bang-zoom screech and spuzz we're talkin' about here - is interesting in two ways outside the pure exhilaration of lissenin' to it an' that's 1) hearin' all the background anecdotes and hows and whys and whos and wheres when yer a geek like me and 2) hearin' about shit i ain't never heard that i just gotta-gotta-gotta cuz damn you got me all amped up and into it! but this, fer all intents, is a slow read (tho' not a long one), and doesn't much conjure anything more than hazy resignation and an odd dull sadness. don't worry if you don't get on this real quick (tho' you'll read it in time, i'm sure) - just let the action rock itself be yer action rock fer now an' always, true believers.

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The Mice

yeah i know they weren't from columbus. we've been over this. but, should you need some convincing, the mice were a GIANT influence on a handful of bands here, most notably gaunt and moody jackson, who both covered tunes of theirs ("second best" and "pharoah", respectively). so, in honor of frontman bill fox's excellent, double-length performance at lost weekend here in town the other day (highlights: "over and away she goes", "lonesome pine", & "and now again"), here's all the at-one-time-commercially-available mice recordings, plus the track that sat on the scat records site for download at one time, "public television". this is NOT the scat release "for almost ever scooter", which you can still buy, and should (and while yer there pick up some other gems like the new first-ever vinyl issue of bill's debut alb' shelter from the smoke); these are direct rips from the US vinyl of their three records - and therefore it includes the debut 45 missing from the scat release and shares no sources with that kickass disc. in other words, you guys don't be afraid of some surface noise and griffin plz don't get on my case aboot it.

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V-3 - The Other Side Of Darkness

roxanne-era stuff that nudge released, i think. sorry no cover, i got it from the library. you probably can too.

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V-3 Radio on the Beyondo Mondo Record Party

got this from the dude who useta run v-3web in trade fer a burn of the evil twin. in which charles cicirella shows up at 91.3 the summit (akron/canton) to push the upcoming shep trib rec and they just play jim-related stuff and throw stories around fer the better part of an hour.

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Bill Shuster interview with Jim Shepard for Moo Magazine, spring 1996

exactly what it says. there are some glitches in the file - repetition, channel drop-outs - but i don't doubt that you folks who've made shep the most popular cat on this blog (and elsewhere) will dig it.

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RC Mob 'Spin The World'

as mentioned in the pica huss post, this is the first "local" tape i got, courtesy of the columbia house record & tape club (note: this file is ripped from that very same tape). the mob were perhaps even more legendary than pica huss amongst my small circle of friends prior to me visiting campus on any sort of a regular basis - they even played the newport and (supposedly) packed the joint! unfortunately, not much stuck for anyone outside 270 - they never got into heavy rotation on 120 minutes, and the toll probably did better on tour, which is a damned great shame 'cause they were that all-too-rare combo of silliness and professionalism, and they could play AND write a stinkin' tune or two. oh well. their bass player is like still famous sorta and, um, yeah. if you saw the devillain article on columbus recs, this one (along with the 'skulls & balls' coup!) got in there due to yours truly; in my not-so-humble opinion it's the only truly great record the mob made, tho' the earlier ones are certainly more along the lines of their live show and the next one after this poised 'em more fer alterna-nation superstardom.

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earnest - claustrophobia

the last earnest tape, and, like the earlier video 2, quite short (less than the normal 1/2 hour established on the first two anyway) & never really released to anyone except a coupla friends (and i dunno if that's even true in this case) so there's no real cover or anything. again, it's here due to persistent badgering on the part of kevin elliott.

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Beano

"they're inept, but that's their charm." (jerry wick, in a columbus monthly article in which we were voted "best new band" simply because they just went to used kids and asked who the best new band was and jerry was the only one who would talk to them and he had just seen us play the afternoon prior and thought we sounded like wire.)

so by popular demand (i.e. kevin elliott not remembering what we actually sounded like and hounding me), here's more beano than anyone should rightfully listen to in one sitting. it's missing a few things since either there were no recordings i could remember ("scrapmaster") or recordings i just couldn't find ("study hall") or recordings that were fucked up ("telly") or recordings nobody needs to hear ("carpet burns"), but seriously, you aren't gonna be begging for more or anything (although if you do i have a tape of our very last show, which took place in birmingham, alabama, in front of the promoter, two of his friends, the bartender, and the bartender's dog. that tour experience is chronicled in the final track in this file - also the final beano tune - "spencer rocks the universe" as well as the oddball matt tune from the uptighty whitey ep, "bluefield song").

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Kevyn & The Kasualties 'Lemmings'

lattice of coincidence update: a few weeks ago my housemate colin finds this tape in a walkman in a dumpster, and then ron house writes an overlooked in ohio column about 'em (about a diff rec, to be sure, but still), and then squidfish posts an essay-length comment on ron's piece where you can find a little more info about this tape. suffers in a sense from jeff graham's attempt to make everyone sound like the karma farmers, but whetever. dig it.

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Creeper Ohio 'Double Dwa' cassette

fairly early on, mike rep jumped on the creeper bandwagon and this tape surfaced soon after. contains two kickass 45s ("new hit single" and the super-limited paper-bagger of "scalding creek" b/w "little black egg") and a mess of other tracks, all way great & way fun. enjoy.

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Skull Bank

rep released this tape in a really small, private batch just after jim passed. side one is the "under a blood red lava lamp" tape (later on cd and probably you can get it at the library or something) with a song from the 1980 vertical slit ep tacked on, and side two is this - the only skull bank release that i know of (plus a track of jim and mike from 1983 at the end).

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not my favorite shit but it was within arms length and within crawling distance

a mixtape made by one mr. jim shepard for one mr. craig regala in 1996 ("1 copy of 1 - your move, china man," go the liners). i messed with the volume levels considerably to make this more worthwhile listening as something other than just a curiosity, 'cause it's really a killer tape. maybe most of the stuff on here is to be expected, but that doesn't make it any less great: live tapes of bands jim played alongside, released and unreleased stuff from a few different projects, some whacked-out jazz and a bunch of new zealand stuff (including the puddle!!)…this is just fucking excellent.

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Pica Huss cassette

when i was still stuck out in the suburbs and first hearing thirdhand about bands in columbus (and delaware), pica huss were already legends. the first comfest i attended - the last before it moved into goodale park proper - closed the night i went with pica huss and r.c. mob (who i had already heard since their tape was in the columbia house catalog!), and that was the first time i saw 'em. loopus - their singer - was in some ultra-skintight lime green bellbottom bellyshirt getup with tassels and they had these three old dudes playin' horns. gawd they were a monster: WAY fun and all the normals dug the shit out of 'em too. i suppose there are any zillion reasons a band doesn't "make it" to wherever making it is, but man did it seem like pica huss were destined for everything in those funk-driven early '90s.

this is a new rip from my copy of the cassette, not the cd gus gave me a few years back, if that's of interest to anyone.

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Knumskull

the econothugs' sorta-filthy, sorta-evil cousin (yet not without their own special brand of charm), knumskull played a few (hundred) of the weed- and black label-fueled nites at bernie's that have all melted together into a kind of over-humid, over-colorful blur of four or five sticky summers in my mind. if i start talking in depth about who from what band was also in x other band and all that crap i'm going to be here all year but it's worth mentioning that anne spurgeon, sister to the greenhorn spurgeons and quite the guitarist herself, was in this here combo.

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Econothugs singles

all the econothugs singles fit on one disc. twice. with room. i should mention that there are a BUNCH more 'thugs tunes here, along with tons of other stuff (mostly) recorded at the recording workshop in chillicothe by 'red hot scott' waters (singer of my white bread mom/spiderfriendz/gypsy witch).

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crap from the archives

this is the first time any of us saw gbv. went to see truman's water (at that time there was a big joke going on in the british press about how they sounded just like pavement) who were completely insane, throwing ashtrays back and forth with us while they played and basically bouncing off the ceiling and doing these a capella primalscream barbershop nonsense rounds inbetween songs and stuff, and these old dudes opened (seriously & sadly don't remember belreve playing, but maybe we got there late). they had these two other old dude fans who were the only people there but us, one of whom was wearing a hipsack (later i.d.'d as jimmy pollard & pete jamison, natch). nothing about their music stuck (it was bernie's, tho'), but like two days later my friend travis called me up and said, "remember those old dudes? i got their record and IT"S AWESOME." i laughed but later that day he brought over 'vampire on titus' & 'propeller' & we all lost our minds for a coupla years.



sorry fer the bad image quality, i stole it from some guy who was SELLING IT ON EBAY. riiiiiight. i was probably at this show. or probably not. hmm. i wanna know what song is referred to as "Let's Active."