Bob Starker

one day i was perusing the alive or the guardian or something and i saw a businesscard-sized ad that said call bob about starting a band which was illustrated just like the cover o' this here rec, so havin' fallen in deep lust with the skronk eminatin' from them grooves awhile prior (friend in va. befriended andy from swirlies and hipped me to them soon after/swirlies lumped into+onto their friend morgan's label+genre CHIMP/bob put record out on chimp/i ordered it) i thot lo' it can't be cannit? 'course it was i found out - bob having then-recently relocated to here from there (MA) - after ringin' him up and tho' we neverstarted a band or anything we chatted for an hour or three and have remained well-acquainted ever since. you should be aware of bob's musical exploits since he's been 'round these parts (short story: sovines/whoa nellie!/wildrock goto saxman EXTRAORDINAIRE) but HEY! if'n ya don't have this rec' yer missin' th' sweetest spot. perfection like this comes along oh only ten or twelve times in any idiot's wax stax. i can't bother explaining what these seven titles soun'like so jus' download it sorry ever'body else IT'S THE BEST RECORD THAT WILL EVER BE ON THIS BLARG.

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Dogrocket

well i've been putting this one off for awhile b/c
1) it's all on cassette and running casstettes into th' computer is something i hafta be inna fairly specific mood for, like say totally sick and laying around reading the (7th)last samurai again and
2) i had it in my head that i NEEDED to scan all the dogrocket newsletters in and post them as pdfs concurrently with th' music
but when i realized i could just do that later and i realized that i was totally sick just laying around reading the (7th)last samurai again i thought hey it's probably high time i did that dogrocket post.
so.
one day i was sorta skating with my friend sonny and sorta having one of those hearttoheart conversations one tended to have with sonny when he mentioned that hey that evening he'd promised some friends he'd go see their new band at stache's and would i wanna come along. well it was getting along past one of those wonderful late summer sunsets and the parking lot we were in outside the mall where windbreakers useta be wasn't getting to be any better of a skate spot so i said sure let's go to that show what the hey. tho' it's interesting to no one, the fact is that this was the first time i had gone to stache's to see a local band. i don't know if i really believed in local bands. i had tried to have a couple and we played at houses or nowhere and i had heard rc mob and pica huss and seen basement underground too many times in garages and earwig in storefronts and everything but still it was awhile (well ok not a long while) before i saw greenhorn and it all came together for me. so we went to the thing and his friends were in broadcaster the band eric had before tiara that had brett who runs spoonful in it and matt duckworth maybe the best guitar player this town has ever seen and brian freshour who is in the top 3 just plain nicest guys i have ever met who also can-not seem to have a bass sound anything but way rad. [inhale] so they went on and man did they have it together and i thought HOLY SHIT there are other dudes who are trying to make the same musick i am listening to and trying to make as well which at the time was like a whole bunch of my bloody valentine and a smattering of the wackjob original pavement drummer's drumming and a lot of my own naïveté and retardation of course so that was an eye-opener and here i am still reeling from that and the perfect late-summer evening that feeling that is just teetering on the edge between two EQUALLY GREAT things but somehow it maintains and then dogrocket go on and i'm just blown away again.

i should stop to explain something here:
i had some friends in highschool who did not believe in anything but bob mould. and although i did not share their perspective (i like him fine), well what with hanging around with them and especially knowing that there were OLDER BROTHERS who were even more cultishly convinced made it into some arcane construct that i could not fuck with tho' i was not - as mentioned - chosen. it was a background hard truth to me that there was something about bob mould which i was never going to understand but which i should probably in some way feel a little less whole for not understanding.

anyhow - dogrocket being possibly the greatest of all the mid90s hüsker dü worshippers (overwhelming colorfast, arcwelder, &c. - who the aforementioned cult oddly not only accepted but pretty much universally revered, kindred souls i guess) my first thought was hey i hafta report back about this! but then i just fell into loving them all by my own self. this may seem runofthemill when you consider the degree to which their love of cheap trick parallels their love of bob/grant/greg and therefore warps their mpls angst blasts into something entirely more muscular and CHUNKED FULL of unabashed pop wizardry (not to mention childhoods obsvly sat in front of th' AM receiver sapping up th' sappy sounds and fostering an infatuation with th' sentimental side of th' radio dial), but there are a couple things here that roll against that assumption: dogrocket were not that easy to love. for starters there were a whole lotta shorts onstage. and tanktops. whoo. turquoise and white, even. no matter the time of year. and injokes. man were they all about the injokes. but hey, so was my band, so what could i really say against that (except that it was hard to feel like you were part of something that kept making it abundantly clear that you were not). but hey a band's gotta entertain themselves, first and foremost - and if we have anything to be thankful for in this town it's a take-me-as-i-am attitude from our entertainers when they climb onstage and dogrocket spent so little time up there NOT KICKING ASS that you didn't have any time to worry about it anyways. but i digress.

dogrocket remains one of my very favorite col's bands even tho' some day in 1997 or so they got a different bass player and when they lost their office temp jobs they stopped making that newsletter (which i really will scan soon ok). later they went on to be in other bands, SOME OF WHOM ARE/WILL BE *FEATURED* ON THIS HERE BLARG!

this file has three of their cassette eps and the rest of the tracks they did at thornapple while recording the third tape, 'blown' (which has absolutely no hidden tracks on it if you can believe that). the michelle era, if you will.

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myspace

there is an ishkabibble one.
that is all.

go to it

Thunderbird

jason from preston furman/grafton/bygones/&c came over one day with his wonderful wife joyce and this tape and we spoke of books and made a cd of the tape and they left. that tape and this here download are of course jason's solo project, recorded sometime prior to a coupla years ago.

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Swivelarm Battlegrip tapes

onetime when we useta get th' vinyl ink catalog they had written that kill sybil sounded like mbv (or at least, enough) and n.c. ordered th' record which is ok but i got another of their seveninchers awhile back and it hasn't stood too well which is beside the point cuz even if it had they don't hold one candle up to th' swivelarms here. my memory isn't what it once was (i don't even remember what it once was as shirt-tail has said) but one thing i do remember having seen these dudes/dudelady more than way too many times in those mid90s is bill just minding his own business rocking the absolute snot out of the bass there and then BAM! flying across the stage and landing in that "hey guys take a knee" stance and ruling it, ear dead inside th' monitor for the rest of whatever song - i mean it could happen ANYTIME, not when you'd expect it fer shirley BAM! loved it. what i did not remember was how gosh-damned SATURATED eric's guitar is, it's fucking MASSIVE, futbol fans, and val's enuff of her own singer that she don't get too bogged down inna riot grrl thing and therefore hers isn't as dated a wail as some o'those ladies' in teh retrospect. one doesn't hafta ask around too much to git at th' fact that i've long been known to admire benco's drumming idears so rilly i kinda been havin' a blast lissenin' to these tapes today and well i say you should too.

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Soups & Sauces

gigantic thankyou to colin for being the first (of many, hopefully) guest blather contributor:

Summer camp is among those liminal experiences that are fundamentally about being in some moment or other but are often of greater consequence to broader life trajectories than anyone involved could anticipate. Me, I met a Gahanna-Lincoln high schooler named Justin Coons, we talked politics on the phone FOR HOURS and went on a hot date to the Ross Perot campaign stop at the Nationwide Hilton. Justin introduced me to his schoolmate/bandmate friend Jim Graham, c/o 1992 (now a professor of psychology at WWU). Their band, Soul Kitchen (only zine review I ever read of their demo tape suggested that 'Devoid of Soul' was a more fitting name), was one of the Gahanna+Westerville high school bands I'd go see at metro park gazebos and VFW halls, with the occasional Apollo's show. I think their singer died of autoerotic asphyxiation, plus we were listening to lots of ska and made pilgrimages to Chicago for the JumpUp! fests. We spent a lot of time in cars and 24-hr restaurants and were among the cohorts of 90s high schoolers who annoyed the hell out of older Stache's patrons and staff, worshipping Ishkabibble and The Repairmen and standing outside shivering when less sympathetic sentries worked the door. 1991-92.

Jim met Lizard (then Tod) McGee at a wedding and when we weren't breaking into the remains of Cinema East or the Ohio Penitentiary the younger among us spent out time being fans of Earwig and getting better acquainted with bands like Greenhorn, Ugly Stick, Girly Machine (in retrospect those having less to do with each other than the schema we developed would suggest) -- having a guide a few years older was invaluable. Lizard had Lizard Family Music and a garage studio in his Whitehall home rivaling anything we'd heretothen experienced on a personal visit. To us, separate mixer & tape machine + control room glass = pro.

Through frequent-enough exposure to Stache's plus Shave the Baby and the Eardrop comps, we figured out some other stuff to listen to, and the idea of a Columbus V/A wasn't out of the question. All HS: Preston Furman at CAHS, Parsnip at Fort Hayes + UA, Mindchild at Westerville, Liquid Circus at Gahanna, and Enlargements/Boners admittedly from a less coherent background.

Right. So, Jim got some money (he was the one with a job) and Why Not Make a Comp w/ Aforementioned Money? Lizard McGee recorded Parsnip and the Boners, Preston Furman gave us a tape, Mindchild recorded at Thornapple, and the Enlargements borrowed a 4-track we didn't really know how to use. I think Lizard plugged tracks together and gave us a DAT that we took to Rome Recording, A Christian Recording Studio, in Obetz. Apparently some poor guy had to ride faders through that entire tape to get the noise reduction right -- I still feel a little guilty about that. J-cards at Kinko's, I think, maybe using the copycards that replaced $US as currency for awhile. It came with a zine with features on lockpicking and teenage-quality (at best) rants: cf veganism and what the fuck's up with society?. I think maybe Jim went to college before this was out, so we worked on it when we were both in town. I think we made 300, and we never bothered to see whether we were making our money back.

Without much in common musically and not much reason for social cohesion, there wasn't much thrust on any band's part to promote it or make anyone do it again. College helped the organic sorting into scenes without high school as the fundamental geographic delimiter, and group identity became more a consequece of where one chose to spend time than where one was required to spend it. Even humble events can reveal broad themes.

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Parsnip

well as with lots and lotsa bands from the blast from the past you've probably heard of/from one or some of the dudes/dudeladies since and of course with parsnip here that is no exception it's a wellknown FACT that one ramble john krohn played the guitar in this here combo and if you don't know who that is you better ask somebody ok. parsnip were a BLISTERINGLY GREAT live band i mean good lord mindblowing fer serious but this single isn't all that good (at least i think that every time i listen to it and it ain't all that much) and the soups & sauces (v.soon!) tracks are meh inna diff way but you can argue that amongst yerselves now that i've gone and put this on th' innernet. my copy is cracked which will be apparent tho' it plays thru fine but still if you wanna buy it lemme know.

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Lost My Uncle Wayne, 1998

it occurs to me we have something* akin to cryogenics like as far as (shit) musicks are concerned 'cause i think a lot of the problem there is getitoutgetitoutgetitout whether it's because you wanna move on or you wanna sell it or what it doesn't matter but really i think so many of us can agree that we'd like or at least we'd have liked things to happen sooner not later even where our creativity is concerned and like even if we have one or two or five day job(s) but hey it's probably not gonna happen anyway (amirite?) (?) so let's maybe stop with that there. this *=the ability we have to make something and just let it sit there and i don't mean finish it and sit on it not release it i mean just make it, write it down very notatedly or even better put it on a multitrack something or other and wait, oh eight or twelve years and then see what kinds of toys you can rustle up or maybe even just have sitting in your room by the later date when you've totally forgotten about what it sounds like or why and how you did it and just make it a real thing again, let it live and breathe and amaze you and it's easy esp. if it's all on tape already to not be too precious about it 'cause really the amazing thing is that it's there at all and then of course it's taken on this whole life of its own - revealing things you did and choices you made all those years ago so that without any extra effort those things are going to be there no matter what you do (in the case of a multitrack tape here we're saying it doesn't matter all that much what fiddly effects you mess with or how high the levels are or are not) which is always true but it's just that here with this kind of deal you FUCKING REALIZE THAT where with something yer like in the midst of all caught up in you worry that your great concept might not get across and you mix 37 times and you worry that your statement will be lost and your genius will be unsung and you will die in obscurity but with this old crappe obviously you are still here and there's such a sweetness to the whole endeavor.

anyhow i think i had a point and if so that point was that it would probably befit us to wait until there's a cure for the sickness sometimes. maybe all the time. i mean we've been trying to release the music of the future for so long (even if it's based in musics of the past) it might be nice to do it the wrong way 'round.

there were two rough mixdown cassettes of this my uncle wayne stuff from 1998 or so and i lost mine and davey lost his and i thought the reel was lost but it turns out when someone spilled coffee all over some tapes once i put it in a diff box and didn't label it and didn't find that to be true until last year. i mixed it again this morning and even though there is a lot of snot in my head i think it sounds real good and i am very happy to put it here for you. photo above is of the one and only real uncle wayne.

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badoobadarber

well i got a cease and desist for the gaunt post. at least i think i did. no info is available anywhere the blogger ppl are telling me to look. feel free to guess whether it's hazelmayer, bettina, or those warner doods who couldn't sell all those cutout vinyl copies of bricks & blackouts who's being bitter aboot it. y'know whoever it was coulda just made a fucking comment. GROSS.

EDIT: reposted

Ass Ponys - Mr. Superlove

dunno what needs to be said about these guys/this rec (TAPE) - as nec. as scrawl, prolly, as far as oh musicks go, and just as unavoidably original as those gals (and later guys) in of course their own bizarro way. takes probably everything you'd wanta know about "americana" (proto-, right?) (i mean, like, divine horsemen or something) in teh '80s and ridiculizes (everyother take)/legitimizes (their version) (natch) it in the most DEAD-SERIOUS way imaginable - where later (watch these skies) they trafficked in something akin to novelty numbers on their catchiest material here even the most silly stuff (opener "hey swifty") can be pretty fucking harrowing er scary depending on what hole yer looking up out of/down into at the time. fun and lean and important, all at the same time - the modern-day (yes the late '80s are the modern day) equivalent of the carter family as far as entertainment goes - and had the mass marketability of the cult of entertainment in america not gone FUCKING CRAZY between those two's respective eras i'm POSITIVE they'd be heralded as such.

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HOT PURSUIT

DOUBLEFUCK this record. i can't even BELIEVE what i do for you people.

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Snapshot

kinda excellent rick springfield-era (1984) radio pop with enuff power innit to align it favorably if not quite with "goodbye to you" then at least with that great holly penfield rec. songs are short blasts with diff fleeting & transparent reference points under the hooks - beat street hiphop, footloose-style antheming, those huey lewis-esque new wavers that weird al ripped off for his originals circa 1983… man do they lay on the FEATURING JULIE IVORY schtick heavy tho', i mean the "write to " addy is th' JULIE IVORY FANCLUB, whatever, shoulda scanned th' back sleeve so you could see them betwixt-th'-waist-an'-knees (front et rear) shots of julie's red jeans too. evidently she was some kinda local celebrity with some kinda boobtube mag on channel ten, whatever - if you know more and feel like commenting aboot it i'll read it and not feel bad. interestingly (or not) she's still here and sangin' up a storm in TWO copybands. you look 'em up.

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Great Plains - Cornflakes

udds & suds companion piece to th' career-spanning double-disc length of growth set, chockfull o' charmers incl. rockband version of ron house staple "five o'clock" that i didn't know existed till one them wyatt's shoved a copy of this disc down my pants. nowhere is a bad place to start as far as great plains are concerned so if you haven't started yet do it here and if you have well go ahead and start over, it's never too late.

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The Bassholes Make A Record For Matador

TRUE.

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Anna Ranger

nowadays people are prolly lazy and underinformed (mildly) enuff to just say nathan is like perhaps a stephen merritt fan but every time i see him play it just sounds to my ears like he's fucking channelled pretty much my exact experience of being alive in 1988: it's a morrissey/new order fest fer surely but it's so much more than that; ripping shit off is one thang and it fer shirley can be fine but got-damn if it isn't something else entirely to conjure a coupla groops yet be completely ON THEIR LEVEL and conjure an era without being the least bit anything but right-fucking-now. this tape's new but who cares, it's effin' timeless.

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MONSTERTRUCKFIVE

about the same time i was putting together the gaunt…but not forgotten comp and amassing greenhorn cassettes some dude was doing these cdrs called please don't sue me or something - real nice and all but i don't mind kicking his ass with more and better shit so here's the mt5 version, fuck that guy (j/k, luv ya!).

gimme five 10"
columbus, ohio
dry leaves hot wire
singles and comp tracks
breaker

Human Sufferage

so two new year's days ago i was living with bumbico and we met up with gary and whoever down at the dube and then it seemed like a good idea to buy a bunch of whip-its and head back home…eventually there was a nice little party goin' with entertainment consisting basically of those whip-its and leftover champagne or fresh beers and someone spilling something on the floor every twenty minutes to a rousing chorus of "sham-wow! sham-wow!" since we had gotten a box of them for xmas and also me playing some records, these two included - mainly for lutzko. sometimes you just gotta lay a history trip on a motherfucker. so in tribute to the anniversary of that heartwarming soirée and ALSO to lutzko's brand-spankin'-new wwf-style feud with certain members of the washington beach bums (is he th' ted dibiase of col's??), here's a lesson in how to make fucking punk rock in oh, circa 1983-4.

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