Offbeats 'Dumb Looks Still Free' Vinyl

offbeats were in th first generation of goofball speedcore thrash pop in th US - perhaps th finest non-genre of musick ever to bounce around vfw hall walls. on th strength of manifestos like 'our immediate goal is to buy some more beer', offbeats were snatched up late in th game by relativity in order to function as that label's very own replacements clones. it did not work and th US sank further into th great depression. before that, tho, they recorded a bunch of stuff they lost th masters to and then way later they dubbed their cassettes onto this record. latter-day member doug enkler went on to form prisonshake with griffin from spike in vain. read up, kiddies: clepunk article

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Guided By Voices 'Crying Your Knife Away'

sleeve notes:

Bela Koe-Krompecher's 26th birthday party at Stache's in Columbus, Ohio, June 18, 1994. The party actually started at 3:00pm in Bela's backyard. Kegs were flowing and Pete Jamison manned the grill while Bela's grandmother (beer in hand) presided over the whole affair from a La-Z Boy in the middle of the yard. Records were traded, lies were told, and perception was severely impaired. Around 10:00pm the party went mobile, stumbling a few blocks away to Stache's. The drink of choice was Rolling Rock, and before GbV took the stage at least one band member caught a nap.

recorded, edited and mastered by Dave Doughman
house engineer Tera Stockdale
all songs copyright Needmore Songs (BMI) except last song (not from same show) by The Breeders, copyright Period Music

[note: this is ripped from th original vinyl - green & yellow wax]

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FENSTER

fairly mersh, nicely orchestrated third wave ska. some distorto guitars but not so much punk to it. some melodic nods to th green day side of things on tracks like "fly as chuck" and some nice '70s jazz-funk type stuff on th following track, "pride and a pack of smokes". i'm sure th lyrics are fine but they might even suffer from a lack of th puns so many later ska bands live(d) on. a huge slice of a notable corner of late-'90s col's for ya here, with members of trigga happy and burlap sun guesting on th aforementioned tracks.

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The Staggers Will Make Hundreds

when i mentioned th pillowbiters' misogynistic streak i mentioned th staggers' even BIGGER one, simply because their other lp ('the staggers are dead, long live the staggers') is - seriously, here - th ONLY lp that has ever actually disgusted me. for some reason this one doesn't make me feel fucking filthy (no pun) when i throw it on. that may bum them out, but i'm not exactly sorry about it. of course they'll never top th wicked comp track "hell" (which they evidently despise), but this is some hella decent sub-amrep scuzz. members of classical ass, whose kickass lp i'll dig out & post one o' these days.

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Anna Ranger 'Dolphin Blue' EP

three fucking stellar tracks from recent full-band sesh, check it out. not downloadable (who knows why, but i'm sure you can figure something out if that bugs ya). full lp to come this fall.

http://annaranger.bandcamp.com/

Jim Shepard & Charles Cicirella 'The Dispossessed'

This entire session was recorded as you hear it - no planning or disgusting egos intervening. I came in from Cleveland, Jim already had music laid down (except for typewriter, acoustic guitar, violin, and aerosol can which were all laid down live and this includes dead traffic you hear throughout recording). I listened through headphones while reading poetry that in a large part was written either that day or previous afternoon. This CD is released as an honest & quite sublime testament to Jim's diverse artistic nature/temperament & how when the chemistry is good & stinking, like an over satiated sun, anything can and does occur. Jim and I were and still very much are caterpillar astronauts and I'll miss being his friend and foil FOREVER… ONWARD FORWARD INFINITE
Charles Eric Cicirella

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Tree Of Snakes 'Beheaded' + "I Am A Lion"

'nuf said! (except that this file also includes th four songs from th "i am a lion" 45!)

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Frostiva 'Ochnomos'

my first encounter with frostiva was when they were already broken up but some of 'em were called rabbit and they got a song on an alive comp, so forgive me if i completely missed th boat. this disc knows what it's doing and clocks in at th perfect 26 minutes, tho' with six songs ya gotta wonder what th ladies are doin' rilly, i mean 15 songs/26 mins, sure, one song/26 mins, sure, but six/26? hm. well i can tell ya what they're doin' in fact is darkly jammin' around with some smooth and sinister harold faltermeyer synths they hint at with th first tune ("la magia verde") but there they are knee-deep in track three ("zero hour") after begging ya to notice in track two ("paramount impostor"). kind of a siouxsie-without-a-budgie vibe in some ways, or a magneta-lane-without-th-pop-songcraft. fourth tune ("eros") is straight in with a throwing muses approximation that almost immediately gives way to something that coulda been on th fourth or fifth lush lp. certainly a post-shoegaze vibe that carries over into th fifth track ("pathos") but th kind of shoegaze vibe that's aware that lush covered zounds on a single, and isn't afeared of borderline prog/math arrangements and that kristen hersh warble. this sounds more cle that col's even down to th post-industrialisms (lestat, i mean) of th final number ("suspiria" - complete with those goblin synth-swathes). more than anything tho' i'm thinking they were a VERY indie heartthrobs which makes sense i guess i mean they shoulda had a tune in th end credits of th l-word too. i think they're pretty much back together or at least were as behind you with knives (possibly th best kitchen reference band name ever).

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Human Boys

human boys have a lot in common with ipps for sounding exactly dick like them: they play shows slim-to-no times a year; their tapes, tho' killer, pale extremely seriously in th face of those rare live shows; and they're in th tippity-topmost percentile of insanely great bands to ever aimlessly wander col's streets. th first of th two cassettes here compiled finds h.b. in a similar setup across th tracks, with one of 'em on drums, one of 'em on vocals (predominantly positively SPAT across whatever room they were in), and one' of em (i should mention there's only two of 'em) on grinding, distorted keyboards; th second tape obfuscates this arrangement (if indeed it's employed) with jackhammered samples and an even-more boombox-esque recording quality, but weaving thru th bilge is some of th most aggressively inventive aand necessary musick this side of th suicide, throbbing gristle, & this heat records that it belongs in league with.

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Superstar Rookie // Early Empire

roughly 150,000 years ago i was talking to kevin from 84 nash and he mentioned that they (of consistent drummer woes up to that time) were almost positive they were gonna hire this dude dan i'd never met and would i like to go "check out" his band even though he played guitar in it? yeah, sure, ok, sez i, so we go to th then-newly-reopened northberg tavern (aka basement of donato's) and see superstar rookie play. i left afterward pretty jazzed aboot it cuz they were doing a sort of jawbreaker thing that was a lotta fun and (i know it seems impossible to believe) no one else was mining th same territory, so (for that as well as myriad musical reasons) it seemed damned fresh. after meeting those dudes my old band (don't ask) played with them many a time and they at one point dragged me to this funky, failing bar/grill they said they were gonna turn into a rock club by badgering th weirdo old dude there who would nuke you a hotdog for 75¢ (which they did, that place is our beloved bobo) and then of course after awhile they broke up like everybody does. dan (bandman) did indeed play with and eventually quit 84 nash and started the handshake and is now back drumming in kyle sowashes and for awhile a coupla th other rookie guys (travis & cop) had a band called early empire (with another handshake guy - joel walter, who also plays with kyle sowash now, but in his other band, animal cubes - as it happens), whose ep i am so nice as to include in this file here available as well. listening to th 'problem with words' disc after digging it out from oblivion a few months ago, i was pleased as PUNCH to note how well it's holdin' up. i ended up playing it three times at th bar that nite and no one bitched.

early empire are maybe a bit more "serious" - with some uncomfortable nods (probably inadvertent) toward th crummy butt-rock side of 'emotion' so prevalent in th late '90s (and still) - but it's good to hear th dudes let go on some of th mid-song passages and fast bits. their love for intertwine-y treepeople guitar figures really shines on "january one" - probably th most rookie-like of th songs on their disc - and their abiility to write sunny day-style stuff without completely ripping them off quite maybe inspired a little jealousy from th rookie's recordist jon chinn. (file includes th aforementioned 'the problem with words' cd & early empire ep - 'resolutions and a gun' - as well as superstar rookie's way-great debut 45 on diaphragm.)

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16 Bitch Pile-Up

sarah bernat was in town last last wknd (at least) & talkin' to her briefly at th bar reminded me that i'd found a few instances of their tapes &c being available to dl but hadn't mentioned that on this here blarg yet. as with all (sure) groops that get lumped in with their peers, 16 bitch are about as different from sword heaven as they are from rc mob, but their recordings are of such a consistently high quality that i wouldn't hesitate to mention them in th same breath with not only s.h. but mb, pengo, sightings, &c. if you actually downloaded th magician killer record (if not well DO IT NOW), dug it, & haven't heard these ladies, fucking pucker up. they released appr. 7000 records; here's four. thanks to not noise music and the static fanatic for these.

b.f.f.
lord hall
make like a fetus and abort (with mike shiflet)
ADAD

Tom Foolery & The Mistakes

before there was them kyle sowashes there was tom foolery and the mistakes and if you like th latter you'll like th former and fer shirley vice-a versa. once i seen em open for duvall in dayton. like you care.

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The Bygones 'Circles'

the bygones' first proper album-length release here, and tho' i prefer th two sessions prior (one released on cdr with a sleeve photo depicting much desk clutter and milwaukee's best and th other - th debut of "burgundy eyes" - simply a lost demo; i have since lost my copies of both of these), that doesn't mean this isn't a fuckin spectacular disc. every song on here is a classic and if anybody gave two sh*ts aboot th first wallflowers record i'd say this one deserves to be right up there alongside it. as it is, it is - but in th $3 bin (great things come from there). sigh.

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Dirty Mouth

dirty mouth is in a lotta ways easily th best band in col's right now (even if it's simply because i can't think of one other band that's actually any fun*). their songs are all super good, they don't get bogged down in their politics, and they even have a good time scorching th shit out of a nirvana cover. all you Serious Punx™ take note: this is how it's done.

new demo

first demo for free on bandcamp

*except hookers made out of cocaine, who are also fucking amazing.

Gut Piston 45

same time i grabbed th recently-posted gut piston demo from '92 i got this 45 on eardrop from '95 - kind of a banner year in col's rock'n'scuzz and this here seven-incher belongs right up there on th short list of th era's TOP HITZ.

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The Embarrassment Vinyl & Tapes

well mebbe this'll be aboot as far-out - distance-wise - as we'll ever get here at mtf, but who knows. we can of course do WHATEVER WE WANT. but in any case for a whole messa reasons an embos post isn't th most insane thing for a mostly-col's, ohio blog: they was good friends (and after-th-fact labelmates) with our own great plains, a coupla th songs on their 'retrospective' cassette were taped in oh (at mr. brown's and the jockey club, tho' i've heard some o' that liner info is errant), and th ass ponys, bein' giganto fans, even covered their way-perfect "two week vacation" (a song that inspired me to declare th embos my numero uno fave-rave heroes even tho' it was YEARS before i even managed to track down another track. erm.), for three. plusly nobody ever seems to look at our sister-(non-oh)-blog terminal '75 anyhow, so i figure in th interest of anyone at all seein' this i oughta put it here.

lest ye think me/us completely without purpose allow me to explain th very grand purposefulality of this here post. so, despite th fact that th embos are TH BEST BAND OF EVERTIMES, their recorded history has been documented, actually. (i know. quelle surprise!) BUT, this documentation (thankful as i am for it) hasn't been without its flaws. chief among these over/undersights is th fact that their big ol' double-disc history lesson ('heyday'), apart from being allowed to lapse out of print (shame!), was saddled with th crispest, leanest, wackiest remixing/remastering ever to grace th hallowed halls of my late and so sorely not-missed old portable cd player. but since th first disc of that set is made up basically of 94.3% of th material off their originally-released-on-vinyl output, here i've made a file of those original needle-drops*. however, where they inserted th KILLER "two cars" (also available on th 'retro' tape, wait for it) i've included instead th never-ever available otherwise studio version of "pushin' too hard" from th first 'battle of the garages' comp.

second file here is my original transfer of th 'retrospective' cassette, plus "sound of wasps" directly from th subpop 7 cassette. lotsa these tunes ended up on 'heyday' (and some were even these versions. i think.), but in my not-so-humble opinion this one squash them like grape. you know.

should th citizens of yon blogosphere rattle their prison chains loudly enough (and th embos camp don' protest) perhaps i could be conned into posting some of th next-level rarities i have around and/or a smattering of live sets (and even mebbe disc two of 'heyday' and th 'blister pop' comp).

vinyl
tapes

*first single ripped from 2011 test press edition (small hole) reissue on last laugh; 'embarrassment ep' ripped from first side of 1987 issue 'embarrassment lp'.

UPDATE!! from mr. adam smith of columbus discount recording and many fab combos (necropolis, unholy 2) around these parts comes - esp for an embos geek of my, uh, high order - nothing short of a total revelation via donewaiting:

I did the restoration work on the master tapes for the sex drive reissue that came out on last laugh. I'm currently doing the restoration on the master for the S/T ep. The masters for these records sound fantastic. Tons of bass. So, that got me thinking about the bad sound quality on the heyday stuff, the "crispest, leanest, wackiest remixing/remastering ever to grace th hallowed halls of my late and so sorely not-missed old portable cd player" You're totally right, that stuff sounds like garbage. The difference between the half track masters and the heyday cd is just too drastic for a bad mastering job to make sense. I've got to think that no mastering engineer in his right mind would mess up a track that bad. So, my current hypothesis on the bad master on heyday is that it wasn't a bad master at all, instead, the master tape to digital transfer was done incorrectly. All of the embos masters that were done at Fort Apache, even the live in studio stuff, was mixed through a Dolby A noise reduction unit. Those Dolby A units were about $2000 per stereo unit in their day, so they aren't all that easy to come by now. It took me a couple of weeks to track one down to do the Sex Drive job. I suspect that when the transfers from the master tapes were done for heyday, they weren't decoded using a Dolby A unit, instead they were just put on a 1/4" tape deck and run into whatever digital unit the transfer guy had. To experiment, I threw the S/T E.P. masters on my MCI 1/4" deck, set it up to the tones on the tape and didn't decode the playback w/ Dolby A. Bam!, all thin and crispy. Dolby A in, a beautiful mix that kinda sounds like a Thin Lizzy record.

so there ya have it, a doublemajor mystery solved!!

them guys boardin' again?

thought i'd better get a photo of this rad mark heintzman reish on assault skates before i wear th ohio completely off th ketchup bottle. mark won th nsa amateur championship held at th ohio state fair th year i moved back here (still th only contest i've ever attended). they even had it on th news (with "you're beat" by m.o.d. playing in th background! who pulled that one off??). his part in th g&s vid 'footage' rips and th last thing he does is hit a ledge (now unskatable due to a buncha stupid crap being glued to it to deter shreddage) in downtown col's. this board rules and so does mark. cheers.

GbV 'Crying Yr Knife Away' REMASTER

so th incredible (and incredibly driven) (no pun intended) mr. analog loyalist over at the power of independent trucking blog has applied his usual whupass remastering service to this classic-era-defining live set. not a thing needs to be said to recommend that you download this asap but lemme say two things: i remember (barely) walking from bela's to stache's that day (rolling rock in hand) as detailed in th liner notes and th guy you hear constantly yelling "bobby!" from th audience is th one & only travis f., who th gbv dudes just fucking couldn't get enough of. i'll have travis's phony phone call tape from around this time posted here shortly…

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Black Horse and Other Strange Stories, Jason A. Wyckoff

so i run into pat dull at th laughing ogre (turns out he has a conan fixation) th other day an' while shooting yon proverbial SHIZ he mentions that jake from clay & flipping hades wrote a book and that while he bought it cuz hey he knows th guy when he started reading it he found it very quickly to be VERY FUCKING GOOD and in fact he was carrying it around right there that very day. so i sez hey i think i heard Q (manytime bandmate of jake's) say something aboot that th other nite, i'll check it out. an' i did, ordered it just that very week from jake himself and while it wasn't cheap (only 300 printed, top quality, in th UK no less) it turns out that it is REALLY FUCKING GOOD, i mean stellar, in my top five short stories books (an' i fucking LOVE short stories books) with a bullet (

TOP FIVE BOOKS OF SHORT STORIES

• Honeymoon and Other Stories, Kevin Canty
• Magic For Beginners, Kelly Link
• Wall Of The Sky/Wall Of The Eye, Jonathan Lethem
• Strange Wine, Harlan Ellison
• this here tome of which we speak

) fer shirley! if yr wondering what makes this one tick well yr first three guesses (autobio, jokes, rock) would be way off th (proverbial, again) mark since jake has crafted a creepy compendium (that's alliteration, babe) of - you guessed it - strange tales, which would be not out of place converted to comic form in th pages of a (hurry up an' do it) revamped 'weird fantasy' book. jake's gotta little lovecraft an' a little king to his step, without sounding at all like either, an' if he indeed made a list of all th' stock tales (sasquatch, vampires, death-ballads-come-true, &c.) he could turn on their fucking heads beforehand, i wouldn't be surprised, tho' right from th ease-em-in start he's treading territory entirely his own. i can't recommend this book highly enuff (ok mebbe i can) - nevermind th price tag, you will not be anything but blown away.

available from jake (best for US orders)

available from his publisher (best for UK orders)

Greenlawn Abbey

there's a line in a gaunt song that goes "i just want to listen to the shoes" and i can tell ya for a fact that jerry wasn't lying when he said that but methinks perhaps our friends in greenlawn abbey took that one step farther and ONLY listened to the shoes. tony's voice is a dead ringer for a murphy brother and the same pre-cars powerpop sensibilities are there, tho' greenlawn out-rocks shoes about 5-to-1 here with some serious cheap trick-isms all over these two discs. savvy listeners will also no doubt recognize - despite all attempts at anachronism on th part of th band - that this is music written post-"everything flows"; above th wham/bam recording approach and th one-two-and-we're-off-again arrangements, compositionally these tunes are on a par with the posies and are most probably better than anything velvet crush ever eked out (tho' as a hearty not-fan, i haven't listened to them in many a season) - and in all honesty th disregard for perfection (esp. on their first disc) lays bare an action-rock aesthetic that a lotta powerpoopers sadly eschew in favor of dullsville late-zombies perfectionism. greenlawn also have a fucking ace-in-the-hole in bassplayer matt davey and his rare-yet-always-wicked minor key good-sebadoh-meets-evil-treepeople ravers.

these days th three original dudes sometimes show up backing chris burney as dead indians, but are evidently completely tired of playing their own tunes anymore.

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Kevyn And The Kasualties

Kevyn and the Kasualties‘ first LP is ambivalent even before you put it on: one side is labeled “Punk?” and the other is “Pop?” Pathology on vinyl is always better with a crack rhythm section and Kevyn had Nudge Squidfish and Rudy Krash n Burn (not real names heh heh). They went on to form V3 after this release which shows that at least Jim Shepard was listening to this confused, heartrending, and ass-kicking LP. Like more than a few post-punkers in the mid-eighties, Kevyn was torn between Hardcore’s demand for manly toughness and Alternative’s feeble plea for originality. Four songs on the punk side are disquisitions on his aesthetics; as he sings in-the-pocket punk in his nasally midwest Johnny Thunders style all he can sing about is punk. Injustice for Kevyn struck home only where his music was. “Let’s Kill R-N-R.” “Screw FM.” For a man determined to be “Drunk Loud and Obnoxious” there is something almost polite and modest in his ambitions.

He opens up more on the “Pop?” side where Nudge especially helps him forge a powerful pop punk mini opera. (Gary Reeve produced it and avoids the common reverby pitfalls of the era.) All the songs focus on love and feature crackerjack arrangements that are minimally but tastefully abetted by organ and wah-wah. On the “Holy Trinity” he might overextend and leave us Protestants glad we got we rid of that shit but even that song has an assurance lacking in Kevyn’s next, less overlooked album on Okra.

-Ron House

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Nocturna 'Periwinkle' + 'Stardust' EP

i know, i know, i've been bagging on high schoolers and college students pretty ruthlessly lately, but man, i don't have a fucking plan for this crap. i get a big pile of tapes and shit there and sometimes i just start running em in, barely knowing what to expect. it ain't my fault all this garbage coalesced in front of my stereo this time.

anyhow, if you were wondering what th type of kids (namely carlos avendaño, later of flotation walls) who woulda started arcade fire (no i still don't know what they sound like, just that there are a lot of them) ripoff bands had it been 2010 were doing in th mid-'90s, well OF COURSE they were ripping off th most over-over-overwrought pseudo-orchestral smashing pumpkins melodrama. and yes, it's chockfull of KILLER lines like "all the pain that comes with you" and "this is who i am" and shit (fave: "some things we find by losing").

what puzzles me MOST about this stuff (and yes, many things about it puzzle me, including th brain-fucklering fact that these tapes were recorded at schwab and ultrasuede - not cheap studios - while everybody else was bugging out on th fact that 8 track cassette decks were being made) is th way th girl/boy vocals don't harmonize or even exist on th same plane. i guess it's maybe just a symptom of young women who listen to too much tori amos (still not really sure what she sounds like either but there's definitely too much of her) or something, but there's NO EFFORT made to conjure a collective [good] thing out of th various parts - and i guess that could be applied to th entirety of th music. everyone's playing th same song, in some way, but it's like after they agreed roughly on however to do that they just never listened to each other or th collective result, and it doesn't form anything attractive - much less magical. and i'd think that's what billy corgan-obsessed kids would be interested in - some kinda hokey "magic" (via feigned depression, natch) - but maybe they were just trying to grow ponytails and touch panties. in which case i hope they succeeded (i don't. -ed.), 'cause there's nothing about this that satisfies even th most vague and forgiving notion of why one wants/needs music in their life; it's utterly joyless navel-gazing schlock made by people who haven't actually had any experiences yet but have evidently been GRAVELY affected by their few attempts at spin the bottle or something. (i honestly don't want to give th impression that i don't think childhood/adolescence/etc can't be/isn't a bizarre, fuckedup time or that i refuse to acknowledge how oddly/deeply [seemingly tiny] gestures/occurrences/etc can punch into a kid's unconscious, but when it manifests itself into tchotch like this a) i have trouble believing th experiences aren't simply invented and 2) well, sometimes BAD is BAD.) all in all it sounds like they simply hadn't yet figured out that they could just go to th fucking renaissance faire…and, actually, if all th lyrics were about quests and mythical beasts and shit i would probably like this enough to tolerate th fucking girl's voice, even.

but maybe you'll like it.

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"through my looking glass i see all the ache inside of me."

SERIOUSLY.

doubting Thomas 'Heaven Gave Us Money' LP

and we continue with the crappe! at first i thought there was exactly one good thing about this lp (th overuse of th phrase "the fields behind k-mart" in th track "once you remember"), most of th rest of it being entirely forgettable/somewhat grating consciously-outsider alterna-gunk seemingly influenced only by mitchell froom's soundtrack to 'café flesh' and warren zevon, but th tune "minute forty-five" is actually pretty great in its nash the slash-isms (tho' i doubt i'll ever listen to it all that much). unfortunately overall this is th kind of thing that "helped" widen collegiate consciousness into half-acceptance of stuff like school of fish and crash test dummies a few years later. i dunno what these dudes were going for really - maybe they were just wasting time while they got thru dental school (obviously they didn't have any other friends so recording in their attic was probably their only recreational avenue) - but most of this is just kinda not-dark-enough but sorta depressing, not-poetic-enough but overly verbose and not-funny-enough but fairly cringe-worthy. come to think of it this might be a pseudonymous brian ritchie solo effort. better luck next time.

(note: extensive restoration and digital gobbledygook had to be done in order to salvage th frankly excruciating a capella intro to th fourth track due to a big ol' scratch on my dollar copy. you can thank me later. and if you feel like beating up whoever lives in their old house for th crimes these guys perpetrated against humanity, th sleeve lists their late-'80s residence as 123 clinton street.)

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spyglass cassette

now here's something unlikeable. let's first address some words that should never, ever be used in yr lyrics: trust, distrust, forgive, drown, sentiment, & pride come to mind…and that's pretty much because i decided to pick one per song from th convenient lyric inner sleeve of this tape - glad they thought their crap important enuff to print! should you be unfamiliar with spyglass's ouevre, lemme sum up th sucky little corner of mid-'90s emo that they felt rad enuff about to ape: take th extrovert "weird" girl at yr school with th clunky shoes, find four dudes who tuck in their shirts and get opie cunningham haircuts, add one lowercase word as a collective title for their music-ish meanderings, rinse, repeat. so where on th one hand you have th FUCKING FANTASTIC and genuinely interesting and arresting discount, on th other you have th mildly tolerable samuel and th distinctly execrable copper. one guess from whence th lads and lass of spyglass pull th entirety of their influences - tho what ANYONE sees/saw in these acts (other than 'hey, a GURL'), i can't fucking fathom. literally th most tuneless tunes and overwrought non-emotion applied to STOOPID (and not in th good way) sentiment PLUS th most chalk-scrapingly AWFUL style of singing i can imagine. i'd rather spend th rest of my life on an island with those horrible gurls from sleater-kinney sing-shouting at me about tampons than listen to this tape (or th youtube vids of copper and samuel that i pulled up to make sure my memory wasn't being unkind) one more time. pretty much th exact opposite of th frog a mungus tape (tho that one's got lyrics just as embarrassing).

you might like it, tho'.

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Gut Piston Demo (1992)

finally, some more gut piston for ya - this time it's an early 'demonstration tape' recorded at pica house (these days aka legion of doom). ENTIRELY more ramonesified than th other tape already posted here, you can tell that th dudes hadn't yet been completely infested by col's scuzz (just lima scuzz. and that's some scuzz indeed). fortunately none of this comes to bear whatsoever on these four tunes' respective abilities to kick major fucking ass.

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frog a mungus 'velour' cassette

1995 shining moment for these guys (and, at that time, gals). th three places on th interwebs that mention 'em these daze make a big stink aboot their shoegazerness, but i sure don't remember 'em that way. anyhow this tape has lotsa splatty guitar lines all over but i wouldn't call 'em sonic-youthy (certainly not in th way that say, th neon blud tape is sonic-youthy, anyhow) and tho' there's some judicious use of stompbox delay on some of th vox (thx to billy h., producer/engineer extraordinaire), th singing is pretty straighforward. i'd go as far as a very ruff velocity girl comparison in that department, but even that's reaching and anyhow v.g. were shoegazey for only about 2.5 minutes anyhow ("my forgotten favorite"=alltime jam, tho'!). so to oversimplify, end-result-wise, f.a.m. were dancing around swivelarm battlegrip and kill sybil territory more than anything else (tho' in reading th lyrics mebbe a better uncomfortable pairing would be copper and samuel - plus bonus local wanna-be's spyglass [don't worry i've got that tape cued up]) but coming from a completely different perspective than those bands - which is probably best-evidenced by th trajectory that these folks took musically after th 'mungus ceased to be; even if you just follow th rhythm section you come up with th cherubs-meet-linda-blair-isms of subdevil and th what-if-fu-manchu-really-were-funny tack of their current project (with bogtrodder/acid blacker/limb trialer mike sliclen) chomp-chomp. which is to hint that all musical comparisons are largely for descriptive purposes only as th frog a mungus contingent were then and are now expressly about conjuring whatever they can/whatever tickles their fancy out of their personal musical ether - influences and contemporaries be damned.

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Daniel Gold 'The Magnanimous Cuckold'

EXCELLENT 1996 arp-based mini-lp from th elusive dan gold. misplaced my copy years ago and had been telling myself i'd pick up th next one i saw - which i had th opportunity to do at spoonful th other day. cheers to ruland!

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Ass Ponys 'Electric Rock Music' + "Earth To Grandma" CD5

homespun EXPANDO edition of major label debut includes non-alb' traxx from one of th two singles released off th rec. should you be in po-zeh-shun of th other ("little bastard"), do please send it over.

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Peter Laughner

"he catalyzed a scene in Cleveland that, one could safely say, is the virtual blueprint for the independent music scene, even today."

not th type of guy to enter reliable studios on a regular basis, pete made sure to keep most all of his genius a COMPLETE SECRET for all his years (much like his good pal l. bangs), but th fact remains that whatever his musical motivation at any particular time, th guy helped INVENT PUNK ROCK (dubious achievement that it is) AND NEW WAVE AND POSTPUNK (AND he DIED before any of those even gained a foothold in th popular consciousness!) all during a coupla years when most people just wanted to forget that rock'n'roll ever fucking existed in th first place, and for that he deserves a goddam giant statue in tower city, yet hasn't even been "awarded" entry into th "rock" "hall" of "fame" just up th street. gawd humans is stoopid.

Take The Guitar Player For A Ride (not my rip, CBR 192, 18 tracks including both 'vinyl-only' tunes)

Setting Son (CBR 192, not my rip)

Friction at Pirate's Cove, 11.2.76 (not my rip, CBR 256)

Ass Ponys 'Grim'

here ya go, th second ass ponys release on okra and their last before jumpin' to a MAJOR LABEL, back when major labels still had a coupla guys/gals with HEADS ON THEIR SHOULDERS workin' for 'em.

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(VBR around 192, not my rip. somehow th first two songs got switched both in order and in title. i'm sure you can figure a way to rectify this.)

Beano (Secret) Demo

here's th only thing beano actually 'released' in our "career" - and even then only in an edition of like eight at a neil house show. i think we charged a dollar. each one was in a different color/flavor, with th covers hand-traced (by me) from art thom did. most of th stuff on this probably appears on th beano cd i made to pass out at trevor's wedding, but i thought it was worth it to post this anyhow since i think most all of th takes are different. ALSO, this features two tracks (live at bernie's) with their original drummer!

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Thom Lessner

i met thom OVER 1,000 YEARS AGO when i got asked to try playing drums for a fellow i had just met's recently-drummerless band. that was beano, we played for awhile. it was great. certain things led to us not playing anymore but that's a whole other thing. sometimes we still do. anyhow, nowadays of course thom has thee excellent SWEATHEART in philly and numerous art gigs like MAKING ALL TH POSTERS FOR TH SCHOOL OF ROCK or MAKING VIDEOS FOR THE DARKNESS but before that he spent a buncha years (starting in high school) four-tracking his way to obscurity. here are all th tapes i have documenting that endeavor:

GUY SMILEY

THE ASHBY STASH

3-D THOMMY

EVERYBODY SING ALONG

notes: th 'guy smiley' tape was done, if i remember correctly, as a project for one of thom's classes at fort hayes. it marks th only time thom used a name other than his own for his solo stuff. th copy he gave me had a whole bunch of stuff on th b-side as well, so i've included it. 'the ashby stash' was in some ways a retrospective at th same time it was a collection of then-current recordings, so it shares some tracks with th 'guy smiley' tape. i didn't edit any tunes from either; i'm sure you won't mind. there are tons of guest stars on these songs, including rjd2, all of beano, peggy honeywell, sonya fix, & maika carter (she's married now, i know). i may have titled some of th unlisted tunes incorrectly, but that's how it goes, eh?

Peggy Honeywell "Bower Bird"

awhile back a buncha dudes got together to throw a raging kegger and watch peggy honeywell sing th same song a lot. forgot aboot it/couldn't find it/&c for years, but now here it is. shot in col's, you may recognize a buncha th buncha dudes.

Jim Shepard + Multiball

        September 12, 1998. Walt's Lounge. Summit Street. Columbus, Ohio, USA. Drinking the cheapest beer in the house. Billy big brother who sells used cars bought me a round. Crazy fucking Jenny bought me one too, as she continued to berate me, shoot me her middle finger, and babble on in her whacked-out Jack Daniel's haze. I've seen her sit by herself and just laugh her head off. She holds a job, has a boyfriend, but she is A-1 nutso. It's mid-afternoon, OSU is winning 49 to zip (like I care), and besides talkin' to Carol the bartender's boyfriend Mick, the highlight of the day is slippin' 4 quarters into the DRACULA pinball machine for a 2 player game and winning 2 free games. You top 110,000 points and you win. It's better than Vegas. I've been THERE, dropped 2 rolls of quarters in the slots, and split. The '96 tour, 7,000 miles. 21 days. Me and Squid, the 'merch-man', had a rental car. Rest of band w/girlies had a van. Left 'em in Venice Beach. They knew the way home…

        I've never been known to play the kind of SPORTS that make ya sweat. I play pinball. At Walt's Lounge, I seem to be one of the only people to play the DRACULA machine. When I was 10 and enjoying my boyhood life in Vermont, my family hijacked me to a sad slow-moving town in central FLAWRIDA. I hated it. When I got out of high school I moved to Ohio w/2 friends and we started the band Vertical Slit.

        The only thing in that hot swamp-land town that made life tolerable was the Hi-Lan Lanes Bowling Alley 2 blocks from the house. I was an addict. It was the machines. In the early '70s, I was a young teenager. I was also a pinball wizard and a pool hustler. Grown men would weep as me and the V. Slit drummer Dave Mikula would call the 8 ball four rails in the corner and make it. Back in those pre-video days pinball was a whole different animal. The scoring numbers rolled around on cylinders and to get the ball to pop up so you could shoot it you had to push in a lever. Big machines back then were 'STUDENT PRINCE', 'METEOR', and 'HOT ROD'. It seemed we spent half of our lives at the bowling alley. The fuel to feed out addiction was quarters. Any way we could get 'em, we'd get 'em. Steal change from the parents, go door to door "collecting money for the junior high basketball team" (which wasn't actually collecting money for any 'cause'), and…well, all the quarters would go into the machines at the bowling alley. Eventually it would go for other things like cigarettes, dope, and liquor. I scored a dishwashing job in the restaurant at the bowling alley. This would provide chump-change for the machines.

        Pinball is pure magic. It's not like playing pool, bowling, contact sports, or playing cards. It's one on one. You against the machine. You can't touch the ball (or the 'multi-balls'). All you can do is pull back the plunger, let the ball go, and work the flippers. I used to push on the machine, shake it around, but I don't bother w/that much anymore. It's a game of skill, and when you can win 2 games on a one-dollar investment…friend, you are a damn good player.

        I create music. I drink. I play pinball. Right now, those 3 things seem to be the focus of my earthly existence, but that's fine. I never wanted to be a prize-fighter, and I won't work with the suits. Every night when I get off my 2nd-shift job I head to the bar. Walt's Lounge. I play pinball. Sometimes, me and a girl friend each play a flipper, but her reflexes are kinda slow and she'll make the ball drain. Hang out w/the middle- to old-age working class drinkers. I feel safe there and lemme tell ya, when I kick the machine's ass I feel a sense of satisfaction unlike any other.

        Pinball is one of the most worthwhile things on the planet, it's been a huge part of my life…and when you're a master player, hey, it makes the evening quite alright…

-Jim Shepard of V-3   9.14.98