Mowing has been the name of the game around here for the past two days. It really adds up when you have an acre of grass and weeds to mow by hand, and the mower's been broken down for three weeks. One of my dogs, Bear, likes to keep me company and help me out.
When doing the music thing on the net, I am constantly reminded of all the good things going on for music lovers out there. I discovered this site,
The Perfumed Garden , some time ago but had completely forgotten about it. You can't go wrong with a John Peel tribute site if you love to hear your favorite band in a live studio setting. While reading comments on another site I discovered a pretty cool fellow music blogger, Fritz, who has stuff going on all over the place. His music and such blog
4 Letter Word , his artwork
Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung and his kick ass band is here,
Dead Offenders . Definitely a valuable scene contributor.
Speaking of scene contributers, my first experience with Capitol Punishment was in the mid 80's when I got the (in)famous "Jody" 7". That's been posted elsewhere, but I will post it for you in the future too. When I was in college, my buddy Steve and I were into these guys and I think wrote to them a couple of times. In 89 or so we got to see them at a killer show at the Gilman with the also awesome Econochrist. It was cool because Dale and Jocelyn remembered our correspondence and had Tshirts for us. That show was the motivation for playing music of our own, WD40 started a few months later. I still have the Tshirt. They had a different line up from the classic band, but they still rocked. They have a pretty good sized discography and in my opinion, Slum With A View has some of their best stuff. Flex had this to say though, "Sound is a lot thinner than on the previous 12", also the voice is mixed too loud. Some good HC tracks and some less interesting slower tracks." I disagree wholeheartedly, this thing is a fucking masterpiece!
EDIT: The tunes are gone (victims of the pirate apocalypse) and I couldn't find the album on youtube...damn! I did find a very cool write up by Dale at the
Hangover Heart Attack blog...
"The first band Jocey and I played in together was a new wave band called ALTERED FEATURES. That was in 1980 and it lasted just a few months. We really wanted to play punk not wave. We looked for a new project and hooked up with EricTsuda. He wanted to try his hand at singing and he knew a drummer, 16 year old Keith Johnson. Eric thought up the name of the band and we practiced in his living room. A few months later we played our first gig, July 4, 1981 with the DEAD KENNEDYS, THE FIX and 7 SECONDS at the Belmont Ballroom in Fresno. That original line-up was short-lived and by '82 Eric was replaced with Ralph Lotspeich on vocals and a few months later Mike Branum took over drumming duties from Keith. Eric went on to play drums for DEATH OF GLORY and The UNFIT from San Luis Obispo. Keith moved up to San Francisco.
From 1982 to 1987 we kept that same lineup, which is a long time in punk band years. And what an incredible time those years were! We had a lot of fun from time to time and achieved goals every band strives for. In the years to come we would record and release 5 studio LPs, 3 7-inchers, a couple videos, lotsa demos and compilation tracks for several different labels. We were on a few labels here in the U.S. Mainly We Bite America in Chicago and Unclean Records in Austin, Texas. In Germany were were on Destiny Records, Berlin and We Bite Records in Tubingen. We had the pleasure of touring the U.S. 3 times; in '85, '86 and '89 and Europe twice; in '87 and '91. We played all over California including many times in San Francisco and the bay area. We got to play with some of the really cool punk/hardcore bands of the day: THE DEAD KENNEDYS, BLACK FLAG, MINOR THREAT, BAD BRAINS, DISCHARGE, etc. In our earlier tours we played mostly in the midwest; Chicago, Memphis, Houston, Omaha, Milwaukee, etc. Our '89 US tour took us to the east coast for the first time and we were so thrilled to play at the legendary CBGB in New York." There is also the
Stagedive Records page, which is a wonderful resource. Best of all, they do have asoundcloud with some rarities...
[soundcloud url="https://api.soundcloud.com/users/7210265" params="auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true" width="100%" height="450" iframe="true" /]
While I was searching for the album on YT, I found this wonderful vid of another Fresno band, Plaid Retina, doing a cover of my favorite song off the album, Concrete Forest...
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tLJSVUcbRs&w=560&h=315]
We don't see very many deer down by the creek behind the house, where we take the dogs for a walk, but I see their tracks all the time.
We do see deer all the time by the pasture where we keep our horses. Definately not the best picture but if you zoom in on this one you can see a doe just to the left of those four dead trees in the middle, mixed with the evergreens.
I wish I had the other four installments of this comp, but this Fresno one isn't too bad. I got this one because it has Capitol Punishment on it but the previous singer, Ralph, is not singing. Okay song from them but the stand outs for me are the S.A.D. Boyz and Plaid Retina. I actually went out and got more of their stuff because of this comp. I don't know why I always quote these guys but, Flex had this to say, "Part three with some good HC tracks by Capitol Punishment and SAD Boyz. Good stuff, but not too exciting." Oh well give it a listen and make up your own mind.
EDIT: Links deleted for fear of copyright police…go give your money to iTunes or something…
One thing that always bums me out is road kill. Yesterday I found this badger dead in the middle of the highway, so I dragged it off to the side before it got run over a million times and turned into something completely different. There is something depressing about that to me, which just may be the waste of life it represents. The badger is a special animal to me in that they are pretty tough but for the most part they mind their own business and like to be left alone.
I hadn't done a comp record in quite some time so I thought I would give this a go. On the album it says 1984, but from what I've read they say 1985. Humph? Not important. A nice mix of punk/hardcore bands from Holland that maybe not everyone has heard. I got it about the time the PEACE comp came out because I liked the Gepopel song from that comp. Of course this doesn't have the magnitude of the Peace comp but it is a damn good Dutch sampler though. The KFTH thing here, 
If you follow this blog, you know that whenever I don't get too many comments on a post I usually come along and do another from the same band. So, another one from these San Diego crazies is what you get. If you didn't feel compelled to try them out the first time I'm giving you another chance. I like their stuff and given a second chance maybe you will too. Chris, the guitar player said he liked this a lot better than the 7" and I would probably agree. From 1998 I believe. Man I was really starting to be a loser at this time and don't remember much, except of course that I was a loser. Oh well, we learn from our mistakes eventually, don't we? It's all good and worked out for the best. Life is good for me now in so many ways. Anyway, the first tune is my favorite, but you can pick your own.
EDIT: 5 years this post has been up, Chris drops by to check it out and come to find out I had all the tracks wrong. Investigating a little further it turns out the track listing on the back cover is wrong. So...went through and listened to each track (luckily this thing came with lyrics) and got the correct song titles...phew. If part of what you're doing is archiving music and making something long lost available to everyone, may as well get it right. On the plus side it was great running through and listening to this again, well worth it.
Something kind of cool happened as it does sometimes around here, and in the world too every once in a while. One of the Eureka High kids, Josh H. (a man of course now, probably with a family, kids of his own and so on) from back in the day, found himself at MR and decided to provide a donation. It comes in the way of a demo tape made by some of his classmates, My Name Is Chris. I hope he comes back and fills in the blanks, but he had this to say, "It's their Days of Slack demo, and I recorded right off the Memorex 
Is this for real?
I figured another Top Ten All Time was in order and to be honest I just felt like listening to the Mob. There's no need to regurgitate a history I'm not too familiar with. KFTH had a lot to say (the site is dead now, a real information tragedy) , while 
I think it's time for something a little bit older and in the Top 10 All Time category. If you do not own this album, you should, because there is not one song that doesn't rip on this album. You can find this all over the blogs, so I didn't feel too bad about ripping it, but because this is a big record label thing, I'm going to take a page from the other blogs, and remind you that this is for demonstration purposes and you should only keep the download for 24 hours (EDIT: Hahaha).
EDIT: I crack myself up reading this post 11 years after it was written, still feel that this record should be in every person's record collection. According to Discogs there are something like 144 versions of it and in my opinion it's warranted as it may be the best live album ever, if not then certainly way up there. The vid had this comment from the uploader after some idiot called him out in a comment on it (you ever want to feel like you'd rather not be part of the human race, read the comments on a typical fucked tube video)…
I put the horses out to pasture this morning. Mine is the black and white paint while my wife's is the palomino. The city kid has come a long ways.
This is one of my buddy Chris' many bands from San Diego. You can catch him as Billy Druid on his killer site here, 
Just a quick one here because I really know nothing about this band. Hardcore from Norway released in 1987 but I think these guys were around several years before this. I think this may be my only Norwegian record, but I could be wrong, maybe some stuff on a comp or something. Maybe someone will comment and give more details. I think I just got it back then because of a good review and because it was a low cost flexi. On a side note, I checked around and I don't think anyone makes flexis in the US anymore. I talked to Eva-Tone and they said they have the equipment still but they can't get the material anymore. What about Europe, anybody know? I thought it would be cool to put out flexis again, but I'm just a dreamer. Give this a listen and tell me what you think. At the very least you will have learned a few Norwegian words, right "folk".
EDIT: Links deleted for fear of copyright police…go give your money to iTunes or something…
