Capitol Punishment - Slum With A View

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 artworkVergangenheitsbewaeltigung 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]