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The other day down by the creek behind my house the buzzards (turkey vultures) slowly started coming out for what must have been something dead or dying in the trees. We never did find it but a couple of days later as we were out hiking you could smell death and decay in the air. If you check, there are 13 buzzards in the last picture. Kind of foreshadowing this post.
I know this has been posted elsewhere, like here, Detailed Twang, but if you know me you know that redundancy is not such a bad thing. Some things need to be said over and over again, just like some records need to be posted over and over again. This one is that good in my opinion. I think it was my first purchase at Vinyl Fetish in Hollywood, about the time it came out in 1981. I had already been exposed to the occult through my family and I bought this one for the record cover alone. If the cover was cool though, the music just blew me away. Punk, hardcore, deathrock (in that order?) is the best way to describe it. If somehow you are unfamiliar with the band check this, 45 Grave for a little bit of info. This is one of my favorite 7"s hands down...
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGVXTX3NHxE]
While doing this post I was kind of enjoying doing some research on the band, checking out their discography and just listening to their music. I had never heard their first vinyl track, off of the Darker Skratcher comp. A new wavy cover of an old early 60's tune but kind of interesting... [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eed34wTE2h8]
Other than the Black Cross 7", I knew I liked their tracks off of the incredible Hell Comes To Your House comp, but my copy has a needle fracturing scratch on that side of the album. If you haven't heard that comp you need to because there is a lot of good music to be found there... [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4zwXaLLYHc?start=1177]
After these tunes the band basically got completely deathrock and kind of lost me on their other recordings.
In my search I was surprised to find a cover of one of the tunes off of the 7" I posted by none other than the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Kind of a trip but these guys were old Hollywood scenesters so I guess it's no surprise that they would choose to cover one of Hollywood's best. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gl-fv1o_Tgw&w=560&h=315]
EDIT: Sorry, links to tunes deleted for fear of the copyright police...they were damn good too. Go give your money to itunes or something...in all seriousness pick up a repress of some of these and support the band/label...
My son hanging and waiting with the horses while I fill the stock tank. I don't know about where everyone else is at but it's been pretty hot around here lately. I'm okay until it gets over a 100 degrees (what is that in celsius?) and you get that hot wind blowing. The part of Kansas we're in isn't known for shade and there hasn't been a cloud in the sky. I wouldn't mind a rain but then it would be humid as hell. Oh well a person can always hop into the stock tank, lay down in a creek or head on down to the community pool.
I guess we got it from the Crass thing but in high school we used to drive around and spray paint stencils like this one all over the place. Kind of pointless in a way but it sure was fun. Grafitti art was really popular back in the mid 80's, the kind that was more artful than these stencils. I remember the cops checking our hands for paint on at least one occasion but we were clean. I kept the stencils under the floor mat.
Another top ten one here for you all to mull over and like the rest there will probably be some disagreement. To me this one in particular is too important to at least agree that it is historically significant. I first got into Crass in 1981 when I bought the Nagasaki Nightmare/Big A Little A 7". So different from anything I had heard up to that point. Feeding of the 5000 released before that in 1978, and it just blew me away. They had so much to say and the way they said it, stood on it's own, at least to my relatively young ears at the time. What they also served to do for me was to open up the doors on to a lot of other really good stuff both on and off the Crass record label. Poison Girls, the Mob, Rudimentary Peni, Icons of Filth, Conflict and so on. Later on as my friends were listening to GBH and the Exploited, I still favored the Crass stuff as far as Englich punk was concerned. One thing about Crass is that everyone has an opinion about them and it tends to be more than just they suck or they rule. A good example is at Peter's killer KBDR site here, 
