Happy Thanksgiving! Or, "Why a "joke" punk band reminds me of my parents..."

A dominating central figure of my parents living room was a stereo cabinet housing an aforementioned reel to reel tape deck, a receiver, a vinyl record player, and some kind of dolby a-b-c switch... this was a separate component that I think was eventually shrunk to the size of a pea and could be found on the side of every walkman produced in the 80's.
This component when switched a certain way and in combination with some knob or switch on the receiver would create a noise that would scare the living daylights out of my sister and I...
I remember we attributed this noise to some character (from sesame street?) called Sammy the Snake... which is weird because it didn't so much sound like a snake to me. I remember for some reason thinking that it sounded like an attack of screaming indians and a hurricane wind combined.

I was 5-7 years old and this made sense to me.

Eventually the stereo cabinet contained a dual tape deck and around 1989 or 1990 a single tray JVC CD player...(fancy!)

One of the occasional records my parents would play was Arlo Guthrie's Alice's Restaurant, an atrociously long, hippie sounding Thanksgiving story of sticking it to "the man" and then hanging out at your favorite diner...or something.

I am obviously not a fan. I do,however remember being entertained by the passage where the narrator is going to see a shrink... it went like this:

And I waked in and sat down and they gave
me a piece of paper, said, "Kid, see the psychiatrist, room 604."

And I went up there, I said, "Shrink, I want to kill. I mean, I wanna, I
wanna kill. Kill. I wanna, I wanna see, I wanna see blood and gore and
guts and veins in my teeth. Eat dead burnt bodies. I mean kill, Kill,
KILL, KILL." And I started jumpin up and down yelling, "KILL, KILL," and
he started jumpin up and down with me and we was both jumping up and down
yelling, "KILL, KILL."

Spencer is about to be the same age I surely heard this for the first time...maybe I should play it for him....

maybe not...

Instead, I'll play him this song by Alberto y Lost Trios Paranoias, a comedy rock band, formed in Manchester, England in 1973. They apparently hung around long enough to watch the punk explosion around 1976-77 and trained their attention towards lampooning it by mimicking it. Mimicking it in a really convincing way...This song, "Kill" was apparently a jab at The Dammned's goth-punk image.

Immediately upon hearing it I was reminded of Arlo Guthrie going all Psycho-Killer...

What do you think...


Kill (NSFW warning, and NO I wont be playing this for Spencer, not just yet.)

From their outstandingly sarcastic "Snuff Rock" EP

The Normals: Almost Ready

I know very little about The Normals...just that they came out of New Orleans in the late 1970's...and not many bands can say that. Not many punk bands anyway.

This song is a classic along the lines of the second song I ever posted on this blog, (Television Addict) a great guitar intro and high energy! The singer sounds like he has some non specific accent (New Orlinan?) but that makes it cooler.

Thanks to the terrific Killed By Death site for this audio!

enjoy


Almost Ready

The Shirts!

My Parents had a reel to reel tape player on top of our stereo cabinet during the 70's and 80's. I swear to god that it was the same model used in the Evil Dead movies,but that could just be the similarities of most reel to reel tape players.

I remember my dad kept a couple dozen reels in the bottom of the cabinet and would play them from time to time. Steppenwolf, the Beatles, Jesus Christ Superstar and others. The Hair soundtrack was also played, which really is quite awful, but one of the female stars in the motion picture was Annie Golden lead singer of the band The Shirts.

The Shirts were among the first wave of bands to play CBGB in the late 70's art/punk movement. Not really given the notoriety of the Talking Heads, Television or the Ramones, The Shirts having a much poppier sound, they still add to an impressive list of the acts coming from that time and place.

Why didn't my parents go the extra mile and get a couple Shirts LPs and play those? Didn't they know Annie Golden was involved in something way cooler than Hair...all you had to do was Google it.... in the 1970s....

Here is a song called "Teenage Crutch" from their self titled debut LP.

Teenage Crutch

The Shirts apparently reformed after many years of inactivity... www.theshirts.net

The Banned "Him Or Me"

This single happened to be out on my stacks of CDs, and it is great...so I have posted it.

A nice slice of 1978 punk/power pop, a cover of Paul Revere & the Raider's "Him or Me".

From Tooting (!) England, one of several bands that made a moderately successful single and then vanished. This is NOT their moderately successful single - it is the follow up, which I like better. Besides their moderately successful single was a less interesting cover (Little Girl by Syndicate of Sound.)

enjoy!

http://www.the-banned.com/

Him Or Me