Punk Muzik

It’s funny that bands, decades dormant, or folks associated with them go ahead and attempt to chronicle the past. This problematic situation leads to some fuzzy recollections and probably even some accidental farces.

That being said, when folks wind up working on projects such as these, it becomes the gospel for people searching through recorded music’s past. And with Cleveland sporting such a rich and long running history, taking a look at a few recollected memories – as well as some compiled demos – can’t hurt too much, now can it? Read more

Garage rock has again reared its ugly, bug-eyed head. In the wider culture, the genre subsided briefly, but the Bay Area’s affection for garage has enabled it to persist from its inception during ‘60s through the present day.

Heir apparent to the capes and catastrophe that the Count Five have come to represent were San Mateo’s the Mummies. In the quartet’s ramshackle assemblage of a few chords was all of the Bay Area’s low rent rock history. The group’s Egyptian inspired get-ups harkened back to the acid eating Count Five: a sense of showmen-ship was as important to the group as its music, which was a mélange of garage tropes and revved up surf-rock vibrato. Read more

Coming out of scene so tied to that of Minor Threat’s sound as well as the whole independent Dischord thing must have been difficult.

The second wave of DC punk affiliated groups – by this time, it was incontrovertible that there was as much pop and straight rock influence as to begin a disassociation with hardcore proper – didn’t necessarily fair too well. Off course after Ian MacKaye figured out the Fugazi formula, his band would go on to international fame, but there weren’t too many other success acts from the ear. Nation of Ulysses garnered a bit of attention and so did Dag Nasty. That latter group, though, went through a few singers and didn’t really settle on a sound over the group’s first few albums. Read more

A big part of the late 70's punk mythos is the music venue CBGB, itself an ironic twist considering what the name means. It was founded by club owner Hilly Kristal in 1973 as a performance space and record shop for Country, Bluegrass and Blues, later adding the cryptic OMFUG (Other Music For Uplifting Gormandizers) when a bunch of decidedly different styles of music started drawing larger crowds. The idea that CBGB was the quintessential punk club is a classic example of retroactive continuity. CBGB only became a punk club in the 80's after it acquired that reputation in the pop culture consciousness of people who had never actually been there.

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With each passing year it becomes increasingly apparent that the idea of the punk rock musical revolution of the 1970's isn't so historically or even spiritually accurate. Really, it's more of an invention of the hopelessly nostalgic millennium's end Best Of lists that popped up a decade ago. Some combination of overgrown kids, irresponsible music journalists and various amateur revisionists created and then perpetuated the reductive understanding of new music in the mid-to-late 1970's, much to the delight of programming producers at VH1. Listening to the truly big, truly influential stuff that happened in major scenes around the world during that period, it's clear that supposed revolution of punk rock wasn't the first shot fired, but the popular revolt that followed.

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The funny thing about punk from earlier eras – or even this one, as evidenced by Green Day – is the fact that the political villains that are roiled in a buncha lyrics have largely disappeared by now. Specifically, the late ‘70s and ‘80s stuff is rife with blatant and somewhat unsophisticated screeds against whatever politician was at the time causing some punkers problems - whether real or imaginary. Read more

Weird, but genius all the same...

Sometimes photo-montage doesn't work...it does here, though...

Why the Mummies were in Hoboken, I dunno...But I'm glad there was a camera.

Michigan by way of Seattle weirdos the Spits have become the key to low rent punk stuffs during the first decade of this new millennium. Surely, that sounds like hyperbole, but regardless of what the uninitiated believe, the brothers Wood (Erin [sic], Sean) and Lance Phelps bashing drums issued a disc, Vol. IV, in the middle of ’09. And while not everyone in the world is pleased with the disc, it was kinda impossible for the Spits to continue on such a run of acclaimed albums.

That, though, doesn’t mean that the slab is less than previous efforts, just that folks are getting too picky. Read more