Entertainment

After reading this piece over here, further comment almost seems useless. Here we go, though.

The Testor’s are a name, as is singer Sonny Vincent, that resounds throughout all of punkdom as some sign post of the genre’s spreading from some insular New York thing to the world wide phenomena that we all know today.

Before the onslaught of repressed punk obscurities, the Testors existed in a corner of the punk kingdom that only a few folks had been exposed to. Basically, this entire story can be applied to San Francisco’s CRIME as well. That West Coast band, for the most part, worked up a bunch of middling punk inflected tracks and cemented a legacy that easily surpassed the music’s actual importance. At this late date, copping that CRIME discography has got to be a tremendous bummer.

And so is gettin’ an earful of the Testors’ Complete Recordings. In that aforementioned review, there’s mention of a nation wide tour with Cleveland transplants the Dead Boys. And the connection makes total sense. That band, sporting the always charming Cheetah Chrome on guitar, really released only a handful of tracks that could today exist independent of the band’s legacy and still be afforded too much deference. That’s not to diminish anyone’s historical contributions to the genre, that’s just how time works. What was once shocking is no longer a surprise.