Jason and the Scorchers: Still Country After All These Years

Jason and the Scorchers have been working out an equation balancing aggressive rock tones cribbed from seventies bands and traditional country stuff for just about thirty years. For the most part, the band works out what it had in mind – and relatively easily.

Each of the ensemble players possesses untoward amounts of musical ability as recognizable in its rock presentation as its straight country stuff. At times, the band pushes tempo to the breaking point, frequently finding itself referred to as the forbearers of alt country and cow punk. And while that’s well and good, it’s pretty easy to figure out that Mike Ness and Social Distortion were recording in this general arena (that group favored punk over country, but the mix is still there) at least three years before the Scorchers were on fire.

But what announced this Chicago cum Nashville band to the country was its 1982 single, appropriately titled Reckless Country Soul, subsequently reissued with a few bonus tracks. So, at this point, the recording really counts as a long player, coming in at just over a half an hour.

Regardless of its run time, each of the ten tracks is really a study in some disparate approach to melding various rock stuff with country and nascent fifties’ pop. And honestly, when the band doesn’t totally pull it off, the results are still more entertaining than whatever’s getting passed off on country radio stations the nation over.

“Jimmie Rodgers' Last Blue Yodel” prominently features the collective singing prowess the Scorchers possess. And not to slight the group, but it’s hard to find those harmonies pleasing in a traditional way. Luckily, most folks getting an earful of this stuff are going to be fans of the Burrito Brothers, Commander Cody and whatever other stoned country band one might be able to recall from decade’s past.

Over the last thirty years, the Scorchers haven’t changed its approach and even seen the (pretend) subgenre it worked out become something of an underground sensation, replete with press outlets cropping up to cover the scene all proper like.

Chicago’s Bloodshot Records has taken up the mantle of whatever it is the Scorchers concocted so long ago. And even as that imprint’s halcyon days have been left back on that dusty trail, there’s enough of a back catalog to sustain a cadre of folks working with interesting source material.

It might not be adventurous any longer, but it’s impassioned music.

Ozzie: Robot References Don't Make '70s Hard Rock Any Better

As crappy as it must have been to be a group attempting to negotiate original music during the early years of the seventies without the support of a major label, it has to be as frustrating for those folks to watch the continual dusting off of old records. Each album touted as the lost link from glam to punk or hard rock to sludge might not really have anything to do with those genres in a conservative sense of the word. But at the time, crossing over into whatever sound was then in a songwriter’s head and moving back towards more distinctive stock was the point. It didn’t frequently result in stardom. But there’s more than a handful of bands being dug up that appreciated prog as much as Zeppelin.

Sacramento, while not known for its music scene – Ganglians are pretty cool though – has seen a level jump in profile as of late, in part due to SS Records. The imprint, in addition to releasing newer, skewed rock and punk related efforts, has been seeking out older, Sacto (or East Bay) based groups to spread around to a new generation. No one can dispute Monoshock’s greatness. And while was more than a decade between that band’s inception and Ozzie performing at local venues, there’s a stony cloud of pot smoke being emitted from each.

Ozzie, though, isn’t a single dude. It’s a group of players with wildly diverse interests – who do in fact, kinda look like Tin Huey. Beyond just looking a bit like that Akron/Kent act, Ozzie includes some of the same weirdo Zappa influence into its songs. There’s nothing as wantonly bizarre as "The Revelations of Dr. Modesto" on Ozzie’s Parabolic Rock, a compilation rounding up the band’s lone single as well a number of unreleased tracks.

It’d be hard to peg Ozzie as a proto-punk group. Or a glam band. Instead, taking in Bowie and enough radio rock, the ensemble just comes off as a weirdo hard rock group – one a bit too far out there for the radio to have been impressed. That doesn’t mean all involved lacked chops – the drum break on “Faunamania” is arena rock approved.

The band’s ‘hit’ and the first track here, “Android Love,” should be better than it is based solely on its title. Almost getting into punk/new wave territory isn’t good enough. It’s a decent track, but doesn’t necessarily warrant fawning over. For home-town fans only.

The Moles: Lonley Hearts Get What They Deserve

Recently reissued through Kill Shaman, the same East Bay imprint that brought you the Ty Segall and Mikal Cronin collabo earlier this year, the Moles 1991 album isn’t even tangentially related to garage styles. And for whatever reason, the vast majority of prose spilled on Untune the Sky figures the band as some sort of chamber pop band. There’re problems with that as well, but we’ll get to that in a moment.

Fronted by Richard Davies, whose recorded a great deal subsequent to the dissolution of the Moles, the band was basically an extension of his composerly penchants. With a sprawling track listing, here augmented by the addition of a single, there is present a good deal of everything. But tagging the band as anything but tangentially related to pop music is an easy way out of describing what’s going on here.

Tracks like “This is a Happy Garden” might be able to pass for something that accidentally found its way onto the radio during the nineties. But the purposefully drab tonality of it all removes it from comparison to the Beach Boys or whatever other group one might connect with well orchestrated pop. In mentioning that California group, “Breathe Me In” almost solidifies a tie between this Australian group and the better known ensemble. Of course, Pavement might be just as good a reference point – for the music, but not the vocals.

It’s all pop music, I suppose, if Guided by Voices counts as a pop group. And it kind of does.

The Moles’ desire to wrangle just about any strain of rock related music, though, is an admirable approach to take. There weren’t too many groups capacious of wringing some truly distorted rock progressions out of its instruments and marrying them to some sweetly sung, if not occasionally deadpan, vocals.

With this counting as the third release of Untune the Sky, no one should be expected the Moles to suddenly become a significantly influential ensemble. What it will do, though, is to give Kill Shaman a release which finds itself lauded in the independent press.

Taking a chance on a business proposition (which is what releasing records is, after all) such as this should find the label making a few bucks. But waiting for the album to crop up on message boards and auction sites after the pressing runs out is surely going to make for a pricey item.

Kurt and Courtney: Exploitative Documentaries

I’d intended to write a bit on the fascination Americans – or moviegoers in general – have with gory/gross, yet unique documentaries. Capturing the Friedmans is an admitted classic in a weird way. And so is Nick Broomfield’s Kurt and Courtney.

It would have been easy to traipse through the organization of Broomfield’s work which makes him not only look like a well meaning, investigative documentarian, but the object of Courtney Love’s misplaced ire. The whole movie goes pretty much like this – “What’s she trying to hide?”

Either way good movie. But in tracking down specifics of the film, I stumbled upon an interview cum cultural criticism posted on Salon and penned by Michelle Goldberg. Apart from the fact that the Courtney/Kurt, Public Enemy/Elvis contrast doesn’t make any sense, the entire article is angled at making Courtney seem like just another star who did what she had to do in order to attain the level of notoriety she appreciates today. Uhh, that’s bunk.

Apart from the fact that between her first and second albums fronting Hole, she devised a shift towards pop sucrose, dismissing her general fixation on glamor is atrocious. Yeah, Kurt’s attraction to someone so vain is confusing, but Goldberg characterizes him as a “too-weak husband.” Ok.

Well, he was a junkie. And that’s an addiction. So, it’s possible that he would have been a tremendous father (or an awful one). But along the way, Goldberg doesn’t so much explain why she enjoys seeing Love’s gross smiling peering out from magazines apart from the fact that it’s manufactured. And I supposed that aping the persona of a star and achieving it is impressive, but no less disgusting. Also, the writer not being able to conjure a “truer line in rock 'n' roll than ‘I want to be the girl with the most cake,’” is ludicrous. How ‘bout, “I fought the law/And the law one.”

That was pretty easy. Whatever. She wrote for Salon and don’t.

Wading through Kurt and Courtney, though, appreciates over time. Having watched the film a while ago, I didn’t have any idea who Dylan Carlson was. But Earth rules and so do a few of the songs off Pentastar: In the Style of Demons used in the film’s soundtrack.

There’re a bunch of odd interviews included. And interesting one’s at that. It’s just too bad Broomfield felt it necessary to close the whole thing out with Cobain’s aunt sing-speaking to a group of elementary school kids. Good film, bad ending.

Marine Girls: A Low FIdelity Beach Party

Everything in life comprises odd timing and weird coincidences. So, my tracking down the first album, Beach Party, by Britishers Marine Girls, released just about thirty years ago, could have only led me to a piece of writing by Tracey Thorn and posted over at Quietus.

One of the group’s two songwriters, Throne runs through a few odd meetings she’s had over time during which famous people expound on their love of all things Marine Girls. She goes on to figure that ending the group so soon and so suddenly was the only end note possible.

After hearing Beach Party, it’s not an unfounded sentiment. Just a bummer. And if one’s even vaguely interested in the Young Marble Giants, the Marine Girls count as important listening. In fact, if one’s ear holes have been finely tuned to the girlishness rolling off of that lone YMG compilation, prepare yourself. This sounds even more sparse – just devoid of drum programming.

First issued on Phaze (?) and subsequently reissued by Television Personalities’ front man Dan Tracey, the Marine Girls first long player fits seamlessly with what the Television Personalities and groups like the Desperate Bicycles were working with. It’s not that these bands were willfully inept at its collective instrumentation, each was empowered by the possibility of recording music…and having anyone else hear it.

Today, that’s lost on a lot of folks with bedroom styled recordings, aiming at beefing up visibility before attempting to work up a live band. But the Marine Girls are the sound of people figuring out how to entertain. For that very reason – and the fact that the band was made up of women not too far beyond 20 – Beach Party focuses almost exclusively on love songs. It’s a universal trope. An understandable one, though.

Difficult isn’t quite the proper word to explain picking out highlights here. Most songs are pretty much all the same. “Day/Night Dreams” has hand claps and seagull sounds drop in atop of the song. But for the most part, unless there’s a surprisingly catchy hook, this is going to all run together.

The album opener – penned by Thorn – “In Love” almost apes a ska riff, but is quieted by the vocals. Again, though, the song’s just about the most despicable and problematic issue facing couples or those that used to be couples. Bloody, stupid love. We can all pretend that we’re happy for those we’ve become estranged when they find a new mate. But seriously? That’s how naive (and good) this album.

Bo Diddley Gits Fuzzed and Funky

Bo Diddley remains one of the most entertaining, if not most important R&B or rock players in the history of recorded music. The reason for skirting his being ridiculously important (even though he clearly was and is) stems from the huge number of players springing from the late forties and fifties that sought to work in the same aural terrain as Diddley. Of course, no one else has a beat named after him. So, there’s that.

Helping to solidify a genre, though, left Diddley and a number of other stars lost during subsequent musical innovations. The trouble had as much to do with changing the approach to music as it did with simply being of an earlier generation. And while a great many albums recorded to cash in on whatever was perceived failed miserably, Diddley was able to turn in a few discs after his prime had passed that warrant a new spate of listeners.

1971 saw the release of Another Dimension. The album didn’t do too much for the guitarist financially or artistically. Which isn’t a surprise if examined in a vacuum. But the disc preceding that 1971 effort, Black Gladiator, was a pretty engaging listen working to meld Diddley’s understanding of guitar theatrics with a new world of harder funk.

There’s not a straight stinker on the entire album. And even when Diddley falls back on his earlier successes, as on “Power House,” it’s done with enough verve as to not matter all that much. His guitar playing, though, isn’t as consistent.

That shuffling two notes Diddley is known for plundering couldn’t have ever presented too much of a difficulty in performances or recordings. It doesn’t here either. But on “Elephant Man,” there’s a wayward snatch of random guitar flubs which were apparently supposed to outline the song’s chord progression. It doesn’t work at all. And there’s no reason for the mistakes not to be edited out. But they were. So why place that track at the head of the album? The rest of it’s that strong.

“Elephant Man” is easily the most engrossing listen over the course of the entire album. Diddley whoops and hollers in total abandon. His backing band raves up a good fury – ala Root Down – and the man himself wrenches some good noise from his surprisingly distorted guitar. Counting as a masterful effort regardless of the period – or performer – doesn’t explain the odd inclusion of those missed notes. Not being with Chess Records any longer does.

Code of Honor: Beyond Hardcore

It’d be cool to uncover some random hardcore band from the second wave of it all and find out that there was some all important group of dudes running around the country doing damage – but for the right reason. Code of Honor isn’t it, but might be kinda close.

Coming out of the same scene that gave the world the Dead Kennedys, Code of Honor were apparently raised on the most visible of punk groups and a huge number of BYO albums. It’s not that Code of Honor apes a Youth Brigade thing – and thankfully, because this San Fran based act is dramatically more entertaining. But it’s not to difficult to hear the same type of hardcore 7 Seconds was working out in Las Vegas all over Code of Honor’s few releases.

As the story goes, a few of the would-be band members shared an apartment together and decided that there needed to be some sort of code to live by – for punks and in a general, day to day sense. Whether that actually happened or not is difficult to say. This band existed, though. As did a song with the same name, briefly detailing a proper way to live.

If that sounds like what accidentally happened with straight edge, you’re right. The thing is, though, no one took Code of Honor to an illogical end, basing existence on its songs. Of course, whatever one needs to get through the day is what one needs to get through the day.

Part of why this didn’t all catch on, though, was that due to Code of Honor coming up in the wake of those first string SST and Dischord bands, these Cali residents sought to expand the restrictive genre. That didn’t happen on its split with Sick Pleasure. That in-fact is a pretty rote representation of politicized punk at the time. But even the band’s first single sports a bit of nascent funk stuff – “What Price Would You Pay?”

As the band eventually arrived at its only long playing disc, entitled Beware The Savage Jaw, all involved had exerted enough individual musical acumen that squeezing it all into a single disc wouldn’t have made sense. It happened anyway. With front man Johnithin Christ moving closer to a beat poet’s conception of fronting a rock band, Code of Honor basically ceasing to exist makes sense. Why the Husker’s and Minutemen made it probably has to do with ditching punk’s trappings instead of augmenting them. There’s still good music from Code of Honor – it’s just obfuscated by some experimenting.

Half Japanese: As Wrought through Film

Alternately referred as a group springing from Maryland and Michigan depending upon the point one’s attempting to make, Half Japanese are somehow still doing just about the same thing it was in 1974. And while folks like Neil Young or Bruce Springsteen can say the same thing, each of those guys has received that magical payday at the end of a tour.

Surely, Half Japanese have made a few dollars – not that Jad or Dave Fair really care. After all, during the latter portion of the seventies, the duo sent out tapes and whatever they figured as art, gratis, to a list of fans they’d kept in correspondence with.

It’s that kind of grassroots, naiveté, though, that’s made Half Japanese a pretty big deal. Again, though, the guys in the band probably don’t see it that way. Thankfully, someone got the idea to interview the Fairs on camera as well as a host of critics (Byron Coley), record label honchos (the dingle berry helming Matador – he comes off like a tremendous douche) and….Penn Gillette?

Yeah, for The Band that Would Be King, Penn gets into a story springing from about the time he was on Miami Vice. Apparently, the comedian, actor and magician had to (half) steal the masters for Half Japanese’s 1988 Charmed Life. Luckily he did. ‘Cause that album rules.

Either way, the documentary grants each Fair a decent amount of face time with Jad seeming more bizarre than even his music could have hinted at. But after hearing him speak at length, his geeky gyrations on stage seem even more genuine.

It’s still at times difficult to make it through some his Jad’s more cheese ball writing efforts – “Miracles Happen Everyday” specifically. But his simple and purposefully unfettered lyrics come off as an extension of Jonathan Richman. So, it can’t be all that difficult.

The film does grant viewers a surprisingly broad view of what the band was doing, who cared and why. Contextualizing the band within the then current major label machinations goes a long way to better explicating how Half Japanese even came about. And while it’s endearing to hear the brothers discuss getting to work in their parents house, going to see the MC5 and the Stooges, there’re a great many minutes wasted on latter day live performances. Of course, Mo Tucker drumming on a few songs makes up for any perceived shortcomings, but still….just go buy a record.

Wild Man Fischer: Recommended Listening, Kinda

This isn’t a hoax or a gimmick. It’s Frank Zappa and his label, Bizarre, being genuinely interested in music that wouldn’t have had a chance at proper distribution otherwise. Of course, it’s then a fair question to ask, why wouldn’t Wild Man Fischer have been able to secure a record deal otherwise?

Good question.

Well, being homeless and schizophrenic doesn’t usually make for a combination readying one for international stardom. Fischer, though, spent his days stalking up and down the Sunset Strip, sparing change. When he was actually able to pick up a few cents here and there, he rewarded the contributor with an original song (there’s a track on Fischer’s album detailing just this activity). And this is, presumably, how Zappa found Fischer.

Either way, the would-be-impresario took Fischer into the studio during 1968 and recorded a double album – the cover depicting the singer in cross-eyed, weird faced glory.

The resultant disc, An Evening with Wild Man Fischer, is obviously not suited for public consumption. So, if the oddest efforts Zappa ever issued (or Beefheart, or the Residents) are a bit too far out there, stray away from this. Of course, none of that is a proper musical antecedent to what Fischer was doing. Instead, something between street preachers hailing from the south and field hollers could serve as some sort of sensible reference point. But that doesn’t even do the Wild Man justice.

The first track on Fischer’s double album, “Merry Go Round,” as out of key and meter as it is, gets revisited mighty quickly as the second track finds the singer rewarding someone on the street with the tune.

In fact, more than just a few moments on the album are spent detailing Fischer on the street, just talking. Of course, that’s all juxtaposed with studio work, and Fischer working alongside the Mothers.

Freer and perhaps even more representational of what Fischer heard in his head are the tracks on which he simply goes about it all a cappella style – again tying him to workers in the field. Tracks like “Dream Girl,” which he apparently wrote while still a teenager, obviously work with proper pop tropes – in terms of lyrics, at least. But Fischer accompanying his verses with a falsetto makes the whole thing even more wacky even if at times it sounds like Jonathan Richman weeping all alone.

Recommended for weirdoes and those who listen to music for the sake of listening to music.

Madness: Its Second Step Beyond

Almost everyone who owns a radio knows the song “Our House.” And while the guys comprising Madness are unquestionably glad they collectively wrote that song and subsequently made a (night) boatload of money from the effort, it shouldn’t be considered the pinnacle of the group’s creative achievement.

That song cropped up during the mid eighties, but even Madness’ first long player of the decade saw profound shifts from what was portrayed on the ensembles first disc, One Step Beyond.

By 1980, the punk thing had pretty much become a joke. And along with it a great deal of Two Tone stuff had changed to the point that it was difficult to recognize. That being said, a number of critics saw the changing approach to song craft as bands maturing.

Regardless of that being a proper distillation of the situation, the bouncy ska reveled in over the course of One Step had pretty much disappeared by Absolutely. Still present was a pervasive sense of fun – even if the songs didn’t necessarily all touch upon the lighter side of life.

A pronounced, white R&B influence crops up pretty frequently, “Ernie” being a prime suspect. But what’s important to reckon is that Madness, like other ska acts, appreciated a generous skinhead following. And skinheads (of the non-racist variety) enjoyed dance music. So while “Ernie” might not be to the liking of baldies today, or then, the song served a purpose.

Even beyond that, though, Absolutely reached near the top of the charts. And with that wealth of new fans, there had to be some work represented on the album that was grabbing folks.

For the relative purist, though, tracks like “Close Escape” were kept aboard for this effort. As with most Madness tracks that actually (kinda) properly ape a JA music thing, some listeners might hear the cheese ball eighties’ influence as much as anything else. And while that’s a point of view not easily dismissed, Madness was a UK band comprised of a buncha white guys. Players straight from JA might not have worked up this material, but as an extension of the earlier cohorts, Madness does a fine job representing the time and place that it hailed.

Following “Close Escape” is “Not Home Today.” And for a moment it sounds as if August Pablo composed the track. Reaching the hook, though, becomes problematic. Again, purists are going to make the gas-face at this one, but Madness serves a purpose as a marker of the genre’s development.

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