As it is now, the band continues issuing work as concerned with punk’s significance in the underground culture as it is with a garage lineage pulled from a backlog of records. Either way, judging from the cover of the group’s first long player, they rank as the reining heartthrobs over at In the Red Record.
What follows will only tangentially include anything about music…
Understanding that these are some good looking dudes – apart form the one guy who appears to suffer from having all of his facial features crammed into a tiny spot on his face – In the Red or whoever had a hand in the production of that first disc thought it was usefully to plaster the band’s collective mug on the cover. It should have worked. Hell, I’d betray my masculinity and my prior track record to duke one and then be able to claim that I’d reckoned with homosexuality with a pretnedo-famous band dude.
We could go on a pseudo-date before the band’s set to play a local gig. Maybe walk down the street after dinner, concealing an open container in a coat pocket, making our way to some venue that’s just as innocuous and ramshackle as what’s up the next day.
I could cheer from the lip of the stage, mouthing words to songs I took the time to learn hours before just to impress the dude. It’d be fabulous.
All of this, though, makes me more of the eventual and total commoditization of underground musics. Weren’t punks ugly losers who weren’t able to be tolerated in any company apart from some small segment of the reject population. That obviously wasn’t the case during the seventies in New York. But that was New York.
Growing up, most folks at shows had some glaring physical issue – teeth that precluded one’s mouth from closing, some jacked up leg problem (which has now become the pigeon-toed thing everyone forces) or was just plain ugly.
Oh yeah, Cheap Time issued a second full length called Fantastic Explanations (and Similar Situations). It sounds like the Saints at some points - "I'd Rather Be Alone." But only vaguely.