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.
That being said, part of what makes the Testors something of a disappointment to hear thirty some odd years after its founding is that a good deal of the phrasing Vincent uses in his vocals have become excepted models of singing in a punk band – “Crazy Lazy Jane” being as good an example as anything else. The same might be figured in regards to instrumentation and how guitars are voiced here. That same song sports a melodic progression in so many other songs that if it were rendered in solely instrumental terms, it’d be almost impossible to distinguish one from the next.
So, the most base assessment of the Testors and this cash-in style anthology is simply to figure it as working towards uncovering and disseminating the entirety of punk’s history. That’s a worth while cause, to be sure. At the same time, though, there seems to be very little reason to be engaged with each and every dispatch from the punk record stacks.
Either way, though, Vincent’s gone on to a rather prolific solo career. And if nothing else, it’s better that he’s making music than making burgers up the street.