ALABAMA

 

The first non-country concert I saw: STRAY CATS @ Frank Erwin Center in Austin, Texas. 
The first real punk show I saw: THE DEAD MILKMEN w/BABY M in Tulsa, Oklahoma. 
Perspective is wild, because there were probably less than six years between these two events.

The first record I bought with my own money: CHARLIE DANIELS BAND Million Mile Reflections.
The first cassette I bought with my own money: ALABAMA My Home's In Alabama. 
The first punk tape I acquired: Tough call, but I traded Nikki Jorgensen my copy of BON JOVI's Slippery When Wet for her copy of SUICIDAL TENDENCIES' self titled debut in 1986. 

Notable: 
• Several country concerts pre-dated the benchmark gigs - RONNIE MILSAP, KENNY ROGERS, HOYT AXTON, WILLIE NELSON, DOLLY PARTON and others. Living in Austin had its perks, even though I could have been seeing DICKS and BIG BOYS if I had been a couple of years older. 
• I read a review of HÜSKER DÜ's Flip Your Wig in an issue of Creem that I picked up from the magazine rack in Safeway; it inspired me to shoplift a copy of Candy Apple Grey a few weeks later when I was on an orchestra field trip to Oklahoma City and we went to the mall (because shopping malls were a novel treat to us small/er town kids). Shit blew my mind. 
• My step-cousin visited in 1987 ands saw that I was getting close. She bought me Give Me Convenience Or Give Me Death, Never Mind The Bollocks and X's See How We Are and helped me bleach my jean jacket and paint the evil dude from ST's Join The Army on the back. I am eternally grateful, and will always remember how disappointed she was with that X record. 
• Two shows I wish I could revisit now that I know more things: GRIMPLE @ Kelly's Bar & Grill in Norman, Oklahoma (1992 I think) and BORN AGAINST in Cudahay, Wisconsin (1993). They were both milestone gigs, but I was clueless.

Really though...I still am.

THAT FIRST TAPE
My mother cleaned some shit out of my sister's room recently, and handed me a small bundle of tapes that survived the decades. Not quite ready to listen to the tapes of her talking and singing yet, but I was very happy that she held onto the shit from my younger years. I've listened to this tape hundreds of times - but last week I popped this physical copy in a deck for the first time in thirty years was truly special.

TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES FROM DAY ONE

 

Here it is: Region Rock. Those shitty folk punk banjo playing inept coffee shop rock motherfuckers that ain't punk that people call Region Rock? Fukk that shit. Because you know what's punk? Fukkn STUN GUNS and SPAWN SACS and LES TURDS and KREAMY 'LECTRIC SANTA and shit like that. So forget what you think about some overly broad and arbitrary subgenre descriptor, because if this is Region Rock then I was there for it the first time and I haven't left. 

TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES FROM DAY ONE

30 BANDS, 51 SONGS FROM "THE REGION"

BLACK HOLE KIDS // HOLINESS CHURCH OF THE VALLEY

This four cut split is an audio time warp that feels (sounds) like it reaches back way more than six short years. Chaotic West Coast screamo (MOHINDER, HEROIN) collides gorgeously with Euro metallic genius (ACME, AKEPHAL), and both bands do it with sincerity. A rare split where the acts involved sound enough alike that it gives you pause, but the distinctions become clear the more you meld with the sounds. 

BLACK HOLE KIDS // HOLINESS CHURCH OF THE VALLEY

...and when you go to your grave, there won't be anybody to pull the grass up over your head...

BOBBY HORTON

Another charity shop score from a trip through the American Southwest, this collection of US Civil War era tunes is every bit as endearing as I hoped it would be when I gambled that quarter. No need to address the politics of a bunch of Confederate anthems, as I'm well aware of the ideological shortcomings, just take this cassette as an homage to long forgotten folk music of the South....and this is volume THREE, so it seems that our Mr. Horton is fukkn committed. 

SONGS OF THE CSA

BLACK HOLE KIDS

Posted to me a few months ago by a kind F.O.T.E., this is a two song taster from Birmingham, Alabama's BLACK HOLE KIDS. Steeped in '90s emotional hardcore and offered up in earnest, this admittedly short demo is like a time machine - let it transport you back to sweaty basements and a total lack of pretension. 

PROSTHESIS vol.1

EXTREME HARDCORE

Leaning more towards the DIY metal that was floating around the underground tape trading world and concentrating on bands from the South, Extreme Hardcore is a 90 minute excursion guided by cult hessians and determined small town thrashers. Texans DEAD HORSE start the party with three tracks - this band was just a whisper to us Oklahomans at the time, but their tracks hold up brilliantly. BLUCK, crossover maniacs TRANSGRESSION, and downtuned churning primitive death metal from Alabama's RANDOM CONFLICT continue the battle while raw noisy hardcore from RADIATION SICKNESS and SKELETAL EARTH wrap up the first round. After a 6 minute death metal opus from NOCTURNUS, Tennessee's FOREVER UNGRATICAL CORINARIC TECHNIKILATION (F.U.C.T. - whose Dimensional Depth Perception full length completely melted my high school mind some 20 years ago) blaze two bombastic burners that are worth the whole download and are followed up by ripping old school HC from fellow Tennessee denizens REDNECKS IN PAIN. CONFRONTATION dish out three tracks (one from their 1989 EP), and we take a trip to the Northeast for legendary weed thrashers EXIT 13 and PHLEGM, who offer three more each to close out the party. This comes from a time when snail mail was just simply mail and underground legends were born...and before the word Extreme had anything to to with sports.

EXTREME HARDCORE COMPILATION 1990

JAPANESE WOMEN

The name of this band is sure to result in some unintended traffic to this blog (currently, several visitors a day find their way to a treasure trove of punk cassette downloads by entering the search terms WOMEN IN PRISON and SEX PRISONER), but hopefully those pervs who find their way here will stick around and listen to some seriously deranged jams from Alabama's JAPANESE WOMEN. Plodding and deliberate noisy hardcore with sinister vocals that put them in line with the world of punk bands that people seem to think are primitive black metal bands because they sound evil. This is mid tempo damage of the highest caliber, courtesy of Tapes Of A Neon God.

ORDER

KOROVA

Honest and brutal, chaotic and sincere hardcore punk shrouded in noise and layered with sound. KOROVA hail from Alabama and embody the very essence of Noise Punk, even though they are far from the shoelace around the forehead "Finland '82 reincarnated as a 00s crasher crust warrior and I have DISORDER running through my veins, motherfukkr" set. Four brutal studio tracks that capture the intensity of early '90s Southern hardcore/crust and then bury it under walls of sound, and then a live set on the flipside that proves that the intensity isn't just a product of 4-track magic. Happy Monday...

DEMONSTRATION #7089

RIPPLING FLESH

Fridays are for compilations, here at TEHQ, and this one is a fukkn scorcher, if I do say so myself.  An entry over at KFTH was the only way I was able to identify half of this shit, and even with that limited guide, it's kinda tough picking out the CAPITLE (sic) tracks from the PSYCHO tunes, and MOTTEK and RAZZIA sound a bit alike as well on this release, so a fair bit of the editing here might be a little suspect (the few song titles I've included are pure guesses...I figure it's a safe bet that when the singer for the brilliantly named band PUNKS shouts "KKK" over and over throughout the song, the song is called "KKK," but you know what they say about assuming...).  Ripping shit throughout, the first half from the USA (PUNKS, killer live shit from Alabama's THE KNOCKABOUTS, CAPITLE, PSYCHO, NO IDENTITY, THE ART THIEVES, my favorite songs on the tape from JERK WARD and TOEJAM) and the other half from West Germany (R.A.F. GIER, RANOLA, RAZZIA, MOTTEK, EA80, BLUTTAT, and a band I cannot identify).  A few songs from each of these bands, and everything here is top notch, enjoy.

RIPPING FLESH

WOGENDES FLEISCH

for folks in the greater Los Angeles area, please come say hello tonight: OPT OUT, 

NO STATIK, ANIMALITOS, LA VOZ, COBWEBBS at The Eastside Manor on Olympic in LA.