MARISSA MAGIC - "The Fall" - Tape - 2014

    A little over a month ago, I was stepping onto a plane in Alabama, a little tipsy and on pills, not really sure if I'd ever see my dad alive again. About a week later, I realized that I was right. As I was trying to get comfortable inside of that soon-to-be-airborne metal tube full of normal humans, I scanned my mp3 player for anything that might make me feel sane...or sound at least as fucked up as I felt at that moment. When I reached the "M's", I already knew where I would be stopping. I put on "Infinity Bums" by MARISSA MAGIC and felt like I was listening to something that was made for that exact moment in time. Maybe the drugs kicked in. Maybe the tape helped sooth my frazzled mind. Whatever happened, I kept that release going through my brain on repeat for most of the plane trip back to San Francisco. 

   A few short weeks later, I was sitting on a couch at an Oakland punk house when Marissa plopped down next to me and handed me her new tape. At first glance, I thought she was handing me a homemade tape of THE FALL, but soon realized that I was wrong. This tape, to me, is nothing like the last one and I'm totally okay with that. When I first put it on and heard one of my favorite songs, I thought that she gave me a bunk tape, but then heard that it was really her. I'm not even gonna try to explain this one too much because I'm not sure if I can. Marissa doesn't use any traditional instruments (as far as I can tell) on this tape and mostly sticks to tape loops and layers upon layers of her voice. The deterioration and static lends to a deconstruction (or destruction?) of the typical noise tape. Or maybe I'm wrong. Maybe she was just listening to the radio and shit got fucked. Either way, it leads me into a world that I know little about but am constantly intrigued by. I find it to be uncomfortable, challenging, entrancing and soothing. 

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I don't know how to get this tape other than having Marissa pull it out of her pocket at a show and handing it to you. 

Marissa plays guitar in STILLSUIT, who put out an awesome LP in 2013. It quickly grew on me and I think it's one of the more interesting and intriguing LP's that have come out in the past year. 

50 MILLION - "This One's Pretty Cool, But I Like the Old Stuff Better" - CD - 1995

   I've already explained who 50 MILLION is and I've told you how much I love them, so I'll tell you about the first time I saw them, which is when I bought this CD.
   To be honest, I wasn't going to go to their show in Huntsville, AL back in 1997. I didn't know who they were and they were playing with some pretty crappy bands, but the flyer proclaimed "50  MILLION from San Francisco, featuring ex-members of J CHURCH". I loved J CHURCH, so I went to the show just to see 50 MILLION. (tangential side note: Wade from 50M played drums in J CHURCH for less than a year or so and recorded with them on "The Procession Of Simulacra - The Map Preceeds the Territory" 10", which coincidentally is the first record I ever heard by them.) I was more than a block away from the show and heard this loud, low booming voice of a guy talking somewhere. As I got closer, I realized that the voice was coming from this long-haired guy in front of the venue and he was talking a million miles per hour to one of my friends and telling her she had beautiful eyes. He turned to me as I walked up, saw the HICKEY patch on my jacket and introduced himself as "Shellhead". I found out that he was good friends with the guys from HICKEY (who had rolled through town a few months earlier) and they had told him to look for me and some of my friends. It was sweet. I met his brother Wade (the drummer on this tour) and their friend, Bloomie (the bass player). Shell continued to hit on my friend (very sweetly and not at all creepy, I might add. My friend was enjoying it and talking to him all night). It turns out that she was the ex of "J", this bruiser/greaser who had a reputation of starting fights with touring bands, young punks that were smaller than him and anyone who said anything slightly negative to him. He was a fucking jerk. I was afraid of him because I was young and scrawny. He had fought HICKEY, the SPAWN SACS and even tried to beat up my friend Ivy when she had a broken foot and was hobbling around on crutches. World class jerk here.

     Anyway, "J" was lurking around in the shadows, glaring at Shell talking to his ex while getting drunker and surlier. It didn't help matters that when 50 MILLION took the stage, they played a HICKEY song and dedicated their sweetest, sappiest songs to the woman. 

   As far as their live show went, I was sold. They played everything from awesome pop-punk to metallish dirges to feedback-laden experimental noise. They were pretty fucking amazing that night. Also, they set up all of their equipment in front of the band's stuff that played before them, thereby trapping it back there so that the douchey, crappy pop-punk band that played before them had to wait until they were done so that they could load out. I remember watching the members of that band stare helplessly and hopelessly as 50 MILLION played a 10 minute version of "She Is a Monster", making it drag slower and slower until Shell was laying on the floor, making his guitar feedback and Wade was playing something like 5 beats per minute. It felt like vindication for having to watch that crappy band's piss-poor excuse for pop-punk for 30 minutes.

   Anyway, at some point during the set, Shell tackled me in a faux wrestling match and we rolled around on the floor in a fake fight. "J" took that as his cue to attack and ran up to kick Shell in the head a couple of times, which he defended as protecting me (totally ridiculous, since that dude threatened me numerous times). After the show was over and 50 MILLION had packed up, Shell was talking to the woman and "J" made his move. He started pushing Shell around and threatened to kick his ass for trying to steal his girlfriend. Wade ran up, jumped between them and threatened to kill the guy, telling him that he would cut his head off. (a little background: Wade had parts of his head shaved off. He's an old Texas bad-ass covered in homemade tattoos and has a nasty disposition, but a heart of gold. On this tour, he looked like a completely deranged, sadistic, escaped mental patient.) "J", for the first time ever, looked genuinely scared of someone. I left with 50 MILLION in their van and found out that Wade had a machete tucked into his pants the whole time. He had fully intended to cut off "J"'s head if he didn't back off. As Wade was driving to my house, he calmly said "I'm glad I didn't have to blow his head off with the shotgun". I turned around and the shotgun was right behind me.

   I bought this CD from them at the show, even though Shell told me that it sounded nothing like their live show. I thought it was weird that a band would put out something that was wholly unrepresentative of their sound but I bought it anyway and it bummed me out when I listened to it for the first time. Over time, it quickly grew to be my most favorite thing that the band has ever put out. It's a collection of home recordings by the two brothers that dates back as far as the mid-70's, but mostly sticks to the early-to-mid-90's. A lot of the songs were started by one brother who recorded his part and then sent the master tape through the mail to the other brother to finish. It includes now-classic songs like "Baltimore", "Burn Away", "Egg in the Face", "Evergreen" (which Matty Luv of HICKEY once called "the saddest song ever written") and 22 more. 50 MILLION were (and are) a brilliant band that encompassed the hopes, dreams and ultimate failures of being broke and hopeless, but found solace and comfort in that and learned to be proud of and celebrate their lives, no matter what. They were also drug-addled, drunk and unapologetic, but who wasn't? I'm so very happy that they made it out of the 90's Mission punk scene alive.

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   ...and here is the reason I didn't use "J"'s real name in the story. You may wonder, "Why would you use an alias for some jerk who beat up all of your friends?" Well, a few years after leaving Huntsville, I went back to visit for a few days. Some friends and I went out to the river to hang out and drink a few beers. On the way, they said they were gonna pick up "J" to go with us. I said "uhhh...what the fuck dudes? I don't wanna hang out with this macho fuckwad" (or something like that). They just said it was cool and picked him up. After a couple of drinks, I said "I need to talk to you" and pulled him aside. After all of these years, I had gained some self-confidence and decided to tell him how I felt. I tore into him about how demeaning it was that he beat the shit out of young punks, how fucked up it was that he threatened women with violence and what my friends across the country thought of him. I told him how angry I was at him for all of those years and how much I wanted someone to just beat the living shit out of him. Then, I braced myself for the beating he was about to give me. He didn't. He stood there and listened to everything that I had to say and then he told me that I was right and that he was sorry. I couldn't believe it. This guy had never shown any remorse in the moment or admitted any signs of weakness or apology. He explained that he grew up fighting as a means of survival and as a way of life. As he got older, he didn't see any other way of living and fighting became his only method of solving problems or disputes. He told me that he wasn't happy during that time and worked a lot on changing his behavior to become a better person. He didn't expect me or anyone else to forgive him for all of the harm he had caused so many people, but he wanted me to tell those people that he's really sorry and he wishes that he could make up for it somehow. So, if you ever lived in Huntsville or came through there in a punk band in the 90's, it's highly possible that you know who I'm talking about...and if he fought you for some stupid reason, he's sorry. The rest of that night hanging out with him was great and memorable. I even hugged that motherfucker at the end of the night. Life is strange.

If you want to order stuff by 50 MILLION and many other great bands, please visit STARCLEANER.

FRED LANE & RON 'PATE'S DEBONAIRS - "From The One That Cut You" - LP - 1983

    The record pictured above is probably one of the most important records (to me) that I will ever put on this blog. This record is responsible for vastly altering my ideas of music and changing the way I've thought about it since hearing this for the first time. It's just as important to me, musically, as THE MINUTEMEN'S "Double Nickels on the Dime", seeing the CRAMPS when I was 12, hearing the HICKEY LP for the first time, meeting my friend Harry and experiencing my first live IMPRACTICAL COCKPIT show. I came across it at Sunburst Records in Huntsville, AL when I was absentmindedly flipping through the new releases (which is weird since this thing came out in 83, but recorded in the mid-70's) one day in 1996. All of a sudden, this freak (pictured above) was staring me in the eyes and I didn't know what to think of it. I mean, how do you pass up a record with scrawled handwriting all over the cover, accompanied by THAT guy with band aids all over his face? Well, I couldn't pass it up. I bought it immediately without knowing anything about it and I remember Jay (the store owner) looking at it and saying "What the fuck is this, man?"

    When I first put it on, I was a little disappointed. This was just like...lounge music or something. I had some bummed out visions of those people who buy "Exotica" records and think they're really wild. I almost picked up the needle off of the record, but then it started to get weird. It started to delve into a cacophony of horns and weirdness that was approaching free jazz and straight up noise. The arrangements would flow out into a mess that sounded unstructured, out of tune and completely out of focus...but then it would all come back together in one big swell that sometimes worked, sometimes didn't, but I fucking loved it. This record grew on me over the years and started to inform the way I approached music and helped me to gain a better understanding and appreciation of the true freaks of the music world.

     But who ARE these people? That's the question that took me a few years to figure out (I didn't use the internet until 2001, plus no one I knew used it in the 90's anyway). It was next to impossible to find out any info about them in books or zines. The closest thing I found was a tiny blurb in the book Incredibly Strange Music but even that hardly said anything worth noting. After a while, I found out that this was from my very own home state of Alabama! The liner notes say that some of these songs were recorded in a stage production and a musical. After more digging, I found out that the group that played on this Fred Lane LP (the group consists of 21 people) had worked previously on another LP called "Raudeluna's 'Pataphysical Revue", which was recorded live at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa in 1975. It was basically a variety show that consisted of deranged swing standards, noisy improvisations, hardware store noise, a "Concerto for Active Frogs" and more.They needed an M.C. for the night, so they chose their friend Tim Reed, who renamed himself Fred Lane. The record sounds crazy, fucked up and beautiful and I love that it happened in front of a live audience at a school in Alabama. Between the noisy improv, pre-recorded applause, and door prizes (4 used tires), most of the audience walked out.

   Before this even, a core group of folks from this band were hosting group paintings and jam sessions at their house where prior experience wasn't necessary. This was the beginnings of this whole scene of people and improv musicians that continues to thrive to this day. Around this time, the guitarist Davey Williams met and started a longtime collaboration with LaDonna Smith (both on this Fred Lane LP) that continues to this day (incidentally, I saw them perform a performance art piece in Montevallo, AL when I was 12 or 13 that was a pivotal moment in my life that helped me to realize that "something else" was out there beyond mainstream music, beyond suburbs and beyond what I had ever even thought about. It meant a lot to me.).

   Anyway, let me get back to the point here. Apparently, this record ("From the One That Cut You") was literally inspired by a crude note scrawled on brown paper, wrapped around a bowie knife, found in a secret compartment in a 1952 Dodge panel truck when some friends (the owners) came by a house in order to repaint it, in order to elude capture by the naval police. The note, a sort of love/threat/confession inspired Tim (Fred Lane) to write the song, the stage show and create the character who performs the song...all from three sentences written by someone named Fuear. (This info comes straight from an article by Joe Tepperman) The note read " I hope the paine is gone. This is the one that cut you? P.S. Don't wear about Jimmy I will take kear of him the same way I took kear of YOU".

   There was a third album called "Radio Car Jerome" that came out in 1986 and a lot of people seem to love it, but I found it to be too structured and a little hokey. It didn't have the fucked up spark of the previous LP and a lot of the improv was gone. There was also an idea for a fourth LP called "Icepick to the Moon" but it never got past the idea stage and maybe that's for the best. A guy named Skizz Cyzyk has been working on a documentary about Fred Lane for 10 fucking years now and I wish it would come out already. I wrote to him once, asking questions about it and he never wrote me back. If you want to read more stuff about Fred Lane, Say Day Bew Records or the early Alabama improv scene, be sure to click over to the Raudelunas site. Be careful though because it can lead you down a wormhole of misinformation and internet time-suck. Apparently, this crew of folks loves embellishment and Dada-ist wordplay. 

   Also, I could talk about this record and Alabama for another 3 pages, but I will spare you. If you want to talk more about it, get in touch and I will bore you to tears.

Download "From the One That Cut You"