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Archive for the ‘Cro-Mags’ Category

Tom Gilligan–Irish Drummers Volume 1: Interviews with 32 Irish Drummers (2019)

Posted in 1990, An Emotional Fish, Bad Brains, Bitch Falcon, Blades Club, Cactus World News, Cro-Mags, Cypress, Dave Grohl, Deep Purple, Dream Theater, Fangclub, Fontaines D.C., Frank Zappa, Gemma Hayes, Glen Hansard, Glenn Kotche, Green Day, Guns n' Roses, Hothouse Flowers, Marianne Faithfull, Metronomy, Midnight Oil, Montauk Hotel, My Little Funhouse, Neil Peart, Overhead The Albatross, Picturehouse, Pillow Queens, Pugwash, Queens of the Stone Age, Sepultura, Sinéad O'Connor, Snarky Puppy, Snow Patrol, Soccer Mommy, Stella Mozgawa, Sultans of Ping, The Commitments, The Coronas, The Frames, The Redneck Manifesto, The Who, Therapy?, Thin Lizzy, THUMPER, Tim Finn, Touts, Unsane, Vulpynes, Walking on Cars, Warpaint, Wilco on February 16, 2021| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: MY LITTLE FUNHOUSE-Standunder (1991).

Drummer has a funny story about joining My Little Funhouse.  It’s especially funny given how young he was and how raunchy the band seems.

This album feels like a hair metal band whose second guitarist had just heard of grunge.  Lead singer Alan Lawlor sounds bratty and sleazy like an L.A. hair metal stud.

There’s some ripping guitar solos (“Destiny”) and big soaring ballads (“Wishing Well”) and there’s a dumb straight up rocker (“L.S.D.”).  There’s even the quiet intro (lighters up in the air) “sensitive” song (“breaks my heart/tears me apart”), “Anonymous.”

The one musical surprise is the summer guitar intro of “Been too Long” which sounds like it belongs to another song all together.  Although the bass/drum clap along is pretty apt.  “raintown” is another song that is a little unusual here–it feels like a B-side.  Lawlor’s vocals are toned way down and the production is much softer.

Perhaps the one thing that sets them apart from the West Coast metal is the song “Catholic Boy.”  Yup, it’s just as sexual/ist as a typical metal band, but the specificity of being Catholic seems very Irish to me.

My Little Funhouse opened for Guns N’ Roses when they toured Ireland.  And that makes perfect sense.  This album is completely of its time (or maybe a year too late).  With the right exposure, they would have been huge.  But this is the only thing they released before they broke up.

[READ: December 30, 2020] Irish Drummers Volume 1

I received this book at work and thought it would be interesting to look though.  I flipped through the names in the contents and was pretty sure I hadn’t heard of any of these drummers.  But it turns out I knew a lot of the bands they played in, just not their names.

Gilligan says that he created the website Irish Drummers several years ago.  It was an opportunity for him to interview Irish drummers and celebrate them.  Gilligan himself is a drummer but never really played with any bands.  Probably the most famous Irish drummer, U2’s Larry Mullen, Jr is not in this book, but he is on the website.

Gilligan thought it would be very cool to publish a book and here it is. The interviews are truncated for the book, you’ll get a lot more online.

Each interview has a picture (or two) and three to seven questions.

I have made some notes of interest from the drummers who had something unique to say. (more…)

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John Berger–“Passeur” (New Yorker, December 24 & 31, 2001)

Posted in Chess, Cro-Mags, Death, John Berger, New Yorker, New Zealand, Nostalgia, Old Age, Pigeons, Poland, Rachel Kushner, Short Story on February 11, 2021| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: CRO-MAGS-The Age of Quarrel (1986).

In a post from a couple of days ago, Rebecca Kushner mentions a bunch of punk bands that she either knew or hung out with.  I was amazed at how many of them I’d heard of but didn’t really know.  So this seemed like a good opportunity to go punk surfing.

Cro-Mags are another of those classic punk bands that I never really listened to.  I mean, sure I’ve heard of them.  And that album cover is well known to me.  I just never gave them a listen.

This is their debut album.  They are still together but have only released 6 records.  And their later stuff is much more heavy metal oriented.  But this first one is classic punk.

There a whole bunch of really short songs–eight under two minutes.  But there  were hints at the metal direction because there are also some longer songs too.  Opener “We Gotta Know” is over three minutes and even has a wild guitar solo from Parris Mitchell Mayhew.  “Seekers of the Truth” runs to over four minutes and is comparatively rather slow paced.

But the punk elements are there too.  Chanted call and response and a song like “World Peace” has a good moshing break down.

Overall, it sounds a bit like a few of the metal albums form the 80s that I really liked.  There’s no reason I shouldn’t have listened to this back then.  They’ve even got pointed lyrics that as a teen I would have really gotten into

Interestingly, their follow up album, Best Wishes, had a big lineup change.  Their bassist (and the only guy who has been with the band for all of these years) Harley Flanagan took over on vocals.  His singing style was very different.  The short songs are gone and the metal feel really dominates.

In Kushner’s essay she talks about Harley the hare krishna and you can see that spirituality in his lyrics

Days of Confusion which is only 2 minutes long has this lyric

In these days of confusion much illusions try to get you
Try to trick you Every single day
Much aggravation and frustration
Devastation always heading my way
And I know why I’m suffering
Looking for satisfaction my mind keeps leading me astray
And I know and I see spiritually there’s gotta be a better way
It’s nice when bands do the right thing.

[READ: February 2, 2021] “Passeur” 

A man is in Krakow, the only major Polish city to have survived World War II without its buildings being severely demolished.

He is staying in “a pension” (which I’m picturing as a hostel) and asks where the nearest ATM is.  I enjoyed this line:

It’s not far, she said, sighing regretfully, as if she wished she were sending me to the other side of the world.

He says he has never been in this square before, but he knows it by heart.   Or at least he knows the merchants–grandmothers selling vegetables and home-made goods.

Then he looks in a barbershop and he sees a man who looks comfortable there, Ken.

Ken was born in New Zealand and died there. (more…)

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Rachel Kushner–“The Hard Crowd: Coming of age on the streets of San Francisco” (New Yorker, January 18, 2021)

Posted in Autobiographies, Bob Dylan, Bullitt, Cro-Mags, Death, Drugs, Free Beer, Gorilla Biscuits, Jimmy Carter, New Yorker, Pearl Harbor and the Explosions, Prison, Punks, Rachel Kushner, San Francisco, CA, Touch Me Hooker, UK Subs on February 8, 2021| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: U.K. SUBS-Another Kind of Blues (1978).

In this essay, Rebecca Kushner mentions a bunch of punk band members that she either knew or hung out with.  I was amazed at how many of them I’d heard of but didn’t really know.  So this seemed like a good opportunity to go punk surfing.

U.K. Subs are a punk band that I’ve heard of but really knew nothing about.  A little research tells me that they have been active all of these years–their latest release was in 2019.  That’s some serious staying power.  According to Wikipedia, there have been about 75 members of the band over the years.

This first album is a pretty fascinating listen.  Most of the seventeen songs are under two minutes long, but they’re not blisteringly fast or anything.  The songs are more or less blues based (as the title indicates) but faster and grittier

This is definitely a punk album.  But they follow a lot of rock song conventions.  Indeed, “I Live in a Car” is a minute and a half long but it’s got verses a chorus and two guitar solos.  “I Couldn’t Be You” even has a harmonica solo.

But songs like “Tomorrow’s Girls” offer good old punk chanting choruses.  And “World War” which is all of a minute and twenty three seconds is actually over 20 seconds of explosion.

“Stranglehold” was a pretty big hit in England and it’s easy to see why.  It’s got an immediate riff, a three chord chorus that’s easy to sing along with and a bouncy bass line.  And it’s all of one minute and fifty-seven seconds.

Checking some of their other releases through the years, UK Subs definitely went through a metal phase in the 80s and 90s, but their 2016 album Zeizo has found the punk spirit again.  I think I like Zeizo better than their first.

[READ: February 2, 2021] “The Hard Crowd”

I’ve read a few things by Rachel Kushner, although I’ve never given any thought to her biography.  I never would have guessed that Kushner was part of a San Francisco pub scene when she was growing up (or that she is essentially my age).

This essay is about that time in her life.  When Jimmy Carter was president and he quoted Bob Dylan in his acceptance speech “He not busy being born is busy dying.”

She says that being born is an existential category of gaining experience and living intensely in the present.  Conversely, dying doesn’t have to be negative–the new stuff is over but you turn reflective you examine and tally–it is behind you but it continues to exists somewhere.

She says she’s been watching film footage found on Youtube shot in 1966 or 1967 from a car moving slowly along Market Street in San Francisco, where she grew up.  She assumes it is B roll from a film, because it is professional grade (she imagines it was for Steve McQueen’s Bullitt, but that’s not based on anything).

She worked at the Baskin Robbins making $2.85 an ahour.   The shop is now gone and she thinks it’s weird to be sentimental about a chain store, but when her mother took her to the IHOP years after she worked there, it all came flooding back–sights, smells.  Despite every one being identical, this one was hers. (more…)

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