Sha La La Volume 16

We’ve spent a good bit of time and energy over the last 15 miserable months ranking our favorite records and songs on Twitter music polls (follow us @JFloyd_Popwell, and check out @RichardS7370 for the lists). While that’s been a great way to kill the time and discover and rediscover loads of music (and make some virtual friends), it’s time to get back out into the traffic-filled roadways, under the soon-to-be-wildfire-ash-and smoke-choked skies, and get ripped off by corporate convenience fees–so we can once again see live music! Fleece me and get me too drunk to care! Nothing has changed! Here we go again!

Here’s some things to watch and listen to while you’re saving nickels for the next concert:

V/A
Ferociously Stöned – A Tribute to Motörhead 
The Company Records 

Motörhead was famously fueled by alcohol and amphetamines, which is why they are such perfect driving music. And though they are absolutely enjoyed by cannabis consumers across the globe, the band’s music is 420 million miles away from the metal that earns the adjective stoner. The crankers from London always preferred to be called a supercharged rock n roll band anyway, so enough with this business of labels.
The songs on this compilation don’t just jam the gears from full throttle to low, but embrace the heaviness that was the speeding tank called Motörhead. It works. 

Rather than try to make a funny about Fast Eddie Clarke becoming Dense or some such nonsense, here’s a story. I’m reminded of the time in 2003 when my buddy J Boggs flipped a sudden u-turn in the middle of Sunset Boulevard because he thought our friend Dan might be hanging out at The Seventh Veil. I can’t remember if Dan was there, but we met Lemmy in the outdoor smoking area. J lit up a smoke and drew hard, “Hey man, we saw you open up for Dio and Iron Maiden a few weeks ago in Long Beach. You were fucking awesome!”

Lemmy growled back, “I know. We had to open that fucking show. We should have headlined!”

Now that the virus seems to be behind those of us who are vaccinated, we need to get back up to the Rainbow Room in West Hollywood to have a drink with Lemmy’s statue. See what he has to say about the state of things. We’ll listen to this on the way up.

Round Eye
Culture Shock Treatment

Sudden Death Records

You know how some songs by The Stooges fall apart at the end with a saxophone bleating out all over the glorious mess? Round Eye take those moments of chaos and turn them into a whole wild album called Culture Shock Treatment. Hailing from Shanghai in the People’s Republic of China, the group consists of American, Irish, and Italian expats who don’t much like Communism (which begs the question why do they live there?), and make a racket railing against it. There’s a free-jazz spirit dancing like a spinning hippie all over this spastic-fantastic, happily angry record, yet the overall vibe keeps things ironically groovy despite the often charged lyrics. It’s post punk gone wild. The album is produced by the venerable bass master Mike Watt, and mixed by Descendents’ drummer Bill Stevenson, and the punk-is-what-we-make-it heart of Watt’s style, and even the less pop-punk parts of Descendents albums (think “Schizophrenia” and “Uranus” from the ALL record) are some kind of reference points for the unique sounds of Round Eye. Frantic freaky styles that must be absolutely eye-and-ear popping live. Here’s hoping for a tour to come our way. 

V/A
SPIKE: A San Pedro Compilation
Water Under the Bridge Records

There’s a new bridge that connects our hometown of Long Beach with the happenings in San Pedro. It’s a sleek thing, as far as bridges go; wide and extra tall so it’s passable by all the mega ships entering the harbor filled with crap to fill your Walmarts. Because of this compilation, we plan to be crossing that bridge often this summer (and beyond, unless the anti-vaxxers ruin everything) to see some excellent bands. Here’s proof that the underground rock/punk/garage/alt/rad/skaterock/poppunk/insert-label-here music scene of the Harbor area of SoCal is as strong and rocking as it’s ever been. With artwork by Raymond Pettibon, the record itself is already a collector’s item, but the seventeen songs boost the value enormously. Bookended by Todd Congellierre’s bands Toys That Kill and Clown Sounds, the comp also features Mike Watt and the Secondmissingmen, The Wrinkling Brothers (featuring George Hurley of the Minutemen), the catchiest pop-punk trio we’ve heard since the ‘90s (a band called Tables Turned – that song has been in our head for a week and we aren’t asking it to leave), some crunching anti-numbskull awesomeness from A Lovely Sort of Death, haunting television ruminations from Slaughterhouse, and the demand that we continue to Stay Home by the band with our new favorite name, Stoner Cop. A record full of great underground bands that gives us a smile bigger than a half pipe.

Punk the Capital
Washington D.C. Punk 1976-1983

It feels like there’s been three or four docs about the Washington D.C. punk scene lately. Maybe it’s just been Dave Grohl talking about how he grew up near there all the time in an attempt to get people to associate him more with Minor Threat than radio rock. Anyway, it means more screen time for Ian MacKaye, Henry Rollins, and the members of Bad Brains, which is not a bad thing. Punk the Capital aims to tell the story before the story, and it starts off doing just that. So we learn of and see mid-70s footage of The Slickee Boys, The Nurses, Overkill (not the NJ thrash metal band), and some band called White Boy that MacKaye says inspired him to put out his own music. Those experimental bands never really sounded like what one would think of as punk, but they were the bands that the future punk rockers were seeing instead of doing their algebra homework. 

The unstated goal of any doc about D.C.  music should be to find and show the earliest Bad Brains footage possible, and Punk the Capital yields some pre-dread backflips and some images of the band playing at an influential hippie art house turned underground music venue, a place called Madams Organ – riffing off its location in the Adams Morgan section of the city. From there, it tells the story we feel like we’ve heard often – Teen Idles to Minor Threat with Rollins getting the Black Flag gig some time, and the Bad Brains heading up to New York, and then someone correctly pointing out that Rites of Spring is one of the best bands ever. All good, all true, all already very much known by anyone who cares about such things. 

D.C punk is better archived than any city’s (as we learned that Jello Biafra said to Ian MacKaye), and this here’s another photo, flyer, and footage filled collection to add to the beginning of the story.