"RADIO NAPALM" Podcast # 28: 2/25/14 (For Joyce Coffey)

"RADIO NAPALM" Podcast # 28: 2/25/14 by "Radio Napalm" W/Tim Napalm on Mixcloud

Poor Joyce Coffey of Epping, NH. She was recently arrested four times in 26 hours! Why? She played AC/DC's "Highway To Hell" quote-unquote "too loud!" Ed The Engineer, I, and even dumb-as-shit-in-a-box Scooter know that AC/DC can NEVER be too loud! Even if New Hampshire cops can't figure out that "Rock 'n' Roll Ain't Noise Pollution!" So, this week's episode of "RADIO NAPALM" is dedicated to Ms. Coffey. No, we don't play any AC/DC this week. But we sure do play loads of ALL-NEW punk and garage goodies from DOA, THE STRYPES, THE JIM JONES REVUE, THE OBN IIIs, BITERS, SUPERSUCKERS, CHEETAH CHROME, and more. The Garage is BRIMMING with loudness, this week!

"RADIO NAPALM" Podcast # 27: Feb. 16, 2014

"RADIO NAPALM" Podcast # 25: 2/16/14 by "Radio Napalm" W/Tim Napalm on Mixcloud

Enough specials, already! It's time for AN ACTUAL BRAND NEW EPISODE of the most swingin' sound around, "RADIO NAPALM!" It's ALL-NEW this week, INCLUDING THE MUSIC! Every song played on today's show was recorded the last two years, to guarantee maximum freshness. So, WHO SAYS THERE'S NO GOOD NEW MUSIC?! Not Tim Napalm, Ed The Engineer, nor Scooter! So, dig the new noise from THE ENEMY, THE WHITE WIRES, REV NORB AND THE ONIONS, THE HANGMEN, FLESH LIGHTS, THE ALARM, UK SUBS, and so many more! Plus all the comedy, echo, screaming, old commercials, and Ed The Engineer and Scooter you can eat! And more exclamation points!!! AND CAPITAL LETTERS!!! CAN YOUR HEART STAND IT?!!!

The "RADIO NAPALM" Special: A History Of The Hormones

'Tis true, brethren. As of January 25th, 2014, The Hormones live again! The new 2014 lineup of The Hormones take the stage at Beerland here in Austin, playing our first gig in three years! Joining Tim "Napalm" Stegall on lead guitar and lead vocals are new lead guitarist/backing vocalist Clint Shay, drummer Rob Laundy, and bassist Tom Trusnovic. Opening will be Clint's band The Stand Alones and ex-Hormone Ron Williams' The Inflatable Baptists. Doors are 9 PM, admission is $5! We will also have $11 t-shirts, $2 1-inch punk rock pins, and $3 stickers! (Out of towners can get all the above for $20, including postage! Contact me at timnapalm@yahoo.com.)

Meantime, "RADIO NAPALM" presents a special program: "A History Of The Hormones." Besides everything we released during our 1994-1998 recording lifetime - all three singles ("Sell Out Young," the ultra-rare "Cartographer Of Love," "Castaway") and every comp appearance - the show also presents SEVEN UNRELEASED VINTAGE RECORDINGS! All taken from lost sessions for The Hormones' debut LP and a live radio session for KUT in Austin cut in 1996, as well as live songs from a local TV broadcast. There's also vintage interview material with Tim and Ron from that KUT live session, and an excerpt of a recent interview with me, and my own off-the-cuff reminiscences.

Click the link below, open your speakers wide, and PLAY FUCKING LOUD! See you at Beerland!

The "RADIO NAPALM" Special: A History Of The Hormones by "Radio Napalm" W/Tim Napalm on Mixcloud

"RADIO NAPALM" podcast # 13: PAT FEAR ROCKS!!

"PAT FEAR ROCKS!!" That's what it said on the side of his Flying V. And White Flag mastermind and daredevil punk rock prankster Bill "Pat Fear" Bartell is no longer with us - died in his sleep last Monday, following years of health problems. I knew Bill, but not well - we were both ex-fLiPSiDers, for one. So, of course, I had to at least play four White Flag hits and read a poem Tony of The Adolescents composed, memorializing the friend he knew well.

Among other highlights:

• Scooter gets a bigger vocabulary!
• We play more of your requests!
• Classics from THE LOOTERS (aka that Sex Pistols/Clash band from Ladies And Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains), THE CRAMPS, BLACK FLAG, and WIRE!
• New noise from OFF!, THE STRYPES, BULLET PROOF HEARTS, and more!

It's all NAPALMTASTIC! Now click and play!

"RADIO NAPALM" # 13 9-29-13: PAT FEAR ROCKS! (R.I.P.) by "Radio Napalm" W/Tim Napalm on Mixcloud

Now, here's the playlist:

THE LOOTERS - Conned Again (1980, unreleased Pistols/Clash hybrid, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE FABULOUS STAINS)
ZAKARY THAKS - Face To Face (1967 Corpus Christi garage punk)
THE CRAMPS - Domino (1979)
PINK FAIRIES - City Kids (UK, 1973)
WIRE - I Am The Fly (requested by Rob Cooley, Georgetown, TX, and Jennifer Kerr, Chewelah, Washington)
BLACK FLAG - I've Had It (requested by Sam Rogers, NYC)
THE SCIENTISTS - Last Night (Goose [the Great Dismal Swamis, ex- Phantom Creeps], Friedricksburg, VA)
RUBBER CITY REBELS - "Rubber City Rebels" from the split with the Bizarros (Brian Schickling , Long Beach )
OFF! - What's Next? (Grand Theft Auto V, 2013)
THE STRYPES - Blue Collar Jane (recent single)
10 CENT FUCK FLICKS - Womanaire (Queens sleaze punk on Drug Front Records)
BULLET PROOF HEARTS - American Custom (Omaha punk rock 2013)
PLOWBOY SPOTLIGHT: BOBBY BARE JR. - Make The World Go Away (You Don't Know Me: Rediscovering Eddy Arnold)
WHITE FLAG - Shattered Badge (1984, Mystic Records COPULATION LP)
WHITE FLAG - Suicide King (Wild Kingdom, 1987)
WHITE FLAG - Instant Breakfast (Wild Kingdom, 1987)
WHITE FLAG - I'm Down (Jail Jello split w/Necros, 1986)

Live Review: The Adolescents At SXSW

Tony Adolescent and Tim Napalm: Survivors of the 1998 Adz/Hormones Tour Of Texas! (Photo snapped by someone backstage at Scoot Inn on my phone.)

Live review: The adolescents

Wed., mar. 13^Th, Scoot inn, Austin, Tx.

(Yeah, it's a bit late. What the fuck...?)

The crowd's rather thick, and so's the air, bearing the heat 'n' humidity more befitting Austin in July than during SXSW. A young idiot two humans to my left unzips his worn Hot Topic black stretch jeans, pulls out his plug, and begins hydrating the concrete and every leg within splashing range with his whizz. A big OC-circa-1981-looking bruiser roughly my age grabs the uncouth youth and begins administring an instant ettiquette lesson with fists and boots, screaming about what a jackass he is, then hurls him out of the crowd and into the arms of security.

The bruiser turns around, sees me, and grins, “Whoa! You're Tim Napalm from The Hormones! I love your band!”

Three songs later, Adolescents singer Tony Brandenberg yells from the stage, “Is Tim Stegall still here? I though I saw him earlier...? Oh, there you are! Hey, Tim!” And straight into “Amoeba....”

It's 2013, and The Adolescents still stand tall and proud. There's no longer an Agnew to be found among the six string section, but the current manners of the Gibsons (whose names escape me) handle the crunch and octave runs beautifully. It almost doesn't matter: If Tony and bassist Steve Soto are on the stage, it's gonna be The Adolescents up there, and they're gonna be great. This is loud, proud, vintage punk rock at its tightest and most powerful. The blue album classics are so tuneful and brilliantly constructed, they never grow moss, always sounding amazing whatever year they're being played. And any new noise The Adolescents conjure will rock just as hard. And they're gonna play hard, with passion, ferocity, and commitment.

But it's 2013, and Tony B. is a school teacher when he's not an Adolescent. And he and the band flew in especially for this Converse and Thrasher co-sponsored SXSW day party, were raging through their set, and were to be back at the airport in a matter of hours, whereupon Tony would be up a few hours after that to take his class on a field trip. Adulthood does not stop, even when you're perpetually Adolescent....

There's those who would sneer at all this, sneer at the idea of a classic punk band playing the hits for a perpetually moshing crowd of umpteenth generation punks not even born when these songs were new. Fuck 'em. Punk did change the world, in a very small but still significant manner. Punk created a world within The World in which we can go wild and think and live differently. It became modern, urban, electric folk music, a sphere within which raw, honest expression can live and breathe, where musicians of resilience and power can be working musicians making some semblance of a living out of screaming out their pain and world view. What is so wrong with that? No, it's no longer The Revolution. But we won it, even if the rest of the world doesn't see it that way. And as long as it still affords a place for a band as great as The Adolescents to live and breathe and thrive, I'm all for it. It's enough for me.

The Remains Of The Toxic Narcotic, Pt. 3: School Jerks

As noted earlier today, I've decided to go ahead and post the inventory I'd compiled for what was to be my online punkzine, The Toxic Narcotic. The cover and the opening editorial were posted earlier. Now I give you a review of the band whose record inspired me to start the mag to begin with, and who also inspired me to seek out The New Punk Rock Generation and revive "RADIO NAPALM." Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Toronto's School Jerks:

It turns out the sound of pissed-off modern youth is the sound of pissed-off 1981 youth!

Tim Discovers school jerks....

And what of the heroes of The Toxic Narcotic's debut issue? School Jerks are the very reason I'm doing this 'zine and relaunching “RADIO NAPALM.” They are energy and excitement incarnate. I know next-to-nothing about these guys, aside from their being a Toronto export and that they couldn't be older than we-just-hit-drinking-age. But a more potent burst of raw power hasn't been felt in these parts in many a year. It hit hard enough to make me quest to find a swingin' new punk rock generation. I found 'em. School Jerks are the tip of a hulking goddamned iceberg of punk rock goodness.

13 songs in 13 minutes, 12 inches revolving at 45 RPM. I don't have physical vinyl - I managed to score a digital copy. I have literally no information, even their names! I know they released three 7-inch EPs prior to this. Judging by the one I heard, Decline, those were stepping stones to this explosion.

Just sloppy enough to be fun, just produced enough for the guitar tones to be sharp and all instruments to be distinct, School Jerks is an ASSAULT. I couldn't begin to tell you whatever the hell the singer is singing, so unintelligible is his bratty bark. But he's ENRAGED about something! Nothing's overly distorted here - if anything, it borders on modern garage punk, except delivered at the speed of “Pay To Cum.” If nothing else, this may be what a Billy Childish record would sound like if he'd been raised on a steady diet of The Germs!

(GI) certainly sounds like a touchstone for these guys; you could easily file School Jerks alongside that, Damaged, Back From Samoa, Group Sex, and Hollywest Crisis. Yet this ain't Sha Na Na with a mohawk and combat boots! It turns out the sound of pissed-off modern youth is the sound of pissed-off 1981 youth! Brutal shit, and an instant classic! I really want to see these guys live, now....

(Get it from http://www.gravemistakerecords.com/catalog/ or http://gravemistakerecords.bandcamp.com/album/school-jerks-2)

The Remains Of "The Toxic Narcotic," Pt. 2: The Editorial

As noted yesterday, I've realized my plans to do an online punkzine may be too ambitious, given my current life activity. All that I would have done, in terms of the prose, now just becomes blog postings here. After all, the blog is the modern fanzine. The cover was posted earlier. Here is what would have been the first editorial:

THIS IS HOW IT'S DONE

I sit here, not wondering if a matchbox would hold my clothes ala Carl Perkins, but writing. Blasting from my hi-fi is a disc issued last year: The self-titled debut LP by a Toronto band, School Jerks. 13 songs in 13 minutes, on a 12-inch 45 RPM record, it sounds just like the sort of old school hardcore records that Really Red singer Ronnie Bonds (AKA U-Ron Bondage) used to play on his Sunday night punk rock show over KPFT in Houston, "Funhouse." We're talking a furious screech that wouldn't sound out of place stacked up on a turntable with The Germs' (GI), Black Flag's Jealous Again, or The Cheifs or Angry Samoans. More impressive yet, it was made by a bunch of guys who look like they're far from leaving their teens, never mind shaving.

I'm a professional freelance rock journalist, have been for years. I want to write about School Jerks. I won't be able to. None of the publications I write for will let me. My editors, if I dared approach them, would tell me none of their readers would be interested. That pisses me off.

I am, besides being a professional freelance rock journalist, also a lifelong musician and punk rocker. I've always done these things. I began in punk rock fanzine culture, doing one of my own in the '80s (Noise Noise Noise) for two issues, before moving on to contribute to fLiPSiDe and Your Flesh, among many others, then going professional in the '90s as punk invaded the mainstream in the form of alternative rock, becoming well-known as a writer for Alternative Press and The Austin Chronicle, plus other publications. The underlying whatsis driving me, though, was my love of raw punk rock and my punk roots, and my desire to expose bands I discovered and loved to a broader audience.

I quit journalism in 1997 to concentrate on making music with my band The Hormones. I was burned out, after a protracted period of strained relations with the Chronicle and AP and honestly thought I was retired. I also was tired of the lack of respect my musical side garnered because I was also a well-known rock journalist. These people obviously did not understand that, as fellow scribbler-and-rocker Lenny Kaye and I once discussed, my musical activities and my journalism were two sides of the very same coin: A desire to give back to a culture and way-of-life that had given me so much. I can now see that these people will never get it, and it's best for me to get on with it.

BUT...I have returned to the game just recently, after spending fifteen years only writing the occasional piece, usually if someone wanted an Iggy Pop interview, or if Guitar World wanted an oral history of the New York Dolls. And now I'm back with The Austin Chronicle, as well as doing interviews for the Rock 'n' Roll Dating website, making my living as a journalist. Which is fine and well: For the most part, I get to pick and choose my subject matter...

...for the most part.

Like I said, there's great new young punk bands I'm discovering, seemingly all at once. I want to write about them, but I wouldn't be allowed. And I want to write about them with raw enthusiasm, the thrill of the moment, in unrestrained language. I wouldn't be able to do that in my outlets, either.

So, it's time to truly return to my roots.

I'd love to cut-n-paste-n-Xerox a proper old school punkzine. However, I neither have the cash to do it nor the cash to lose on such a proposition. Still, I've been saying for years that blogs are the new fanzines: Technology allows instant publication and exposure to a potential audience of literally the span of the world wide web, something said proper old school punkzine distribution could not offer. This really is the original DIY/seize-the-moment/instant-access punk rock ideal finding its most full realization.

"When your culture abandons you, create your own." Trouser Press publisher Ira Robbins wrote that at the dawn of punk in 1977, and those have been the words I've lived by. Hence, Toxic Narcotic, an online punkzine, written and published by me, using and abusing the new technology. Toxic Narcotic: Written and published out of love, in raw language coming directly from the heart and the gut. This is how its done. This is punk rock.

-TIM "NAPALM" STEGALL

Publisher

Austin, TX

Feb. 4, 2013

5:59 PM

Now's as good a chance as any to announce some new projects

The Mark Of Quality, Since 2008

Second cup of coffee already, which means I'd better type fast....

First off, now that I'm back in the rock journalism game full-time, I've resumed my duties as American correspondent for John Robb's great UK-based punk culture site, Louder Than War. I resumed my Letter From America column musing about Black Flag's reanimation, and giving props to my fave new band, School Jerks. You can catch all the buzz, cock, right here: Just click all this blue underlined shit. 

Second, the reappearance of the Mark Of Quality above might be telling you of another reanimation. Yep, I'm reviving "RADIO NAPALM!" It'll now be a bi-monthly, one hour, streaming podcast via the Mixcloud site. I had The Garage rebuilt (at great expense), and Ed The Engineer and my hydro-cephalic assistant Scooter and are furiously toiling in my off hours to produce a quality Boss Punk Radio experience for you, which you can now stream whenever you get the urge. No, no more live broadcasts, which I cannot do any longer. Nor is there a chatroom, unless I set one up and all you old Irregulars want to meet whenever a new episode is first uploaded and available. Be sure to add the "RADIO NAPALM" Facebook group, right here, and bookmark the new "RN" Mixcloud site. 

Finally, my return to the ink-stained world led to my discovering, almost overnight, a whole rash of exciting new punk groups the world over. I'd dare say there's enough there to suggest a new wave of punk rock rising! It's all very exciting and proper. I want to write about it, but things have changed. None of the mainstream outlets I currently enjoy have time for truly underground music, which is odd to me, considering  I was the guy who brought groups like The Gories and Mono Men into Alternative Press when every issue seemed to have another Wax Trax act on the cover.

Hence, I've decided to start a new punk fanzine, done totally online. It's called The Toxic Narcotic. It'll be a few pages of quick, dirty, raw extended record reviews and graphics, basically me unloading about the new sounds I'm digging at that moment, published instantly. It'll be available as a PDF you can download from this blog periodically. Watch this space for the first issue, as soon as it's done.

BEST OF 2012: BOOKS

Feburary 2nd, and I'm STILL working on my Best Of lists for last year?! What the hell is my problem, anyway?! Guess life is too busy being lived to think about it. Plus most of my stuff is still sitting in a pal's garage in Denver, waiting for me to work up the scratch to have it shipped back to me. (And THAT will take awhile, as I found the solution to What I Will Do To Replace The Temporary Holiday Job At The Book Store is Getting A Two-Day-Per-Week Retail Gig And Finding Myself Inadvertantly Becoming A Full-Time Freelance Rock Journalist again. Which means I'm busy as hell and not going to see much in the way in cash until maybe a month from now. But it's all good, as certain annoying sorts like to say....)

So, since I've now got my brain properly hyper-caffeinated and Johnny Throttle's excellent England's-Finally-Got-Its-Answer-To-The-Devil-Dogs debut LP for the wonderful Dirty Water Records imprint damaging my hearing further, all I can do is search my fevered brain and attempt piecing together what books I read last year, keeping in mind I read on average a book per week. And not all of those I read are new. And I couldn't afford a lot of new books last year. Nor could I always find what new ones I wanted to read at the public library nor in my friends' private collections. Nor that I really want to keep digressing into the ozone like I appear to be at the moment.

No, this isn't a fucking book, you silly twit!

Among the new books I remember liking was certainly Johnny Ramone's posthumous memoir, Commando. A fast read, mostly due to its intended form (Johnny's brief reminiscence accompanied by others' voices), it neither misses the intended other voices nor needs them, nor feels skimpy. In many ways, Commando reads like both Johnny's right-ward politics and highly influential guitar style: Loud, fast, brutal, fun, funny, terse and economical. It also gains bonus points for its unusual packaging, which is reminiscent of a grown-up punk rock version of a Little Golden Book.

Then there's the literary debut of my long-time pal, the Rev. Norb. Besides becoming my favorite podcast DJ with his “Bubblegum Fuzz” show and a professional Trivia Night host in his native Green Bay, WI, the former Sick Teen/Sic Teen editor and MRR columnist and bandleader/frontman (Suburban Mutilation, Depo Provera, Boris The Sprinkler), Norbie became an author last year. It apparently was the best way for him to cope with being snowed in during a typical Green Bay winter. He decided to simultaneously tell the tale of Boris' history and explicate his hilariously dense lyrics for the band. What The Annotated Boris ended up being was as hysterical and smart as you'd expect Norb to be if you have even the thinnest familiarity with his work. It's also the most hilariously-overannotated book ever written! Seriously: The footnotes are as equally weighted as the text! It also reveals Norbie to be the seriously great lyricist I never really thought about him being (and unfairly so, I'll admit): Over-the-top funny and intelligent as you expect him to be, densely-packed with cultural references and in-jokes, and surprisingly angst-filled. I never thought I'd be saying this of my friend, as much as I admire him. But with The Annotated Boris, Norb could stake a claim to being a spastic American answer to John Cooper Clarke!

Then there's Punk Rock: An Oral History, from my boss at the Louder Than War punk site, John Robb. John's kind of my English cousin: A long-time punk rock musician in The Membranes and Goldblade and a respected rock journalist with Sounds and other publications. And this is not really a new book, but the long overdue American publication of a 2006 book of his. It takes the form of other punk histories like Please Kill Me and We Got The Neutron Bomb in allowing the participants' voices tell the tale, and yes, this is strictly focused on the UK. But unlike nearly every other book on the subject, Punk Rock: An Oral History DOES NOT presume punk died with Sid Vicious' last breath and the story there. Robb takes in UK punk's 2^nd/3^rd/4^th waves without sneering (another thing these sorts of books never do), and also takes in post-punk and offshoots like 2-Tone. Voices that frequently get drowned out in these books by John Lydon and the usual suspects also get their volume knobs boosted dramatically, such as Charlie Harper, most of The Damned's membership, TV Smith and Gaye Advert, Penny Rimbaud, etc. It's a truly worthy, fine, necessary addition to the punk rock bookshelf, very welcome.

And that's all about all I can stand of this exercise, for now. Now I have to wrack my brains and try to think of what movies I liked last year. 'Til then....

Year-End Inventory III: Books I Dug

Alice Bag greets you from the cover of Slash,  May 1978.

Greetings, my Irregulars, from Your Irregular-In-Chief. It's a chilly, sunny Sunday afternoon in Denver. I'm in my friend's apartment, X live bootlegs on the hi-fi, a glass of cool, fresh water at my hand. My leg is healing nice-like, the advent of an ACE bandage doing wonders in my recovery and mobility. The leg's still tender and I have to be careful with it. But the pain's more like a dull ache now, rather than the skull-piercing shredding of my nerve endings it has been, which has made me a prisoner of a bed or couch for a few weeks now. That feels like a massive improvement. So, back to work for real, tomorrow.

I come to you today realizing I'd promised a reading wrap-up for last year. I do have to say that, due to funds, etc., that 2011 was not a year I either purchased or read much that was new. For the most part, I caught up on oldies I'd yet to read from either other pals' collections (such as Charlie Solus' vast James Ellroy archives) or things I found in thrift stores or used book stores for cheap. In the case of Ellroy, I had to marvel at his crisp, clean language, the brutal honesty, the ability to use real life events as a literary springboard, and his amazing ability to capture marginal life in mid-century Los Angeles (as well as pulling back the rocks and exposing the worms and snakes crawling beneath the city's showbiz surface). What strikes me as Ellroy's peak, American Tabloid, goes well-beyond the L.A. city limits to encompass the whole of America in the '60s, which is a rather daunting task. Still, he accomplishes that with ease, and the rest of his oeuvre definitely places him as the latest in a long line of great poets of Los Angeles' underside: Raymond Chandler, Charles Bukowski, even John Doe and Exene Cervenka. Bless him for that.

Then there are my other newfound discoveries: Alex Cox's X Films: True Confessions Of A Radical Filmmaker (Soft Skull Press, Berkeley, CA, 2008), which not only offers frequently hilarious behind-the-scenes accounts of the making of Repo Man, Sid And Nancy, and various other Cox films that aren't as well-known, but also serves as a primer in how to be an independent artist in an increasingly corporate world, with all the joy, rewards, and ugliness therein; Mark Evanier's Kirby: King Of Comics (Abrams, New York, NY, 2008), a huge, lavish, hardbound celebration of the man who was arguably the greatest comic book artist ever, Jack Kirby; Billy F. Gibbons' Rock & Roll Gearhead (with Tom Vickers, 2008; softcover edition from Voyageur Press, Minneapolis, MN, 2011), loads of hilarious philosophy and autobiography around the edges of beautiful photographs of the vast twin guitar and custom car archives of the ZZ Top guitarist – eye candy deluxe(!); and John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy Of Dunces (Grove Press, New York, NY, 1980), possibly the funniest novel I've ever read, and certainly the best I've read set in New Orleans or in the early '60s. How this has never been made into an equally epic and hilarious film is beyond me; Jack Black would certainly make a great Ignatius J. Reilly....

Of the few new titles that jumped into my shopping bag last year, my favorite was Alice Bag's Violence Girl (381 pages, $17.95 softcover, Feral House, Port Townshend, WA 2011, feralhouse.com). Subtitled East L.A. Rage To Hollywood Stage: A Chicana Punk Story, this should clue you in to what's great about it: It's not just another punk book. True, Alice Bag is as iconic figure as Darby Crash or anyone from that Masque scene. She was of that original generation of fierce punk rock women (Patti Smith, Penelope Houston, Joan Jett, Exene, The Slits, Poly Styrene) who made questions of gender irrelevant and inspired with their brilliance, their ferocity, and their righteousness. But there's a lot more to this book.

Like I said, this isn't merely an L.A. punk history. This is Alice Bag's story. So we get taken back to that environment which spawned Alice: From her parents' origins in Mexico to the Los Angeles barrios where she was raised. We see that Alice was given an odd mixture of love and abuse, mostly due to her father. He would tell young Alicia she was exceptional, that she could do anything, and nurtured her artistry...then lash out in drunken rage at her mother in the next breath. She was equally shaped by weight issues and her own ethnicity, until a mix of the Chicano and glam rock movements in the early '70s helped her burst whatever shell was there and gave her pride and determination. Then came punk and the formation of The Bags. And Alice Bag emerged a sexy, rampaging, intelligent force.

L.A. critic Ken Tucker tries to turn the town onto The Bags...and then undersells their 45?!

Fortunately for her, despite some inclinations in that direction, Alice only dipped into the debauchery and self-destruction inherent in punk rock Los Angeles. Moving back into her parents' home midway through might have helped, giving her some literal and philosophical distance from the damage that was developing among her peers. And even after The Bags' imminent death, Alice kept creating, either musically or in other areas, and eventually graduated college and became a school teacher. As a teacher, she remained an activist, centering on educating and encouraging the underprivileged, even spending time teaching in Nicaragua in the mid-'80s. She continued following and acting on her principles and beliefs, and has benefited for that.

Amazing, what can be done with some photo booth strips and a Bic pen....

Like the Alex Cox book I mentioned earlier, Violence Girl should serve as an inspiration to the young artist and rebel: For once, the heroine doesn't self-destruct. Alice Bag stayed on the course, rose above, and keeps doing what she set out to do. Punk rock doesn't have to kill. Nor does environment. Yes, there are happy endings in punk rock – and life – sometimes....

Year-End Inventory II: The Music

"Personally, I like the Bern Elliot and The Fenmen reissue!"

This is always the time of year your fave-rave cultural journalists love to compile Top Ten Lists of the stuff they got sent for free that they feel was important. I never enjoyed doing those lists - how egotistical can you get, making such grand pronouncements? Fact is, taste is individual, the brain is an imperfect memory bank, and something's gonna get left out that'll offend someone or other. Then again, most of my actions offend someone or other, it seems. So, what the eff...?

So, despite having retired from the rock critic fray in 1998 and only occasionally writing about music for pay in the years since, I know there's scores of people out there who still look at me as being a (*gulp*) "rock journalist." Not that they likely care what my opinions are on anything....

Still, for some odd reason, I can't resist doing a recap for the past year in culture. Guess I crave punishment, for some weird crime I'm unaware of....

Record Of The Year 2011: This had to have been the oddest musical year in my memory. I don't know about your memory. But I think we have official evidence of the destruction of the music business by the Oughts' technological revolution now being complete. I no longer have any accurate compass on new music, new bands, etc., etc. Now that music has been fully democratized and placed in the hands of The People by technology, it's harder to find the cream on the surface for the flood of people starting bands and releasing every note they play on MP3, etc. And my tastes are no longer in synch with Da Yoof, so I don't really know or get what people with a lot of facial hair like.

Yeah, I guess I'm officially old.

I do know that what filtered through to me last year were a number of strong releases from veteran bands, some of which I wrote about in this blog (Gang Of Four, Michael Monroe), some of which I didn't (Motorhead, UK Subs). But two records (yes, I still call 'em that, whether the source is digital or not) stand out in my mind from this past year: The New York Dolls' Dancing In High Heels Backwards (which I wrote about here) and one I didn't write about and should have, The First Four EPs by OFF!

That Dolls record, like everything the reformed New York Dolls have done, has been rather controversial. Some people are just never going to get over the absence of Johnny Thunders, Jerry Nolan, and Arthur Kane. And many expressed to me that Dancing.... sounded less like the Dolls to them than the previous pair of studio albums by the reunion lineup. That actually might be one of the strengths of Dancing....: It broke from the sound of the last two albums, and even broke from Dolls tradition with its strange, almost avant garde production. Less reliant on raunchy guitars and more on atmosphere and songs, this also may have hewed closer to the Dolls' classic spirit than anything they'd done since their heyday. Why? Because it's almost surely the Dolls' tribute to their girl group roots, right down to the faithful cover of Patti LaBelle and The Bluebells' "I Sold My Heart To The Junkman." It's a solid album through-and-through, and one of the two new discs I reached for the most this past year.

OFF!'s Steven McDonald (l) and Keith Morris (r) sandwiching yours' truly, Denver, CO., Oct., 2011 (pic: Adams Pinkston)

The other release, by OFF!, is both a throwback and a shockingly vital, brand new blast. Fronted by punk rock force-of-nature Keith Morris (do I have to tell you he was in Circle Jerks and Black Flag?!) and featuring members of Redd Kross (Steven McDonald), Burning Brides (Dimitri Coats), and Rocket From The Crypt (Mario Rubalcaba), this is hardcore punk as it was originally intended: A solid blast of intensity. This isn't about speed or politics (except in the most personal, real-life terms possible). This is about raw power, anger, and sheer release. Keith's performance, on this record and live, is especially potent. He's unleashing something, and you can't help but pay attention to this unfiltered torrent of emotion and spleen. This band could be a one-band revolution all in themselves. Bless 'em.

Coming soon: My picks in books, movies, etc. Enjoy!

Check out my new blog at Louder Than War!

I've just begun a new assignment for my UK colleague John Robb's Louder Than War website, as its American correspondent. I will periodically post a blog there called "Letter From America," where I'll be writing about US musical, political, and cultural matters from my peculiar perspective. I began with some thoughts about Occupy Wall Street, and the response less than eight hours later is already great! Check out the first post by clicking here. Please let me know what you think, and please help get the word out. Thank you.

I Wanna Be Animated: Ramones Cartoons!

"So, we meet up back at The Mystery Machine after the gig?"

Ramones Pics

 I always wondered why the Forest Hills Four - Johnny, Joey, Dee Dee, and Tommy (or Marky) (or Richie) (or Marky again) (and what about CJ?) - never got their own Saturday morning cartoon show. If ever a band deserved to have their wacky hijynx animated, it was The Ramones! I mean, they kinda hinted at that once themselves:

But did Filmation ever come by with a contract? Did Hanna Barbara ever realize The Ramones should have guested on that same Scooby Doo series that had guest appearances from Don Knotts or Batman and Robin? NOOOOO! Hell, even THE BEATLES got a cartoon show in their heyday!

Well, some enterprising soul decided enough was enough. Apparently, a few years back, someone did their own animated clips set to Ramones classics and uploaded them to YouTube. The results are crude, but no less crude than either those '70s Hanna Barbara or Filmation "limited animation" series I mentioned earlier. And these are probably a million times funnier and soaked in The Ramones' spirit, right down to the pop cultural and cartoon references, even references to other Ramones lyrics.

Let's dig in:

 

And this last one, for "Chainsaw," might be my favorite, as it's the most ambitious production, right down to the intro and fake movie trailer at the end:

I don't know if The Ramones' corporate interests approve of these clips. But I don't think they're an embarrassment, and I wish whoever this animator is would do more! Gabba gabba, we accept, we accept you! One of us!

R.I.P., Poly Styrene

Dig the photo: This ain't Madonna or your typical pop diva. The young lady's a bit chunky, she's half-Somali/half-Brit, wearing braces, a military helmet liner and what is basically an adorned garbage bag. The pop music business would never push someone like this in a million years! (Although, in a time prior to this, the young lady above had attempted just such a stab at the big time, with a bubblegum reggae single called "Silly Billy" issued under her real name, Mari Elliot.) Instead, inspired by a Sex Pistols gig attended when she was 19, Mari gave herself the above-depicted remake, emerging as Poly Styrene. Her coming out party with her band X-Ray Spex warned the world in the first few seconds: "Some people say lil' girls should be seen and not heard. I say...OH, BONDAGE! UP YOURS! ONE TWO THREE FOUR!!"

The racket was unique, even for the then-radical punk scene: A typical sub-Pistols thrash, yet leavened by the mock cocktail lounge sax of 14-year-old Lora Logic. It was as if Roxy Music had been hijacked by a pair of teenage girls and forced to see the new way of thinking. And then, you had to deal with the lyric matter.

"I was trying to do a diary of 1977," Poly explained to Jon Savage for his landmark UK punk history, England's Dreaming. "I wanted to write about everyday experiences....My thing was more like consumerism, plastic artificial living....There was so much junk about then. The idea was to send it all up. Screaming about it, saying: 'Look, this is what you have done to me, turned me into a piece of styrofoam, I am your product. And this is what you have created: Do you like her?"

A lot of us did. X-Ray Spex' sole LP in the day, Germ Free Adolescents, was startling in its ferocity and humor. As I posted on Facebook last night: "Dig this talent, this ferocity, this vision of taking everything plastic and artificial about this planet and throwing it back in the planet's face! With venom and humor. And creating an anti-glamor to wrap one's self in. There wasn't a duff track in all of Germ Free Adolescents." This one, "Identity," happened to be my favorite:

Later, Poly would undergo a religious conversion to Hare Krishna. This, after dropping out of the scene following what she saw as a UFO visitation. She was misdiagnosed with schizophrenia, later to be readjusted properly as bipolar disorder. She would make a few solo releases, even reunite with X-Ray Spex from time-to-time, and quietly raise a daughter who is now a musician herself. 


Poly Styrene had just issued a new solo disc, Generation Indigo, in April. What I've heard sounds excellent. Sadly, just as the album was issued, Poly had also revealed she was now battling breast cancer and would have to postpone her tour plans for the album. The cancer was apparently far wider spread than she was letting on: Poly Styrene died yesterday at home, surrounded by her mother and her daughter. She was 53.


Word had gotten out swiftly by the internet, people posting tributes all over Facebook. Oddly, no legit news source would confirm it for hours, until the early hours this morning. I remained skeptical until my colleague John Robb in the UK posted this remembrance at his excellent Louder Than War site. Then the usual reliable sources - NME, The Guardian, BBC - finally covered her passing. Nevertheless, this is a heavy loss: A chief member of that group of truly revolutionary female punks - think of Patti Smith, Penelope Houston, The Slits - who made gender an utter non-issue in the early days of punk, is gone. Sadly, the playing field would later not be so level - yet another way hardcore ruined punk. But Poly Styrene remained an example well beyond what was supposedly her "moment." She was inspiring to many of us, beyond gender. We could use that vision, that taking a snapshot of society's trashiness and using it as weapon. If that's not true defiance, I don't know what is.


Rest in peace, Poly. Your likes won't be seen again.

Tim's Greatest Hits: The Kinks (The Austin Chronicle, 1996)

The klassic Kinks: "So, wot's wiv' this duh-nuh-nuh-duh-nuh shit, anyway?"

Happy gnu year. I've been busy fighting off a respiratory infection and trying work my way out of another financial hole, hence the lack of blogs lately. I can announce that I have finished the first draft of my first novel (some of which was serialized in my old MySpace blog) after five years' work. So hopefully that will see publication this year. I can also safely say there will be more music and more radio from me in the future. So stay tuned.

Meantime, I offer another of my journalistic greatest hits: My interview with The Kinks' battling brothers, Ray and Dave Davies. This was done in the summer of 1996, just as The Kinks had released an "unplugged" album that ended up being the final Kinks album; the Brothers Davies had also just issued their respective autobiographies, displaying very different styles. I also found myself in the middle of one of the classic Davies brothers' feuds as Ray tried to prevent me interviewing Dave, which resulted in me tracking down Dave via guerrilla methods, and resulted in me being the only US journalist to talk to both Davies brothers that particular press cycle.

This piece ended up one I'm particularly proud of. I hope you like it, too.

Rock & Roll's Cain & Abel: The Kinks' Davies Brothers

The Li'l Green Aggravation Society

by Tim Stegall

Everything you've ever heard about the Kinks is true. Everything you've ever heard about the Kinks is a lie. Everything you've ever heard about the Kinks is distorted beyond belief. True, by now the story of the Kinks is a tale about a pair of brothers, Raymond Douglas and David Russell Gordon Davies -- especially considering that original bassist Pete Quaife abandoned post long ago and drummer Mick Avory finally followed suit in the mid-Eighties. And, yes, like most brothers, Ray and Dave have had their conflicts. It's sure to happen to relatives with clashing personalities that are forced together in close quarters for long periods of time. Yes, cymbal stands fly and guitars get smashed, and there have been moments when they've made Oasis' Gallagher brothers look like the shallow, attention-seeking pansies they are. But if you believe that brotherly animosity is what the Kinks are about, you've read too many tattered back issues of Circus.

No, the story of the Kinks is the story of the most brilliant and insightful popsmith the Sixties British rock scene produced, and of one of the most distinctively raunchy rock & roll guitar players to emerge from a pack of Lennons, Richards, and Townshends. First and foremost, however, the Kinks are about...

Dun-nuh-nuh-duh-nuh!
Dun-nuh-nuh-duh-nuh!

It sounded like nothing you'd heard in your life.

Dun-nuh-nuh-duh-nuh!

It sounded monstrous, nasty, vicious -- like a big, green, swamp snake snapping out, ready to attack.

Dun-nuh-nuh-duh-nuh!

Then came the voice: flat nasal, almost indifferent. Giirrrll, ya really got me goin'/Ya got me so I don't know wot I'm doin'. The lyrics seem to wanna hold your hand, much like those
cute/cuddly/inoffensive Beatle boys, but the music leers at ya, as if with a tube of K-Y in its hand. And it keeps building, piling on intensity in ever-thickening layers, 'til the whole damn thing blows apart in a guitar solo that ka-booms like so much 16-year-old testosterone buildup. One more verse swaggers in on its Cuban heels before the song comes to a tottering resolution, which sounds like its drunkenly kicking huge-ass holes in the sheetrock.

When the teenage Dave Davies took his daddy's razor to the inefficient speakers of his li'l 10-watt green practice amp and inadvertently introduced the world to the distorted powerchord (Dun-nuh-nuh-duh-nuh!), he'd captured a weird intangible for the audio-acoustic world: frustration. Frustrated with "that clean, chingy Fender sound" that then characterized rock & roll guitar with only a few exceptions (Link Wray, Paul Burlison of Johnny Burnett's Rock `n' Roll Trio, Howlin' Wolf sideman Pat Hare, John Lee Hooker), Davies unleashed a sort of sonic profanity which has yet to be excised from the rock & roll vocabulary. This is why, even today, the record which introduced the world to Dun-nuh-nuh-duh-nuh! -- the Kinks' "You Really Got Me" -- sounds just like Punk Rock 1964.

Ray Davies, whose laconic deadpan has had to recreate that moment virtually every night the Kinks have taken a stage, concurs. "Yeah, there's a lot of similarities in there, obviously," he intones in a voice pitched in a terminally bored register, probably not helped by having to do another anonymous interview on another anonymous phone in another anonymous hotel room in Boston. "I think when that wave of punk came through the U.K. in '77 and '78, there had been a terribly pompous period in music before that.

"Without naming names," he laughs, "Elton John and Rod Stewart were strutting around, and although they were both friends of mine, I was not terribly into what they were doing. We were doing our sort of Schoolboys In Disgrace thing, Soap Opera things, kind of a different way to go. And it was all very pompous, and music was becoming The Stadium or Nothing; stories of promoters giving artists Cartier watches, and they were all making so much money. It was getting a bit obscene, and when the punk thing came along, it was great, more than a breath of fresh air. There were a lot of acts -- like the Kinks, I suppose -- that actually welcomed them, because we didn't really fit the mold of the successful stadium bands."

Dave, the younger Davies brother, can't really argue with the Kinks-as-punk-rock theory, either. "Yeah, it's weird, innit?" he asks over a telephone line from London in a voice less bored and higher pitched than older brother Ray's, though they share the same pudding-thick Cockney seasoning. "There were only a few bands that had this sorta really rough-sounding, what we used to call `R&B' style in the Sixties. There were the Yardbirds, there was us, there was the Pretty Things, as well. There was this band called the Downliner's Sect, who were very typical of that London/West End scene -- very R&B, blues-based -- a very important band from that period, but I don't think that they were poppy enough for the public."

And therein lies what links the Kinks with first-wave punk: The best vintage U.K. punk records featured really good pop songs played....

"...with a little bit of aggression," Dave blurts. Just the same as the Kinks did, when their name meant stupid, red, fox-hunting jackets and endless mutations of the primordial "Louie Louie" riff. The punks paid endless propers to that legacy, whether by affectionate pilferage (such as the core riff to the Clash's "1977," which sounded as if Mick Jones had been playing it, er, all day and all of the night), or directly when the band met such pogo rock luminaries-cum-Kinks-fans as Jones, Joey Ramone, and Paul Weller. Ray even recently informed a U.K. rock magazine that the best rock & roll show he ever witnessed was a chaotic 1976 set from Johnny Thunders' Heartbreakers: "It typified everything that music was about, really. And what rock should be about!"

Their influence has endured. Just ask dyslexic British garage maven Billy Childish, whose records sound like he owns Dave's Li'l Green Amp. Or ask virtually anyone in the current U.K. hit parade. It seems any Englishman that picks up a guitar these days, if he's not uttering the words "Small Faces," is uttering "the Kinks" instead. (Ironically, Ray recently presented the Ivor Novello award to the Small Faces' surviving membership.) "It's not exactly a mod thing they're celebrating," notes Ray. "It's more to do with English pop, and Small Faces and the Kinks, I suppose, never got that initial praise that they're supposed to have gotten. I suppose they're getting picked up by a lot of smart young musicians."

He's got a point. The Kinks that interests bands like Blur and Pulp is hardly the electric raunch Kinks. They appear more fascinated with the mid-period Kinks of "Dedicated Follower of Fashion" and Something Else and on through to maybe Arthur, when Ray's songs evolved beyond teenage horndog riffrock into something more subtle. The Kinks now mean pop music obsessed with Englishness, whether skewering the upper crust in "Well-Respected Man" or romanticizing the "dirty old river" of "Waterloo Sunset."

It's these Kinks that inform Supergrass' raucous live renditions of "Where Have All the Good Times Gone?" and who provide the subtext as Jarvis Cocker skewers the well-respected slumming debutante protagonist of Pulp's "Common People." It's these Kinks that gloss-coat virtually every note struck by Blur. And don't think the Davies brothers are oblivious, either: Ray agreed to duet with Blur's Damon Albarn on the British TV show The White Room last year, the two blending voices on "Waterloo Sunset" and Blur's "Parklife." More recently the pair reunited for a "poetry gig" at Albert Hall, with Ray reciting "Parklife" poetically to Albarn-ian accompaniment and Damon returning the favor on an unspecified Davies composition. Dave, meantime, enthuses over Kula Shaker and Ocean Colour Scene, among others.

"It's like the Second British Invasion!," raves Dave. "It's really interesting, innit? Things really do go full-circle. This is even more full-circle than the late Seventies punk thing, really, because the actual sounds of the records, sonically, are similar. The structure of their songs are very Sixties. But it's good writing, I think it's very good pop writing."

Well, isn't that what matters at day's end? Isn't the essential ingredient always going to be a good song?

"Yeah, I think so," says Dave. "Melody has been important to me, and I think a lot of the better Kinks songs -- even the hard rock stuff -- has melody. That's been a major part of our music. But I think a lot of people over the years have gotten confused by our diversity. If you played Muswell Hillbillies and (1993's) Phobia side-by-side, you'd probably think they were different bands!"

Well, not too many have had that chance. The eternal story of the Kinks' career has been one of occasional flashes of success amidst several years of criminally neglected (yet usually excellent) records and shit-hot live shows, with modest support from a die-hard cult fan base. You can blame this mostly on record company indifference, which doesn't help the Kinks' perennial image as oldies act; the band who did either "You Really Got Me" or "Lola" or "Come Dancing," depending on when you graduated from high school. Who knows what the band's newly minted profile as Seminal Britpop Influence will bring?

But the Kinks have hardly been inactive, either. Signed to the sixth label of their career, Guardian Records (the recently-erected pop subsidiary of classical giant Angel Records), the Kinks have just released one of the more interesting items in their lengthy catalog: To the Bone, a 2-CD live document culled from both standard wattage-soaked Kinks concerts and from an acoustic set performed before an invited audience at the band's own Konk Studios (where, besides the Kinks, Big Audio Dynamite and Elastica have both recorded). Which means you not only get full-blooded, Marshall-overload renditions of standards like "All Day And All Of The Night," but gentler fare like "Celluloid Heroes" and Dave's signature "Death of a Clown" in a more intimate setting. Dave, for one, is pleased to have another crack at tunes like "See My Friends," which may have lost the distinctive Indian touches that marked its original 1965 incarnation, but now features stronger harmony work.

And even if they didn't have the Kinks to occupy their time, the Davieses have plenty keeping them from pulling a mutual Cain & Abel. With the modest success of Ray's "unauthorized autobiography," X-Ray, comes the release of Dave's autobio, Kink, which has apparently been in the works since the late Eighties. (Nevertheless, the book's uncomfortable timing is hardly lost on the elder Davies: "There's not a lot you can do about it," he smirks.) Dave is planning an anthology of his solo works to coincide with the book's American publication in February, along with a possible tour backed by the Smithereens.

Read the books, and you can virtually read the men. X-Ray finds Ray's tale filtered through an elaborate, near-science fiction plot involving a future run by an Orwellian corporation that sends an anonymous drone to seek out the aging Ray Davies in order to gather biographical data. Kink, on the other hand, is straight-forward autobiography, told with a painful, almost too-naked honesty, running from kiss-and-tell anecdotes of drinking and drugging and sexual experimentation (of both female and male varieties) to an account of Dave's encounter with alien forces who sound like they may be related to those which supposedly visited Phillip K. Dick.

"Yeah, that's just the way that I am," says Dave. "Ray's always closed things. In some instances, it may be a device he's cultivated to protect himself emotionally from certain things that have happened to him. We all have our little, built-in survival devices or kits or whatever. I like to get things done. I find sometimes you get more inspired when you do things impromptu. I always like to get to the point. I think that has to do with my personality. I like to get to the point quicker, then move on and do something else."

Doesn't this also typify their musical roles? Ray appears to be this craftsman, who sits there and agonizes over every detail. Dave's guitar work is brash, impatient, ready to get the job done and go down to the bar for a few fast ones.

"This is where Ray and I have often differed and often had great arguments, because sometimes I feel it's actually not necessary to spend quite so much time over something when you might have it already. And that's happened quite a few times. A lot of our biggest records were actually recorded and actually constructed relatively quickly. I think a big frustration of mine with Ray is that sometimes he spends so much time constructing something which actually isn't really very much different from the original idea. But this is a big ongoing argument which Ray and I have been having for years now. Sometimes, I have to turn to him in the studio and say, `Ray, everybody's falling asleep! It's the end! It's done, it's over, it's finished! Let's move on!'

"But conversely, some things obviously do require a different technique -- you need to construct them in a different way. But it isn't always necessary to go around the houses to arrive at the end of the street," he laughs.

Although the Kinks endure, the street appears to be leading its creative components into different streams of traffic. Ray has clearly been enjoying the solo gigs he's been playing since X-Ray's publication. ("His cabaret show, as I call it," snickers Dave.) An intimate affair, Ray hunkers down with an acoustic guitar, a well-thumbed copy of X-Ray, and the tasteful, economical accompaniment of guitarist Pete Mathison, offering stripped-down renditions of Davies classics -- often given fresh, bluesy reinterpretations -- and relevant passages from the book. ("Joey Ramone came to one of my gigs," Ray laughs. "It was quite funny, 'e liked it. He wants to write a book now and do the same thing! He should.") A Ray Davies solo album is also in the works, a record which would have its base in the solo shows, "but along the way, I'll turn it into something else. It'll be more expansive than that.

"I carry a little four-track on the road with me. I like working that way. The new style I'm writing for this record is gonna be mainly acoustic, anyway. I just need an acoustic guitar and a tape recorder. So, um, we'll see how it blossoms. But I will use other musicians for certain tracks."

Is it just good to get a break from the Kinks and work with other people?

"Well, it's something I should have done more of, I think. Because it does absorb everything I do, the band. It's nice to go off and do things. I'd like to take certain chances. I used to take chances. When you end up with an established act, I suppose, that has a certain track record, it's difficult to take chances in the sense that the record company don't like you to. When you do, they'll say, `Yes, you've got the artistic right to do it.' But they do sod all with it, once they get it. So, it helps me to focus on the thing I'm writing about, and less for a formula."

Ketchup and chocolate ice cream. Twinkies and motor oil. Tipper Gore and Blackie Lawless. Ray and Dave Davies....

"I know," Ray laughs. "It goes on and it goes on."

"Maybe because Ray and I are so different in our approach," says Dave, "it's helped the Kinks' music over the years. It's the tooing-and-froing of two different types of energy operating within it. I'd like to think that when it's been good, it's complementary to the music.

Dave Davies laughs. "And when it's been bad, it's been 'orrible!"