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.

At last, the final BEST OF 2012: FILMS

Mick, Keith, and Brian on the road in 1965: "Blimey! Is Tim gonna write about shepherd's pie again?!"

This might be the most difficult list for me to compile. I haven't set foot in a cinema since 2010, when I went to see The Runaways at whatever that theater is a block over from Amoeba Records on Sunset, the one that used to be the Cinerama. The ticket, the "artisan" hot dog, and the soda were all overpriced as fuck, and the film was a TV movie of the week on a big screen, despite the actors playing Joan Jett and Kim Fowley really nailing those characters.

Besides, I've got no interest in most of the crap being pushed outta Hollywood. Increasingly, I'd rather watch something indie or a documentary, if I watch new films at all. 

Which is why the only new films I can recommend from last year have to be a pair of Rolling Stones documentaries: The new edit of Charlie Is My Darling and Crossfire Hurricane.

I had seen a bootleg video of Charlie Is My Darling nearly 20 years ago. I'd picked it up at friend's record shop in New Orleans when I was playing there with The Hormones. It was a legendary, unreleased documentary the Stones' manager Andrew Loog Oldham commissioned, capturing the band on the road in Ireland as "Satisfaction" made huge stars of the band in 1965. That was all fine and well. But the new version of this unreleased film? Superior in every way: Sharper picture from the digital remastering, for one. And this edit is much better cinema. There's some of the best vintage performance footage of the Stones this side of The TAMI Show, for one. It totally captures the amphetamined sex storm they kicked up with a live audience in their heyday. Then it captures the distinct lack of glamour on the inside of the Rolling Stones: This was work. This is a working band. Ultimately, what really makes Charlie Is My Darling pop is extensive, candid, revealing Brian Jones interview footage used throughout. You truly get a sense of what the Rolling Stones lost when they pushed Brian away.

Crossfire Hurricane, however, is an epic. The band's story gets told for the umpty-umpth time, through current interviews and vintage footage both, most of which has never been seen before. The band do not appear onscreen at all for the interviews; you get these disembodied, elderly voices narrating in their cracked, phlegmy glory, a marvelous contrast to the youth unfolding onscreen. Yes, you really do mostly get The Rolling Stones Legend And Myth here, with the attendant varnish and ego-maintenance you don't get in Charlie Is My Darling (which also provides much of the early footage). And The Ron Wood Years are barely a blip on this radar - you'd be forgiven for thinking the band ended with Some Girls, going by this. But this is the first time the story of the Stones has ever made the cinematic sense it deserved. Which makes this a great movie, even if it's a bit self-serving as a documentary. Ultimately, I dig Crossfire Hurricane, and watch it often. And you're talking to a guy who has watched a lot of Rolling Stones footage in his time. Excellent.

To take a break from the Best Of lists...

Mind you, it's not like I've got anything now beyond covering what films jazzed me last year. But, now that I'm back to being a full-time freelance rock journalist with a part-time job, it looks like I'll be blogging like I used to, even in the days of the old MySpace blog. Just to keep my writing chops up - part of my daily routine.

And there's lots to talk about. For one: Reg Presley of The Troggs passed away yesterday in his UK birthplace of Andover, 71 years old, following a battle with cancer. 71...you can't say the guy didn't live a long, full life, outside of producing some of the most Troglodyte riff rock of the '60s and all time with his aptly-named band. I mean, "Wild Thing!" C'mon! Pure, savage, artless art there, man! "With A Girl Like You": The most brutal slow dance track written and recorded. "I Can't Control Myself," a song both Buzzcocks and The Hormones covered. (Might have to revive that arrangement!) "Love Is All Around," a tune The Angry Samoans covered live at one point, reportedly to Mohawked slamdancing youth that'd merely slow the slamming to the song's pace! According to both the obit Reg's hometown newspaper posted (and hyperlinked above with his name at paragraph's beginning) and in John Robb's own obit at Louder Than War, the guy had a lunatic interest in crop circles, and apparently spent much of his makings from The Troggs researching them. That is hilarious! Thanks for producing some of rock 'n' roll's most brutal pre-punk, Reg. Rest in peace, hermano....

Been listening to a stream of Pissed Jeans' newest at Spin magazine's website (which is all that remains of the mag, now that they've ceased doing print editions). The site's prose on it ("The Philadelphian post-hardcore slashers' fourth album, in its sweaty entirety," "Better to piss your jeans than to fade away") reminds me why I fucking hate how Spin progressed from its beginnings - supercilious, self-satisfied, mock-clever know-nothingness is infinitely unattractive. Still, the record's a rockin' bit of post-Damaged sludgecore, furious and propulsive. It can be heard here....

Interesting piece in The Guardian concerning pirate download sites. The title says it all: "Pirate sites are raking in advertising money from some multinationals." Subhead: "Illegal music download sites pocket large sums of ad revenue without investing in the content's development." Basically, the very tool that decimated the music business as we knew it insisted musicians' work, now basically paid for out of their pockets (rather than through record company financing), be made available on the internets for anyone to download without recompensating artists, all in the name of "freedom." Yet the sites are making huge profits off banner ads, frequently from evil multi-nationals, gambling, and dating sites and the like. Sure, the old biz model was a feudal system in many respects. But it at least offered the possibility of trade for work. This reduces creative types to hobbyists, while a handful become wealthy off those artists' sweat and toil...that they're paying for. Sounds more like "freedom to join the 1% through robbery," to me. This really gets you thinking....

Fuck. Miles more to go, before I have to leave for my part-time gig. 'Til next time....

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....

Best Of 2012, Part 2: Music

I've got a head full of ideas...and a mouthful of music!

Yeah, I realize we're into 2013 by 13 days now, and I still haven't finished posting my best-of lists I started at the end of last year. Honestly, I haven't been writing like I normally do, aside from songs and some poetry. I have not even been keeping my journal, which is a discipline I normally practice daily. Life has just been so full, and I've also been easily distracted by having ready access to technology and entertainment literally two feet away from my bed in my room. Sad to say, what is normally a tool, for me, too easily becomes a diversion and preoccupation. It's all too easy to get caught up in searching out BBC punk rock documentaries to watch, or Johnny Thunders bootlegs to download. Next thing you know, the coffee is drunk, time's run out, and I have to run to work!

But, to get down to the topic at hand, I have to say 2012 was a fabulous year for music. It may have been quiet about it, but I think this one fact alone bears testimony to my statement: I bought more CDs in 2012 than I have in years. And these were all CDs released in 2012. Mind you, it may have only been 12 or 13 CDs, which is nothing compared to what I used to buy in greener days. But that's significantly more than what I've picked up from 2008 (when it seems everything crashed - economically, culturally, spiritually, etc.) to the present. And...every last one is a KEEPER.

There was lots of great punk rock released last year: Riverboat Gamblers' The Wolf You Feed (Volcom), The Dogs' Detroit 2012 blast hypersensitive (Detroit Records, interestingly enough), The Hangmen's East Of Western (Acetate), even the first two releases in Green Day's much-vaunted trilogy of CDs. (SHUT UP! I DON'T WANNA HEAR IT! I LIKED THE CDs, I LIKE THE BAND, AND THAT'S THAT! The second disc is even a rockin' garage punk exercise!) And America's finest straight-up punk band, OFF!, released a self-titled second CD via Vice Records that made you thankful force-of-nature Keith Morris isn't seeing a therapist, so we can keep getting more bursts of sheer RAGE(!!!) like this. The Jim Jones Revue dropped a third full-length, The Savage Heart (Punk Rock Blues Records/PIAS Recordings), that showed them going further into varying musical dynamics and better production without loosing their rootsy savagery.
Another English band, Night Of Treason, transcended their roots as a '70s punk jukebox with a great debut CD, Gentlemen & Hooligans, that was the best 1979 English punk record released since 1979; it's chockful of passionate, committed originals that showed a firm grasp of the British kitchen sink songwriting that made The Jam, The Clash, and even The Specials great, and didn't sound the least bit nostalgic or pastiche-like. Even old school punk rock titans the Sex Pistols and Johnny Thunders' Heartbreakers weighed in with worthwhile deluxe 35th anniversary box sets dedicated to their true sole LPs, Never Mind The Bollocks and LAMF. All the required bonus demos and such are excellent, especially in the case of Bollocks: Who can resist hearing the demos of things like "Bodies" and even "Belsen Was A Gas," complete with decent Sid Vicious bass playing?

Then there are records you can't really slot in anywhere. Public Image Ltd., for one, surprisingly self-released a comeback CD that's way solid, This Is PiL. Yet it's neither a return to the furious experimentation of the classic Lydon/Levine/Wobble records, nor as pop as the music the ever-shifting post-original lineups made. But it's better than all those latter records, and almost as potent as the 1st two PiL albums. Then you have ex-Angry Samoan Gregg Turner and his first solo release, Gregg Turner Plays The Hits (White Noise): He recorded a charming set of small combo, low volume tunes with strong '50s roots that resembles nothing less than Jonathan Richman with the vicious sense of humor that drove Angry Samoans classics like "The Ballad Of Jerry Curlan." And honestly, Gregg's tunes are so catchy, you'll find yourself hours later randomly singing odd hooks like "Bobcat Bite, they kill rabbits...."

In some ways. I look upon 2012 as a fine year for roots rock rebels. Blame that, primarily, on Chaz Matthews introducing me early in the year to the charms of J.D. McPherson and Pete Molinari. (I'm listening, via Spotify, to Molinari's 2008 A Virtual Landslide, one of the finer byproducts of Liam Watson's Toerag Studios.) You might also blame this on Bob Dylan, whose fine Tempest was the best Chess Record released since the '50s (whilst neither being released on or recorded at Chess). This may be a spurious assessment at best, however: Neither McPherson nor Molinari released a note last year, aside from a better-distributed reissue of McPherson's Signs and Signifiers CD. But the record I listened to most last year was by an artist who'd normally stand toe-to-toe with those two, Dan Sartain. For years, Sartain's plied a moody rockabilly that suggested Nick Cave collaborating with Jody Reynolds, with Reynolds writing all the music. Something must have snapped within Sartain however. He began the year releasing a totally form-breaking, straight-up punk rock record, Too Tough To Live, via One Little Indian in England.

This is no joke: Sartain walked into San Francisco's Lucky Cat Studios, cranked his amp to distortion levels, and unleashed 12 songs in 19 minutes that suggested he had a brain rupture while listening to nothing but the first two Angry Samoans records and the first Saints album, with a bit of Black Flag's Damaged for an attitude check. In a year where the lyrical bile ball Keith Morris launched on the OFF! album would qualify as 2012's Most Pissed-Off Record, Sartain actually outstripped Keith: Dan is more irrationally pissed-off. Tracks like the opening "Nam Vet" and "Indian Massacre" pin you to the wall with sheer rock 'n' roll fury, and others like "Now Now Now" (a duet with Jane Wiedlin) have a sweet nursery rhyme musicality that still doesn't dull the roar. 

Enough already. I've already spent way more time writing this than I'd planned. I'm now bored and anxious to get on with my day. Coming next: I try and remember if I read any new books that stuck with me. Thank you for reading this.

Only In Texas

Earning the rent selling books at the dayjob, as the frantic fuss out their last minute Xmas gifts. Just as I rounded the corner from straightening the sports section, this big cowboy - hat, boots, the whole nine - comes storming out of the religious section. He spots my work badge dangling from my neck.

"Ah'm lookin' for Willie Nelson's book!"

"Well, sir," I smiled, "I realize Willie's a religious figure in Texas. But you won't find his book there!" We laughed as I led him to the music section....

Only in my home state....

Diggin' Up The Bones Of Strummer And Jones

To accompany that bit of verbal nostalgia below, here's some of the best live footage of prime Clash I've seen. A legendary gig at a Manchester fun fair (as they call carnivals in the UK), it was filmed for Tony Wilson's So It Goes series, which ended up being where many of UK Punk Mk. I's greats would make their television debuts (including a pre-record contract Sex Pistols, notoriously debuting "Anarchy In The UK" days after it was written). This is not too dissimilar from the Clash that I remember seeing, barring their having morphed into amphetamine rockabilly musicians by then, at least visually. Enjoy!