Mudhoney / Halo Of Flies - Mod Showdown!

Another split single of obscure cover songs featuring Mudhoney. This is a good one too.

Mudhoney covers Billy Childish (again), this time it's Billy's first band, the Milkshakes, with "She's Just Fifteen". You don't see too many songs celebrating pedophilia out there these days, do you?

Halo Of Flies covers mods/psychedelic pioneers John's Children, famous for having Marc Bolan of T.Rex in the band briefly. It's a sped-up noise-rock reinterpretation of a  60's classic. Good cover.

A: Mudhoney - She's Just Fifteen
B: Halo Of Flies - Jagged Time Lapse
Enjoy!

Mudhoney - Blinding Sun

This is a promo release of Mudhoney's second big label single, and is from the Piece of Cake album. The album title apparently refers to how easy it all seemed, and they didn't exactly take their big label debut all that seriously, admitting that the album was "Half-baked".

It was the beginning of a long, slow decline phase for a once great band. The album lacked the attitude of the early singles and the consistency of "Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge" and they slowly slipped into irrelevance. Kind of like Nomar after the wrist injury.

"Blinding Sun" is at least one of the more well-baked songs on the album, and was a solid choice for a single release. "King Sandbox" plays on the "piece of cake" theme in the lyrics, and also comes across as one of the more half-baked efforts.

A: Blinding Sun
B: King Sandbox
Enjoy!

Mudhoney / Gas Huffer Split

One of my favorites, simply because the cover art is too damn funny. The sleeve folds out to a larger image of the two bands fighting.

Both bands cover fairly obscure punk acts. Gas Huffer takes on the Silly Killers' "Knife Manual". I can honestly say that despite all of the obscure stuff I've dug up, I've never heard the original, and after doing some internet sleuthing, that seems to be a common theme. There's no sign of them except for references to Gas Huffer's cover, and no one seems to have heard anything by them. (Note- found it. Duff McKagan of Guns n' Roses was in this band, briefly, and they only put out one 7")  Fun song though, and there's some cool guitar licks from future Monkeywrench guy Tom Price.

Mudhoney takes on The Angry Samoans' misogynistic angry break-up song,  "You Stupid Asshole".  I really liked the Angry Samoans in high school. Totally politically incorrect and quite goofy at times, ("Lights Out" is still a great little song) which kind of sounds like Mudhoney themselves, actually. Mudhoney were better at playing this kind of thing than the Samoans though. It's much better than the original.

Harvard Sq. Newbury Comics, I think. Note that this is just a regular old 7", and not one of the ultra- cool saw blade ones pictured below. I might just have to go and get one of those.

A: Mudhoney - "You Stupid Asshole"
B: Gas Huffer - "Knife Manual"
Enjoy!

Green River - Come On Down

The return of LP Sunday. Thanks to lots of snow days.

There's been a lot of Seattle stuff this week. Gorilla, Mark Arm, Love Battery, tons of Sub Pop singles...

So I figured I'd go way back, and rip this album, which  marks the unofficial beginning of the whole Seattle thing. The first "grunge" album. This band is two parts Mudhoney (Mark Arm, Steve Turner) two parts Pearl Jam (Jeff Ament, Stone Gossard), and one part some random guy. (Alex Vincent).

Kind of a crazy mix, since Mudhoney didn't take themselves (or anything) too seriously, and Pearl Jam was a serious band. And of course, that's why the band split. "Artistic differences" and all. Basically, Turner wasn't fond of the musical direction of the band as they veered toward metal in their later days, and Arm seemed to think that Gossard (who played with Turner since high school) and Ament were too driven for a major label deal and were in it for the money. Alex Vincent bailed on life in the US and fled for Japan. Everyone seemed to wind up where they belonged. Pearl Jam was a wildly successful big label band, Mudhoney kept their independence far longer than most Seattle acts, and bombed as a major label act because of they just weren't mainstream enough, and Alex got to eat soba and drink sake. They're apparently doing the occasional reunion show, and there have been rumors of a new album in the works for a couple of years now.

I got this used in Amherst somewhere in the early 90's. Al Bum's maybe? I fully understood the cultural significance of the album, especially since the whole Seattle things was front and center at the time, and figured I should have it for that alone. I honestly can't remember ever listening to it though.

It clearly skews towards the Mudhoney side of the equation. I guess that's what happens when Mark Arm writes a lot of stuff. It's noisy. Come On Down and Swallow My Pride could have been on Superfuzz Bigmuff if you changed up the guitar settings and effects. I can see why Turner was complaining though. Not quite his sound.

A: Come On Down, New God, Swallow My Pride, Ride Of Your Life
B: Corner Of My Eye, Tunnel Of Love
Enjoy!

Also, while I know she's not reading this, happy 41st to my big sister.

Mark Arm - The Freewheelin' Mark Arm

Mudhoney's Mark Arm takes on Dylan's "Masters of War", and even steals Dylan's album cover, putting him in a gas mask.

This was released during Gulf War part 1, and wasn't exactly a topic about to be covered by Mudhoney, who were as apolitical as any band could be. Arm doesn't exactly have the best voice for folky stuff, but then again, neither did Dylan, so why not?

The B-side is a goofy Bo Diddley-esque thing (he even gets partial songwriting credit) about rickets, Amsterdam, and getting beat up.

A: Masters Of War
B: My Life With Rickets
Enjoy!

Mudhoney - You're Gone

Another Mudhoney single. These are from the Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge time period. "You're Gone" was only released as a single, but "Thorn" was on the album.

The final song, "You Make Me Die", introduced me to English garage rock king Billy Childish. It's his song, and he's singing it with Mudhoney backing him up. He released an album on Sub Pop around this time, with Eightball's Dan Clowes doing the art. His stuff all sounds the same, but at least you know what you're getting from him. I grabbed the Sub Pop Singles Club record he did, which came out around this time too.

A: You're Gone
B: Thorn, You Make Me Die
Enjoy!

Mudhoney - Something So Clear demo - Reflex Flexi Disk

OK, so it's not quite a 7". I figured I'd get this ripped though. I got this out of a Reflex magazine, they generally did these flexi-disks as an insert. Being into all things Mudhoney, I grabbed this one. Can't say the magazine was memorable in any way, and I'm sure I never bought another one. It was a cool gimmick though.

It's a much rougher cut of the song "Something So Clear" which had come out a few months prior on Mudhoney's best album, "Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge". It's fuzzier, gritter and, well, muddier sounding, though the paper thin vinyl may have something to do with that, too. It's also missing a cool little guitar bit that appeared on the final version.

I admit this one is a bit lame. Taking the easy way out after a long holiday weekend and a long workday. Still, I thought this little flexi-disk thing was worth documenting. Also had an interesting reminder of 1991 over the weekend, so maybe I subconsciously grabbed this because of that. I mail ordered that Mudhoney CD in the summer of 1991 as I had no chance to get to a store. I was working 6, and often 7 full days a week in a tiny restaurant kitchen in Rockport, pulling doubles on the weekends. It was a hot summer, made worse by working within arms' reach of a steam-jacketed kettle, 2 convection ovens and a convection steamer. A 6 burner range was about 5-6' away, too. My particular spot in the kitchen hit 105 regularly. My biggest challenge was not sweating into the food, and I would joke that everything I worked on would be a little extra seasoned on the hot days. At least the other full-time prep cook was great to work with. She disappeared off to school at the end of the summer, while I stayed on to close the place down for the season. I went to a post-Thanksgiving party in Rockport this weekend and she was there, first time I'd seen her since then. It was fun to re-live the horror, and she brought a pie made with the old restaurants' recipe. Minus the sweat, of course.

Some more AmRep by request tomorrow.

A: Something So Clear (demo)

Enjoy!

The Monekywrench - Clean As A Broke-Dick Dog

Introducing LP Sunday, the first in an occasional series. Writing about the Monkeywrench earlier gave me the idea to do this.

Why break my own rules? It's called The Daily 7, not The Occasional 12, right? Well, because I can, and I've got maybe 25-30 LPs that are at least reasonably hard to find in digital format, and I'd like to get around to converting these, too. And LPs are a bitch to convert. You've got play a 45 minute record, split the tracks up by hand, and so on. So I'll work on those on the weekends while (if) I have some extra time to do that, and stick to singles during the week.

On to the record of the day, Clean As a Broke-Dick Dog. I'm pretty sure I mail-ordered this directly from Sub Pop, knowing that the odds of this reaching the stores in the Pioneer Valley were pretty small. This was a must-have as far as I was concerned, and I wasn't about to take any chances. Mudhoney/Gas Huffer/Big Boys side project? Sign me up! It's beautifully packaged, with an homage to old blues/jazz artists with the blue duotone cover and the lengthy, ridiculous essay on the back that explains the relationship between the blues and punk (with a Darby Crash reference! I love it when these things come full circle!) before moving on to extol the virtues of The Monkeywrench. It's perfect. I compared the cover art to an old Coltrane album I have, and even both of the essays fonts are identical. It's on fairly heavy, nicely marbled blue vinyl that makes it look like a bowling ball. Sticking with the old record theme, the label is black with silver ink.

What's inside the cover isn't exactly perfect, but it's close enough. Mudhoney, my favorite garage-slop-grunge act of the early 90's, gets the blues. That's pretty much it. Straight up garagey rock n' roll with some added slide guitar, harmonicas, and so on. It's a solid album, with some standout tracks. "Call My Body Home" is probably the best song about insect infestation ever recorded. "Bottle Up And Go" is as cool as its title sounds, and there's a great little slide-guitar hook to it. They do a great job covering the unlikely pair of Buffy Sainte Marie's folkey "Codine", and Redd Kross's "Notes & Chords Mean Nothing To Me". They nail them both, adding a lot of depth to what started out as two pretty stripped-down songs.

I never did check up on these guys after I got this. I just figured it was a one-off side project. I'm just now finding out that they cut 2 more albums, seems like they do this every 7 or 8 years, which is pretty cool, and probably a lot of fun for them. I should go track those albums down. Amazing how much I've lost touch with this stuff. There was a musical void in my life starting in the late 90's that lasted until recently. At first, I lost track of what was current, and then I just lost touch with everything. I didn't even know that Sub Pop did a Singles Club parts 2 & 3 until I started on this little vinyl project. School, kids, jobs, more school...it all sort of distracted me. Now I've got a decade of music to catch up on, and I'm already trying to catch up with the stuff I already own. But that's cool, it's a good problem to have, really. I've got something new to listen to every day.

1. Call My Body Home
2. Angelhead
3. Cold Cold World
4. Codine
5. From You
6. Doubled Over Again
7. Great Down Here
8. Look Back
9. Bottle Up & Go
10. The Story as I Was Told
11. Notes & Chords Mean Nothing To Me
12. Stop This World
13. I'm Blown
Enjoy!

The Holez / The Monkeywrench - Germs split single

OK, this wasn't selected at random. I couldn't resist the temptation of following Courtney Love with, well, Courtney Love. This is the first of many split singles, with different bands on each side. This one features a couple of grunge era/punk rock supergroups. The Holez is Courtney Love's Hole with Pat Smear (who also recorded/toured with Nirvana around this time) of the Germs added to the lineup. The Monkeywrench is Mark Arm and Steve Turner of Mudhoney, along with Tim Kerr (Big Boys, Poison 13) Thom Price from Seattle legends Gas Huffer and Martin Bland (Lubricated Goat) on drums.

Both bands are playing Germs covers, so having the actual Germs guitarist on hand for one song seems like a good idea, and they copped the Germs album art with the black cover/blue circle. I was pretty excited when I saw this (in Main St Records, Northampton, apparently, the price tag is still on it) it had all the makings of something great. Interesting lineups, and some fun early, messy US punk that you could really do something with.

It's not bad, but it didn't meet my outrageously high expectations. I guess there's something about the Germs that only the Germs should do their material. How do you take on Darby Crash's vocals? Should you? Hearing Courtney Love sing "I'm Dar-by Craaash!" on "Circle One" just seems...wrong. Her voice is really flat, too. Say what you want about the unintelligible vocal stylings of Mr. Crash, but he brought some serious psychotic energy to everything he did. Musically, it's perfectly fine, nothing special though. The original is one of the Germs' best, too. Oh, what might have been.

"Shut Down" isn't one of the Germs' best. The original is a sloppy, rambling directionless nine minute long punk song (a contradiction in terms if there ever was one), and The Monkeywrench do a nice job tightening up the music from the original with Tim Kerr adding a bluesy slide guitar to it, but unlike Courtney Love, Mark Arm goes over the top with his Crash vocal impression. It ends abruptly, as if they ran out of tape. At least that kept it under nine minutes. I did say that I like the experimental nature of the 7" record, and I live by that, but that means you've got to die by it sometimes too. The Monkeywrench cut one really fun LP, "Clean As a Broke Dick Dog", which I also have on vinyl. I'll have to rip that some time.

This was apparently released in late 1995, despite being recorded in 1992, and these songs appeared on a Germs tribute album. This is probably one of the last things I purchased in this collection.

A: The Holez - "Circle One"
B: The Monkeywrench - "Shut Down"

Enjoy!