Minutemen - Paranoid Time

Goddamn, I love the Minutemen. I picked this up in Cambridge in some basement record store that I doubt is around anymore. I'm pretty sure that this was a 1990-1991 or so SST re-release. It's on emerald green vinyl.

Mike Watt is about the nicest guy you could imagine. I was a shy, star-struck kid at a Firehose show at Pearl St. way back when, and I saw him getting a beer at the bar well before the show and went over to say hi. Sensing my awkwardness as I approached, he pulled me aside,  pulled out a seat, and said "Hey kid, what's yer name? Sit here and hang out with me while I make up my set list." So I did. I asked a few questions about life on the road, and how Firehose came about, and he answered them while scratching his chin and jotting down song names. He didn't have to tolerate some geeky 19-20 year old hanging around him, he could have just as easily gone backstage. It all adds to the "regular guy" legend of Mike Watt, I suppose.

There's seven tracks stuffed onto this little 45. Most are under a minute long. This was their first release, and they got a bit more polished as time went on. Watt gets all the fame for his bass work, but Hurley is one hell of a drummer, and Boon could play, too. I wonder what would have happened had Boon stuck around a bit longer.

A: Validation, The Maze, Definitions, Sickles and Hammers
B: Joe McCarthy's Ghost, Fascist, Paranoid Chant
Enjoy!

Dinosaur Jr. - Just Like Heaven

The end of 2010. I'm kind of sad to see it go. It was a good year. Everyone was healthy, at least until the last few weeks. Got back out there and started running again, getting some decent mileage in, especially in September. Work was engaging and finally seemed to have a future. Started this whole blog thing up. I really expanded my collection of MP3s, both from way back when, and I finally started listening to new stuff again.
Anyway, it certainly beat 2009, which pretty much sucked ass except for May 1. By comparison, 2010 was divine. Just like heaven? OK, maybe it's a stretch, but it seemed to fit, and I want to end the year on a high note.

Great cover of the Cure song. It ends abruptly as they ran out of tape on one of the tracks and just stopped it there. The B-sides are good too.

Happy New Year to everyone!

A: Just Like Heaven
B: Throw Down, Chunks
Enjoy!

Hüsker Dü - Eight Miles High/Makes No Sense At All

Another Sunday, another 10" record. Later than usual today, being out of commission for a few days has me behind schedule here. Anyway, these odd-sized records just looks strange on the turntable, sort of a weird bastard child of the 12" and the 7".

SST was in steep decline when they put this out in 1990, combining Hüsker Dü's most successful 7" releases on one 10", even though these were released 5 and 6 years earlier. Two of these four tracks were unavailable any other way, and they had received a lot of buzz over the years, so SST had a lot to gain by re-releasing them. They had also run out of quality artists at this point. Hüsker Dü was long gone, having moved on to Warner Bros. in 1986, before dissolving in a haze of drugs and suicide (their manager killed himself) in 1988. SST's latest crop of big-time acts, Sonic Youth & Dinosaur Jr. had recently fled, and Greg Ginn was putting out more and more modern jazz recordings, which the label's fans never bought. They had to dig into the back catalog for new releases that could make them some money, it seems. In an effort to keep up with the times and Sub Pop, the vinyl is bright green.

A lot has already been written about these singles. Hüsker Dü's cover of "Eight Miles High" is seen as some sort of landmark, where mid 80's College Radio, Alternative Rock or whatever you want to call it, took a 60's classic and completely and utterly changed it, throwing in all kinds of angst, anger and pure volume that was never present in the original in the process. It's an intense and great recording. "Masochism World" was a favorite of mine on the Zen Arcade album, and a live version was the original B-side for this. Which is too bad, really. They could have really gone for the full psychedelic 60's redux and thrown a version of "Hare Krishna" on there instead. That would have kicked ass.

"Makes No Sense At All" is still a great song, but this single was better known for its B-side, as the Huskers did the theme from the Mary Tyler Moore show. Their little homage to hometown Minneapolis. Another great and unexpected cover.

No clue where or when I picked this up. Hüsker Dü was my favorite band in high school, and while they had been replaced by Mudhoney and Sonic Youth by 1990, this was something I would have eagerly snapped up, especially since my only copies of "Eight Miles High" and "Love Is All Around" were copies of copies on battered cassettes. A CD was released of this, but today I'm glad I went for the vinyl.

A: Eight Miles High, Masochism World (Live)
B:  Makes No Sense At All, Love Is All Around
Enjoy!

Dinosaur Jr. - Freak Scene

Feeling a bit rushed lately. I've found that I like to be a day ahead. That gives me some time to tinker with the recording, listen to it a few more times, dig up some information on what the band has been up to since then, maybe even edit my random stream of crap writing style, and so on.

Unfortunately, I've been spending my nights at MGH with my super-fantastic aunt these days, and she'll be there for a while, it seems. The prognosis is good overall, but she's stuck there for a while waiting for surgery, which totally sucks. So I visit after work and get home late. These are going to be a bit more hasty than usual in the meantime, and may stop for a few days, though stopping messes up my plans to be done with this endeavor before baseball season really kicks in, which looks to be more interesting all the time.

Anyway, I came back from my latest visit and found that my somewhat loosely organized piles of 7" (the yet to do living and already done dead had been segregated) on the office floor had all been picked up and put back into a vacant spot in the bookshelf. My weak attempt at organization has been thwarted! Undaunted, I reached into the newly unified pile and pulled this out. I picked a winner. Wow, listening to this brings back a lot of memories. Amazing how music can capture all of these moments in time, store them away, and retrieve them all the moment you hear that song again. It had been a while. I've listened to Dinosaur Jr many times since then, but by default, I turn to their You're Living All Over Me album because the opening punch of "Little Fury Things", "Kracked" and "Sludgefeast" just calls out to me, and I blow right past Bug, which features "Freak Scene" and holds all of these long-lost memories.

These guys were flat-out great, and completely unique for the time. Blue Cheer loud, with excellent guitar and wah pedal work by idiot-savant J Mascis that countered his whiny, kinda stoned sounding vocals. Together, it all worked beautifully. I picked up Bug right after it came out based on some reviews and recommendations and was immediately hooked. 

When I started buying vinyl in 1990 or so, this single seemed like a great thing to grab, and the B-side was something I'd never heard before (the ending is a fun noisy mess). I bought a lot of SST from the mid 80s up until I bought some Dinosaur singles, so this marks the end of the label for me. SST seemed to fall apart after Dinosaur went on to sign with a major. Black Flag, Husker Du, and the Minutemen weren't walking through that door anytime soon, and SST seemed to have some managerial issues, too. Sub Pop took over as the indie label of choice soon afterward. Unfortunately, most of those old SST purchases were on cassette (there are a few exceptions...). I've replaced most of the old tapes with CDs, at least.

A: Freak Scene
B: Keep The Glove
Enjoy!