Great Moments In Flexi-Disc History

While searching for the Kendra Smith flexi-disc, I came across this one, given away with a different issue of The BOB Magazine. I had totally forgotten I had this, but it's a good one.

The A-side "I'll Meet You Halfway" by Redd Kross is an outtake from 1993's Phaseshifter. It sounds to me like the boys were going for a kind of Neil Diamond vibe here (quite sucessfully, I might add). This also appeared on the B-side of "The Lady In The Front Row" 7" single (but not on the 10" EP that I own, go figure).

Side two has a then 48 year-old Moe Tucker performing "Teenager In Love" accompanied by her daughter Kate on violin and sax. Like everything else Moe touches, the results are completely charming.

The other B-side track, "So So Sick" appeared in a slightly different version (titled "So Sick") on Unrest's fantastic 1992 album Perfect Teeth. I believe this version also appeared on a limited edition Teenbeat 7" box set of the album. It's criminal that Perfect Teeth, one of the best albums of the 90s, has fallen out-of-print. It's not even available as a download, although a compilation of some of the better tracks and rarities from the same period, B.P.M. (1991-1994), is available at iTunes. "So So Sick" (possibly the same version as this one) is also available there, presumably sans flexi-disc induced distortion. Once again, I've done my best to clean up the sound without negatively impacting the music, I hope you enjoy the results.

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Tuscadero to Perform "The Pink Album" Live

Tuscadero will perform their 1994 classic The Pink Album live in its entirety in a series of special concerts this summer. Each performance by the newly reformed indie-rock legends will feature an early and a late show. In the early show the band will perform the lo-fi indie version of the album as released by Teenbeat in 1994, and in the late show they will play the remixed major label version as released by Elektra in 1996.

Alright, that's not really happening. To the best of my knowledge Tuscadero has not reformed and I know of no plans to perform The Pink Album live (remixed or otherwise). But how surprising would it actually be? The "classic album played live" phenomena has gotten so entirely out of hand at this point that little would surprise me. If you don't think so please consider this--by no means complete--list of albums that have been performed live over the past several years:

Built To Spill - Perfect From Now On
The Meat Puppets - II
Sebadoh - Bubble And Scrape
Thurston Moore - Psychic Hearts
Tortoise - Millions Now Living Will Never Die
Public Enemy - It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back
Mission of Burma - Vs.
Lour Reed - Berlin
Patti Smith - Horses
Primus - Sailing the Seas of Cheese & Frizzle Fry
Killing Joke - Killing Joke & What's This For...!
Jethro Tull - Aqualung, Thick As A Brick & A Passion Play
Mountain - Climbing
REO Speedwagon - Hi Infidelity
Cheap Trick - Live at Budokan
Alice Cooper - Greatest Hits
Died Pretty - Doughboy Hollow
Ed Kuepper - Honey Steel's Gold
The Scientists - Blood Red River
Sonic Youth - Daydream Nation
Slint - Spiderland
Redd Kross - Born Innocent
The House of Love - The House of Love
GZA/Genius – Liquid Swords
Cowboy Junkies - The Trinity Session
Comets on Fire - Blue Cathedral
Teenage Fanclub - Bandwagonesque
Girls Against Boys - Venus Luxure No. 1 Baby
Green on Red - Gas Food Lodging
The Stooges - Funhouse
Mudhoney - Superfuzz Bigmuff Plus Early Singles
Melvins - Houdini
Belle & Sebastian - If You're Feeling Sinister
Cat Power - The Covers Record
Dinosaur Jr. - You're Living All Over Me
Dirty Three - Ocean Songs
Gang of Four - Entertainment!
Jon Spencer Blues Explosion - Orange
The Lemonheads - It's A Shame about Ray
Echo & The Bunnymen - Ocean Rain

I won't pick on any band in particular and claim that any of these albums don't deserve this kind of treatment. It's just that, considering the phenomenon as a whole, we clearly have a trend that has gotten ridiculously out-of-control.

The whole thing started off innocently enough. Brian Wilson, recovering from years of creative inertia, self-abuse and seclusion triumphantly took to the stage to perform the Pet Sounds, and later Smile, albums in their entirety. Troubled Love front-man Arthur Lee, fresh off a stint in a federal penitentiary, followed suit by performing Forever Changes live with his new band. Only a horrible cynic would begrudge these artists the right to revisit these long past moments of glory, especially considering the years of hard living that followed them. These concerts were triumphs of the human spirit and demonstrated an inspiring level of artistic resilience.

Following up on those successes, an organization called All Tomorrow's Parties created the ironically titled Don't Look Back series, in which complete albums from the more recent past--mostly from the indie-rock cannon--were performed live. Divorced from the emotional back stories that made flawed live performances of Pet Sounds and Forever Changes interesting, I would have expected such an undertaking to fail miserably. After all, live performances and albums (however good they happen to be) have their own unique virtues, most of which don't overlap. The great thing about albums is that they can be played back in their entirety (or in part) at any time. By contrast, the best live concerts present a once-in-a-lifetime, never to be duplicated experience. Favorite albums comfort us with the familiar and the expected, while the best live shows surprise us ("Wow! Are they really covering Klaatu!").

It's frankly hard for me to imagine why someone would want to know exactly what song is coming next in a live performance. Back in 1987 when Hüsker Dü chose to promote their then new album, Warehouse: Songs And Stories, by performing it in its entirety, in sequence at their live shows, I felt slightly ripped off upon leaving the show. I wanted to hear some of my favorites songs from their other albums performed live too. And with such a structured, predictable set-list it seemed like it was difficult for the band to turn in a truly inspired performance.

But now for some reason, this is exactly the kind of predictable live music experience listeners seem to crave, and I find it difficult to understand why. Let me be clear: I don't blame any of the artists for doing this. It's harder than ever to turn a buck in the music business these days, and this is a perfectly honest way of doing so. My beef is with the audience.

For me, this is the equivalent of taking a particular moment in time and fossilizing it in amber. Why fetishize Bandwagonesque when Teenage Fanclub has released a string of fantastic (in some cases arguably better) albums since their brief commercial apex 15 years ago? Worse, I believe the music on the album--presented in the right context--can still be vital and alive, but presenting it in this way risks turning it into a staid museum-piece.

This is an overly long post, and I still don't feel like I've articulated what really bugs me about this trend. I only hope it runs its course soon.

Vomit Launch

Vomit Launch has to be one of the two or three most poorly chosen names in the history of indie rock (if you can think of worse ones, please share them). You expect a band named Vomit Launch to sound like the Circle Jerks not the Young Marble Giants' American cousins. I estimate that Vomit Launch could have sold an additional 3,000 records over the course of their career if they had named themselves the Little Furry Kittens, which would have brought their likely sales up to a respectable 3,087 units.

This stuff comes from a compilation of early material released by Teenbeat in 1994. "Star Trekking" was recorded in 1985 and originally released on the Not Even Pretty EP, "Blood On Me Eggrolls" was recorded in 1989 and is an outtake from their Rough Trade/Mad Rover LP, Mr. Spench.

Air Miami

I guess you could say Air Miami never took off. Formed in the wake of Unrest's demise by Mark Robinson and Bridget Cross, Air Miami released a couple compilation tracks, a few singles, a couple of cassettes, a full length album and an EP or two. Then they dissolved and the principals went on to other things. I was a big fan of Unrest's final two albums, in which they morphed from a schizophrenic D.C. punk band into anglophile popsters of the highest order. Air Miami was okay, but never really lived up to the standards of the previous band, as is so often the case. Songs like "World Cup Fever" hewed a little too closely to their Euro-trash influences for my taste.

They did get off to a very promising start with this single, "Airplane Rider." Stylistically, it is not different from the Unrest of Perfect Teeth in any meaningful way, which is just fine by me. Someday maybe I will catch up with some of the projects Mark Robinson has been involved with after the breakup of this group.