January 20, 2007
Danny Wood
This YouTube video in this post has been removed per the request of the artist. (@10-7-2007)
Rick at 4:34 pm
June 6, 2006
All Hail
I’ve always liked “violent” music (no more so than when I was a drug addict and anaesthetizing my emotions at every opportunity). In the late 1980s, I went to the Felt Forum at Madison Square Garden to see Slayer. I think Rob Straker went, too. The opening act was Danzig. The auditorium had stiff, removable seat cushions that were soon flying through the air in a massive pillow fight. The front rows had degenerated into gang warfare, with impromptu pits devolving into bloody slugfests. 
Scary chaos. Stadium punk and metal shows in NYC always had an atmosphere of “some random shlub is gonna get fucked up.” Judging from the battle wounds I saw, there was more than one such casualty. When Slayer hit the stage, they rocked like head-banging hair puppets with maniacal stage moves that could only have been inspired by the Devil himself. The dirtbag audience was almost tamed by their sheer demonic force. Escaping with my life in a taxicab afterward felt really exhilarating. My only regret was that I didn’t buy the garish Slatanic Wehrmacht t-shirt.
Years before my formal interest in Satanism, I enjoyed the likes of Slayer, especially their first LP Show No Mercy (which, unlike most people, I prefer to Reign in Blood) from the vinyl version of which this most excellent track is taken. Rege Satanas!
Slayer - “Black Magic”
Usually, Toe Stubber doesn’t review bands that are this popular - but it’s been three weeks of mental reclusion, today’s date is 6-6-6, and I thought you folks needed a treat. Here’s to not getting sued. I love you all.
Rick at 10:05 am
April 29, 2006
Heart Test
What can one say about 1/2 Japanese? Anything and everything, it seems. Among critics they’re kind of a rock ‘n’ roll Rorshach test, but the results will probably be more accurate if you love them, and I do.
For a good overview of the Half Jap phenomenon, I recommend the excellent documentary The Band That Would Be King, wherein Penn Jillette and various hipsters - many of whom I actually knew back when I was hip - dryly pontificate on the Fair brothers’ genius, in between live footage and storytelling. I do agree with the bitching of one disgruntled reviewer that the movie could’ve used more of the raucous early tunes prior to their breakout “accessible” record Charmed Life. My favorite numbers are from the first decade, up to the point where David kinda lost interest; I love the 1980 triple album set 1/2 Gentlemen Not Beasts (which includes all the hits below) and Loud LP (the beginning of their “big band” sound), and the Horrible EP of monster songs. And this one; the debut 7″, Calling All Girls.
Someday we’ll have a Toe Stubber party, and I’ll DJ their scrawnking best for ya. Can’t forget the David Fair Coo Coo Rockin’ Time - Coo Coo Party Time solo album, or spinoff bands like the Workdogs and the Chumps.
I remember there was a heavy-drinking friend of my pal Marcia’s named Bill Jordan who idolized Half Jap, even to the point of dressing like, and resembling, David Fair (though, in Bill’s defense, the “David Fair look” is not a high-maintenance style). Bill cofounded the local band Scalding Urine, a freeform noise project that was obscure even among friends of the group.
Don Fleming used to work as a dishwasher at the Bayou nightclub on K Street in Washington, DC when I was a busboy (Don is now a supremo honcho in the recording industry), 
and the young Stubber was the number-one fan of Don’s spooky sixties-pop band the Velvet Monkeys. Don went on to play guitar with and produce 1/2 Jap as well as bunch of other people you’ve probably heard of. Half Japanese is still Jad Fair’s baby and you can find out about newer stuff here.
Before I end up writing an historical treatise here, why don’t you just play a couple of blasts off this seminal 1977 record that spawned a million lesser “we can’t play our instruments” bands. It’s just two brothers, kicking up something loud and vaguely similar to rock ‘n’ roll. David Fair’s melodic expressions may be a bit rough on the ears, but his barking enthusiasm is infectious. For me, Jad’s lusty bravado in “School of Love” and his beat-up pleading in “Shy Around Girls” are the raw emotional highlights. Open your heart.
1/2 Japanese - “Dream Date”
1/2 Japanese - “Calling All Girls”
1/2 Japanese - “School of Love”
1/2 Japanese - “Battle of the Bands”
1/2 Japanese - “Bogue Millionaires / Cool Millionaires”
1/2 Japanese - “Ann Arbor, MI”
1/2 Japanese - “Shy Around Girls”
1/2 Japanese - “Her Parents Came Home”
1/2 Japanese - “The Worst I’d Ever Do”
Rick at 1:48 pm
November 21, 2005
We Will Win
Okay, here’s something that’s going to be too un-musical for a few of you. All I can say, by way of explanation, is that this 45 was introduced to me at an age when I was a really, really alienated young man.
SPK stood for several things, like “Surgical Penis Klinik,” “Socialist Patients Kollective” or “System Planning Korporation.”
SPK delivered imagery of medical horror mixed with the cryptically threatening language of terrorist manifestos. They were from Australia and mysterious legends swirled around the band - they’d met as workers and patients in a mental hospital, it was said, and were involved in radical criminal activities, of which the musical entity SPK and its solipsistic Dokuments were only the propaganda arm. Spooky! You can read lots of their old public statements on this ugly site. In fact, they maintained pretty strict anonymity until the real group apparently split up, industrial music got swallowed up by goth and ravers and Graeme Revell began putting out crap like Metal Dance under the SPK moniker.
Before Answer Me!, before Ogrish & Rotten.com,
SPK was shooting videos featuring pickled punks and the severed heads, hands and genitals of real human corpses inside a morgue being moved around, puppet-style, in a rude sexual congress, with a soundtrack consisting of thuds, screams and washes of pink noise. I’d like to show you that video. Perhaps some other time… when I can actually watch you squirm.
SPK - “Mekano” (2:12)
SPK - “Slogun” (6:08)
Rick at 10:17 pm
November 17, 2005
Thursday You Need Love
A band as great as Trio shouldn’t have their legacy tarnished by Volkswagon commercials, or obscured by cover versions, no matter how heartfelt. Why don’t more people know about this group? There must be something about a German accent that still rubs der Volk the wrong way.
I usually dislike Trouser Press, but they didn’t get it half wrong this time. I love the way Trio was able to embrace both sarcastic defeatism and sickly sweet sentimentality, especially in tender numbers like “Out in the Streets.” (Speaking of which, I don’t know the story behind those two weird digital-like “skips” you’ll hear - it must be an original mastering defect, because the song’s the same in every format I’ve heard… Perhaps one of you knows the answer.)
Then there’s “Broken Hearts (For You and Me)” which steers the cold melancholy of a regular pop love song along the edge of absurdity, building into that brilliant “aii-yii-yii-yii” vocal finale. In retrospect, Trio seemed really influential in terms of their oddball application of the principles of minimalism to rock/pop. Meaning: ahead of their time. For example, until the electronica boom, I can’t recall any similar rock use of the Casio VL-Tone; the Fall’s “The Man Whose Head Expanded” comes to mind, but that’s it - and that’s about as opposite to Trio’s stripped-down Teutonic soul as you can get.
Here’s a very illuminating section from an excellent Wikipedia entry about the band:
“…Trio preferred the name Neue Deutsche Fröhlichkeit, which means ‘New German Cheerfulness’, to describe their music. At that time, as now, popular songs were based on extremely simple structures that were simply polished. Trio’s main principle was to remove almost all the polish from their songs, and to use the simplest practical structures (most of their songs were three-chord songs). For this reason, many of their songs are restricted to drums, guitar, vocals, and just one or maybe two other instruments, if any at all. Bass was used very infrequently until their later songs, and live shows often saw Remmler playing some simple preprogrammed chords on his small Casio keyboard while Behrens played his drums single-handedly eating an apple. This simplicity was not simply due to an inability to sing or play well; Remmler’s later solo career shows that he was capable of much more complicated music, and Kralle has demonstrated considerable ability as a guitarist in other ventures. Rather, their songs were bare-boned to show how bare the bones actually are.”
If you’re curious, there’s no real best-of collection; any of their records are a solid mix of good & great. Go ahead and buy the counterfeit reissue of their s/t American debut (actually just an unrelated retrospective with the same cover slapped on it). Or try this.
Then drink a bunch of coffee and turn it up loud.
Trio - “Sunday You Need Love Monday Be Alone”
Trio - “Broken Hearts (For You and Me)”
Trio - “Anna - Letmeinletmeout”
Trio - “Out in the Streets”
Rick at 9:11 pm
October 23, 2005
Floating in Formaldehyde
When I was 19 or 20 I moved back to the DC area, after a disastrous attempt to escape to New York by leeching off my girlfriend Nadine’s life savings. I lived in the basement of a group house on North Glebe Road in Arlington, Va with Bruce Merkle, XoXoX (who was dating Bruce’s sister Leslie), Leslie and her kid and many others who came and went. Bruce formed the band Color Anxiety which later morphed into 9353.
Specimen Fred were comprised of RICK (guitar, synth, vocals), XoXoX (synth) and TOM (bass, vocals).
Specimen Fred only ever played two shows. One was an multi-act art terrorism event at DC Space called the FBC Horror Circus, and another time Rick & XoXoX did a dual-synth act opening for 9353.
Penis Surgery at the FBC show (MP3 - 96 seconds)
Rick Rodine was the de facto architect of the band, the promoter (to the extent they ever wanted one) and the person who hand-crafted the individually decorated cassettes that are pretty much Fred’s only physical legacy. I remember visiting Rick in his basement room, getting stoned and listening to the tapes he’d made of himself on guitar, which he’d multi-tracked by playing along with previous recordings, one boombox to another. Rick was very influential among his friends, inventing a strange idiom based on comedy and alienation. He and I collaborated on Fat Bleed Comics and other shit-disturbing flyers and stickers that got distributed by hand to the business-suit class in Arlington, Rosslyn and Northwest DC. (Doing my “research,” I discovered a huge cache of periodicals and flyers by our various friends in my closet. I have no idea to what use to put them.) This carried over into a campaign of cryptic stenciled graffiti messages spraypainted on downtown office buildings. Those perpetrators shall remain nameless. We also used to sneak into abandoned or unguarded sites and climb up tall fire escapes to dilapidated rooftops, among other crimes. Ah, those were the nights.
Most tunes were recorded at FredQuarters, the bright-green-and-dark-purple-painted basement room of Tom’s peculiar mom’s house in ArVa. Though Rick was the prime motivator in the band, it was a real collaboration. Sometimes only two sides of the trio would record (and there were also millions of one-off jams with members of our extended clique).
Often XoXoX (a prodigy who shared my enthusiasm for certain substances) might establish an off-putting, almost non-musical theme on rhythm synthesizer while Tom Crawford (an anti-scenester, very focused guy who mostly liked heavy metal and Killing Joke) laid down an intimate line of precision bass. But there really was no format; the approach may have been technically strict but the product was incredibly varied and largely instrumental. Lack of a drummer forced the band to play it tight. For all I know, Specimen Fred may sound “quaint” to moderner ears, but as an art-damaged young man with a love of Devo, the Residents, Eraserhead and SPK, it all went straight down my piehole without mastication.
Rick is a visual artist living in NYC and Tom has fallen completely off my radar - last I heard he was still married, in Northern Virginia.
After drugs, girls and circumstance conspired to break up Specimen Fred, Rick Rodine joined with Rick Hall, Mike Horsley and Bill Kamens to form the band Rick ‘n’ Mike ‘n’ Bill. There’s lots more history, but I know you’re probably getting bored.
I’ve always dreamed of putting a collection of Specimen Fred material out on vinyl or possibly a limited-run CD, just for the sake of posterity. As you can see, I don’t even know the names of some songs. The members of the group are notoriously averse to promotion - that’s why if you google “Specimen Fred,” this page might be the only relevant result. That’s just a goddamn shame. After you download, post a comment and let me know if you think there’s an audience for this stuff, and then I’ll see what the band’s big-ticket demands are.
Specimen Fred - “Specimen Comes Home”
Specimen Fred - “When You Die”
Specimen Fred - “Yo Pablo”
Specimen Fred - “Another Realization”
Specimen Fred - “Floating in Formaldehyde II”
Specimen Fred - (no title) #23
Specimen Fred - (no title) #37
Specimen Fred - (no title) #35
Specimen Fred - (no title) #25
Specimen Fred - “Those Kids”
Rick at 11:09 pm
October 5, 2005
You Too Will Die
When I look upon Daniel Johnston’s work, I am filled with a sadness that, I confess, is born of envy. How can one lonely man excel in the fields of music, filmmaking, painting and drawing and still have the energy to indulge in fundie Christianity and long, torturous bouts of manic depression?
Thus it has been for young Daniel, through a series of brilliant cassette tapes he recorded, according to the bio, “on a $59.00 Sanyo mono boom box” in 1983-84, to his so-called discovery in the mid-decade as some sort of street-cred mascot for various lame rock bands and subsequent coronation as the Godfather of Indie Rock (well, it could be worse) complete with obsessive-fan sites and a soon-to-be-released documentary that looks really fucking good.
Anyway… the songs. Here are three of them: stark, funny, chilling, personal and painful. I love this guy.
Daniel Johnston - “Hey Joe” (from Hi, How Are You cassette; reissued on Homestead Records)
Daniel Johnston - “Walking the Cow” (from Hi, How Are You)
Daniel Johnston - “Funeral Home” (live) (from 1990; Shimmy-Disc Records)
Shout-out to Markus from Zurich.
Rick at 10:40 pm
September 20, 2005
Of Fishes Great and Fishes Small
New blog. New post. This is all new to me. Please bear with me while I learn how to do simple, basic things like wrap text and get a goddamn digital photo of a vinyl record. (They’re really difficult to take in focus without glare.)
I first became an Al Kizys fan when I saw his band the Bag People play at the 9:30 Club in Washington, DC in the early ’80s. All anybody knew about them was that they were from NYC - which at that age was all I needed to know. Couldn’t tell you who they were opening for (the first or the second time they played) but I remember feeling real cool hanging “backstage” with the band. There’s a blurb I wrote in the Live section of an issue of WDC Period that I can’t seem to find anymore. I don’t know who broke the dressing room mirror. The Bag People were a fun band, sort of in the noise/hard rock vein - which was an unusual combo at the time, not a massive collection of subgenres like it is today. If I’m not mistaken, they did a Deep Purple cover.
A few years later, I was in NYC myself. Like most of my memories of that time, it’s obscured by a heroin haze, but amid all the lifestyle bands that formed my music worldview, Of Cabbages and Kings held a special place behind my eardrums. Their first self-titled 4-song 12″ on Purge/Sound League Records (home to Missing Foundation and other L.E.S. noise hooligans) is a grand hymn to rock’s intellectual majesty, with Algis doing a knuckle-shredding Lemmy-esque bass strum over a subterranean bellow of pain. “The Veil Thins” is magnificent, the lyrics an apocalyptic seaman’s poem credited to David Stowell.
Check out the classic ugly photo-booth mug shots, the kind that practically every noise band of the era used on their album art to evoke a sense of pseudo-anonymity and criminal menace.
Face, the 1988 followup LP, has its moments, too, but for me nothing beats the debut number. Both of the first two records were recorded at Fun City studios by Wharton Tiers. Until doing the research for this post (not really my strong suit, as will become clear), I didn’t even know that the Cabbages had put out four releases. Tracks from the last two albums are available for download here.
An Italian webpage about them is located over here.
DISCOGRAPHY
Of Cabbages and Kings (Purge/Sound League) 1987
Face (Purge/Sound League) 1988
Basic Pain, Basic Pleasure (Triple X) 1990
Hunter’s Moon (Triple X) 1992
…also, Mesomorph Enduros comp (Big Cat) 1992
The rhythm section of this band could do no wrong. Al and Ted joined the motherfucking Swans for a time while Ted helped found Prong and later joined Godflesh and Jesu. Al and Carolyn both played with Glenn Branca’s Guitar Ensemble along with Miriam McDonough, who used to do my taxes.
Enjoy the spell.
Of Cabbages and Kings - “The Veil Thins”
Rick at 12:20 am
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