BROADCAST #17
AIR DATE: 04-24-07

Fanatics! It’s Tuesday afternoon, several hours away from tonight’s broadcast. I will be onstage when the show is on so Engineer X and I put this one together last week. I hope you liked it. I will be onstage all week long with Janeane Garofalo and Marc Maron at the wonderful Silent Move Theater at 611 N. Fairfax Avenue - Los Angeles, California 90036 - 323.655.2520. The show starts at 8-ish with Janeane then Marc, then yours truly. Last night, The Stooges played at the Wiltern. Engineer X, Fiancé X and myself were there of course. They were great and what made it very interesting to me was that on my of the songs, Steve Mackay was playing sax. It was cool to hear him play on songs I had never heard him play on. Last night, like last year when I saw them, I thought the stand out track was Fun House. The jam at the end is so heavy and last night was no let down. At the end of the song, Iggy was screaming something about the only way something can be good is if it’s hard while the band was shrieking and smashing all around him. Mike Watt was in fine form and those Asheton Brothers, DAMN!!!!! They are so deadly. Those leads were rippin’ and Scott Asheton was so deep in the groove, those two are giants. It was a great night. So anyway, below, you will find some details on the songs you heard tonight, I hope you find something in them you can use. We will be back with you live next week and it’s going to be a great show, please tune in if you can. Until then, STAY FANATIC!!! --Henry

For you Fanatics who can’t live without hearing this show again or if the original broadcast time is too hard on your sleep cycle here’s the re-broadcast schedule.

USA: Fridays: 0200 – 0400 hrs. PST
UK: Fridays: 1000 hrs. – 1200 hrs.
Continental Europe: Fridays 1100 hrs. – 1300 hrs.
Australia: Fridays 2100 hrs. – 2300 hrs.

XBXRX - Against the Odds: From the Sixth In Sixes CD. We are on a very heavy XBXRX / Hawnay Troof thing at the moment. I love this stuff. I love true maniac music by those who are really inspired. There are so many career-oriented musicians in the world and they sound like it but now and then, you come across the truly inspired who are visionary and really doing their own thing. Bands like this, people like Dax from Deadboy & The Elephantmen, they are what it’s all about I think. I have always admired people who are all the way into their work to the point where the separation between the art and the artist disappears. Most never even get close.

Iggy Pop – Funtime: From the The Idiot album. This is one of Mr. Pop’s greatest moments. It’s the first of the two back-to-back records Iggy did with David Bowie. The other one, Lust For Life, is just as good, if not better. They got together again in the 80’s to make the Blah Blah Blah album that has some good tracks but not as many or as good as these two records. Mr. Pop is a very talented and intelligent man and to make things even more interesting, the man just thinks differently and that’s always a plus. You need these records!

The Inkspots - Mamma Don't Allow It: Many years ago, a woman who is now an amazing doctor in California turned me onto The Ink Spots. I think she had some on a tape she played me. After I heard them, I went after all the music of theirs I could find. I think we listened to Your Feets Too Big by the band before. The band has been around, with a shifting line-up, for decades. When you get a CD of the band, there’s no real albums, it’s just compilation CDs of varying quality. Buy with care! This is from the Swing High Swing Low CD.

The Melvins – Set Me Straight: From the crushing Houdini album. This is the band we get letters about, letters asking why we don’t play their music more often. Duly noted, Fanatics, duly noted. I have quite a few albums of theirs but not all of them. I will put more Melvins into the mix. It’s not like they’re not awesome. This was the first Melvins record I ever got. I know that makes me late to the game but what else is new.

Members Of The Galata Mevlevi Music And Sema Ensemble - Ey Allahim Beni Senden Ayirma: From The Music Of Islam, Vol. 14. Sufi music from Turkey. This is one of the greatest box sets ever. I don’t know anything about any of the musicians in this collection which makes it even more interesting to me. Hell, I can’t even pronounce any of them either.

Lee Sain - Them Hot Pants: From The Complete Stax/Volt Soul Singles Vol. 2 box set, CD 08 to be exact. I looked up Lee Sain and can’t find anything on him. He’s one of the many great artists on Stax. I think there’s a live version of this track on the 3CD set of the Music from the Wattstax Festival & Film Live concert. I don’t have that one but I should change that. I have heard the Stax box sets all the way through at least once but there’s so much of it, I get a little lost in it all. I noticed that I had not sourced any of these for our show so I dug in and this is the song that jumped out. One of those great Stax recordings that is so simple and so perfect.

Anti-Pasti – 1980: From the Singles Collection album. I only had this one single. The band came to town a little after I joined Black Flag and played the 9:30 Club. Anti-Pasti were one of those bands that was part Punk Rock and whatever you would call what the punk bands in the early 80’s were doing, that kind of Oi meets Punk thing. These guys were doing it. The singles hold up pretty well. It’s all a little simple and brutish but not altogether bad. This is one of the better songs on the collection.

Public Enemy - Move!: I took this off the Can't Truss It CD single. This song can be found on the Apocalypse 91: The Enemy Strikes Black album. The reason we are listening to the single version is because it’s “safe” for radio. I don’t need to make Engineer X dive for his dump button more than I already do. There have been some really great Public Enemy b-sides and alt. versions that have never come out on CD and I have always wondered why. I thought they would all have come out by now. I thought this album was good but also thought PE should have taken more time in making this follow-up to Fear Of A Black Planet. It has great songs but it came out so quickly afterwards, I wonder if the band was just trying to keep up the momentum they had built up. It would have been on hell of a thing, to try and rival Fear, as much as I would have liked to have made an album that good, it would be very hard to deal with the pressure to come up with something to stand up to that. Shut ‘Em Down was another single off this album, great stuff.

SPK – Israel: From the Leichenschrei CD. Remember we played this group several weeks ago? I never had any of their albums, just two live tapes and that one compilation cut. This is the band’s 2nd album, released in 1982, which would be right around the time I met them. They released an album on Thermidor which was co-owned by Joe Carducci, who was part of SST Records. They stayed with us for a day or so. They were polite, very quite and very intense. The name SPK is derived from Sozialistisches Patientenkollektiv, a radical group formed by Dr. Wolfgang Huber in 1970. I didn’t know any of this so I looked it up on the internet and if you want to know more, you should as well. Pretty intense stuff. They believed that to cure their sickness they had to carry out violent attacks on society, which might explain why the group’s music was so hectic. I should put the tapes I have of them on CDR and bring them in for our show.

The Stooges - Down On The Street (take 2): This is from the Fun House Sessions box set that came out years ago. It is a Stooges Fanatic’s ultimate release. It is, if all is to be believed, the entire Fun House Sessions. I remember when I first saw the listing for the box set and saw that it was going to be a limited edition, I reckoned they wouldn’t last long so I got right on it and ordered mine. When it arrived I listened to a CD a night until I had worked my way through the entire thing. It was an interesting ride. It seemed that the band didn’t have any of the music really set in stone arrangement-wise and the lyrics seemed to change take to take. The band would do the song over and over again, seeming to find out what the song was and what it needed by jamming through it. Most of the time, the version of the song you hear on the proper album is the last or near to the last take. It’s all very interesting but in my opinion, there’s no take left off the real album that’s better than what made the final cut. There’s some leads here and there that rival what’s on the album but for the most part, this is for the Fanatics. It’s amazing to hear the band work through stuff though and if you can get your hands on this box set, do it. If not, borrow and copy. Burn, Fanatic, Burn!

Family Fodder - Savoir Faire: I found the band’s best-of called Savoir Faire and have only listened to it once but I like them. You remember we listened to them a few weeks ago with their song Debbie Harry. Days later: I have been listening to this CD repeatedly and it’s really great. The band sounds different in almost every song. I have never heard anything else by the band besides this CD, their albums and singles are very hard to find. I hope I get a chance to hear the rest of their stuff as I am digging their music so far. I don’t know why even this CD is hard to find, it shouldn’t be. As far as I know, there are two CDs of Family Fodder in print. There’s a newer one called Water Shed that the band made in 2001. I have it on order and have not heard it yet. Here’s some information on the band: http://perso.orange.fr/vivonzeureux/Pages/pidgfamily.html

Charlie Harper & The Urban Dogs - Sex Kick: This is from a best-of record Charlie put out a long time ago. I guess he can’t find the master tapes because the CD sounds like it’s taken from vinyl. It’s a pretty solid record and this track is interesting since it’s a cover of a Vibrators song. Vibrators vocalist Knox and Charlie are long time pals, once the two of them came to one of our shows in London, that was great for me.

Alan Vega – Bring In The Year 2000: From the Power On To Zero Hour CD. It’s been a little while since we have played Vega. Like Bush, I am catapulting the propaganda! I am waiting waiting waiting for my copy of Station, the new Vega release. I have been promised but so far, nothing! There’s some great music on this hard-to-find CD. I put this album out many years ago and although critics were happy and the people who bought the CD were glowing with happiness but there were not many of them and sadly, the record went out of print. Doesn’t mean that it’s not good though. Alan’s solo records are very consistent and very cool. If you see any of them on the Infinite Zero label, all those are worth checking out as well as the Dujang Prang album that I put out on my label. That’s one of the best ones in the heap, I think. I can’t wait for Station to come out. As soon as I get my hands on one, you will hear at the earliest opportunity.

T.S.O.L. - Abolish Government / Silent Majority: I took this from The Best Of Rodney On The ROQ CD. I thought I had this entire record on CD but it seems that I don’t. This was one of the last records I bought before I left town to move to California and it’s still my favorite True Sons Of Liberty release. That was one heavy bunch of dudes and their followers were pretty scary. I saw some insane things happen at T.S.O.L. shows, lots of audience violence and security-getting-hammered-by-audience experiences. Their fans were the types who looked for trouble, they hoped for violence and found it more often than not. I don’t remember how the shows were, it was a long time ago. I remember Dukowski and I pulling some bouncers off a kid at one of their shows, I thought they were killing the kid. The bouncers then turned on Dukowski and the thing got really bad for a second and then cooled out.

Harry Partch - The Wayward: II San Francisco - (A Setting Of The Cries Of Two Newsboys On A Foggy Night In The Twenties): From the Harry Partch Collection Volume 2 CD. Previously to finding this 4 CD collection of Partch’s music, I only had one CD of his work. I was at a book store the other day that had a small CD section and these were in it. I first heard Partch’s music when Chris Haskett of the Rollins Band played some for me. I got a CD of his stuff after that. Partch built his own instruments and invented his own kind of music, no doubt influenced in part by his upbringing in remote parts of America and his time as a hobo during the Great Depression. I think Tom Waits heard some of this stuff as some of his albums like Swordfish Trombone have some serious Partchiosity. I could be completely off the mark though.

Public Image Ltd. – Memories: This is the year of PIL on this show! From the Second Edition album. There’s a lot of PIL I have never heard, I don’t know much of their music past the Flowers Of Romance album past the singles. I don’t know if I am missing out on anything or not. I talked to an engineer who worked on one of the later albums and said what a nightmare it was to deal with Mr. John Lydon and to get an album out of the mess of music the band had brought in. I think it was one of the more popular ones as well.

Junior Murvin – Tedious: From the 3CD Arkology set. You get 50 + tracks produced by the Master Mind himself, Lee “Scratch” Perry. Besides this song, the only other song of Junior Murvin’s I have heard is Police & Thieves, so famously covered by The Clash on their first album. I read a bio on him and there’s nothing that jumps out, he made some good songs that’s about all I have been able to find out so far.

The Fall – Paranoia Man In Cheap Shit Room: From The Infotainment Scan album released in 1993. We have played songs off this album before and as I have said before, it’s part of a larger phase of The Fall. This album to me, is album 1 of a 2 album idea, the 2nd one being Middle Class Revolt that followed in 1994. Both are great and if you get a chance and are so inclined, make a file in iTunes and graft these two albums together and see what you think. I think you will find it to be a very entertaining and informative listen that might be more substantive than listening to either album on its own.

The Tra-La-La – Mystery: From the Is That The Tra-La-La CD. I think this is a really cool band although I hope that on future efforts, and I do hope there is more to come, that the band explore the dynamic potential of their vocals. Having heard all their releases that I know of, it seems that there’s not much attempt to see what happens if the vocalists don’t all sing at the same time and try some arrangement moves that might break things up a bit. Great stuff on this album, clever songwriting and cool girl indie singin’ but I bet there’s more under the hood if they checked.

The Puppies – Big Muff: From The Puppies USA CD. It’s Heidi and her damn band! I like this record and it’s fun to play because it seems to needle her a bit. Big Muff, written a few years ago, is a subtle song with a delicate lyric. Sure, it sounds like she’s singing about Rock and Roll, because it’s only Rock and Roll to her but if you listen carefully to what she’s NOT saying, then a whole world of color, imagery and passion reveals itself to you. Sure, she would say, “Whatever,” if you were to tell her that the song made you think differently about free trade and what it’s doing to job security in America and how the outsourcing of employment and our huge trade debt to China is something we should all be concerned about. To some, it’s only Rock and Roll, but not to me. No way. Not ever.

Dinosaur Jr. – This Is All I Came To Do: Another track from Beyond, the new Dinosaur Jr. album, due out May 1st. There’s three shows set for May in LA. I hope to get to them if I am in town but more and more it’s looking like I won’t be in town for their shows, which is a drag but if there’s a choice between travel/adventure/risk, I will always take it over anything else and so I might be out in some other part of the world. I am listening to the album as I am writing this. I have checked it out about three times now and it’s still killin’ me. What a great band!

Satan’s Rats – You Make Me Sick: The singles of this band were always hard as I remember. Ian had them but I never did until later. I don’t know where he heard of them, perhaps he saw the single at Yesterday & Today checked it out. I know of three singles the band released:
In My Love For You / Façade – 1977
Year Of The Rats / Louise - 1977
You Make Me Sick / Louise - 1978
John Esplen and his great label Overground Records managed to re-issue a couple of the singles but as always, did the right thing and released all the band’s available recordings on a CD called What A Bunch Of Rodents that holds up very well. I don’t know why they wasted a whole side of a single to re-record Louise, perhaps they thought it was going to be a hit. Here’s some SR info: http://www.punk77.co.uk/groups/satan2.htm

Les Tambours De Brazza - Nto Na Nto: The mighty drummers from the Congo are back on our show with a track from Zangoula album. The band’s albums are not all that easy to find and expensive when you do. I managed to snag this one online for a pretty good price. The last time we listened to this group, it was from the Ahaando album. It was almost a year ago, Melvin Gibbs turned me on to this band. I hope I get to see these guy live some day.

Metalux – Shelldrum: From the Victim Of Space CD. Thank you, Engineer X for lending me this album so I could become a Metalux fan. One of those damned “Noise Bands” ”lumped in” with Wolf Eyes and Hair Police and others. This is a great album that one will quickly form an opinion of. This record will give you the best brain damage. Some of sounds these bands are getting are so new to my ears, it’s so great. As long as there’s bands like this, music will always be fine.