New Wave for the New Week #119

This week's NW4NW entry may take the prize for Most Obscure Entry.  Here, in handy bullet-point format, is the totality of everything I know and was able to discover about The Nelsons:

• They were from Lubbock, TX.
• They entered and won one of the earliest rounds of MTV's Basement Tapes, a competition for unsigned bands, with their homemade video for the song "I Don't Mind."
• They released an EP, Bag Your Face, in 1983, which contained "I Don't Mind."
• They also released a single circa 1986 for a song called "Nuke The Prom;" the flipside of the single featured an even more obscure band, Rambo Bambi, performing an odd composition called "Eating Out Is Fun."
• After discovering that Ozzie and Harriet Nelson's sons were using the name "Nelson" and were about to break big, Lubbock's Nelsons changed their name briefly to Unexplained Cattle Mutilations (source).
• The Nelsons most high-profile gigs saw them opening for Culture Club and performing at Farm Aid.
• They also performed as a straight blues band, calling themselves The Texas Blues Butchers (source).

That's it.  That's all I can tell you, other than the fact that "I Don't Mind" is one of the greatest cartoon-y New Wave songs of its time, and thank heavens someone had the foresight to post the long-forgotten video on YouTube!

So enjoy a rare slice of early 80s New Wave goofiness, "I Don't Mind" by The Nelsons.  And if you can add any more info about the band, whatever happened to them, or where they are now, by all means speak up!

Six Word Sunday

Sometimes there's nothing to be said.

New Wave for the New Week #118

Back in the good old days of New Wave and Punk vinyl, one of the ways that those of us who were into the music discovered new bands was by picking up records released on certain labels.  If you knew the label's "identity" or signature sound, and you liked it, you could safely bet that chancing a couple bucks on a band you never heard but who recorded for that same label would result in the discovery of a band you couldn't wait to tell your friends about.   In Punk circles, labels like Dischord, SST, Dangerhouse and Posh Boy each had very identifiable sounds; in New Wave it was Sire, Mute, and - my personal go-to label when searching for something new, I.R.S.  Originally starting out as Illegal Records in the UK, I.R.S. Records was the creation of Miles Copeland, brother of Stewart Copeland of The Police.  Indeed, the first release in the label's history was The Police's debut single, "Fall Out."  The I.R.S. sound was guitar driven but not without synths.  I.R.S. bands often rode the grey line between New Wave and Punk (The Stranglers and The Dead Kennedys and The Damned all put out records on I.R.S., but so did Wall Of Voodoo and The Alarm and The Go-Go's), but the music was always good, always interesting, and always creative.  And it was through my tendency to pick up anything on I.R.S. that I discovered Skafish.

One of the earliest signings for I.R.S. (in fact, the first non-UK act that Miles brought on board) was an odd fellow by the name of Jim Skafish.  Jim was a strange-looking nasally-voiced performer making some waves in the Chicago underground scene for his infectiously catchy songs and nearly alien physical appearance.  He was actually a classically trained jazz musician, but Skafish and his namesake band made somewhat off-kilter,  jagged rock music using a wide variety of instruments both acoustic and electronic.  The first Skafish release, the 1979 single "Disgracing The Family Name," was a wonderful cacophony of multi-layered instruments so wobbly that the song seems ready to collapse in on itself at any moment, yet so dense as to avoid that fate as it races to its conclusion.  In many ways, it is an almost perfect representative of the I.R.S. label's sound: if like this, you're gonna like just about everything else!

Enough people did like the sound, it seems; Skafish received more column space in a 1980 Rolling Stone Magazine article about a concert where they were the opening act than the headlining (and quite well established) Stranglers received!  I.R.S. wanted to get a full album out while the buzz about Skafish was still going, but Jim was spending a lot of studio time and almost all of his recording budget tinkering and rerecording and perfecting the songs for Skafish (1980).  In the hopes of recouping lost time and money, the label mixed the record rather quickly and rather shoddily, and while the material on it was quite good, it sounded terrible and did not sell.

Skafish got noticed again in 1981 for their performance in the concert film Urgh! A Music War, where they performed the somewhat controversial (for it's time) "Sign Of The Cross."  With renewed interest in the band, I.R.S. took a gamble on a second album.  1983's Conversation flopped even worse than its predecessor, mainly because the music had taken an unfortunate turn toward too-slick dance-pop.  Jim parted ways with I.R.S. and headed back home to Chicago, where he continued to write and perform for many years.

Skafish suddenly resurfaced in 2006, over two decades since their last record, with the surprising Tidings Of Comfort And Joy (A Jazz Piano Trio Christmas), whose title accurately describes its contents.  A pleasant holiday diversion, but who expected it?  Two years later, Skafish released an odds-and-sods compilation of early material called What Is This? (1976 - 1979), which includes early versions of "Disgracing The Family Name," "Sign Of The Cross," and other assorted goodies.  The title here would indicate that perhaps another installment may be planned covering Skafish's post-1979 work, but so far none has appeared.

For this week's NW4NW entry, here is Skafish's classic, "Disgracing The Family Name."  The clip was put together to coincide with the release of What Is This?, and includes footage from throughout Skafish's career. Enjoy!

Six Word Sunday

Me: Hello!
Her: *click*
Me: *sigh*

Opening Day!

We're under way, folks! Today opened the 2011 Major League Baseball Season, and all I can say is "Baseball, I sure have missed you!" Never mind the fact that here in PA is rainy and freezing cold, and the forecast over the next day or two says the highest the temperature around here will reach is 51ºF, it's Baseball Season and all is once again right with the world!

The season begins in earnest for me tomorrow at 1:05PM EST.  That's the scheduled start time for my beloved Phillies' opener against Houston.  The 'Stros are schedule to start our old friend Brett Myers, and I'll be overjoyed if the Phils send him packing early.  Never could stand Myers, even when he was here pitching for The Good Guys.  Between his foul-mouthed tirades against reporters and his penchant for domestic abuse, Myers is one of the most unlikeable players in the game from where I sit. Roy Halladay will be on the mound for Philadelphia, ready to begin his second year as the Phils' #1 starter.  So how will he follow up last year's mind-blowing season, including a Perfect Game and a Post-Season No-Hitter?  I cannot wait!

You'll be seeing several baseball-related posts here this season, but if you really want to follow my day-to-day rantings and ravings about MLB in general and the Phils in specific, follow me on Twitter - that's where most of my baseball talk takes place.  I'm @berutt, and I'll be happy to talk baseball with you.

For now, pass me a beer and a dog.  It's just about game time.

PLAY BALL!

Today's Anxiety Attack: A Stalemate With The Demons

In previous posts I have talked about the demons I must always fight, OCD and Social Anxiety, and how insidiously spiteful they are.  Forever they watch for the slightest little chink in my armor, or that one part of a moment when I let my guard down every so slightly, and they immediately seize upon the most miniscule opportunities to immobilize and imprison me, to make the world with which I can interact just that much smaller, or to at the very least snatch away a little bit of joy.  Sometimes I win; sometimes the demons win.  Today, a rare third option materialized: we split the difference.

At the end of May, The Go-Go's are kicking off a reunion/farewell tour.  Yeah, that's right, The Go-Go's: Belinda, Charlotte, Jane, Kathy and Gina.  "We Got The Beat" and "Our Lips Are Sealed" and "Vacation."  I was always a huge Go-Go's fan, but I never did get to see them live.  As luck would have it, they are starting the tour in Hershey, PA, just over half an hour from where I am sitting at the moment!  Well, I'm not missing my last chance to say I saw The Go-Go's live when they're practically going to be in my backyard!

Through a series of emails, I invited a friend to come to the show with me, and she and I began making plans.  As I started researching ticket prices, I mentioned that The Go-Go's website was reporting that some of the shows on the tour would also feature The B-52's, but sadly Hershey was not one of those shows.  She came back with a list of the cities where The B-52's were definitely announced.   I joked that the closest was Boston, MA, and "golly, it's only a six and a half-hour drive!"

Little did I suspect she'd actually reply with an offer to go to the Boston show.  Her proposition was that if I would finally agree to get my learner's permit and start learning to drive, she would consider the Boston road trip.  I wouldn't even have to drive on the road trip itself!  She has long been after me to learn to drive, so I took this as a little needling, and said I would get the Hershey tickets tomorrow when they go on sale.
In the meantime, however, she had talked with some other friends who were potentially into the idea of a road trip to Boston, so she wanted me to hold off buying the Hershey tickets until the road trip idea was either confirmed or sacked.  The tickets aren't cheap, and doing both shows would be out of the question.

And then it hit.

The first blow came from the OCD demon.  He usually is the one to strike first.  I could immediately feel my brow knitting in consternation, and my frustration level rising.  No! No! No! This is not what I had planned.  I had planned to go to the Hershey show.  I had invited my friend to the Hershey show.   My OCD, mild as it may be in the grand scheme of things, becomes the screaming child in the restaurant who the parents can't quiet down when plans are suddenly changed on me.  Spontaneity is not a luxury I am overly familiar with.  I need to know what the plan is, and I need to stick to the plan.  I usually do have a "Plan B" and "Plan C," but in this case those alternates were other people I might invite if this friend couldn't make it.  I was utterly unprepared for the idea of changing which show to go to.  That was already decided.  My guard was down, just for that moment, and OCD seized on it: "That's the wrong show.  You're supposed to be going to the Hershey show.  Now everything is ruined.  You don't get to enjoy this!"

Then, the Social Anxiety demon joined the attack.  One of the things this demon has taken from me over the years is the ability to travel freely, especially to places I've never been.  The last real travel excursion I took was a trip to upstate New York to visit another friend who had moved there.  That was in 1996.  Since then, even when I take vacation time from work, I don't go anywhere.  Now, there are some trips that I have made regularly enough over the years that have become immune to this demon's salvos: Spending a few days in Johnstown, PA, where my employer's production division is, for example, or traveling to New Jersey or Baltimore to see a band in the usual haunts.  In each of those cases, though, returning home in the same day is not only possible, it has been done.  Boston and back in the same day is not possible, and anytime I find myself more than a cabride's distance away from home for any length of time, the panic starts to overcome me.

"You can't be away from home that long! What if something happens? What if there is a fire? What if someone breaks into your home while you're gone?  What if you get stranded wherever you're going? What if you get hopelessly lost?"  It's a great example of the thought spirals I've described before wherein there is the rational side of me that is watching this all take place, recognizes what's happening, realizes the insanity and illogic, but is utterly unable to stop it, while the irrational side of me believes and amplifies every thought that goes through my head.  "Plus, you'd be traveling with a bunch of people, some of whom you don't even know!  They're not going to like you; they're going to laugh at you; you're going to be the butt of all the jokes!  You don't get to enjoy this!"

Understand, this all hits me in a split-second's time.  These attacks are not storms that gradually roll in like my bouts of depression; these are sudden explosions that appear seemingly out of the blue.  There is no time to prepare.  I can only respond.  And so I sat there, staring at the email on my screen, feeling that god-awful feeling of my stomach lurching into my throat, feeling the unpleasant tingle of adrenalin rushing through every avenue it can find within my body, feeling my heart pound like it will surely burst from my chest, feeling my breaths grow quicker and more shallow.  And I sat there hating that I was I going through it yet again, over something so innocuous as a possible road trip to Boston with a friend to see a band that I've always wanted to see.  How can my brain be so broken?

The next response I usually have, after the anger at myself, is the embarrassment.  In this case, it came in the form of, "OK, how do I get out of the Boston idea without letting her know that I have fallen to pieces over the past five minutes like a fool?"  This is where the excuses start formulating.  A quick check of the calendar showed me that the Boston show is on a Thursday night- AHA! There's my out!  I dashed off another email to her, this one saying that a weeknight is not good for me for travel because of work.  Of course, she reminded me that I have vacation time I can use.  DAMN!  So, I came clean, and admitted to the anxiety attack I was having.

I forget sometimes that I have a wonderful network of very supportive friends, especially those who have known me for many years and who have seen me at my worst as well as at my best.  After 14 years, this friend has seen me at the farthest ends of either side of that spectrum, and yet remains my friend (though that has no doubt been very trying at times!).  So when I told her of the anxiety, and that I would really be more comfortable with the Hershey show, she simply replied, "No problem. Hershey it is."  And when I then apologized for being so damned goofy about things, her words back to me were, "Never apologize for being yourself.  You're great."   There was no judgment, there was no unsolicited advice on how to handle anxieties, there was no "Oh there, there you poor thing;" there was just a friend being a friend.  It was the perfect tonic.

So this time, instead of the usual all-or-nothing battle I wage with my demons, we can call it something of a draw. Yes, the demons won a little bit - they took the experience of a road trip to Boston away from me.  But I won a little bit, too.  I'm still going to see The Go-Go's, just as I had originally planned, so they didn't take that away, and I was reminded by a good friend that, for as much as these demons try to convince me differently, I'm really pretty OK.


__________________________

Related posts:

Table For One
Fighting The Demons Again

New Wave for the New Week #117

So, how far would say the stylistic leap is from straightforward lounge jazz to geeky experimental electronic synthpop?  For Richard James Burgess, Andy Pask, Christopher Heaton, Peter Thomas and John Walters, it was easy.

Those five gentlemen came together in the mid-1970s to form Landscape, originally a typical jazz combo who worked rooms throughout the UK and, in 1977, scraped together enough funds to release two 7-inch EPs of their instrumental jazz sound on their own Event Horizon label.  By the end of the decade, they developed a strong interest in the emerging technology of pre-programmed electronic instruments and computerized rhythms, and had begun involving these futuristic sounds in their compositions.  With the growing popularity of synthesizer-based New Wave, and a noticeably different crowd coming to hear their sets, the transition made perfect sense.  By the time of their debut album in 1979, Landscape was no longer playing smooth jazz.

Their self-titled debut caused minor ripples, but went largely unnoticed despite a minor push behind it's lead single, "Japan."  Where the quintet made its mark was with their second album, 1981's From The Tea Rooms Of Mars...To The Hell-Holes Of Uranus.  Chockablock with clever lyrics, danceable hooks, unexpected cheeps and chirps, and universal cultural references, the songs here are almost too smart for their own good.  The driving "European Man" bemoans the loss of the worker in favor of the machine; "Einstein A-Go-Go" underscores the then-current global fear of nuclear war; "Norman Bates" retells the tales of horror from the Bates Motel with sinister psychological undertones that would make Hitchcock himself proud.  None of it typical dancefloor material, yet this is undeniably a very danceable album - a juxtaposition that itself remains a knowing commentary on the times.

A third album, Manhattan Boogie-Woogie, appeared in 1982, but lacked the punch of its predecessor.  The clever ideas were lacking (save for "It's Not My Real Name") and, aside from the title track, the music was overly produced and heavily slicked down.  Interesting, but not essential.

Shortly thereafter, Heaton and Thomas left the band, leaving Burgess, Pask and Walters to continue on under the revised name Landscape III.  As a trio, they recorded a couple of innocuous dance singles, none of which sold well.  By 1984, Landscape had broken up.  Burgess and Walters each went on to successful careers in music production: Burgess helmed records for Kim Wilde, Adam Ant and King, among others; Walters credits include albums by Kissing The Pink and Twelfth Night.

All three albums can be had on CD in different permutations:  Landscape has been released on two different 2-for-1 CDs, one pairing it with Tea-Rooms of Mars and the other pairing it with Manahttan Boogie-Woogie. Tea Rooms is also available as a stand-alone CD with bonus tracks, including some of the Landscape III material.

For this week's clips, let's enjoy Landscape at their peak.  First up, the clip for their most successful single, "Einstein A-Go-Go," and second, the wonderfully satirical clip for "European Man."  Enjoy!

Six Word Sunday

Which matters more: Result or Process?

New Wave for the New Week #116

Last week's NW4NW entry, The Adicts, were a band that has kept basically the same four-man lineup for the past 30+ years.  This week's band has not been nearly so stable.  In fact, over the past 32 years since their debut gig in 1979, no less than 22 different people have cycled in and out (and, occasionally, back in and back out) of one of Australia's finest musical exports, The Lime Spiders.

The band's founder and mainstay, frontman Mick Blood, created the band originally as a lark, paying tribute both to the acid-dripping psychedelic garage bands of the 1960s, but also to the growing scene of Australian Punk bands including The Saints, Radio Birdman, The Fun Things, et al.  By 1983, The Lime Spiders had broken up and reformed at least twice, and were on their third permutation of musicians.  Nonetheless, they won a record contract at a local "Battle Of The Bands" contest, and released a double-45 featuring covers of two obscure '60s tracks (The Haunted's "1-2-5" and The Liberty Bell's "That's How It Will Be") and two originals that were remarkably accurate renderings of the style, "25th Hour" and "Can't Wait Long."   A follow-up single later that year, "Slave Girl"/"Beyond The Fringe" became an underground hit, and all six tracks were combined into 1984's Slave Girl EP for international release on Australia-based Big Time Records, who had just seen much success exporting another Australian band, The Hoodoo Gurus.

With blazing energy, driving rhythms and Mick Blood's gravelly scream, The Lime Spiders managed to be at once novel and yet very, very retro.  A third single followed in 1985 and paired their own "Out Of Control" with yet another obscure cover, this time shredding Wimple Witch's tempo-shifting acid trip "Save My Soul."   By this point, The Lime Spiders' musical formula was solidified, even if the band itself was not - each single had featured different versions of the band.

Nonetheless, the underground rumble they were creating was loud enough to be heard by the producers of the 1987 movie Young Einstein (anyone outside of Australia actually remember  Yahoo Serious?), who wanted to use "Slave Girl" in the movie's soundtrack.  Licensing issues prevented that, but Mick Blood and his musicians of the month came up with the similar "Weirdo Libido."  That song's appearance in the film brought the band to the attention of Virgin Records (who had released the soundtrack), and by the end of the year Virgin issued the band's first proper LP, The Cave Comes Alive

With it's lead single "My Favourite Room" and another smattering of obscure covers, the album seemed at first blush to be another formula record.  However, bits of personality and creativity shone through, especially in the absolutely stunning "Jessica," which verged nearly into ballad territory!  A simply fantastic record start to finish.  It was followed in 1988 with Volatile!, a record that, while bright in spots, did not quite live up to its title.  The rough edges of the band had worn a bit smooth, and they  sounded tired, especially in comparison to the odds-and-ends collection Headcleaner released around the same time, which recapitulated the first three singles along with assorted tracks from the band's earlier days, both live and in-studio, that were not otherwise readily available.  After a year or two on the shelf, the final Lime Spiders album, Beethoven's Fist appeared in 1990, although the band's moment had passed.

In the ensuing years, Mick Blood has gotten the band back together several times for reunion tours, and interest in the band has been strong enough to see two more recent releases. 2003's Nine Miles High is an excellent career retrospective containing just about everything you need to hear; Live At The Esplanade documents a 2007 reunion gig, with the band charging through many of their best songs.

This week's clips feature The Lime Spiders at their zenith.  First up, the clip for "Weirdo Libido," followed by the video for "My Favourite Room."  Enjoy!

Six Word Sunday

Every day I'll write the book.