DIG IT! N° 62

DIG IT! N° 61

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The dB's - Neverland

The dB's  Neverland  CD  1996
Black And White / Dynamite / She's Not Worried / The Fight / Espionage / Tearjerking' / Baby Talk / Cycles Per Second / Bad Reputation / Big Brown Eyes / I'm In Love / Moving In You Sleep / Judy / Happenstance / We Were Happy There / Living A Lie / From A Window To A Screen / Ask For Jill / Amplifier / Soul Kiss / Neverland / Storm Warning / Ups And Downs / Nothing Is Wrong / In Spain / I Feel Good (Today).
Tracks 1-13: "Stands For Decibels" (1981) Produced by Alan Betrock
Tracks 14-26: "Repercussion" (1982) Produced by Scott Litt

The dB's: Gene Holder: bass / Will Rigby: drums / Chris Stamey: guitar, vocals, keyboards / Peter Holsapple: guitar, vocals, keyboards.

Playing sharp, tuneful songs with a hint of psychedelia and some challenging melodic angles, the dB's were the band that bridged the gap between classic '70s power pop (defined by bands such as Big Star, Badfinger, and the Scruffs) and the jangly new wave of smart pop, personified by R.E.M. And while the dB's spent the bunk of their career living and working on the East Coast, they were the among the first and most important representatives of the Southern branch of the new wave; most of the group's members hailed from North Carolina, bringing a Southern warmth to music that sometimes sounded cold and spare in the hands of others.

While the latter-day dB's releases -- the ones released after Chris Stamey left the group -- were all good, sometimes great, jangly power pop, it was the early Stamey/Holsapple years that made them truly memorable. Neverland is a two-fer that collects the entirety of the first two dB's albums, Stands for Decibels and Repercussion, onto a single disc along with one bonus track each. The quality of the Stamey/Holsapple dynamic is spelled out here: Peter Holsapple's more straight-ahead pop gems alternate with the paranoid, quirky Stamey tracks and, while the differences can be difficult to digest at first, the undeniable hookiness in all the material makes this accessible even to non-fans. In the 18 years between the original issue of these albums and this reissue, the music has barely aged: "Amplifier" sounds as radio-ready as ever, and Stamey's Beach Boys-esque pastiche, "She's Not Worried," still sounds current. The two bonus tracks -- "Baby Talk" and "Soul Kiss" -- are a bit more chaotic than the albums themselves, but are fitting additions nonetheless. The music of the dB's was never really in or out of style, but the fractured, spontaneous brand of pop on their first two albums has proven to be the blueprint for many to follow. Although available only as a German import, the collection is budget-priced, putting this great music at the fingertips of fans. Allmusic

On their debut, the dB's combined a reverence for British pop and arty, post-punk leanings that alternate between minimalism and a love of quirky embellishment, odd sounds, and unexpected twists; Stands for Decibels is clearly a collegiate pop experiment, but rarely is experimentation so enjoyable and irresistibly catchy. Singing and songwriting duties are shared equally by Chris Stamey and Peter Holsapple -- Stamey, more quirky and psychedelic-leaning with a winsome, pure-pop whine, is nicely balanced by Holsapple's more earthy drawl and straightforward approach. The album stands not only as a landmark power-pop album, but also as a prototype for much of the Southern jangle that would follow. [Stands for Decibels remained criminally unavailable in the U.S. for years. When IRS reissued it on CD in 1989, Holsapple's "Judy" was added as a bonus track.] Allmusic

Repercussion is very much of a piece with the debut, repeating much of the same formula that made Stands for Decibels great -- terrific harmonies, winning melodies, and catchy hooks with subtle quirks thrown into the mix. This time, they feature a fuller, more polished sound, but the impact of the songs isn't diminished. Stamey left shortly after Repercussion to pursue a solo career. ["pH Factor" was added as a bonus track to the IRS CD reissue in 1989.] Allmusic
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THE BATORS - It's All About Fun

THE BATORS   It's All About Fun  CD  2010
1-2-3-4 / Hoppin' Cretin / Black Leather Jacket / Tell Me Baby / I'm Done With Ya / One Nite Luv / Drink & Destroy / Pretty Rock 'N' Baby / Palooza / I Do What I Want / Cigarette Flavored Lips / Tonite.
Arrangements by The Bators.
Recorded & mixed by Starbuck Leroidurock & Sam Gimme.
Mastering by Johnny Lowe.
The Bators: Sam Gimme: rhythm & backing vocals / Carl Toog: bass & backing vocals / Dave Snotty: lead guitar & vocals / Mungo Gerry: drums & backing vocals.

Great name for a band! Arriving in 2010 via some pretty sweet influences from back in the days when great bands were everywhere, or so it seemed, it came as no shock then that '1-2-3-4' was going to kick the album off in true 'Pipeline' style, coming across as sort of a little bit 'Pirate Love' but, hey, why the fuck not?

 'Hoppin' Cretin' sees the introduction of some vocals and the snotty by name, snotty in style Dave Snotty sneers and gives it heaps whilst the boys in the engine room dish out the rock 'n' roll. If you're gonna ape some bands then you might as well go right to the top of the food chain in my humble opinion and ape the Ramones and The Heartbreakers, right? It's not rocket science what these Canadians are about and God bless 'em for just wanting to play the type of music they so obviously love and credit to them as they have a fistfull of insane tunes to back it up with. 'Black Leather Jacket' has every lick and fill from Chuck Berry's repertoire all neatly fisted into the top pocket of this number - it's rapid, catchy and does exactly what it says on the album cover.

 On this evidence it is all about the fun and playing some wicked rock 'n' roll while you're at it.  On every play I get a little tip of the hat to such greats as The Boys on stuff like 'One Night Luv', a bit of 'Seven Day Weekend' on 'Pretty Rock 'n' Roll Baby' mashed up with some 70's proper glam. Some Buzzcocks and Addicts in there as well  for good measure and we also have the love torn balladeering on 'Cigarette Flavoured Lips' and I'm not sure if it's Tyla or The Babysitters but I do know it doesn't matter what well they drank from for each song because the final result is a killer record that'll put a smile on yer face and a spring in yer step.

Album closer 'Tonight'  just about sums up the whole groove of the album - fun, fun and some more fun. But it should also be all about The Bators because on this evidence they have style, attitude, suss and a whole lot of toe tappin' tunes - Young, loud and wonderfully snotty. The Bators rule!

Written by Dom Daley for ÜberRöck
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DENNIS THOMPSON'S VINTAGE LUDWIG FOR SALE!

DENNIS THOMPSON'S VINTAGE WHITE OYSTER MARINE LUDWIGS FOR SALE!

Dennis Thompson's FAVORITE drum kit is for sale! The Ludwig White Oyster Marine set is original and in excellent condition considering the man whose style of drumming was to ATTACK.....

Dennis has treated the kit with great care over the years as you can see in the photos taken this past weekend.

Attention Music History Memorabilia Collectors!

Dennis Thompson's Ludwig White Oyster Marine Custom Kit is FOR SALE !!

BRAND: LUDWIG

COLOR: WHITE OYSTER MARINE

SET PIECES:

26X18 Bass Drum

14X6 Chrome Snare

Speed King Bass Drum Pedal

16X16 Floor Tom

18X16 Floor Tom

8X10 Tom

10X9 Tom

14X10 Tom

15X12 Tom

CYMBALS: Zildjian

20" RIDE

18'' CRASH,

15'' CRASH

 2/15'' HI-HAT

This kit has shared the stage with PINK FLOYD, STOOGES, ALICE COOPER, BOB SEGER, ERIC BURDON & WAR, and ROD STEWART AND THE SMALL FACES, just to name a few.

SHIPPING HANDLING/INSURANCE TO BE HANDLED BY PURCHASER

TO MAKE AN OFFER 

EMAIL

 MACHINEGUNTHOMPSON@GMAIL.COM

Dennis Thompson Blog HERE

Dennis Thompson Facebook HERE

THE LAZY COWGIRLS - Third Time's The Charm - Again

THE LAZY COWGIRLS  Third Time's The Charm - Again  CD  1991
Losin' Your Mind / Meat Shop / Dye 'N' Red / A Lot To Learn / Reborn / Loretta / Hybrid Moments / Rock Of Gibraltar / Jungle Song / Anymore / What Are You Talkin' 'Bout Baby? / Tearful Pillows / I'm Talking To You / Justine / Bullshit Summer Song.
Produced By The Cowgirls & Eric Stone.

The Lazy Cowgirls: Pat Todd: lead vocals, guitar / Allen Clark: drums / D.D. Weekday (Doug Phillips): guitar / Keith Telligman: bass.

If The Ramones had been a road-tested biker gang instead of pop-obsessed cartoon speed merchants, they might have sounded something like The Lazy Cowgirls. Merging the buzzsaw roar of first-wave punk, the sneering attitude of '60's garage rock, the heart-on-your-sleeve honesty of honky-tonk, and the self-assured swagger of The Rolling Stones, The Lazy Cowgirls play raw, sweaty outlaw rock and roll at its most furiously passionate and physically intense; like a Harley gunned up to 95 mph, The Lazy Cowgirls may not sound safe, but they sure are fun.

Vocalist Pat Todd, guitarist D.D. Weekday, and bassist Keith Telligman left their hometown of Vincennes, Indiana in 1981 to move to California, hoping to get a rock band off the ground. In 1983, they finally settled on fellow Indiana refugee Allen Clark as a drummer, and began hitting the L.A. club circuit as The Lazy Cowgirls. After countless shows playing to "no one, and people from work" (according to Todd), the band caught the ear of Chris Desjardins (aka Chris D.), former leader of art-punks The Flesh Eaters. Desjardins got the band a deal with Restless Records, and produced their self-titled debut LP in 1984. The album didn't quite reflect the band's powerhouse live show, and they were soon dropped from the label. After two years of local shows and occasional touring, Bomp Records came to the rescue by releasing the band's second long-player, Tapping The Source, which came much closer in capturing the fire of their live show on plastic, and merged fifth-gear originals like "Goddamn Bottle" and "Can't You Do Anything Right?" with stripped-down covers of "Justine" and "Heartache." The following year, the newly-founded indie label Sympathy For The Record Industry opened for business with Radio Cowgirl, a souvenir of the band's high-octane live set at KCSB-FM in Santa Barbara.

Following yet another bout of long touring, the band cut the near-definitive How It Looks -- How It Is in 1990, but years of hard work with little commercial reward began to take their toll, and at the end of 1991 Telligman and Clark quit the group. The Cowgirls' rhythm section became something of a revolving door for the next few years, and while The Lazy Cowgirls cut a handful of singles and EP's for various small labels, conventional wisdom had it that the band had called it quits. But in 1995, the Cowgirls re-emerged with a new album, the superb Ragged Soul, and a seemingly stable lineup, with Todd and Weekday now joined by Michael Leigh on rhythm guitar, Ed Huerta on drums, and Leonard Keringer on bass. The band toured the United States and Europe, but 1996 brought more personnel shake-ups, as D.D. Weekday and Ed Huerta both turned in their notices. Bob Deagle signed on as drummer in time for 1997's A Little Sex and Death, with Eric Chandler sitting in on guitar. By 1999, Michael Leigh had rejoined the band on guitar, and almost 20 years after leaving Indiana, the indefatigable Pat Todd began pushing the The Lazy Cowgirls harder than ever, with the band spending plenty of time on the road and releasing two solid albums on Sympathy within six months of each other, Rank Outsider and Somewhere Down The Line. The live album, Here and Now: Live was issued in summer 2001. 2004 found the band recording for a new label, Reservation Records, and releasing their strongest new album in years, the rootsy I'm Going Out And Get Hurt Tonight. Allmusic

How It Looks — How It Is never downshifts from overdrive, but the wheels are often left spinning. Generic blitzkrieg bops like "Teenage Frankenstein" and "Sex Kittens Compare Scratches" are conceptually hackneyed and musically shopworn. Then again, Todd's sneering delivery alone can carry hate missives like the title track, "Alienation Maybe," "Cheap Shit," the very Pagans-like "D.I.E. in Indiana" and other testimonials to the desperate life. The subsequent CD edition adds a remixed version of the Australian Third Time's the Charm EP, minus the interview that originally accompanied the five tracks. The sound on Third Time's the Charm is inferior to the band's other stuff, but completists won't care. TrouserPress

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RICHARD HELL & THE VOIDOIDS - Blank Generation

RICHARD HELL AND THE VOIDOIDS  Blank Generation LP/CD  1977/1990

Love Comes In Spurts / Liars Beware / New Pleasure / Betrayal Takes Two / Down At The Rock And Roll Club (Alternate Version) / Who Says? / Blank Generation / Walking On The Water / The Plan / Another World / I'm Your Man (cd bonus track) / All The Way (cd bonus track).

Produced by Richard Gottehrer & Richard Hell.

Richard Hell & The Voidoids: Richard Hell: bass, vocals / Robert Quine: guitars, backing vocals / Ivan Julian: guitar, backing vocals / Marc Bell: drums.

Richard Hell was one of the first men on the scene when punk rock first began to emerge in New York City as an early member of both Television and the Heartbreakers (he left both groups before they could record), but his own version of punk wasn't much like anyone else's, and while Hell's debut album, Blank Generation, remains one of the most powerful to come from punk's first wave, anyone expecting a Ramones/Dead Boys-style frontal assault from this set had better readjust their expectations. "Love Comes in Spurts" and "Liar's Beware" proved the Voidoids could play fast and loud when they wanted to, but for the most part this group's formula was much more complicated than that; guitarists Robert Quine and Ivan Julian bounced sharp, edgy patterns off each other that were more about psychological tension than brute force (though Quine's solos suggest a fragile grace beneath the surface of their neo-Beefheart chaos), and while most punk nihilism was of the simplistic "Everything Sucks" variety, Hell was (with the exception of Patti Smith) the most literate and consciously poetic figure in the New York punk scene. While there's little on the album that's friendly or life-affirming, there's a crackling intelligence to songs like "New Pleasure," "Betrayal Takes Two," and "Another World" that confirmed Hell has a truly unique lyrical voice, at once supremely self-confident and dismissive of nearly everything around him (sometimes including himself). Brittle and troubling, but brimming with ideas and musical intelligence, "Blank Generation" was groundbreaking punk rock that followed no one's template, and today it sounds just as fresh -- and nearly as abrasive -- as it did when it first hit the racks. Allmusic

Richard Hell grew up in Lexington, Kentucky, in the 1950s. His father, a secular Jew, was an experimental psychologist, researching animal behavior. He died when Hell was seven years old. Hell was then raised by his mother, who came from Methodists of Welsh and English ancestry. After her husband's death, she returned to school and eventually became a professor.

Hell attended the Sanford School in Delaware for one year, where he became friends with Tom Miller, who later changed his name to Tom Verlaine). They ran away from school together and were arrested in Alabama for arson and vandalism a short time later.

Hell never finished high school, instead moving to New York City to make his way as a poet. In New York he met fellow young poet, David Giannini, and moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico for several months, where Giannini and Meyers co-founded "Genesis:Grasp". They used an AM VariTyper with changeable fonts to publish the magazine. They began publishing books and magazines but decided to go their separate ways in 1971, after which Hell created and published Dot Books. Before he was twenty-one his own poems were published in numerous periodicals, ranging from Rolling Stone to the New Directions Annuals. Along with Tom Verlaine, in 1971 Hell also published under the pseudonym Theresa Stern, a fictional poet whose photo was actually a combination of both his and Verlaine's faces, in drag, superimposed over one another to create a new identity.

In 1972, Verlaine joined Hell in New York and formed the Neon Boys. In 1974 the band added a second guitarist, Richard Lloyd, and changed their name to Television.

Television's performances at CBGB helped kick-start the first wave of punk bands, inspiring a number of different artists including Patti Smith, who wrote the first press review of Television for the Soho Weekly News in June 1974. She had an affair with Tom Verlaine, and formed a highly successful band of her own, The Patti Smith Group. Television was one of the early bands to play at CBGB, and persuaded owner Hilly Kristal to book rock bands there on a regular basis. They also built the club's first stage.

Hell started playing his song "Blank Generation" during his stint in Television. In 1975, Hell parted ways with Television after a dispute over creative control. Hell claimed that he and Verlaine had originally divided the songwriting evenly but that later Verlaine refused to play Hell's songs. Verlaine remains characteristically silent on the subject.

Hell left Television the same week that Jerry Nolan and Johnny Thunders quit the New York Dolls. In May 1975 the three of them formed The Heartbreakers; not to be confused with Tom Petty's band, which adopted the same name the following year. After one show Walter Lure joined The Heartbreakers as a second guitarist.

A year later, in early 1976, Hell quit The Heartbreakers and started Richard Hell and the Voidoids with Robert Quine, Ivan Julian and Marc Bell. The band released two albums, though the second, "Destiny Street", retained only Quine from the original group, with Naux (Juan Maciel) on guitar and Fred Maher on drums, and suffered from Hell's distractions, narcotics especially, during recording.[citation needed] Hell's best known songs with the Voidoids were "Blank Generation", "Love Comes in Spurts", "The Kid With the Replaceable Head" and "Time". In 2009, the guitar tracks on "Destiny Street" were re-recorded and released as "Destiny Street Repaired", with guitarists Marc Ribot, Bill Frisell, and Ivan Julian playing with the original rhythm tracks. Also in 2009, Richard Hell gave his blessing to the public access program Pancake Mountain to create an animated music video for "The Kid with the Replaceable Head". It would be the Voidoids first, and only, official music video. The cut used for the animation appears on Hell's 2005 retrospective album, Spurts, The Richard Hell Story.

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BILLY RATH RIP: HEARTBREAKERS BASSIST DIES THIS SUMMER !

Billy Rath, bassist with Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers, has died at the age of 66 after a long illness.
He replaced Richard Hell in the New York punk outfit in 1976 and appeared on the band’s iconic album LAMF in 1977. They were lined up to appear alongside the Sex Pistols on the British band’s doomed Anarchy In The UK tour, then split up later the same year.
The Heartbreakers continued to reform for occasional shows, but Rath bowed out in 1985 and did not return. After a short stint as a member of Iggy Pop’s band he retrained as a psychologist and began working as an addiction counsellor. He’d been working with his own band, Billy Rath’s Street Pirates, until his illness forced him to move into a care home. He left the facility to be with his family in his final days.
Commenting on the Heartbreakers' notoriety, the bassist said in a 2012 interview: “We didn't make trouble – we made and played NYC rock ’n’ roll. The Heartbreakers were a rock 'n' roll band, not a punk band that pushed anarchy. We wrote love songs, not fight songs.”
He added: “When I joined, in my opinion and others’, I completed the band. It was like I was the missing link that completed the sound they were looking for. The tension was gone and the magic started. Richard Hell needed to have his own sound – he was a poet and a very good one at that. That was the tension. I came along and completed the sound.”
Rath’s death leaves guitarist Walter Lure as the only surviving member of the classic Heartbreakers lineup.

RIP Tommy Ramone

RIP Tom Erdelyi aka TOMMY RAMONE (1949-2014). The last Ramone standing: drummer, producer, engineer, songwriter, sonic architect of one of the most influential bands in the history of Our Music. Sincere condolences to all family and friends. This image based on original cover photo by Roberta Bayley for debut album "Ramones" (Sire Records, 1976)