Channel 3: Land of the Free 7" (2012)

Few predicted 2012 would see SoCal punk come back into view but between OFF!, Redd Kross and now Channel 3, that's exactly what's happening! It almost seems like these grown men have realized that something they pioneered when they were kids was not so fleeting as it once seemed. So, now, rather then just leave their legacies lie fallow, they've each decided to bring the thing back to life. The striking work we're hearing from these not-young men demonstrates that their music wasn't just an ash heap of adolescent angst but a gritty feature of America's cultural landscape, like the Badlands but with more shouting and trebly guitar!





As for Channel 3 (much more HERE), though they might not have signed to as a high-profile label as Vice or Matador (those in the know do revere their new label, Hostage Records) they have taken this late-date to put out one of the best works of their career. While Land of the Free is technically a single, due to the two songs on the vinyl, the download card that comes with the record fleshes it out into a seven-song EP.

And what an extend play it is! Those who need speed, will thrill to the band's ripping paean to the bottle, "This Calls for a Drink" and the ferociously mournful "A Life Remembered" (released previously as a B-side). Those who revere the band's mastery of the mid-tempo, guitar-powered sing-along will be no less satisfied here. Tracks like "Another Day" and "In the Meantime" recall the band's more tempered phase, circa 1984 classic, "Indian Summer", while "Land of the Free" carpet bombs the current political landscape with Clash-level precision and "Make It Home" slows things down just enough to power-up the big chorus.  Even with the twenty minute duration of this trip, there's room for a detour, in the form of the band's charming cover of Sonny Bono's "Little Things" featuring the return of Maria Montoya-Kaye who first sang with the band on their debut albums 30 years ago! Land of the Free finds Channel 3 considering all the twists and turns they've made on their ramshackle voyage and deciding they've only just begun.

Alright MRML readers, whadaya make of the new CH 3 EP? Let us know in the COMMENTS section!

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Channel 3: How Do You Open the Damn Thing? (1994)

So Channel 3 (more HERE) kicked Winnipeg's collective ass two nights in a fuckin' row. For those stubborn enough to get shit-kicked twice, the bar show at The Zoo on Friday and the all-ages show at the Punk Douglas Club on Saturday featured two pretty different sets. The first show was in singer Mike Magrann's words "the 'Vegas set" and the second the more raging full-on set. Friday's set varied the pace a bit - hell they started out with the mid-tempo "Indian Summer" and encored with "One More Time For All My True Friends" (thanks, Mike). The booze-friendly set also included a hell of a lot of stage banter - "Once the hair got bigger and the cowboy boots got taller, we started getting more pussy than Frank Sinatra" Magrann quipped before playing their hair-metal track, "Last Time I Drank".





Saturday's set started out like a beach-storming firefight but moved in some surprising directions including the band's heart-felt cover of The Nils "Scratches and Needles", a surprising decision to play "Airborne" a song they hadn't played in years (watching each member of the band gradually, grudgingly agree to play along was priceless!) and a gender-bender take on "You Make Me Fee Cheap". I'm gonna give the Saturday show the edge but you needed both to see just how much this endlessly self-deprecating band is capable of.

This long-out-of-print live album How Do You Open the Damn Thing? has a set list not unlike what we Winnipeggers with a brain in our head saw this weekend. Enjoy and if you get a chance go see the damn band!

1.     Separate Peace
2.     You Make Me Feel Cheap
3.     Out of Control
4.     Wet Spots
5.     You Lie / Mannequin
6.     Indian Summer
7.     Last Time I Drank
8.     No Love
9.     I Didn't Know
10.     Waiting In the Wings
11.     I Wanna Know Why
12.     Nothing Like This
13.     Catholic Boy
14.     I Got a Gun
15.     Manzanar  

 Alright MRML readers, whadaya make of the long-running phenomenon that is CH 3? Let us know in the COMMENTS section!

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Channel 3 Play Winnipeg!

Okay. Manitobans (hell, Northern Ontarians, Saskatchewanites and North Dakotans too), here's a chance of a lifetime as it seems the papers are all in order for legendary Cali-punk band Ch 3 to play two shows here in Winnipeg!

C'mon out if you can (or encourgae someone esle to do so in your stead) and let's make this night burn like a fucker!

For MRML's rambling on CH 3 go HERE

For show info go here

For the Stylus magazine interview with CH 3 go here

For CH 3's homepage go here.

Channel 3: To Whom It May Concern

Why would anyone wanna listen to an L.P. of a thirty year-old demo tape from a band who never exactly changed the world?

The band in question is Cerritos, California’s Channel 3, (Mike Magrann vocals/guitar, Kimm Gardner guitar/vocals, Larry Kelly bass, Mike Burton Drums) and the record is To Whom It May Concern. Channel 3 played hardcore, which in the eighties meant only two things, either explicit pornography or the American brand of faster, louder, angrier punk rock.

In films about artists, whether it’s Jackson Pollock or Johnny Cash, there’s always that squirm-inducing scene where the exact artistic transgression that will change culture forever is explained to the audience in a massive infodump. So in their hypothetical bio-pic, let’s call it Fear of Life: The Ch. 3 Story, the expository scene, starring Kevin Spacey as David Geffen and Ryan Reynolds as Mike Magrann (damn front man always hogs the screen time) might play out like this:

David Geffen: (leans back on leather chair) You can’t play that fast, kid, someone’s gonna get hurt.

Mike Magann: (slouches against a wall lined with gold and platinum records) That’s the point, man.

David Geffen: (Leans forward, his finger pressed together) And these lyrics, they’re too socially conscious, you’re tackling taboos about American prison camps and changing sexual mores – that’s not going to sell to middle America.

Mike Magann: (Flips the bird) Screw you, David Geffen. And middle America! We’re gonna join an independent label and make raw, wild records, reminiscent of the untrammelled musical freedom of the earliest days of rock n’ roll. We’re gonna strip the music down to it’s most basic components and then play it so fast that people’ll have to read the lyric sheet just to figure what hit ‘em! (Exits, slams door to the opening riff of “You Lie”.)

So this unearthed demo provides the rush of discovery of without all that painful exposition and bad casting. Now you can hear for yourself the songs, ragers like “Manzanar” and poppier ones like “Life Goes On”, that floored producer Robbie Fields, the (non-murderous) Phil Spector of hardcore. You’ll hear Magrann and Gardner ‘s clearly articulated guitar fury and their vocal interplay powering songs which never lack for riffs, hooks or dynamics but which instead manage to do all of that in under 120 seconds.

In Nick Hornsby’s novel, Juliet, Naked, a couple break up due to their opposite reaction to a collection of demos the fictional singer-song-writer Tucker Crowe made for a famously tortured album. Since Channel 3 never traded in the kind of self-dramatizing narcissism common to musical legends from Dylan to Rollins to Morrissey, this collection isn’t likely to destroy any relationships. Instead, as the movie they DID make about the band, the documentary titled One More For All My True Friends, points out Channel 3 were more like a Band of Brothers (Magrann and Gardner having been friends since the second grade) who remain as they began, “Normal guys who got lucky and got to say what a lot of people had on their minds”.

Channel Three didn’t change the world but that might be the world’s loss.

**** out *****



Album available through:Interpunk
Amazon
iTunes
TKO Records

Channel 3 downloads on MRML
Channel 3's web-site
Channel 3's MySpace
Mike Magrann's blog

Channel 3: Airborne

Knee-deep in what they now refer to as the "You guys Suck!" phase, Channel 3 (see here) refused to retreat. The 1985 e.p. Airborne recorded for screwed-up, major label affiliated Restless Records, takes the jagged jangle-pop of "Indian Summer"and jacks up the ante. But vaulting ambition aside, these four fully-formed songs give no hints of the drastic shit to come. While in these grooves you can hear a lurch forward in the level of professionalism, Magrann's sandpaper growl and sharp lyrics remain front and center and the band still plays its guts out just in a more measured, precise way. It's polished but this stuff is way too strong for A.O.R., listen to those (tuneful) gang vocals on the full-throttle, "Waiting for the Sun to Go Down" and you can rest assured we're not in Kansas yet, Toto.

Channel 3 - Waiting for the Sun To Go Down

Then there's the title track, "Airborne", into which Magrann throws all the youthful intensity and skepticism of their early blitzkrieg boppers into a grand-scale pop song with his band-mates shouting along like a gang of disillusioned choir boys. This song should've brought the world to their door. Damn history for her betrayal of Channel 3.

Channel 3 - Airborne

Airborne
(Magrann/Langsford)

If money talks, it also lives
The fat and pale faces show
In East L.A., a baby dies
Well, that's just the way it goes
In their white cars, they drive through slums
And talk of art and distant wars
They shake their heads, and click their tongues
As they reach to lock the doors
In every world, in every age
There's a "they"
And what do they say?
They say we're Airborne
The trapped generation of lies
They say we're Airborne
Dead innocents, aloft with bent desires
May I use "We"?, we're forced to see
The pain of life most every day
I'll have a drink, I'll close my eyes
Then I'll turn to fly away
And so we cry, misunderstood!
Our souls alive, red burning youth
But colors fade, and we might pale
And crash down in three piece suits
I asked a kid the other day
What they teach in this nuclear age
We had some fun in school today
We learned to get under our desks
And start to pray!

(Image courtesy of record collectors of the world unite)

Download Airborne 12" e.p.

Following this the criminally ignored e.p., the band did a grisly volte-face and became a party-metal outfit, stopping to cover Aerosmith in the process. The album in question was panned by most at the time but now has its champions of which I am definitely not one. On this album Magrann's voice is coarser and less expressive, the music and lyrics less distinctive and the whole glam-frat shtick is half-baked at best. Available here for those still curious.
As fort the 21st century, Ch 3 are still on (here's their cover of "Scratches and Needles") and, earlier this decade, they recorded a new album for Dr. Strange Records plus there's a documentary on them called, One More For My True Friends.

Channel 3 : Indian Summer

While many of the bands on B.Y.O Records' 1984 compilation Something to Believe In stuck to the loud, fast fundamentals of hardcore, other bands, like Channel 3, revealed cracks in the punk underground's foundation. Songs like the Nils' heartbreakingly beautiful "Scratches and Needles" and Channel 3's soaring, sorrowful, "Indian Summer" showed a great restlessness with the strictures of hardcore. So it came to pass that 1984, the year of Reagen's dispiriting landslide re-election, marked the splintering of the hardcore underground and it's network of bands, fanzines, labels. People grew out their hair and tastes shifted towards speed-metal or jangly-pop. Such changes happen to every wave of punk but the ideas of punk rock are a contagion and not dependent on any one person carrying them; those ideas simply mutate and spread elsewhere.


Channel 3's "Indian Summer" did succeed in harnessing the angry energy of punk rock to different ends. While Black Flag dug into British sludge-metal to re-invent themselves, Channel 3 dug into California folk-rock, like their contemporaries the Red Rockers (as well as R.E.M. and the whole of L.A.'s Paisley Underground) did. The resulting sound is the mid-way point between the Clash's "Gates of the West" and Big Country's "Field of Fire". Lyrically, Magrann combines the eighties angst touchstones of nuclear fear and adolescent alienation ("I just wanna know how to live...in the Indian summer") quite deftly. Magrann puts those words to a stirring melody, with ringing (occasionally bag-pipish) guitars and some heartfelt Springteen-isms. It''s not only a neglected classic but also one good answer to the question, "What happens to punks when they grow up?"

Chanel 3 - Indian Summer (Something to Believe In version)



Download Indian Summer 7"

Channel 3: I'll Take My Chances

In the early eighties the British and the North American punk scenes kept to themselves. True, British bands like G.B.H. toured North America and American bands like Black Flag slogged through England. However if you look at the classic labels (and their compilations) of that era, No Future, Clay, Riot City etc. in Britain or SST, Alternative Tentacles, Posh Boy etc. in North America, you'll find little Anglo-American accord.


Except, of course, for Channel 3 (and the Dead Kennedy but I'm working on a geo-musical theory here, okay). CH3 were a melodic, tight, gut-pounding southern California hardcore band. In the States they were signed to pioneering SoCal pop-punk label Posh Boy but in England, thanks to John Peel's love of their hair-raising "Manzanar" they had chart action on the Oi!/UK '82 No Future label. Even now they are one of the very few American bands re-issued on John Bull's own record label, Captain Oi!.



While the early CH3 did not differ radically from their bald n' fast brethren, they did outclass most of them. As life-long friends Mike Magrann, vocals and guitar and Kimm Gardner, guitar and vocals formed the perfect united front. Their clearly articulated guitar fury and their vocal interplay does give the band a more British, even Clash-like, sound. Lyrically, English-major Magrann rails against all hypocrisy, even that of his peers ("What's the use of being angry if you don't know why?" he asks on the A-side) and his countrymen (the aforementioned "Manzanar", castigates Americans for their ignorance of their own WWII-era Japanese internment camps). And no matter how fast the polka punk-beat gets, Magrann's sharp, raspy voice never loses the melody.

(Image courtesy of record collectors of the world unite)

The band's development was subtle but unflinching between 1981 and 1983. By After the Lights Go Out they'd blueprinted a clean, clear, catchy punk rock that would take over the world over a decade later. This single's whoa-oh'ing A-side, "I'll Take My Chances" encapsulates the sound and the attitude of that album. The B-side, "How Come?" was a non-L.P. speed-romp, which hits hard and then heads home. However, as it was with their British brethren, change was coming and things would soon get weird; but that doesn't scare us, does it?



Download I'll Take My Chances 7"



P.S. MRML highly recommends subscribing to Ch 3's blog, unlike most rockers Magrann is an honest and witty commentator on his own band's (ongoing!) history.)

(Go here to order this vinyl re-issue of the early Ch 3 demos.)