Archive for February, 2008

In what makes me feel really old and I didn’t even get the record until about seven years after it was first released The Weirdos - Destroy All Music 7″ is now 30 years old! To celebrate this milestone, Bomp Records have released a new Weirdos record.

The Weirdos - Destroy All Music 30th Anniversary LP

This LP compiles the original Weirdos Destroy All Music 7″ along with the Who? What? Where? When? Why? LP. It also contains four unreleased demo tracks that are exclusive to this release. It comes on limited edition white vinyl, or you could get it on CD if you were so inclined. Considering that except for the demo tracks, everything on this can be found on the Weirdos collections on Frontier Records, this is probably only of interest to hardcore Weirdos fans and record junkies such as myself, but I know I’m not the only one out there like that so I’m sure it will do alright, at least in the vinyl format.

I’m sure the usual record stores and mail orders have this or get one direct from Bomp.

Mystic Records just reissued another old LP from their vast catalog of old punk rock.

Dr. Know - The Original Group LP on green vinyl

This is the Dr. Know - Original Group LP on green vinyl. This LP features recordings with their original singer, Brandon Cruz, but actually was released after the band’s first album. Mystic Records found a box of original covers and pressed up 500 green vinyl records to fill them. Unlike the original pressing however, there is a Dr. Know logo sticker affixed on the front cover.

This limited punk classic probably won’t last long. You can probably find them at the usualy punk record shops or I have a small amount of them for sale in The Punk Vault store.

There will be a few more old Mystic Records being reissued on colored vinyl this year, I’ll have info for you as I turn in the artwork for them.

Wednesday night I braved the frigid cold and crappy weather to go to the House of Blues here in Chicago to see The Black Dahlia Murder. I saw them play last fall with Cannibal Corpse and was pretty impressed, enough so that I left my winter hibernation to go to this show.

Hate Eternal

Hate Eternal

Hate Eternal

Hate Eternal

When I got inside the club there was already a pretty sizable crowd of mostly younger fans eagerly awaiting the show to start. The show started about a half hour later than scheduled due to the lineup changing and less bands playing that night than originally planned. At about 6:30pm, Hate Eternal took the stage and as the curtains opened, the crowed roared with excitement. The band ripped into their first song and from then on it was non stop double-kick drum driven metal with thrashing guitars. The singer growled like he was Satan himself and he was huge and menacing looking. During the rare parts where he wasn’t bellowing powerful growls, he was whipping his hair around violently, so much so that it almost looked like a weapon! The crowd ate it up and were moshing and raising their fists in approval.

The Red Chord

The Red Chord

The Red Chord

The Red Chord

The Red Chord

After a pretty quick equipment change, The Red Chord came out and started playing. They also played at that Cannibal Corpse show so I knew what to expect. What I didn’t expect was for them to outshine their last show here. They seemed to have gotten more brutal in their delivery of their brand of metalcore. No one in the band held still for more than 30 seconds while they were playing and they were super tight and energetic and the crowd fed off of that and there were bodies flying around at a steady pace. When they were finished I told myself that they are a band I’d go see again for sure sometime.

The Black Dahlia Murder

The Black Dahlia Murder

The Black Dahlia Murder

After the two great performances preceding them, The Black Dahlia Murder had some pretty big shoes to fill. The curtains opened and the stage was a sea of bright lights and they immediately got down to their task of brutality. In about one minute they showed the entire audience that they meant business and the audience reciprocated by jumping, moshing, raising their fists, head banging, and screaming out roars of approval. As the band delivered each song with a surgeons precision, the crowd went nuts. I swear at one point nearly the entire main floor was just one huge mosh pit. There were people crowd surfing and being launched into the waiting arms of security in the front of the stage. As each person landed in there (while I had to dodge flying bodies to get my shots), the security guards gently caught each and every person and got them back on their feet safely and escorted them back to the action in the crowd.

The Black Dahlia Murder

The Black Dahlia Murder

The Black Dahlia Murder

The Black Dahlia Murder

The band played a good mixture of older songs and newer songs and what I found interesting was the newer songs were getting just as strong of a crowd response as the older ones. They just loved everything the band was doing. Sure the old songs got a huge pop from the crowd, but during the songs the crowd kept a steady pace of their various displays of approval.

When the show ended and the lights went up, there were a lot of sweaty bodies and tired looking but satisfied people who would quickly cool off as they got outside for their cold trips home. Three solid sets by three good bands - I’d say it was time well spent and worth the trip out in the arctic.

A few additional photos from this show can be found on MXV’s Flickr Stream.

Toothpaste - EP (1983 Schwa Records)

Toothpaste were a band from my own city that I really didn’t know anything about until recently. I had heard the name mentioned a couple of times over the years but never gave it much thought. It wasn’t until the end of last year when the band along with Silver Abuse and The Wayouts did a reunion show here in the city that I finally became exposed to their music. It wasn’t even halfway into the first song that I realized I really had missed out on a great band that was right here under my nose and actually were still a band about the time I first discovered punk rock, but I never knew about them or even acquired their 12″.

Luckily I got to make up for lost time by seeing that reunion and as luck would have it, get a copy of their original 12″ for The Punk Vault at the show thanks to a band member having a few copies and bringing them to the show to sell (for the regular price no less!). On top of being a great band, they are also great people and Bob Damrau from the band was kind enough to send me a little band history for this feature.

Over the summer of 1981, John Lundin, Al Szopinski, and yours truly got together and came up with the silly name of Toothpaste because we wanted a generic non-punk name. John had left Naked Raygun, Al had departed from the Way-Outs! and I had quit Silver Abuse all within the span of a couple of months.

We played around Chicago for about a year or so before we went into the studio in November 1982 to record the self-titled EP. We sent copies of the EP (we had 1000 pressed) to just about every independent record company in the country, as well as many college/independent radio stations.

We continued to play around town and eventually coerced Camilo Gonzalez to join our group on bass guitar. (prior to that we had a two-guitarist and one drummer lineup - no bass). Al ultimately left but came back as a vocalist only when we did additional recording sessions, which produced songs as “Sex in Space”, “Opposable Thumb”, and “Freud Taught the Mambo”. One of these sessions also produced the songs that appeared on the Toothpaste 7″ single: “Oh Yeah Come On” (penned by Santiago Durango) and “Kids do the Darnedest Drugs” (one of mine).

Actually, on Dec. 29 2007 (the aforementioned reunion), we performed “Darnedest Drugs” live for the first time ever…

Anyway, John left for film school around 1985-86 and we trudged along for a little while as ‘Devil Luggage’, with Kent Kurzka (ex-Anti-Bodies, among others) replacing John on guitar. (Kent played bass with Toothpaste on Dec. 29).

The 7″ mentioned above is every bit as great at the 12″ and if you ever come across a copy for sale don’t hesitate to pick it up, trust me you’ll be glad you did. Hopefully someday this stuff will get reissued on some sort of CD or at least on iTunes or something.

Thanks to Bob from Toothpaste for taking the time to put together that little history for the site.

Listen to “Palestine” from the record (right click it and save!)

Toothpaste/Silver Abuse/Wayouts myspace page 

The Spontaneous Combustion mailorder has been revamped and is now The Punk Vault store. I just put it up and there is a lot of rare Mystic Records vinyl available as well as some other things for sale while supplies last. The store currently only supports customers in the USA but anyone outside the USA can email their order in and get the shipping total and payment info. Just click the STORE button in the header on this site or you can take the shortcut here.

D.O.A. - Smash the State: The Raw Original D.O.A. 1978 - 1981 DVD
MVD Visual/Sudden Death Records

D.O.A. are a Canadian punk institution. They were among the first and among the best punk bands ever to come out of the Great White North. Not only that but 30 years later and they are still at it in one form or another!

This DVD is a collection of live footage of the original (and best) lineup of D.O.A. from the first three years of their career. The footage was culled from five different locations, one of which was a TV shoot and four of which were shot in San Francisco which must have been a second home to these guys at the time seeing as how often they played there. The footage is a mixed bag as far as quality, it ranges from decent to very good. The sound is presented in straight stereo and overall is pretty good especially considering the technology at the time. As a bonus there is a TV news clip on punk as well as the “World War 3″ video.

Having not been able to see D.O.A. until 1987, and by then it wasn’t the original lineup, it was really neat to see what they were like with the original lineup. Since I am not in possession of a time machine, this DVD is about as close as I’ll get to seeing what they were like back then. Hardcore fans will likely be happy to have this footage in their collections.

Related links:

Order the DVD from amazon.com

Sudden Death Records

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