Friday, April 23, 2010

Bad Brains were fucking awesome.


"...Then my man Sid came over my crib with all these different records: Dead Boys, Ramones, No New York [the compilation], and the Sex Pistols. And he came with those four albums in his hand, knocked on my door one day with a suit jacket on with some safety pins and shit all over it, and I looked through the peephole, and I said, “What the fuck’s this motherfucker doing?” He looked like someone beat him up. He was all ripped up like a bomb blew up and shit. He was my man, but he had seen the Sex Pistols on PBS or something and ran off uptown where the white people live near the university and went to the record store and bought all these records. Then he came over my house, “Yo, check out all this shit.” And that shit! Wow! The first thing I thought was, “If these motherfuckers think they making some shit playing fast, then watch this!” So it was almost like the Beastie Boys when they first started, making fun of rap but kind of got serious. You know, it was like satire to them. Well to me, when I first heard punk rock, being a dude that was open-minded and into Return to Forever, the first thing I thought was, “If the Ramones think they’re playing fast, and if they think that they’re playing some hot shit, watch this shit that I’m going to rip, listen to this riff that I’m going to make and how fast I play this shit ’cause I got Return to Forever that I’ve been feeling that’s really technical,” and I thought, “I’ll work me some jazz riffage around this punk shit.” So it was like a sort of competitive thing I had with punk to make the Bad Brains music so fast and kind of like how on “Sailing On” ends with the jazzy thing and all that."

Darryl Jenifer of Bad Brains from THIS interview.
pretty cool.
I was trying to see if there was a demo of Mind Power which was the prog/jazz/fusion band the bad brains had before they found punk.
I love hearing stories of how people first got into punk rock and got their worlds turned upside down.
word.

oh, and ps. I don't think there are any tapes of Mind Power...
but if I'm somehow mistaken and you have a copy, please let me know... kindof curious as to how it sounds...
word.

Saturday, April 17, 2010

International Thief Thief!!!!


So there's this Fela song called ITT about this corporation that was up to some shady business in Nigeria in the 70s... Naturally, I was kindof curious about what their deal was and today I decided to wiki them.

Among horrid things like financing Pinochet and the overthrow of the chilean government in the 70s, we have this little gem...


"According to Anthony Sampson's book The Sovereign State of ITT, one of the first American businessmen Hitler received after taking power in 1933 was Sosthenes Behn, then the CEO of ITT and his German representative, Henry Mann. Antony C. Sutton, in his book Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler, makes the claim that ITT subsidiaries made cash payments to SS leader Heinrich Himmler.
ITT, through its subsidiary The Lorenz Company, owned 25% of Focke-Wulf, the German aircraft manufacturer, builder of some of the most successful Luftwaffe fighter aircraft. In the 1960s, ITT Corporation won $27 million in compensation for damage inflicted on its share of the Focke-Wulf plant by WWII Allied bombing.[3] In addition, Sutton’s book uncovers that ITT owned Huth and Company, G.m.b.H. of Berlin, which made radio and radar parts that were used in equipment going to the Wehrmacht."


dude, 27 million dollars...
to nazi collaborators...
in the 60s...
I would have figured people would still have been pretty sore about WW2 in those days.
what in the fuck is that about?


my guess is that they had some super defense technology or something and they were like "we'll give it to the russians..."
I mean really though...
what the fuck is wrong with people?

Still looking for it...


America changed the clash... An interesting love/hate relationship for sure... Being so english...
anyway...

I'm wondering if the late 70s and early 80s were as exciting as they look on television or sound on records...
I don't know if people were more bored and frustrated back then or if it was that punk just rewrote the rules or that record companies were still willing to give bands money to try and do something exciting or whatever... It seems to me that music from this time sounds new... like uncharted territory... people must have been psyched...

but like, when this came out had anyone heard anything like it before?



I dunno...

not too much new music excites me... most of the stuff that does sounds old... like it could have been made in another time... when shit was still real...
Is my affinity for this music based partly on the fact that it was made in a different time under a different set of circumstances and different rules? Is this part of some escapist, false reality I immerse myself in to medicate my dissatisfaction with my life and the current state of the universe I know?
I dunno...

I mean, reality is still reality... back then the world portrayed by the media was very thin... now we have this and everyone's story can be heard which is good, but it's also like... maybe too much?
too much information...
everything is equally important...
nothing is real.
it's awesome and it's really fucking with me at the same time...

What kindof society will we have when people never knew a world without the internet?
where little is tangible and everything is an abstract...

it's everything you want at your fingertips but none of it is real...
and you're never satisfied because there's always more...

Do I feel like everything's been done because it has and I don't have to try too hard to find out about it?
Is that the other side of having access to so much information? Is it making art lazy or forcing people to try harder? kindof hard to tell...

Even my questioning it is totally cliched...
But I suppose there can't be a definitive answer... so...
whatever...
fuck it.
; )

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Holy Shit (Old Friends Make Great Music) Social Circkle In TX

Faith / Void

This record is pretty amazing... Did not know there was a video. ; )
(ps. there are a few more on youtube as well... wishing I could get the whole show, but I'm a bit broke...)
anyway, enjoy this...



Notice alec mackaye's insane faces between sentences, the crowd's wild energy and john from void jumping around... I bet that show was fucking intense...

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

I just met her?



This is the first flipper song I'd ever heard back in the day on this comp. tape from the first 10 years of ROIR records... I heard a few great bands for the first time when I listened to that tape...
here's another:



and another...


hell yeah...

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Rollins poetry tuesday.

"The summer had fully unfolded. It stretched out full-length and pressed it's smooth muscles against mine. The air was thick. It surrounded me like invisible prison bars. Every night was dedicated to delirium, dreams of confusion and confinement. I walked in and out of steaming jungles. I would rest in damp, cool shade. Sometimes I thought I would not be able to get up because the rest would make my bones ache so bad. There was a constant din in my ears. A world of sane, soulless pigs surrounded me. Sounded like a war. In this madness I found a quiet place. A place where I could hear my breath. The quiet place. Silent sun. Heavy air. Shimmering jewel eyed woman in my brain. No confinement. An infinite pass. Insane beauty. I thought if I made a sound the whole thing would collapse right down on top of me. I guarded the quiet place. I kept it clean, I told no one about it. Even now, the directions to the place stay with me. I've been thinking about that place a lot these days."
uhhh... oh yeah...