#I.R.S. Records

[myvinylplaylist]

Oingo Boingo: Nothing To Fear (1982)

I.R.S Records

[kdo-three]

Wall of Voodoo - Mexican Radio (1982) Stan Ridgway / Charles T. Gray / Marc Moreland / Oliver Nanini from: “Call of the West” (LP) "Mexican Radio" / "Call of the West" (Single)

New Wave | Alternative | Darkwave | Post-Punk

FLAC File @Archive (left click = play) (25.3MB} (859kbps)

JukeHostUK (left click = play) (320kbps)

Tumblr (left click = play) (160kbps)

Personnel: Stan Ridgway: Vocals / Keyboards Chas Gray: Synthesizers / Bass Marc Moreland: Guitar Joe Nanini: Drums / Percussion

Produced by Richard Mazda

Recorded: @ Hit City West in Los Angeles, California USA June, 1982

Album Released: September, 1982 I.R.S. Records

Single Released: December, 1982 I.R.S. Records

Feliz Cinco de Mayo

[mrmousetolliver]

Beauty and the Beat (1981) The Go Go's.

[weneverlearn]

Congrats to R.E.M. for Making the Songwriters Hall of Fame Last Night!

Last night, R.E.M. reunited for the first time in 17 years for one song at the Songwriters Hall of Fame induction ceremony in NYC; plus this week is Fables of the Reconstruction's 39th Birthday! So here goes an expanded version of a facebook post I made about the expanded edition CD box set of Fables...

Good rockin' little demo that never made it onto an album, though much of the lyrics appeared in the song "I Believe" on their next album, Life's Rich Pageant.

-------------------------------------------

R.E.M. - Fables of the Reconstruction - 25th Anniversary Edition (I.R.S., 2010)

If ya gotta do an expanded reissue CD box set, this is how you do it. Pictured is the rough sketch art sleeve for “The Athens Demos” CD (all previously unreleased and with some songs that never surfaced otherwise), recorded before they jetted off to record their third album way over in the UK, about on their way to wider horizons…

Neat little set also includes booklet w/ liner notes and pix, postcards of each member, and a big fold-out poster kinda based on the store promo poster of yore…

Love this 1985 album that was met with some iffy feelings from the already-big fanbase; not to mention that the band seemed weird discussing the reportedly tough recording sessions, but that I believe Michael Stipe has since said is his favorite or something; and Peter Buck says in these liner notes is “a personal favorite.”

I was amazed at its bigger sound palette that was somehow even more musty Southern gothic than before. (And this record offered up their best 7” B-sides, which would’ve really sent this set way over the top, but are easy enough to find elsewhere.)

R.E.M. was always good at coming up with album titles that kind of seep in, and a lightbulb goes off like the eighth time you sat down with the album (except New Adventures in Hi-Fi; I always thought that title was a little behind the 1960s "bachelor pad" trend LP references of that time period.)

On first glimpse, that the switcheroo of this LP title from front/back cover could also read "Reconstruction of the Fables" seemed gimmicky. But right about that moment in time (1985), the band -- specifically Michael Stipe, I suppose -- was drip-dripping into more political stances, lyrics, etc. Their budding stardom was making them (rightly or wrong) some kind of spokesmen for a generation. This album kind of did have them working as new Southern storytellers, trying to fashion a different characterization of small town Southerners than the usual stereotypes left over from post-Reconstruction/Jim Crow eras (which, when you think about it, started with that Reckoning title)... Whether they succeeded -- and no one demanded they do -- is another question for another day...

Posting this breaks my personal rule of not hyping a band on this page that doesn’t really need it, especially on the day the band is getting inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. But what the hell, they deserve it.

One of my personal gateway bands to more music discovery, and still a top 10 fave album of their's.

[metalsongoftheday]

Friday, March 29: Black Sabbath, "Guilty as Hell"

R.I.P. Colin "Cozy" Powell (1947-1998)

Almost everyone agreed that Forbidden was a low point in Black Sabbath’s history, if not the absolute lowest: it wasn’t just that virtually nobody bought the thing and this lineup ended up playing barely half-full small theaters, but a good portion of the band’s members were vocal about the general pointlessness of it all.  But a fresh listen almost 30 years later reveals that Forbidden has at least some qualities- to be sure, the writing was largely uninspired, Ernie C.’s production was flat, and Tony “the Cat” Martin’s attempts at ‘90s angst and “relevant”, “streetwise” wordsmithing were made more embarrassing by his overemoting.  But even in this incredibly compromised state, Tony Iommi could still cook up the occasional lethal riff, and “Guilty as Hell” was a worthwhile listen largely because of one monster chord progression.  Martin’s lyrics were total nonsense, and his cursing in the middle was far more hapless than tough, but Iommi’s guitar sounded dark as ever and Cozy Powell’s thunderous drumming remained powerful even while back in the mix.  This was the sort of tune that Ronnie James Dio would’ve knocked out of the park 15 or so years earlier, but unfortunately such were the times and circumstances that an otherwise killer piece of music was saddled with a hilariously melodramatic singer, a small label on its way to bankruptcy and an apathetic public.

[mymelodic-chapel]

Suburban Lawns- Suburban Lawns (Post-Punk, New Wave, Art Punk) Released: September 22, 1981 [I.R.S. Records] Producer(s): EJ Emmons, Troy Mathisen

[thriftstorerecords]

Camera Camera Renaissance I.R.S. Records/USA (1981)

[ravenkings]

Elon Musk may be stepping back from running the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, but his legacy there is already secured. DOGE is assembling a sprawling domestic surveillance system for the Trump administration — the likes of which we have never seen in the United States. President Trump could soon have the tools to satisfy his many grievances by swiftly locating compromising information about his political opponents or anyone who simply annoys him. The administration has already declared that it plans to comb through tax records to find the addresses of immigrants it is investigating — a plan so morally and legally challenged it prompted several top I.R.S. officials to quit in protest. Some federal workers have also been told that DOGE is using A.I. to sift through their communications to identify people who harbor anti-Musk or -Trump sentiment (and presumably punish or fire them). What this amounts to is a stunningly fast reversal of our long history of siloing government data to prevent its misuse. In their first 100 days, Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump have knocked down the barriers that were intended to prevent them from creating dossiers on every U.S. resident. Now, they seem to be building a defining feature of many authoritarian regimes: comprehensive files on everyone so they can punish those who protest. “This is what we were always scared of,” said Kevin Bankston, a longtime civil liberties lawyer and a senior adviser on A.I. governance at the Center for Democracy & Technology, a policy and civil rights organization. “The infrastructure for turnkey totalitarianism is there for an administration willing to break the law.”

[metalcultbrigade]

Two years ago Nuclear Assault announced their retirement.

Nuclear Assault was an American thrash metal band formed in New York City in 1984. Part of the mid-to-late 1980s thrash metal movement, they were one of the main bands of the genre to emerge from the East Coast along with Overkill, Whiplash, Toxik, Carnivore, and Anthrax, the last of which was co-founded by Nuclear Assault bassist Dan Lilker, who left Anthrax shortly after the release of their first album.

Nuclear Assault released five full-length albums and toured relentlessly throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, and broke up in 1995. The band reunited briefly in 1997 and then permanently in 2002.

Nuclear Assault Background information

Origin New York City, U.S.

Genres Thrash metal crossover thrash

Years active 1984–1995 1997 2002–2022

Labels I.R.S. Combat In-Effect Receiver SPV

Past members:

John Connelly

Dan Lilker

Glenn Evans

Anthony Bramante

Scott Duboys

Mike Bogush

Dave DiPietro

Scott Metaxas

Eric Burke

Scott Harrington

Nuclear Assault had released six studio albums to date, in addition to two live albums, four EPs and one compilation album. Their most successful records are Survive (1988) and Handle with Care (1989), which peaked at Nos. 145 and 126 on the Billboard 200 chart, respectively.

Other than four new songs in 2015 on the EP Pounder, the band had not released a full-length studio album since 2005's Third World Genocide, and they would continue to perform live sporadically over the years before calling it quits once again in 2022.

[dankalbumart]

Portent Hue by Caterwaul I.R.S. Records 1990 Alternative Rock / Indie Rock / Post-Punk

[industrial-horror]

Bad Music for Bad People is the second compilation album of previously released material by the American rock band the Cramps. It was released in 1984 on I.R.S. Records and was seen by most fans as a cynical cash-in by the record label, following the departure of the band. Sounds, the now defunct UK music paper, gave the album a 5-star review but said, "Miles Copeland's IRS label pick the carrion of their former label mates even cleaner by releasing a watered down version of the ...Off the Bone singles collection that was released in the UK...The music's still great even if the scheming behind Bad Music for Bad People stinks of decay and corruption".

The cover art is a caricature of Lux Interior by Frederick, Maryland-based artist Stephen Blickenstaff who created it on Halloween night 1983. He attended The Cramps concerts in Baltimore and Washington, D.C. and was able to meet and befriend band members with his artwork at the 9:30 Club. I.R.S. Records eventually asked for and was granted permission to use those drawings by Blickenstaff who at the time had no expectations that it would be used as album art.

[myvinylplaylist]

Oingo Boingo: Only A Lad (1981)

I.R.S. Records

[uncleweed]

Over the last 40 years, Copeland has methodically built a music career so diverse—from punk to opera—that it is unmatched by any of his contemporaries. Just how did he go about mastering so many genres? It all started in Virginia.

Born in Alexandria in 1952, Copeland started life as any child of a government worker would, assuming that the parent (in this case, his father, Miles Copeland, Jr. ) was a founding member of the CIA. “Yeah, when I was born, Daddy was away on business installing a dictator in Egypt,” Copeland tells City Paper matter-of-factly. “I didn’t find out about it until I was in college in California. He wrote his first book and there it was in the liner notes. But there had been talk. One of our family jokes is that one day, Miles, my brother, comes home from school and says ‘Dad, are you a spy?’ And my father says, ‘Who wants to know?'”

Due to his father’s career as an international man of mystery, his family moved to Cairo shortly after his birth, then to Beirut when he was 5. Copeland’s father, a former jazz musician, insisted that his children play musical instruments. For Copeland’s older brothers, Ian and Miles III, playing did not take, though both ended up in the music industry—Miles managed the Police and cofounded I.R.S. Records; Ian became a promoter and booking agent. For Stewart, a pair of drumsticks were placed into his hands at the age of seven and have yet to be removed.

The music studies continued. First, when his family moved to England when he was teen, then when he enrolled in San Diego’s California Western University (which has since evolved into two different schools). It was in a composition class taught by Dr. Mary K. Phillips where the first inkling of a burgeoning career as a composer reared its head.

“One day when she gave us all our homework,” recalls Copeland: “Write 16 bars with no parallel fourths or fifths, obeying all the rules. ” Not a natural pianist (“I can either play the chords perfectly out of rhythm or play the cool rhythm with it, with the wrong notes”), Copeland brought his composition to class for review.

Phillips went through her students’ work, praising each of them before playing Copeland’s. He recalls her noting that he included parallel fourths, “‘but I kind of see why you did that because it created tension,’” he says, quoting his teacher 50 years later. “Stewart,” he remembers her saying, “there’s all these mistakes, but this is actual music.”

“That sounds like, you know, faint praise! But how did I kvell!” Copeland says. “It’s true, of course, every musician has delusions of grandeur, and to have just any inkling of affirmation is very big.” (Fun fact: Those 16 bars eventually made their way into “Does Everyone Stare” off the Police’s second album, Reggatta de Blanc).

[randomvarious]

Uhhh, nice addendum to this post I did a while back about I.R.S. Records 😅👁️‍🗨️...

And another fun connection here is that I.R.S.' Root Boy Slim—whose name most likely inspired Norman Cook to go by Fatboy Slim—also once managed to get himself permabanned from his own frat house by future war criminal US president George W. Bush himself after returning to his Yale alma mater campus for homecoming weekend the year after he had graduated and causing quite a ruckus!

[mymelodic-chapel]

Go-Go's- Beauty and the Beat (New Wave, Power Pop, Pop Rock) Released: July 14, 1981 [I.R.S. Records] Producer(s): Richard Gottehrer, Rob Freeman

[shannendoherty-fans]

1993 - Shannen Doherty portrayed by Michael Comte for the November 1993 issue of Vanity Fair.

Brat on a Hot Tin Roof (Part 1)

For Shannen Doherty, the brunette bad girl of Beverly Hills, 90210, hell is other people. In a few short years, she has sent two fiancés and various managers and flacks packing and earned a reputation as one of L.A.'s shortest fuses. But now the volatile actress, a television-size Elizabeth Taylor, wants to set the record straight, and she shares with LYNN HIRSCHBERG the perils of being a star.

She's difficult. She always was. She’s been acting since she was 10, offscreen and on, and she’s never, ever, been easy. "I can be difficult,” Shannen Doherty admits, with a trace of pride. ‘‘But I'm not crazy.” She is serious. Always. She was serious before she became the star of Beverly Hills, 90210, the teen soap opera that is one of the most popular shows on the Fox network, but fame has made her even more serious. There is no irony or humor in Shannen’s perception of Shannen. She feels, she says, abused. By the press. By the public. And, most of all, by her ex-boyfriends. "Don’t judge me for who I am,’’ she says, ‘‘because everybody makes mistakes.’’

She drags on her Camel. She is very small, but she affects a tough look, that bad-girl-in-high-school thing that makes her so tabloid-appealing. Shannen has on jeans and motorcycle boots and a vintage black bowling shirt that reads, MIKE. Her straight black hair hangs down past her shoulders and she’s wearing no makeup. Her most notable feature is her eyes, which are distinctly uneven—the left one is a good quarter-inch higher than the right. Despite this Cubist touch, Shannen’s face is particularly inexpressive. She doesn’t smile much; she doesn’t emote. Shannen is still.

At the moment, she is tucked into an overstuffed armchair in the dining room of the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills. She’s been living here for the past three months, checked in under the alias Doobie Love, a moniker that seems to thrill her. Her new boyfriend, Judd Nelson, picked the name for her. "I like it,” she says giddily. "People have to call up and ask for ‘Doobie’ or they won’t get me.”’

She’s been staying at the Four Seasons ever since her relationship with Dean Factor, her latest fiancé (there has been at least one other), blew up. It was a particularly messy relationship—full of big dramatic fights, screaming accusations, and high-priced lawyers. Allegedly, Shannen pulled a gun on Dean, tried to run him over with her car, and threatened to have him sodomized on his front lawn. Or so he claims. She says he verbally abused her, closed a car door on her legs, and slugged her repeatedly. And nearly all of this was before she accepted his proposal of marriage.

But their love was not fated to last. It is gone now, replaced by a legal restraining order (his) stating that she cannot go within 100 yards of him. ‘“Which is fine by me,” says Shannen, looking rather blank. "I’m thinking of getting my own restraining order."

This is only the latest and most lurid chapter in the Shannen Chronicles, an ongoing study in how to become notorious. In the last two years alone, Shannen has been in a barroom brawl; has fired two managers, one of whom is threatening to sue her for thousands of dollars he claims she owes him; and has fired a publicist, who is also reportedly owed money. She is rumored to owe money to the I.R.S., has been in serious debt to American Express and a bank, and recently lost two endorsements, including Gitano jeans, because of her bad-girl ways.

She’s very calm about all this, refuting the charges point by point, chain-smoking throughout. She left one manager because ‘‘I despise people who lie,” left another ‘‘because the chemistry wasn’t there.”’ According to her, she doesn’t owe the money, didn’t write the bad checks, didn’t start the fights.

Today, except for the Dean thing, the details of her infamy are not important to her. She’s interested in how her image projects—the overall effect is what matters. ‘‘She has an Elizabeth Taylor complex,’” explains Darren Star, the creator and executive producer of Beverly Hills, 90210. "She has a sense of herself, a very strong sense of her own destiny. What's amazing is how much she’s realized it. She’s been able to parlay her visibility in a TV show to this extreme.’’

Still, things have gotten a little out of hand lately even for Shannen, who, at 22, is only beginning to understand that actions have consequences. ‘‘I’ve lost weight and I’ve been smoking a lot,”’ she says, lighting up another cigarette. “This is a really bad confession on my part, but one of the reasons why I started smoking is because I didn’t like my voice and I wanted it lower. Much sexier and lower. Raspier.”” She smiles guiltily. Anything for art.

She does look tired, but her manner is focused, energetic, especially when the subject is Shannen. She’s been working nonstop, having just finished two features back-to-back: Blindfold, co-starring Judd Nelson, and Resurrection. *‘I had four days off,”’ she says with a sigh, ‘‘and started back on the series.’ Tomorrow she is checking out of the hotel and moving into her new rented house way up in the Hollywood Hills, and she’s eager to get her life in order, to put all this craziness behind her.

Most of all, she wants to be viewed in a new light; she wants to be taken seriously. ‘“You know,”’ she says, "when people talk about Meryl Streep, they don’t delve into her personal life. They wish they could, but they don’t. I think they have such incredible respect for her acting that they leave her alone. My goal is to be very similar to that, that when my name comes up it’s not about ‘Oh, Shannen got in another, you know, fight at a bar.' ” She takes a puff and considers her position. ‘‘Being notorious, yeah, it’s great for some things,’” she says. ‘‘But it’s also bad for others. I just wish I was notorious in a much better sense. Like Meryl. That would be nice.”’

Shannen stands up. ‘“You know,” she says as she picks up her cigarettes, ‘‘always having to watch yourself is a major drag. Watch what you say, watch what you do. You know, when all you really want to do is, like, be a 22-year-old girl and live your life and do what you love doing, which is acting.” She puts her hand on her hip. “But I guess it comes with the territory. And I’m dealing with it.”’

Shannen is waiting in front of the Four Seasons for the attendant to bring up her truck from the parking lot. “‘I have two cars,’’ she explains. “A black Mercedes and a Porsche Carrera 4. It’s a beautiful car. And now I have this truck.”” She pauses a second. The Chevy Suburban is actually the property of Beverly Hills, 90210—she has simply borrowed it for a week or so—but Shannen looks at most everything as if she owns it, so now this is her truck. "I like this truck because Dean doesn’t know it. If I see him when I’m driving, he won’t know it’s me.”’ She stares for a second. ‘‘He won’t see me at all.’’

She says this with a mix of spite, petulance, and I-am-Sheena-hear-me-roar bravado, which is the way she always speaks when she speaks about the men in her life. Men. It’s really the men that seem to gum up Shannen’s game plan. They're always getting in Shannen’s way, pushing her around, trying to change her. Managers, agents, producers—but especially boyfriends. They fall in love with her, convinced she’s sweet and serene, young and innocent, with just a beguiling touch of wildness. But then they start to tinker, to make suggestions: if only she could alter this personality twist, keep that one in check, then she would be a truly great girl. They try and they fail. Changing Shannen does not work.

But they persist: they cling to the possibilities. "She has a lot of charm,” insists her ex-manager Mike Gursey, ‘‘but she’s a pathological liar. . . . I’ve never seen her use drugs, but she has a coke mentality. She feels above anything. She feels she can do anything to anyone. She doesn’t see anything wrong with the things she does." (She, of course, doesn’t agree with this.)

And yet Gursey, who is threatening to sue Shannen, would take her back. “‘I thought I could change her,”’ he confesses. “‘I'd still like to give it another shot.”” He pauses. "I had unconditional love for her. That was my mistake."

Well, maybe, but Shannen’s appeal to men is something of a phenomenon. In L.A. especially, there are prettier girls, sexier girls, smarter girls, but she has, it would seem, a mysterious allure. ‘‘She’s sort of dirty,”” says someone who has worked with her, ‘‘but she doesn’t seem to know it. She looks like you could do anything to her, ask her to do anything to you, and she would. She looks both willing and willful.”

This trait seems to attract a certain kind of guy. "It seems to be the norm for me to hook up with really bad men,” says Shannen. “How do I find them? That's the true question. They just come out of the woodwork. They're really gross.”’

She moved in with her first boyfriend, whom she will not name, when she was 18. She had been living with some girlfriends, and before that in the Valley with her parents—her mother works as a receptionist in a Beverly Hills nail-and-waxing salon, and her father is a semi-retired business-man. Shannen spent her teens acting in commercials and on dramatic shows (Shannen has no flair for comedy). At 11, she landed a role on Little House on the Prairie, and then, when that series ended, she co-starred for two years on Our House, where she reportedly feuded with Deidre Hall, the star of the show, who played her mom.

Between Our House and Beverly Hills, 90210, Shannen met her first boyfriend. "He was a total jerk,” she says. ‘‘He was, like, 35. He carried himself very well and he was older and I was like, oh, yeah, O.K. He was pretty cool when I first met him. But then his true colors came through. I moved in and that’s when I discovered his job, for instance. The type of person he was, which was not what you would classify as a good citizen. He sold things. Let’s just say that. He sold things that are extremely illegal. And that was a pretty rough lifestyle for me, because it was my first time out.”’

After three months, Shannen left. She seems to have decided that this short stint was her only debauched period. The only time she took drugs (cocaine, principally), the only time she was wild in the clubs, the only time she lived the life others claim she’s been living all along. Only for those three months. And only because of this guy. ‘‘He corrupted me,’’ she explains.

(Part 2 — Part 3)