#STOOGES

[undergroundrockpress]

1969.

[rastronomicals]

The Stooges

[wantsneedsandloves]

[cocoabubbelle]

[holy-shit-comics]

[highbrow-hepcat]

[omegaremix]

MRKE, 2021.

It’s April. To me, I feel that nothing’s changed. By now I know that all of my favorite businesses to patronize stayed open. Not one record store on the island shuttered. So far, I was proud of myself to visit Williamsburg’s Rough Trade before their relocation this summer. It was the best $417.00 I ever spent. A pinball parlor opened up at my former local mall to my total surprise. It’s something that Long Island never had before. For eight hours and $25.00 I had more than my money’s worth. It’s safe to say that most of the money is coming back again, even if the third stimulus has no face or feelings of how people either benefit or still suffering. Businesses re-opened after New York State’s mandated closures, like my local ticket arcade where I benefit from buy-twenty-get-twenty specials and half-off games on Wednesdays so I’m relieved. It’s been years since I went and I’m long overdue for a night out of a real life 2021 version of The Price Is Right.

My friend M-Ro, brother of archivist and WUSB’s J-Ro, had been out of a job since the cinema-house closed down. He’s done nothing but stay home with his four kids watching infinite amounts of Disney, long-forgotten sitcoms, and other cringy obscurities. Not long ago, he started working again with a friend who later changed career paths and decided to open Pickle Island, a pickle house in Oyster Bay. He offered M-Ro to help run the place and Pickle Island is now a two-man operation.

I hate pickles. I think they’re disgusting, unappetizing, and revolting, They’re an unattractive food to me. I’d never have a reason to buy them ever, ergo be near a pickle house. But when your friend sells part of their CD and video collections there, then you do have a reason to go. I always support my friends with what they do. Snakeskin belts, local shows, photography books, or new ventures. You sell it, I buy it. I haven’t seen M-Ro since one of his final live performances of This’ll Kill Ya’ for his bro-’s bornday at a crowded bar in Hauppauge, so it’s about time I do.

I traveled west on the Long Island Expressway / Rt. 495 and drove past Exit 46, Sunnyside Blvd. / Plainview, where a once-astonishing world of fresh faces and memories that opened up my junior year was an era long dead. Then up north on Rt. 106 / 107. The last time I traveled down that path was when I worked at the Jewish center post-senior year. I got the girl, a Dutch caramel blonde, and also got the job through her father; a mean, threatening, over-protective scumbag who had me on his shit-list for two summer months because I was dating his daughter. I drive up Rt. 106 / Oyster Bay Rd.’s silent, wide-open, grassy roads riding past the stables and million-dollar houses on hills. View the scenic picturesque neighborhoods and one would think how Nassau County sits at the top ten highest-taxed neighborhoods in the entire U.S. Go up North Shore Rd. and see an amazing grandiose view of the harbor’s massive body of water as you coast over the Bayville Bridge and slide into the parking lot across from Pickle Island. I see M-Ro through the storefront, sitting on the couch minding his own as I walk in. He sees me walking towards and waves hello as I come in.

I unintentionally give him a friendly good-to-see-ya’-again hug. Oops. I realized you’re not supposed to do that in a pandemic world. But it’s two weeks after the fact and we’re still alive. After a few lines of conversation, I said to him that it’d be quick and he knows.

I’m not here for the pickles. I’m here to see what CDs he’s selling. It’s already cramped quarters. A Ms. Pac-Man cocktail cabinet sits behind the front window. There’s a few racks of issues of Captain America, Green Lantern, and Wolverine. Another rack of VHS tapes and a shelf of DVDs and Blu-rays. Then the CDs. They’re from his collection. Some duplicates and others he didn’t care about parting, he says. Eight rows or sixteen shelves of discs in total which would take me no more than ten to fifteen minutes to scan…and some neck pain from having to see it all sideways because that’s how he placed them, you  Tetris artist. I’m already positioned in blocking the owner from going behind the front counter. And an all-too-nice suburbanite family of three just walked in; a father and his two kid who are all so fine and dandy to be there. As if they never experienced a bad day or tragedy in their white-winged innocent lives. Nice to know that Dad Of The Year never looked in my direction and wondered why a stranger is twisting over by the shelves.

Seeing his partial stash, M-Ro was never one to shy away from pop. Jewel, Head Automatica, Pretty Girls Make Graves, some pop-punk, first and third-wave ska, Warped Tour bands…no judgment here. Because he’s a solo artist who goes by The Matt Roren Karaoke Experience doing covers and music videos of various popular chart-topping hits. Before that, he was also part of the legendary local pop-punk / ska band The Microwave Orphans and after that the garage-punk outfit The Repercussions which I ended up getting two CDs of. Don’t Fear…and Modern Sounds were the two most expensive discs I bought at $7.00 and $10.00 respectively, still sealed. Come on. You have to support your friends.

As with any receipt, there’s plenty of firsts. This one, however, had the majority of them. Veruca Salt, Faith No More, and The Posies were bands that my alternative circles of friends from both Brentwood and Plainview were into. A low price point allows me to have them now for the first time. Stabbing Westward, as it’s industrial rock, is in my hands. The Presidents Of The United States Of America? Yes. They wrote that song about peaches so that’s valid. Why not get The Stooges first album with a second disc of live material? And being I have their second album, why not get the first from The Specials? It’s one of the very select few ska bands I’ll allow in my collection. None of that too-important elitist third-wave carnival music. I don’t think I have Phil Collins’ But Seriously, and he was someone I listened to feverishly during my Nintendo youth. And Richard Marx? None of you know who he is and if you did you wouldn’t dare mention his name. But I will. My ma’ loved him and once had the cassette. So both middle digits flying high to you all.

As M-Ro counted up the tab, I look to my right and there it was: a Sony Watchman. It’s the third one in two months I seen. My interest in them started when during my Saturday shift, one of my favorite customers, a young 20-ish redhead with glasses asked me for a power bank. On my way of showing them to her, she mentioned about buying some more accessories for her Watchman. I’m not much of a movie person so that kind of flew over me until she showed me an actual Sony Watchman handheld TV. She took it out of the box and turned it on for me. I almost dropped dead in front of her. I read about these things all the time but never saw one in the wild. Now here it was. She recently bought one at Savers for only $4.00 and bought an analog-to-digital converter from us to try and stream it to her flat-screen TV. She even went a step further and told me the manufacture date on it: 1985. The fact that it was her holding obsolete antiquated technology in her hands and was still in working condition made my entire month for me. I told this story to my friends at the radio station and our resident fantasy aficionado Captain Phil offered to send me one from his eBay store, which I’m now a proud owner. Pickle Island had a larger unit sitting on its counter showing a random movie and I’m wondering if some talking head, celebrity, influencer, or magic cartoon kangaroo on Instagram recently touted them for everyone to grab.

This one-and-done expedition was just as quick as when I visited Rosie’s Vintage three years ago, but not the least expensive. $62.00 later, I was the proud owner of a piece of M-Ro’s life. Not a gift, but a purchase. Being Pickle Island is not a legitimate music store by any means, it doesn’t count towards my record-store victory tour. I thanked M-Ro profusely for my patronage and told him to stay in touch which he would. It’s now time to reverse the drive home under partly cloudy blue skies with a playlist of past Springtime discoveries as the evening’s soundtrack. I’ll get to experience the harbor one more time and get an idea of where to take a scenic shoot in the near future. I’m not taking the L.I.E. this time as it’s cramped with traffic but this time the Northern State to Rt. 25, Rt. 345, and Rt. 454 all the way through. I’ll log on to social media for all of my friends and allies at WUSB to hear about because I never shut up about what I bought. I need the assurance and affirmation from everyone which I bought with my money today and, so far so good, it’s favorable. Then I see this posted under my purchase:

“You’re lucky I left some stuff for you.” said his brother J-Ro.

You don’t say! I had no idea some of his collection was mixed in for sale with his brother’s. So which ones, exactly? Unlike his offering, the stuff I left for him from my collection was totally free and not out of pocket. Take that to the bank and cash it in.

Repercussions, The: Don’t Fear…

Stabbing Westward: Wither Blister Burn + Peel

Stooges, The: self-titled

Veruca Salt: American Thighs

Phil Collins: But Seriously

Faith No More: Songs To Make Love To

Lacuna Coil: Karmacode

Richard Marx: Repeat Offender

Posies, The: Frosting On The Beater

Specials, The: self-titled

Presidents Of The United States Of America, The: self-titled

Raveonettes, The: Whip It On

Faith No More: Angel Dust

Repercussions, The: Modern Sounds

[savage-kult-of-gorthaur]

"THE KIDS ARE GONNA LOVE THIS ONE," -- "IT'S GOT HAND CLAPS IN IT!"

PIC INFO: Spotlight on American garage rock/proto-punk band THE STOOGES in the middle of recording sessions for "The Stooges" (probably in the middle of "No Fun" right here), The Hit Factory, NYC, c. April 1969. 📸: Glen Craig.

^Or does there happen to be another track on their self-titled debut LP that also features prominent hand-clapping?

Rock in Peace, Dave, Scott, & Ron of the original Stooges line-up -- God rest them all.

Sources: www.lissgallery.com/glen-craig-iggy-pop & www.pinterest.com/pin/70509550407948090.

[misguidedmartyr]

Iggy and Percy

[dustedmagazine]

CIVIC — New Vietnam & Singles (ATO)

Where to start with CIVIC? The Melbourne fivesome made its inroads outside Australia early in 2023 with a second album, Taken by Force. Produced by Rob Younger of Radio Birdman and, not coincidentally, brought out the band’s hard proto-punk surf sound in a clean, clear way. Yet if you want to really understand the primitive force of this hard-knocking, straight-up rock ‘n roll band, maybe you go back to the beginning, round about 2018, when, fresh out of the woodshed, they produced New Vietnam, their earliest EP, and a string of singles.

This reissue from ATO is the first look for most of us at CIVIC’s undiluted Aussie punk fury. Rough throated Jim McCullough is a dead ringer for the Saints’ Chris Bailey in battering proto-punk assaults like “New Vietnam” and doomed romantic epics like “Street Machine Dream.” That original line-up had only one guitarist, but Lewis Hodgson takes up space for two or three, ratcheting up tension with tight, fast, disciplined strumming, then blowing it up with unhinged solos. Gutty bass cadences anchor the chaos—that’s Roland Hvlaka holding down the maelstrom in “Call the Doctor” and the drums bang hard, without frills, brutal but never boring.

This reissue splits right down the middle, the first seven tracks from the debut EP, the backside an assortment of roughly contemporary material, including four from the later-in-2018 EP Those Who Know, two from the Selling, Sucking, Blackmail, Bribes single and one live version of “New Vietnam” recorded for PBS in 2018. Thirteen of the tracks are originals; the lone cover is a faithful but wall-shaking take of Brian Eno’s “Needle in the Camel’s Eye.”

This earlier material is both heavy and fast. You don’t think of sludge going this hard, but here on cuts like “Nuclear Son” and, especially, “New Vietnam,” the band pursues punk speed through a hard rock murk, held together by relentless drumming and sheer force of will. These couple of tracks are, perhaps, the most Stooge-like of the bunch, but a Motor City diesel haze hangs over the whole endeavor.

Birdman is another clear influence, especially on “Satellites,” with its clear, flaring guitars and arena-sized, not-quite-sung rhythmic chants. “What a time to be alive,” indeed. And the palm-muted, wrecked lyricism of “Street Machine Dream” taps directly into the Saints at their most epic, “This Perfect Day,” for one.  

You can hear this band taking shape even within the limited time frame that this disc covers. “Flick the Station,” recorded about six months after “New Vietnam” operates on a larger scale than the debut EP, with gigantic power chords and serrated anthemic hooks. “Heat” wallops just as hard but with more melody than the earlier material. Signs of softness? Hardly. “Selling, Sucking, Blackmail, Bribes” howls and crashes and makes no compromises. And the live version of “New Vietnam,” again six months out from the debut, goes right up to off-the-rails but pulls it off, blur speed and unhinged.

No question that CIVIC’s latest album Taken by Force is cleaner and clearer, with a stronger dose of surf rock thrown into a volatile punk-and-hard-rock mix. But these early songs are rough-crusted gems, the fire glinting out of corrosive settings.

Jennifer Kelly

[calicomsicgal]

A headcanon I have about the Stooges were made with their mask like face instead of a normal face was because Cursa didn’t want these to be able to talk. (Notice how the mask only cover the top part of a mouth with no bottom)

[rastronomicals]

The Stooges

[bittercinema]

Stooges Fun House on 8-Track

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Exactly.

Wherever this Chris Christie has been for the last eight years, his re-emergence as a truth-telling ass kicker who isn’t afraid of other politicians is an interesting development in a party wholly defined by its intellectual and moral cowardice. Christie is the only GOP candidate who is not abjectly terrified of Trump and his mob. Every other candidate is terrified — and it shows.

Will the voters listen, or will a man with no regard for our safety, sovereignty, and freedom be given the power to destroy the American republic? Should the republic die, it will be from the neglect of citizens who didn’t care about their own freedom, and more disturbingly, that of their children. The cause of death will be apathy and an absence of love and gratitude.

All around the world there are Americans who are in harm’s way working to protect the United States. They are involved in dangerous and deadly work. It is their lives that Donald Trump was risking so cavalierly. It was also the pilots who would be called on to fly into Iranian or Chinese airspace. It was the submariners who provide the nuclear deterrent. It was the CIA officer in the back alley in a foreign land far from home. Trump betrayed every one of them.

Trump will have his days in court, and like every criminal defendant in the United States, he is presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Yet, the indictment alone is enough as a matter of fact for the entire country to reach a verdict about Trump’s abject disregard, recklessness, and unfitness. More importantly, it provides a last and final opportunity for Republican officials who have been elected and sworn oaths to the US constitution to put the nation first for once, at long last. Why won’t any of them simply say enough already? Again, the diagnosis is plastered on each of their yellowed foreheads: cowardice. Trump is bigger than America to them. They are his stooges, and stooges cannot be patriots. They are the greatest collective disgrace in America’s political history, not counting the Confederacy. Shameful doesn’t begin to describe it.

[Steve Schmidt on Substack]

[omegaplus]

# 4,106

Omega Radio for June 27, 2022; #313.

New York Dolls: "Frankenstein" (original)

Wayne County & The Electric Chairs: "Max's Kansas City"

Dictators, The: "America The Beautiful"

Pure Hell: "American"

Iggy Pop & The Stooges: "1969"

Lou Reed: "Ride Sally Ride" + "Sally Can't Dance"

Cherry Vanilla & Her Staten Island Band: "Shake Your Ashes"

Pere Ubu: "Final Solution"

Johnny Thunders & The Heartbreakers: "It's Not Enough"

Dead Boys: "Not Anymore"

Richard Hell & The Voidoids: "Down At The Rock And Roll Club"

Patti Smith: "Hey Joe" (version)

Bonus broadcast on WUSB’s 45th Anniversary; proto-punk, punk, N.Y.C. legends and locales.

[nauseousthings]

Frostbiter: Wrath of the Wendigo, Tom Chaney (1995)