Tape
Notes: Some SST releases that were only released in cassette tape format were given the catalog code SSTC, such is the case here. Jamcon ’84 is a reissue of the tape produced by Negativland’s own label Seeland.
“So shove it in your gaping cassette cavity and enter this unsuspected underworld of American independence: the world of the jammer.” –Crosley Bendix (a.k.a. Don Joyce}
Format: Tape cassette
Notes: The Executive Producer listed as “Daniel” is Daniel Spector, who served as SST’s General Manager from 1988-1990. “OTR” stands for Olive Tree Records. Cue Recording Studios is still in business in a different location in my hometown of Falls Church, Virginia.
Format: LP
Notes: After Damaged, Loose Nut is my second favorite Black Flag studio album but it’s probably the least visually appealing. I mean look at these colors. They just don’t belong together. And the back cover? The magenta lettering on the burnt orange background is practically illegible.
Loose Nut was recorded in March 1985 during the same sessions that produced Process of Weeding Out and parts of In My Head. According to a press release that Ray Farrell sent out on March 18, 1985, Loose Nut was scheduled to be released on May 14, 1985.
For the first time a Black Flag album featured songs by multiple songwriters. In addition to Ginn, the album included material by Kira Roessler, Bill Stevenson, and a song from ex-member Chuck Dukowski’s days in Würm (though Ginn’s arrangement leaves the original in the dust). Ginn even thanks his old girlfriend Medea for “Bastard in Love.” In my opinion, Loose Nut is the record that best reflect Black Flag behaving like a real band with all of the members contributing creatively to the final product.
Format: 7″ single
Notes: Looks like this single was purchased for the original price of $2.50 at Newbury Comics in Boston, MA, which is fitting because the dead wax reads “LAME GREY TOWN” on Side 1 and “KNOWN FOR ITS SOUND” on Side 2. Boston, Minneapolis, London. Take your pick… The uncredited photographer is Naomi Petersen.
Format: CD
Format: LP
When Paul Hudson aka Joseph I aka H.R. of the mighty Bad Brains set out to record a solo album he didn’t do it in the District of Columbia, but across the Potomac River at a place called Cue Recording Studios in sleepy Falls Church.
Cue started off in 1982 in the basement of Jeff Jeffrey’s parents’ house. Most sites say this was in Falls Church but the studio manager I spoke with yesterday, Dusty Rose, told me it was “just across the line” in Arlington. (In a place as small as Falls Church the boundaries are a constant source of debate; Falls Church High School, for example, isn’t located in the city of Falls Church but in Fairfax County.)
In 1987, Jeffrey leased a space on Park Avenue above a janky knock-off 7-11 called 7 Stars, which was the closest convenience store to Mary Riley Stiles Public Library and the Falls Church Recreation Center in Cherry Hill Park, two places where my siblings and I spent countless hours.
H.R. had a long, strange relationship with SST that I describe in great detail in Corporate Rock Sucks, but Keep Out of Reach (SST 177) and It’s About Luv (SST 179) were originally released by H.R.’s own label Olive Tree Records and subsequently reissued by SST. However, Charge (SST 256) was recorded at Cue for SST. (For more details about the studio’s history, check out the You Don’t Know Mojack podcast Now You Say episode #173 with Jim Ebert, a former engineer with the studio.)
I mentioned to Rose I was writing a book about SST Records and he told me that back in the day some mornings they’d come into the office and there would be long rambling messages from H.R. on the answering machine about his upcoming plans to make a new record or tour Egypt. The only other SST artist who recorded at Cue was Ras Michael who made his record Zion Train (SST 168), not to be confused with Zion Train the band, another H.R. project that put out a record for Olive Tree. The D.C. band Beefeater, who also had an Olive Tree connection, recorded at Cue as well.
We’d popped in unannounced so we didn’t stay long, but in the music store on the ground floor an unusual-looking guitar caught my eye. Is that what I think it is?
No, it’s not a Dan Armstrong but a Fender Strat with an acrylic body. What a strange coincidene that would have been, right?
This post was originally published in sightly different form in two editions of Message from the Underworld: 1 & 2.
Format: 7″ Single
I want to tell you the story of the most famous sea chanty of all. At the heart of this story is a tale of woe about a lovesick sailor. I’m a sucker for nautical misadventure and let’s face it: doomed romance is a staple of the genre, as inevitable as the crusty captain and the fatal storm. But that’s not what this story is about.
This story is about creativity, influence, and theft. It’s the story of rock and roll before we started calling it that. It’s the story of a song called “Louie Louie.” You’ve heard it before, and there’s not a thing you can do to stop me from giving it to you right now.
Do you remember the first time you heard “Louie Louie”? Was it on the dance floor? At the movies? Was it an experience of wild abandon or ironic detachment? Do you know who wrote it or who made it famous?
It’s not important when I heard it. But how and when that happened says something about our relationship to rock and roll, which I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, how challenging it is to put your arms around it when each of us has a different entry point based on when and where we were born.
“Louie Louie” is one of those songs that slinks through the history of American music. It’s indifferent to genre, style, popularity or good taste, illuminating all of rock and roll along the way.
“Louie Louie,” it may surprise you to learn, was born in Anaheim, California, in 1956.
Ricky Rillera and the Rhythm Rockers, a Latin and R&B band led by a pair of Filipino-American brothers, were playing at the Harmony Club Ballroom to a packed house of lowrider aficionados and car club enthusiasts. Richard Berry, a Black singer-songwriter from South Central was in the dressing room, waiting his turn to perform, when he heard the band perform the opening notes to “El Loco Cha Cha Cha” by René Touzet. Berry was spellbound. Listen to the first few notes and you’ll see why:
Berry jotted down some lyrics and quickly cobbled together a song. Though just 21 years old, Berry was already an accomplished songwriter who played with several doo-wop bands. He struck out on his own and the following year Richard Berry and the Pharoahs released “You Are My Sunshine” backed with “Louie Louie.”
Berry jotted down some lyrics and quickly cobbled together a song. Though just 21 years old, Berry was already an accomplished songwriter who played with several doo-wop bands. He struck out on his own and the following year Richard Berry and the Pharoahs released “You Are My Sunshine” backed with “Louie Louie.”
The song was a minor sensation in and around L.A. and was popular enough for Berry and his Pharoahs to play shows up and down the coast. They had a good run, and then it was on to the next song. Always hard up for cash, Berry sold his rights to the song for $750 so he could get married.
And that was that. Or it should have been. In the early ’60s, the song took hold when Rockin’ Robin Roberts & the Wailers added “Louie Louie” to its set after finding Berry’s record in a discount bin in Tacoma, Washington.
The Wailers high-energy version of “Louie Louie” made it a rock and roll song, something most adults still hoped was a fad that would run its course. Ironically, it was “Louie Louie” that breathed new life into the genre. You can hear it at the bridge when Roberts improvises, “Let’s give it to them right now!”
The song was so popular that all the other bands in Tacoma started playing it too, bands like the Bluenotes, the Ventures, and the Sonics. These bands all played “against” each other at dance competitions and battle of the bands, but there was no competition between these rock and roll outcasts. They supported each other and lent each other equipment and played on each other’s records. They were a community.
Sound familiar? The garage rockers of the Northwest were forebears of the ‘90s Seattle rock scene in more ways than one.
You’re probably thinking, “Now wait a minute. I thought the Kingsmen made ‘Louie Louie’ famous?”
They did. How they did it is the most outrageous thing about this story.
After “Louie Louie” spread to every dance hall in the Northwest, a pair of bands recorded the song in the same studio in the same week.
The version recorded by Paul Revere and the Raiders, who had recently relocated to Portland from Idaho, is the better of the two, and by better I mean wilder. This doesn’t really come across in this lip-synced performance in which the band “plays” toy instruments, but you can imagine what this was like in a dance hall packed with a thousand sweating kids jumping all over each other.
The Kingsmen’s version is timid and more tentative. There’s no power in it. No emotion. It’s kids playing a song about things they’ve never experienced.
Paul Revere and the Raiders sold a shit load of records in the Northwest. The Kingsmen sold a few hundred, but someone from the label sent the record to a disc jockey at a radio station in Boston who played it not once but twice on the Worst Record of the Week segment of his show. Callers flooded the phone line, demanding to know how they could get a copy of “Louie Louie” by the Kingsmen.
It didn’t matter that this was the weakest version in the Northwest. The people of Boston had never heard it before and fell under its spell, which is a shame. The song became a hit for a band the least deserving of the fame that came its way. Here’s why.
Before the record broke in Boston, the drummer, the fucking drummer, essentially took over the Kingsmen, announcing he would now be playing the saxophone and singing most of the songs, and those who didn’t like it could go pound sand. The singer, Jack Ely, left. When “Louie Louie” started selling, this presented a problem because the drummer couldn’t sing the song nearly as well as Jack could. So he would lip sync it.
Then something truly weird happened. Some kids started spreading the rumor that the lyrics to “Louie Louie” were obscene. Someone typed up alternate lyrics and these circulated among high schools and college campuses. Eventually, someone ratted “Louie Louie” out to the FBI, and J. Edgar Hoover opened an investigation as to whether the record label was guilty of Intrastate Transport of Obscene Material because of course he did.
Now, there was nothing obscene about “Louie Louie.” It’s perhaps the first time in nautical history a sailor was accused of indecency and was completely innocent. When Richard Berry conceived the song in Anaheim, he had a calypso song in mind: Chuck Berry’s “Havana Moon,” particularly the lyrics performed in pidgin English. (There was a tradition, or at least a fad, of calypso songs beings sung in this manner that Chuck Berry leaned on when he did his version. “Louie Louie” is an endless chain of appropriation.)
Berry, with his rich baritone, carried the lyrics off well. The white teenagers of the Northwest? Not so much.
When the Kingsmen recorded “Louie Louie” Jack Ely was still wearing braces on his teeth, and the mics in the recording studio were positioned at a weird angle, and he was nervous. It was his first time in a studio and he was just a kid.
As a result, aside from “Louie Louie,” which, by the way, is the name of the bartender our sailor is pouring his heart out to, you can’t tell what the hell Ely is saying.
Now it should have been an easy thing for the FBI to solve the mystery of the obscene lyrics. except the FBI didn’t want to solve the mystery. They wanted to prove the lyrics were dirty as a way of throttling this low-down dirty thing called rock and roll. Instead of listening to the half-dozen or so previously recorded versions and making out what the lyrics are supposed to say, they let their imaginations sink into the sewer.
Incredibly, the investigation lasted 30 months, and when it was over, the world was a different place. JFK was assassinated. The British Invasion started. And millions of copies of “Louie Louie” flew off the shelves.
Pick your favorite rock and roll band from the early to mid ’60s—from mild to wild—and chances are they recorded a version of “Louie Louie.” The Beach Boys, Ike & Tina Turner, the MC5.
Inevitably, songwriters began to take the essence of the song’s chord structure and make it their own.
Consider the Kinks “All Day and All of the Night”:
Or, the Troggs “Wild Thing”:
Even Richard Berry reworked “Louie Louie” in his song “Have Love Will Travel,” which the Sonics stomped to smithereens:
As the ’60s gave way to the ’70s “Louie Louie” fell out of style as rock became more complex, more sophisticated, more self-important. A brutally simple song about a drunken sailor wasn’t all that interesting anymore. The payola scandal changed the music business and helped usher in a model of consumption based on albums, not songs—though that trend is reversing.
“Louie Louie” became a song for late at night when the musicians were too drunk or stoned to remember how to play anything else. It wasn’t party rock anymore, it was for when the party was over, or should have been over, but you want to give it to them one last time.
On February 9, 1974, at the Michigan Palace in Detroit, “Louie Louie” was Iggy & the Stooges’ swan song. The last song it performed at its final show. Musically, the song is a fairly faithful rendition, but Iggy changed the lyrics, singing the obscene version of the song that had sent the FBI into a tizzy a decade before. Even after all these years it’s still shockingly lewd:
It’s an ignominious end to an incredible run of three criminally underappreciated studio albums that would influence a generation of punk, hardcore, and post-punk rockers. The performance was released in 1976 as part of Iggy & the Stooges live album Metallic K.O.
A few years later in Hermosa Beach, California, when Black Flag was thinking about adding a cover song to help pad its set because the band’s songs were so short, Keith Morris suggested “Louie Louie” because he liked the version that Iggy sang on Metallic K.O., a record that American punks latched on to as a signifier of weirdo cool and a link to a past worth holding on to when rock and roll didn’t suck.
There isn’t an official version of Keith singing “Louie Louie” but you can hear it on the bootleg recording made by Dave Nolte of the Descendents and the Last during Black Flag’s infamous performance at Polliwog Park in Manhattan Beach on July 22, 1979. Naturally, it’s the last song. (I’m not going to link to it but it’s not too hard to find.)
Black Flag became infamous for closing out its shows with “Louie Louie.” The night Ron Reyes, Morris’ replacement, quit the band and walked off the stage at the Fleetwood in Redondo Beach, Black Flag played “Louie Louie” for an hour, with various members of the crowd taking a turn on the mic while Greg Ginn melted the frets off his plexiglass Dan Armstrong guitar. Promoters learned the hard way not to tell Black Flag they had time for one more song.
Reyes’ replacement, Dez Cadena, recorded his version of the song with Black Flag for Posh Boy Records. There are no sailors in it. No moon. No sea. But it’s still sort of a love song.
Before you check it out, pay close attention to the way it starts with a clatter of drums as it launches into the cursed riff.
Sound familiar? It should.
Maybe you can hear Nirvana’s brothers from the Northwest—the Wailers or the Kingsmen or the Sonics—in Nirvana’s “Louie Louie” but I can’t. I hear Black Flag’s deconstructed version, the ghost of a pop song in the chaos of those howling guitars.
Here’s what Kurt Cobain told Rolling Stone in January of 1994: “’Teen Spirit’ is such a clichéd riff. It was so close to a Boston riff or ‘Louie Louie.’ When I came up with the guitar part, Krist looked at me and said, ‘That is so ridiculous.’ I made the band play it for an hour-and-a-half.”
This story has a happy ending of sorts. Richard Berry who wrote a song about a sailor and sold it for $750 got the rights back to “Louie Louie” in 1986. He was still living in L.A. but was barely able to support himself. He was finally able to make a little money every time someone put his song in a movie or a TV show or a commercial, which happened a lot. He lived very comfortably for another decade and now his estate receives those royalties.
There you have it. One man’s vision of a lonely sailor shook up L.A., rocked the Northwest, and made the country so crazy that its top lawmen tried to puzzle out the words of an imaginary deck seaman. It’s a testament to the power of rock and roll and the feelings it conjures up.
Actually, it’s…
If you enjoyed this story, you might get a kick out of Dave Marsh’s excellent book Louie Louie, where many of these anecdotes come from. The details about Black Flag’s use of the song come from interviews I conducted for Corporate Rock Sucks. I found the Kurt Cobain quote in the book Taking Punk to the Masses: From Nowhere to Nevermind by Jacob McMurray, which I highly recommended.
This post originally appeared in slightly different form in Message from the Underworld.
Format: 2LP
To say that Greg Ginn, founder of Black Flag and SST Records, was interested in instrumental music is an understatement. Toward the end of Black Flag’s run, he started writing instrumental songs and incorporating them into the set. While the record Family Man is famous (or infamous depending on your point of view) for introducing Henry Rollins to the world as a spoken word artist, Side Two was all instrumental. So was the EP The Process of Weeding Out, which many fans interpret as the moment when Mr. Ginn stopped giving a fuck.
During Black Flag’s final ill-fated tour across America in 1986, one of the opening acts was Gone, Ginn’s all instrumental solo project.
Given his passion for instrumental music, it doesn’t seem too far-fetched that Ginn would want to release a compilation of instrumental music, but that doesn’t make it any less unusual. Some of the musicians were already on the label when Ginn came up with the concept, others were suggested to him by other SST employees and subsequently brought into the fold. The result was a double album called No Age.
No Age’s front cover features a photo of an industrial hellscape, but what looks like a bombed out fuel depot is actually a storage tank that was being demolished at the nearby Wilmington refinery. The shot was taken by a photographer who’d done another album cover for the label back in the early ‘80s.
The back cover is a master class in PR. SST employee Michael “Spaceman” Whittaker was given the unenviable task of describing each cut, which was a tough assignment since there aren’t any vocals or lyrics to latch onto. “When there is nothing, anything can happen. Welcome to… No Age” reads the headline at the top of the back cover. One former employee I talked to said that sometimes when Whittaker had a lot of writing to do he would take LSD.
I’m not going to break down the tracks (I’m all out of acid) but let’s take look at the Four Sides:
SIDE ONE
Black Flag, Blind Idiot God, Henry Kaiser, Elliot Sharp, Lee Ranaldo
SIDE TWO
Lawndale, Glenn Phillips, Pell Mell, Paper Bag
SIDE THREE
Scott Colby, Lawndale, Paper Bag, Universal Congress Of, Steve Fisk
SIDE FOUR
Gone, Alter Natives, Elliott Sharp, Frith & Kaiser, Gone
(There’s a second Gone track at the end, though it’s not listed on the album cover. I guess the LSD must have worn off.)
My question is where are the Meat Puppets? What about the Minutemen? Both bands had a couple of great instros. One can make the argument that Ginn wanted to promote bands that were touring, but that would disqualify Black Flag and Pell Mell. Nor was Black Flag solely an instrumental band and Steve Fisk often included vocal tracks in his sound collages.
What’s your favorite side?
This post originally appeared in a slightly different form in Message from the Underworld.
Format: LP
Notes: Greg Prato’s Too High to Die: Meet the Meat Puppets is a confounding book. It attempts to tell the entire story of the Meat Puppets as an oral history, but where Prato’s book leaves it up to the reader to connect the dots and piece together a narrative, the stories themselves are incredible. Too High to Die probably comes closest to being on a tour bus and listening to the band tell stories.
On the tour bus, musicians usually don’t reflect on their past unless prompted by a visiting member from another band or an old friend. That’s when you get the good stuff. Prato interviews not only the band members but their friends and associates as well. I don’t know if this provides a fuller picture, but it certainly is a more entertaining one.
The Meat Puppets are a fascinating band. The Meat Puppets went on the road with Black Flag on the My War Tour to support its second album and lots of people who would go on to form important bands who came to see Black Flag were mesmerized by the Meat Puppets. You could write a thesis on the Meat Puppets’ influence on Nirvana alone.
There’s a long anecdote in the book where Kim Thayil discusses how he logged a lazy description of the Meat Puppets first record as “generic hardcore” at the radio station where he worked. Over time his opinion of the record changed and he realized how wrong he was and how that error haunted him. His early dismissal of the band led to him becoming something of an evangelist.
This is interesting to me as a fan because Meat Puppets are a band that grows on you. I picked up a copy of the first record at Beatbox Records in Barrio Logan. The cover is pretty beat up but the record is pristine. It wasn’t a record I sought out, I’d listened to it a million times on iTunes, but there it was in the bin and I snagged it. Listening to it these past few weeks has changed the way I feel about the record, especially the trippy cover of “Tumblin’ Tumbleweeds.”
It might shock you to know that the song was recorded while the singer was on some form of hallucinogen, but then again it might not. The chapter in Too High to Die about bassist Cris Kirkwood’s heroin addiction is gnarly as hell and the story about how he got shot at the post office is worth the price of admission. (I don’t mean to make light of a shooting, but he brought it on himself, and it ultimately saved his life.)
The book came out in 2012 so someone will have to write the next chapter, including the 2019 release of Dusty Notes, which features the return of original drummer Derrick Bostrom.
When the Do What You Want came out last year, I posted a video where I played the promo flexi that Bad Religion gave away. Some joker commented that I should use some of that Bad Religion money to upgrade my cheap Crosley record player. He had a point. I blew out those cheap, built-in speakers ages ago. So I finally bit the bullet and bought a new wireless turntable. I still need to get some new speakers and a new amp, but I’m happy with the product so far.
The first thing I did is spin some of SST’s early releases. The earliest original pressing I have is SST 009, which is the Meat Puppets debut. The recording of this album is infamously muddy. Both Joe Carducci and Spot talked to me about the recording of the album, and I’m saving those details for the book, but long story short: the Meat Puppets took a bunch of drugs and recorded the album in a way that made it impossible to mix. The drum sounds on the record are so muted it sounds as if Derrick Bostrom is in some distant corner of Unicorn Studios. Hard to believe these guys would be a handful in the studio, right?
That said, I wasn’t expecting Curt Kirkwood’s guitar to come through so clean and clear. It was like hearing the record for the first time. It’s not my favorite Meat Puppets record, but I like it more every time I listen to it.
The album still had the lyric sheet when I bought the record at an actual record store here in San Diego. It’s amazing to me this little artifact of the Kirkwoods’ imagination is still being circulated in the universe.
This post originally appeared in slightly different form in two editions of Message from the Underworld: 1 & 2.
Format: 2LP
There’s a lot to say about Soundgarden’s Ultramega OK, the band’s first studio album and SST debut, but I want to focus on the record.
When Soundgarden signed with SST in 1988 it had recorded several demos of the songs that would end up on UMOK. The sessions were produced by Jack Endino, who recorded an album called Bleach by a little known band called Nirvana. (I have a story about that record that blew my tiny little mind, but you’re going to have to wait for the book.)
SST wanted Soundgarden to record at a 16-track mobile studio called Dogfish that Black Flag had used to record its second live album, Who’s Got the 10 ½? Soundgarden was familiar with the studio; they’d recorded an EP for Sub Pop with Dogfish. Long story short, Soundgarden never liked the final mix and even approached Greg Ginn about remixing it, who gave his approval. But life got in the way. Or, in Soundgarden’s case, rock superstardom.
This week I received a copy in the mail of the remixed and remastered UMOKreleased by Sup Pop in 2017. It’s a gorgeous package with embossed cover, extensive liner notes from guitarist Kim Thayil and Jack Endino, new images, etc. The package is a double album gatefold with a bonus EP that includes remixes of many of the demos that Endino recorded.
I won’t recount how the reissue came to be as that’s covered in the liner notes or how Soundgarden got its record back as that’s covered in the book, but I will say that it was released two months before Chris Cornell died.
Thayil is generous in his notes toward SST but holding the package in my hands and listening to the album, I can’t help but think of it as a lost opportunity for SST. Nothing like it exists in SST’s catalog. No anniversary reissues, no special edition remixes, no boxed sets with bonus material.
Why? Because the owner of SST Records isn’t interested in running his business like a normal record label. To be clear, SST does sell vinyl reissues for many, but not all, of its top selling releases, but much of the catalog isn’t available on vinyl, CD, cassette, or even streaming services. It just sits there and that’s a shame. Although it took almost 30 years to finally make it right, the expanded edition of Ultramega OK is a shining example of a band and an independent record label working together to get it right.