Harmony in My Head #3 06-14-04


01. Black Flag  Revenge: This version is found on the Decline of Western 
Civilization soundtrack. I always thought this was a cool version with Dukowski 
making all that noise before Ron Reyes (Black Flags 2nd vocalist) calls the 
song in. The Decline has some great tracks on it and is worth checking out. 

02. Ramones  Sheena is a Punk Rocker: Live version from Its Alive. I got 
this record in 1979 and have been playing it ever since. I saw them a little 
while after this record came out in a place called Louies Rock City in Falls 
Church VA and it was one of the greatest live music experiences I have ever had. 
What a band. This is a great record.

03. Dead Boys  Sonic Reducer: This was on the Dead Boys album Young Loud and 
Snotty. The version played here is a different mix I found on a CD called 
Punk Legends on Freud records. Its a muddy mix of the song but it sounds cool to 
me. Theres been some cool Dead Boys bootlegs and collector type CDs out in 
the last few years. Its good to see this stuff getting out there. 

04. Germs  Manimal: Classic track off the classic G.I. Slash Records put out 
a great compilation of all the Germs stuff called M.I.A. Its in print, easy 
to find and a great record. If you type the bands name into your search 
engine, youre sure to find information on the band and its amazing singer, the 
late great Darby Crash. 

05. Beasts of Bourbon  Chase the Dragon: The Beasts are from Australia. I 
dont know how easy their records are to find in America or if any of their 
records ever got a domestic release. I got to see them a few times in Australia 
and it was strong stuff. If you check into the Beasts stuff, you will eventually 
be lead to two other discographies, one of the singer, Tex Perkins who has a 
whole slew of records out there under his own name as well as with his other 
outfit The Cruel Sea and the other, that of guitar player Kim Salmon. Kim had a 
band a long time ago called the Scientists and theres no doubt we will be 
playing some tracks off those records and he has a bunch of cool solo records 
out under his own name as well as under Kim Salmon and the Surrealists. 
Definitely will be playing all these bands in the future. I have been lucky enough to 
see Kim and Tex perform in a few of their different versions over the years 
and its a great night out. Oh yeah, Chase the Dragon is off my favorite Beasts 
album The Low Road.

06. National Lampoon Radio Hour  Hollywood Gay Alliance: Thankfully, Rhino 
has released a four CD box set of the best of the National Lampoon Radio Hour 
stuff. Theres a lot of talent on those tracks. A lot of the original Saturday 
Night Live Not ready for Prime Time Players are featured. Some great Bill 
Murray stuff. The box set is a best of and if you want more, you will have to 
chase down the LPs which are not hard to find but usually in pretty bad shape. 

07. Casual Dots  Mommas Gonna Bake Us a Cake: A relatively new release on 
Kill Rock Stars. Really cool record. Three piece. Christina from Slant 6 and 
Quix*o*tic, Autoclave, Kathi from Bikini Kill and Steve from Deep Lust. A lot 
of Dischord Records back history there. Anyway, its a cool record, this is my 
favorite song off it because I think Christinas vocals on this are really 
cool. The whole records cool and so is the Kill Rock Stars label. You can find 
them: killrockstars.com. 

08. Back Randy and the Metro Squad  I Slept in an Arcade. A few great 
singles, a great album called Pass the Dust, I Think Im Bowie and that was it. 
Its all been put on one CD by the same name. Completely amazing. Loner with a 
Boner is one of the best songs ever. 

09. JJ Starr on WOL AM  Roll Call: Washington DC AM radio. I made this tape 
off the air in 1986. I dont know what JJ Starr is up to now but he had a 
really cool show back then and people would call in and leave their names. I tape 
a lot of radio stuff. I was always taken by radio voices. On WETA Public Radio 
in DC when I was a kid, they would sometimes play the old radio shows like 
the Shadow and the Lone Ranger. I have been able to find a lot of that Shadow 
stuff as its been re-issued on CD and tape. I have some more JJ Starr that I wil
l roll in the future. 

10. Eddie and the Subtitles  American Society: A hard-to-find single for 
sure. Eddie and the Subtitles were an SoCal band from the 80s. I never saw them 
but I have the records. Theres two albums and a single. I played the single 
version of American Society which I like better than the version on the 
Skeletons in the Closet version. 

11. Dillinger  Ragnampiza: Originally I heard this at Ian MacKayes house 
in 1983 and I played a CDR of the tape I made of it back then. I have since 
found the single but have never been able to track down the LP Bionic Dread which 
I think it comes from. I have a lot of Dillinger records. I think hes most 
well-known for his album Cocaine in my Brain, which is a great one. I went 
online and did a little searching and found that the very cool Hip-O Records has 
just done a best-of with this version on it so I got it used for four bucks. I 
dont know a great deal about reggae or dub music but I have a small stack of 
stuff that Ian turned me onto over the years. Scientists records on Green 
sleeves are cool, A lot of the CDs on the Blood and Fire label are great like If 
DJ Was Your Trade and King Tabbys Dub Like Dirt. Scientist has one on that 
label called Dub in the Roots Tradition which I like a lot. 

12. Eater  Outside View: Some singles and a great album. Outside View was a 
single. Their records are not the easiest to find on vinyl but Andy Blade, the 
singer has put together a great worth checking out 2CD set called The Eater 
Chronicles which has it all plus some cool demos. Eater were one of the 
original UK punk bands. Andy and I keep in touch now and then. He is working on a 
biography on his days in Eater and I have read a fair chunk of it and its really 
great. Lets hope he gets it done if he hasnt already. 

13. Louis Jordan  Beware: Theres a lot of Louis Jordan out there. This 
track, I have to think its one of his better known sides, I pulled from the 9 CD 
box set of his Decca Recordings on Bear Family called Let the Good Times Roll
. When Miles Davis was on his way up, he often used to rip on black artists he 
considered Uncle Toms. Poor Louis was a big ass target for Miles. Its too 
bad, both are great. Jordan always had good bands and was funny and cool. If you 
like Jordan, you might want to check out the Treniers, good stuff. Well get 
into all that stuff as we go. 

14. Thin Lizzy  Blackmail: Such a cool song, never put on an album, it 
resides on Lizzy bootlegs. Great stuff. From the same session theres also a studio 
version of Are You Ready. I have a feeling well be playing that one as well. 
All the Lizzy records are in print and easy to find. You might want to start 
with the classic Jailbreak album. Listener Paul M wrote in and informed me that this 
song was from Lizzy guitarist Brian Robertson's band, Wild Horses. I just looked it up 
and apparently, the Wild Horses album titled The First Album has the track. Thanks Paul! 

15. Discharge  Its No TV Sketch: All the early Discharge singles and the 
first album are great. I dont have all their records but I remember playing 
with them in 1982 in Canada and they were cool live and seemed like cool people. 
I know at one point, they made a kind of metal record and it wasnt what 
people were expecting and they played New York and the legend is that while the 
band was playing their new music that was not going down well with the audience, 
HR from the Bad Brains ran onstage and tackled the singer guy. I would like to
state here for the record, that I wouldnt like to get tackled by HR. The 
Discharge stuff is on Clay Records. Thank you. 

16. The Hoods  Jacko: From a great hard-to-find CD called The Hoods. I think 
its one guy, sounds like one guy. His calls as Michael Jackson are great as 
well as his character, a pimp named Comfort. 

17. Alan Vega  Hammered: Alan Vega is one half of the great NYC band 
Suicide. Hes been making great records since he started. In the early 90s I got in 
touch with him after hearing some of his solo work, in particularly Deuce 
Avenue. His solo records were not available in the USA and I thought they should 
be. I also thought we should do some kind of lyric/art book with him. I 
tracked him down and we got to work. Eventually we got a lot of his solo stuff 
released in America on a label I had on Warner Bros. called Infinite Zero. The 
titles we put out were: New Raceion, Power on to Zero Hour, Deuce Avenue, Jukebox 
Babe and Collision Drive. My publishing company also released Cripple Nation, 
a collection of Alans writing and art. Its all really cool. After all that 
came out, we released two more Alan things. One, the great Dujang Prang, which 
Hammered comes from and a record he did with Ben Vaughn and Alex Chilton 
called Cubist Blues. Alan is one of the great ones. You can find all this stuff 
cheap online. 

18. Ween  The Mollusk: from 1997s album The Mollusk. Should have won every 
possible award from Andrew Weisss production to the lyrics and tunes. How 
much better does a record have to be? Their new album is called Quebec and I am 
sure well be playing more Ween. By the way, a great live band. 

19. Einsturzende Neubauten  Tanz Debil: This track is from their first album 
called Kollaps. I think I got it on cassette when I was in Germany in 1984. 
The band, from Germany, has been around a long time and has put out a lot of 
records. My favorites are the first three: Kollaps, Drawings of Outpatient OT 
and Halber Mensch. The rest are cool but these three are pretty insane. I have 
seen them live and played shows with them and they were amazing live. The fist 
time I saw them was in summer 1984. They played Perkins Palace in Pasadena CA. 
During one song, they lit fire to the stage and the whole place cleared out. 
Fire marshals came in, it was a mess. 

20. Blind Willie McTell  This is Not the Stove to Brown Your Bread: Theres 
a lot of Blind Willie comp. records around but when available, I always get 
the releases on the European label Document. They are very thorough and for 
some, it may be more than you need of any one artist. For instance, Rounder 
records, a fine label put out several CDs of Leadbellys Library of Congress 
recordings. Its a lot of stuff. Document put out almost ten CDs of the stuff 
Rounder didnt. Its like that. Anyway, the Blind Willie cut we played, I dont 
think thats Blind Willie singing, I think hes just playing the guitar but in 
an case, I found it on the Document CD Blind Willie McTell Vol. 1 1927-1931. 
McTell was a great, clean 12-string player and worth researching and checking 
out. http://bluesnet.hub.org/readings/mctell.html provides some cool info. 

21. Captain Beefheart  Sue Egypt: This is off Doc at the Radar Station from 
1980. This album, Spotlight Kid and Trout Mask Replica are the Beefheart 
records I visit the most often. I dont think this ones in print in America at 
the moment. Worth checking out. I am not skilled enough to write about 
Beefheart. Hes like Miles or Duke Ellington. Hes his own genre and is completely 
without peer. If you find yourself interested in this track, I would go online 
and search out information as Im sure theres some dedicated sites on the man. 

22. Betty Davis  He Was a Big Freak: From the 1974 album They Say Im 
Different. Not available domestically. She gets the last name from being married to 
Miles. They Say and Nasty Gal are the ones to find. Theyre not cheap but 
theyre really good. I was told that He Was a Big Freak was written about Miles. 

23. The Lurkers  Cyanide: This song is from the bands 2nd album Gods 
Lonely Men. I have been into this band for about twenty-five years now. They had a 
line-up change at one point and lost their singer Howard Wall. I bought a 
couple of the singles after he left but couldnt get them. They did a lot of 
singles and two great albums with Howard Wall. Fulham Fallout is the first one. 
Captain Oi, a really cool label in England has put out both albums on CD with 
all the singles and demos. You get these two and the BBC Sessions CD and youve 
got all the stuff by the classic line-up. I still listen to these guys all the 
time. 

24. Pailhead  I Will Refuse: I dont know much about this. I know that Ian 
MacKaye and Al Jorgensen got together and did some songs. I dont know how it 
came together or whose idea it was. Ian told me a long time ago and cant 
remember now. Its been a long time since I played Pailheads Trait CD. I have to 
think its in print. I checked on Amazon and it seems to be. A cool record. 
It was cool to hear it again. 

25. Bo Diddley  Say Man: This is off the Chess Best of CD. Dukowski used to 
play this now and again I think. I like that guitar sound on this track. Bo 
has done a lot of work and I have a lot of the records but the Best of is the 
one I always go to when I need to hear the man. How many bands have copped that 
beat. Busted! 
