Mystery Songs- Please Help!
MYSTERY SONG #1 SOLVED!
NO TREND "TEEN LOVE"
Is Mystery Song #1 by the Crap Detectors? You tell me
About 15 years ago, before the BTX reissue of it came out, someone taped me the then-super rare Crap Detectors Victims of The Media LP. But on that cassette, just before that LP started, was the below unlabeled song and I have never known- or taken the time to figure out- what the heck the name of this song was or who did it. It's a pretty good, post-punky, depressing track with some hypnotic guitar noise. The long tale told during the song climaxes with a car crash. Most of the lyrics lot are voiced-over and are not even sung at all. It's about 6:30 in length, which is well past the attention span of those of us who are used to and prefer songs under 2:36, but it moves along nicely. It could well be a mid-to-late 80's song by the Crap Detectors but I have not taken the time to listen to anything past their first LP from 1980 so I am not familiar with most things they did. It is "Teen Love" by No Trend- thanks for solving this mystery, Bruce!So I thought, why not post it to the blog and see if any of you sleuths out there can tell me who this is and any other details about the song (what record it's from, year, etc). The people who regularly visit the site are an intelligent and well-rounded lot of folks with a deep knowledge of KBD-ish obscurities based on the fact that you all have helped eliminate very rare stuff off of my want list over the years (and especially this past Summer- thanks again!).
Give it a listen, and post a comment and help me out if you can with any info. Thanks in advance.
Mystery Song #1 No Trend- Teen Love
MYSTERY SONG #2
This great comp is the home of Mystery Song #2
While we're on the subject of mystery tracks, in very late 2001 Chuck Warner put out a great CD-R comp called Stragglers #1 that gathered together tracks that were added on to revised editions of his H2D-related comp series (H2D, Homework, Messthetics and Teenline). As a bonus, though, were some tracks NOT on any of his other great alphabetically-arranged volumes from various series. One of these tracks was the Ducky Boys ' supremely thuggy "Mercenary"- blown away was me! It was supposed to be on a planned "Letter D" volume of HypedToDeath (#71, perhaps?) but the big lawsuit happened a year later in 2003 and that kinda put an end to the initital incarnation of Chuck's label. The Stragglers #1 comp also introduced me to Nick Pagan, as "You Are Nothing" was included, and it was another standout track. I digress; to my point- Stragglers had a mystery track from an unlabeled cassette that he unearthed in a trash can at Boston’s legendary Rat club in the early 80's. It's a great catchy, melodic-yet-driving song, and I wonder if 10 years later, now that a large amount of musical knowledge has been shared over the information superhighway, if anyone now knows who the hell it is. Again, any info would be appreciated on this song too- thanks.
Mystery Song2 ("Keep Thinking of You"??) (From Stragglers #1 comp CD-R)
And here's Chuck Warner's original liner notes about this song:
Regarding mystery song #1: The reason this is a mystery song is because I recorded a cassette for you years ago mistakenly listing this as a song from the first Crap Detectors LP! It had been mis-labeled on a cassette someone else made for me, but then I realized it wasn't matching any of the CD's songs from that LP. It drove me crazy for a long time until I finally found out that it was "Teen Love" from the first No Trend EP, 1983. Great song!
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Thanks for solving the mystery, Bruce! I will revise this posting when I get a chance.
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Thank you for the Johnny's EP. I give the first track 10/10. The other two I hear as punk-chorded codas-it works as one big piece. I've got it on replay and I'll try to write about ti
Thought N.Z. juvie hall roots punkers (track I've heard is great, I could send it along). Thankfully it's not the Australian cowpunk prettyboys of the same name from the mid-'80s - smug new wavers who figured girls like horses and rock critics hated Reagan. I liked Jason & the Scorchers and a few Aussies dipped their wick same way the Cramps and Gun Club did with their favorites but this album - "Highlights From A Dangerous Life"??? - is track after track of Hoodoo Gurus song "Tojo", reduced to pink and purple playdough while a man who's probably never ridden a bus improves about riding horses in a plummy accent. Worst thing I've heard on the Hot label...Men At Work look like Rose Tattoo by comparison.(They also tried to make the NZ band change their name; ah, the joys of being an "underground" rock star in '86; nobody to care if you suck and being a careerist prick is expected and even admired).
I wrote a longer review to put on my long-neglected blog; I'll let you know if you wanna check it out.
NZ Johnnies are a good scrubby punk band but these L.A. Johnny's are going down in history. I think I mentioned Strychnine not only sound like I wish Crucified sounded, but are that rare bird OOZING KBD. I slipped them into the Slugs spot on KBD #1 and to my ears midwest sleaze rock toasting serial killers trumps glitter dum-dum toasting some bedwetting spitballer. I love the Slugs, but roaring guitars aside I think professional glam/pop/punk is too crowd-pleasing, and KBD are just begging to be misunderstood by somebody.
Johnny's - I think almost everyone would agree - is more punk than Strychnine, but at the same time, it's basically art punk. Devo's version of "Secret Agent Man" might've been the inspiration; the opening made me expect a retro joke-wave romp like Suburban Lawns. First stroke of genius - the key drops and the familiar spy jangle turns genuinely menacing. When the drums kick in all hopes of an easy laugh at '50s tropes vanish. Keyboard on paper might dissuade puritans; but it's mixed/played I'm reminded of paranoid '60s acid garage rather than Depeche Mode. Enough spy theme remains to convey danger; the words are enigmatic, "It's nothing but a love bash" is all I can gather. Par for the course in punk rock...but after an hour on repeat (25 spins?) I'm hanging on his voice still. Not trying to decipher the story...I'm savoring the sheer determination in his voice. The texture of his voice is calm, but he's moving it with no time to lose. Like James Bond scatting while running to defuse a bomb...the mix of courage and desperation in his voice is sort of the punk rock ideal.
Running out of space. Excited to hear something so unique, puritanical in sound(maybe they recorded at the Happy Squid studio/poolshed?)
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Hey, me again. I'm curious to pay the Johnny's for other people. I'm wondering how to describe it...I guess it's an example of a punk scene band (I'm guessing they were college students, with a few years of pre-punk garage time, but most of all a killer instinct for improv in a punk format. Liked Devo, Ubu, the early Rough Trade, maybe No Wave, maybe even an import copy of "Dragnet"...but really they're closer to the LAFMS scene "pop" bands: Human Hands, Geza X, Monitor ... the Happy Squid scene ... the Screamers, Johanna Went .... they're closer to that than the Subterranean/Thermidor sound, and the Minutemen hadn't really taken off yet. Probably they didn't realize their potential, and went on to other things when the skateboards and billy clubs rolled in. I've been in bands with a bit of improvisation, and a more enigmatic vocal technique, and in a bar it doesn't always get raves, so it's easy to lose faith and switch back to the tried-and-true. Tragedy...or it would be if you hadn't found it and posted it. (I'd be more than happy to do anything I can to track them down/find out more).
SPEAKING OF TRAGEDY...here's the sort of coincidence only dedicated record dudes can appreciate. It was 1998, or thereabouts, and I was listening to this internet radio show called Gift Wrapped Crap. It was a godsend...this was right after my house burned down with all my records...and I was hearing stuff I'd always dreamed of, and more I was just learning about. One day, this stark, very Manchester bassline began winding through hails of beaten guitar strings. Beautiful, but not pretty. A guy started speaking over the groove, like a teenager playing anchorman for a school editing class. He described two high school kids - I imagined some very specific preppie-cum-brownshirt types from my alma mater - but without the usual nastiness. Instead he sounded like an alien sociologist, so detached that when the band simulated their deaths in a car crash I decided it was better taken as a universal warning than
an adolescent kiss-off.
I saw the Crap Detectors, "Victims of the Media" on the playlist and thought, yep, that's exactly the sort of thing those KBD dudes might do if they had a full length to stretch out on.
I bought the album from my friend's store (Discourage here in PDX, you might know it, they did KBD 14). But it was nowhere to be found.
And since No Trend's early stuff was out of print for about five more years, and Joe Carducci described them as wrote Flipper imitators (like Killdozer...I still like Killdozer's first album) I didn't hear it until my friend Tage played it on his college radio show in 2004.
The bassline was still awesome - especially since I knew it was played by the girl from Chalk Circle - and the words were maybe a little more sarcastic than I realized, I still think pretending-to-be-drunk-driving is one big elephant in the MADD room.
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