6 March 2013 (Day 65) – American West Coast Punks

I headed out on another country work trip having already decided to listen to a couple of US West coast punk albums.  By this I mean the scene that solidified around San Francisco and Los Angeles in the late 70s and early 80s.  I seem to remember many critics at the time writing scathing reviews about some of the key albums from this scene but this view has altered over the intervening decades.  The original criticism seemed to regard the West coasters as Johnny come lately's who were trying to ape "true" punk a few years too late and for suspicious reasons.  The revisionist view seems to be that although this might have been true, the scene did develop its own identifiable sound which influenced legions of subsequent musicians including the grungers in Seattle.

The first is an absolute beauty:

(170) Dicks – Kill From The Heart + Hate The Police EP

Although the band was originally from Texas, I regard them as a West coast band for two simple reasons. First, they were based in San Francisco for most of their initial career, but of far more importance was the influence they exerted over the scene.  This is regarded as one of the seminal American hardcore albums of the early 80’s and it was reissued only last year by the Alternative Tentacles label run by Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys. Probably a tad more melodic than the Kennedys, they shared that band’s anti far right wing political stance as evidenced by tracks such as Anti-Klan (Parts 1 & 2), Bourgeois Fascist Pig and Right Wing/White Ring.  Yet the best tracks on this are those which departed for the formula such a scorching cover of Jimi Hendrix’s Purple Haze and the 11 minute Dicks Can’t Swim, the closest thing to a funky jam that you’ll ever hear from a hardcore band. As an added attraction the Hate The Police EP is appended, notable for the title track which was subsequently covered by Mudhoney.

When this album ended, I intended to play a compilation album of similar material.  To my horror I realised that most of the tracks had not been re-imported.  Scrolling through my iPod (yes, I had pulled to the side of the road), I realised that most of the tracks from many of the compilation albums on it had likewise failed to import.  A replacement was required and so I went for an obvious choice:

(171) The Dead Kennedys – Live At The Deaf Club

There are a couple of live DK live albums out there but this one is the best.  It was recorded at the Deaf Club in Washington DC in 1979 before they had released their debut but they had already started to accumulate some of the tracks that were to define them.  There are strong versions here of Kill The Poor, California Uber Alles, Holidays In Cambodia and Police Truck but the undoubted high point is the three song encore of cover versions.  It is kicked off by their take on The Honeycombs 1964 hit Have I The Right before detonating a killer version of The Beatles’ Back In The USSR and Elvis Presley’s Viva Las Vegas.

(172) Flipper – Generic

This is my favourite album from this era and scene.  Flipper, like The Dead Kennedys hailed from San Francisco and specialised in a grungy sound which I suspect was integral to the eventual development of grunge.  After a relatively inauspicious opening trio of tracks, most of the remaining tracks on the album find the band hitting a riff and repeatedly grinding it out to the point of exhaustion, often singing just a key phrase until it totally lost any semblance of meaning.  (I Saw You) Shine, Way Of The World and Life all follow this template but they’re all upstaged by the closer, Sex Bomb.  Not in any way associated with the Tom Jones hit, this is a grungy 8 minute blast set to a demented late/“difficult” period John Coltrane type saxophone against a lyric comprising mostly the repeated phrase “Sex Bomb Baby”.   

(173) The Germs – (MIA): The Complete Anthology

The Germs were spawned out of Los Angeles and were notable for their shambolic live reputation and the antics of their lead “vocalist” Darby Crash who committed suicide the day before John Lennon’s murder.  I’d bought this number of years ago having been assured in a number of books about how influential this band had been.  I couldn’t hear it after listening to this album then and I’m still not sure that I could hear it today.  The only thing that kept me listening was the guitar work of Unplugged era Nirvana and occasional Foo Fighter Pat Smear and even this barely got me over the line.  Sometimes I think that some bands are fondly remembered for the presence more than anything else and I suspect this is probably a classic case.

After dinner, I diagnosed the cause of my iPod problem.  Apparently in doing the re-import I failed to specify the Various Artist compilations.  As a result the only tracks that were imported were those by acts whose individual albums had done so.  I’d like to think of this as learning but I suspect that by the time I need to do it again, iTunes will have changed the procedure again.