A Shitstorm of Anticlimax...

...if you'll allow me to quote Dave Parsons.

The first worthless and uninteresting item up for consideration is Danzig Place in scenic suburban Lakewood, Colorado. I was tooling around aimlessly in the truck one clement autumn afternoon in a godforsaken shithole of suburban puke when what to my wondering eyes should appear, but a most unfortunately yclept thoroughfare (well, tetnically speaking, it's a cul-de-sac)! Danzig Place!

Such was my puerile obsession with this stupid shit that I drove out there three more times after I originally espied the sign because I kept getting really crappy photos at night. Last Friday I finally had to go out there in the daylight to really capture its green reflective splendor. Naturally, I wondered aloud how many residents along this road had any idea how hilarious their street name is? And who among us could help but want to yelp a flurry of Danzig lyrics out the window as he drove down this shrine to modern urbanism? "Am I demon?

Need to know!!!" was the one I favored this day. Or "Not of this world! And nothing bites like I do!"

Yeah, it's real easy for me to sit up here in my ivory tower and make fun of Danzig lyrics, but the only reason I'm able to do so is on account of I bought into the Danzig mythos big time back during my senior year in high school. Please bear in mind that being a Danzig fan in '89 was in no way as gay as it would be today. Back then he was fresh out of Samhain, and Misfits collector mania had just begun. That first Danzig record isn't really that horrible of an album, but the lyrics sure are funny.

I had the distinct pleasure of seeing Danzig live in July of 1990. We were on a family trip to Los Angeles and me and my sister were both really into Soundgarden at the time (also a much less absurd pursuit then than now). We found out that Soundgarbage was playing at the Santa Monica Civic Center and we went to the show. Corrosion of Conformity opened and Danzig played second. It was fucking hilarious, y'all! First off, let me state that the drummer Chuck Biscuits was atop a 30-foot cow skull with glowing purple eyes. Evil! Then the band fired up, and Glenn Danzig, that little five-foot-two avatar of the occult, came storming out, ripped off his shirt and started hi-fiving everyone in the front row. It was just really funny. Kinda cute in a way, too, wouldn't you say? It's a little like cajoling a midget shriner to start growling at you just for kicks. Aarrrrrr! You're a mean little guy, aren'tcha?

Aarrrrrr!

Ah, but I divest. A person can only wring so much mocking humor out of a street called Danzig Place. It's really not all that funny, but there's really not much else going on.

Uh, let's see... I went to the Denver Record Collector's Expo the other day; that was pretty rad. Lots of record nerds there. In fact, at the door I told the ticket-taker that I was "here for the record nerd convention." He didn't think that was funny. Here's what that looked like.

Did I buy anything? No. Well, I damn near bought a Meat Puppets bootleg from New Zealand, but I'm taking a good, hard look at my personal spending habits lately so I thought better of it. Plus, if you have three or four Meat Puppets bootlegs, that's really all you need.Oh, but I did see an Everyday Sinners single there! And since it was silkscreened by hand, I was able to remark, "I am touching a record that WantageUSA impresario JD Vanek himself touched at one point!" Unless maybe one of his assistants did that particular record.

Also, you may have noticed that I've begun to boldface the first occurrence of band names. That makes it so you can just skim over all the horseshit and read about your favorite bands.

Also this week I inducted Don Caballero and Unwound into my all-time favorite bands roster, joining the likes of Schlong and other such luminaries from time immemorial. There's no hard-coded criteria for becoming one of my all-time favorite bands, but I suppose there probably should be. Maybe you should come over some time and help me figure it out.

I've been into Don Caballero for a couple-three years now, but only recently have they been kicking my ass so conclusively.

And I recently came across an mp3 version of an entire live set (you too can come across it here), and was astounded to learn that their songs are written and composed! I always thought it was purely improvised.

I've seen Don Caballero twice and both times about had my mind wrecked. Seriously, it is hard to keep your balance when you watch them, so disorienting is the sonic maelstrom. And then the guitar player here...

(whom you might recognize from his cameo in the movie 'Hi Fidelity' [co-starring the hottest actress to ever walk the earth, Ms. Iben Hjelje]) chews gum really emphatically and looks like such a spazz when he's playing. Damon Che, the drummer, plays in his boxer shorts and I think we all caught a glimpse of his beanie-weenie that night, much to our disgust. But it is undoubtedly a treat to watch that guy play drums. Did you know that he beats those fuckers so hard that he has to nail the drums to the stage? And the bass player... they may as well not have had a bass player at all 'cause I sure as shit couldn't hear him. And you can barely hear him on the records either unless he's the only one playing.

And then Unwound, I've fawned over them in these chambers many times before. Ever since I saw them live my appreciation for them has been greatly expanded. Too bad their new record is such a poozer.

So for Unwound and Don Caballero to enter the list, I had to drop the hammer on two bands, and this time the victims are X and PopDefect. No need to panic, ass-butt; they're still all-time favorites, they just fell off the top 25 list like a dried booger off your dashboard. Fu Manchu may be the next to go if they keep insisting on putting out progressively shitty albums. The Meat Puppets keep putting out progressively shitty albums too, but the canon of their work is enough to sustain them into perpetuity, plus the fact that they date back to 1979 for fuck's sake!

Other changes: Dinosaur Jr. climbed up two notches; Schlong dropped from #14 to #20 and may soon fall off the list also, like the metaphorical booger mentioned above, but are being granted clemency for now because of the flamenco work on some of their records. Swingin' Neckbreakers moved up a bit, causing NoMeansNo to tumble to #8. Guided by Voices is (are?) a possible candidate for future induction ceremonies, as is (are?) Man or Astroman. Untamed Youth would be a good candidate, but they only got one or two records, so that kinda makes it difficult to toss out some weighty statement like "all-time favorite band" with such blatant disregard for the august traditions of rock and roll taxonomy. With the release of their new live album, ALL could potentially take the place of Black Flag for that coveted #5 slot, but in light of the fact that I view Black Flag as sort of a historical antecedent to ALL, somehow that would be inherently wrong. Which of course begs the question of why the fuck ALL ranks higher than the Descendents, since ALL essentially is the Descendents... Well folks, I don't invent this shit, I just document it, okay?

So I guess the top 25 list as it stands now is (stars denote how many times I've seen them live) (italics indicate band is still active):

1. Minutemen
2. Meat Puppets**
3. fIREHOSE*
4. Monks of Doom
5. Black Flag
6. Swingin' Neckbreakers
7. ALL***
8. NoMeansNo***
9. Victims Family*
10. Bad Brains** (activity in question)
11. Husker Du
12. Dinosaur Jr.
13. House of Large Sizes**
14. Descendents
15. The Figgs**
16. Nels Cline Trio
17. Fu Manchu
18. Tar Babies
19. Don Caballero
20. Schlong****
21. Mudhoney (do reunion tours count as active?)*
22. Jesus Lizard
23. Unwound*
24. Dead Kennedys
25. Poster Children*

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Here's a couple morsels of rock gossip if anyone's interested:

Item! I was leafing through the new Kurt Cobain biography "Heavier Than Heaven" (in the interest of science, you understand) (fuck, could they possibly have come up with a stupider, more cloying name for the book?) at Borders the other night, and it is revealed that Buzz Osbourne of Melvins fame has a real first name! And it ain't Buzz! It's... get this... Roger!

Mmmmbwahahaha!!!! Roger!

Fans of rock arcana will be delighted to learn that my buddy Rusty once assembled an exhibit of bizarre relics from punk rock luminaries that includes one of Roger "Buzz" Osbourne's pubic hairs!

Item! According to my latest research, Don Caballero has indeed broken up, but I guess Damon Che has a new band called Bellini.

And they apparently have a lead singer, which is weird because I wouldn't think that Damon Che would want to share the limelight with anyone else, if his behavior during the two times I've seen him play is any indication.

Item! I have learned from the 'Lifestyles' section of today's Denver Post, of all sources, that there is a "25th Anniversary of Punk" tour afoot and that it features Marky Ramone, Jerry Only from the Misfits, and Dez Cadena and Robo from Black Flag. And a better assemblage of inept has-beens I cannot imagine. Well, Marky and Jerry Only anyway. I got no beef w/ Dez Cadena aside from the fact that his shitty DC3 records have been stenching up my record collection for some time now. And Robo, a guy who has the distinction of being deported back to Colombia during a Black Flag tour of the UK, should know better than to participate in monkeyshines such as this! And if you look at this photo, he doesn't look all too thrilled to be there.

But in any case, I beg of you people not to encourage these geezers by going to this display of bullshit sentimentality. Well, you can go if you want, but for God's sake, don't actually pay to get in! I haven't felt this crestfallen since I found out that Mike Watt was participating in the Punk Rock Karaoke Tour a couple years back.

I predict next year there'll be a "17th Anniversary of East Bay Apolitical Hardcore With Particular Regard for Styles Which Revive Aesthetics Thought To Be Originated in 1977 But Excluding Bands Mentioned in Cometbus Or Which Included Jeff Ott of Crimpshrine". Now I might go to that one.

Treasures From the Photo Trove

This is a little slice of genius right here. I can't remember where the hell I came across this, but I used it for a flyer for our Fu Manchu cover band a couple years back. I'm gonna go ahead and aver for the record that this photo manipulation is one of the ten coolest things I've ever seen in my life.

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Here's a pretty cool article about the history of SST Records. It's a MS-Word file, which you can download by right-clicking the picture above and hitting 'Save As...' or something similar.

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This is kind of an interesting project. This guy has collected data from folks nationwide as to whether the EXIT signs in their town are lit up red or green. Whoa! Anyway, here's the results of his research. Pretty interesting, no?

The details of the project are here:

http://oxhouse.org/~brent/etc/exit/

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Sarah Schmid! Sarah Schmid! The former Missoula Independent reporter and current Lansing State Journal scriberess is perhaps my most favoritest non-girlfriend girl in the world. This chick can talk shit, swill beer, and fire a potato cannon, all in the space of a day, and all while hideously hungover. And then get up the next day and write a hell of a newspaper article! And her sister's a food scientist! And her dad's a dentist!

Asstrap

The Sweatholes

Captain Curtains (as in beef)

Jack Stack
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CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

Hello. Do your everyday conversations lack vigor and elan? I'm sure they do. Your problem is not uncommon. What 99% of today's conversational dyads lack is the presence of colorful and colloquial similies such as:

"Dang, it's hotter than two rats fucking in a wool sock."

I feel that this would be an invaluable resource for the avid conversationalist and language lover alike. They can be as abstract as you please; in fact the more so, the better. The best ones use alternate meanings of a word, as in, "My dick was harder than a Mexican math test," where two different meanings of the word "hard" are referenced. Also appreciated are non-sensical ones, such as, "Man, I'm hungrier than a goat at a baby shower." See what I'm getting at here?

They can either be expressions you've made up during one of your periodic PCP deliria or ones that already exist, although I think we've all heard just about enough of "colder than a witch's tit."

As per usual, send your submissions to yalestar@yahoo.com and if they get used (and they will), uh... you'll get to feel great about yourself for a couple days.

Collection of Colloquial Similes:

Shit, don't everybody send 'em at once! I don't know if I'll have time this month to get to all ONE of the contributions I've gotten. But here it is, from Mr. Chris LaTray of Lazerwolfs fame and fortune.

"Sweating like a monkey fucking a football"

...and one I just now came up with:

"Lonelier than a dildo at a dime store"

Then this past week, my old friend and former Jay's Upstairs bartendrix Happenin' Holly LaPorte sent in a couple colloquialisms that her dad laid on her recently:

"I can't talk right now, I'm busier than a cat covering shit in a litter box."

and this one I really dig: he was trying to explain something to someone, and he was pretty sure that she wasn't getting it, but "her head was nodding like a turd in a punch bowl."

Everything I Know About Racial Stereotypes I Learned From Hippies

When I was 13 I got a job as a dishwasher at a local ice cream store called Goldsmith's. I started the job on the last day of my seventh grade year and my wage was $1.50/hr cash, God's honest truth!

One night I was complaining about how the owner Dick Goldsmith was such a tightwad. Needless to say, some knee-jerk college freshman girl took me out back and gave me a big lecture about how wrong it was to make ethnic generalizations and what a mean, stupid little boy I was. Fuck, I had never even heard that stereotype! I didn't even know he was Jewish! I was just bitter about making less than half of the minimum wage, and I didn't care if he was a Pakistani quadriplegic pagan pedophile!

Then in high school, our history teacher, a bitter, man-hating wretch of a woman who fancied herself as having profited spiritually from The Burnin' Sixties but ascribed her pitiful lot in life to her alcoholic father almost daily, took the entire period on the first day of class to tell us about how she would not tolerate any racial typecasting, and went on to pretty much list them all for us. The one that stands out in my memory is about how all the Asian students drive really nice cars.

They do? I had never noticed that in the slightest. Is that even a stereotype at all, or was this some thinly veiled bigoted venting she was performing?

See kids, the lesson here is that oftentimes, the people making the biggest stink about sacred liberal issues are often the ones who perpetuate them the most.

On my tombstone, I want it to read, "Everything I know about racism, I learned from hippies."

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All- Live Plus One

Why yes, this is the long-awaited live ALL album, and yes, I was at this show. You can read all about that adventure HERE. And this album is a dream come true, too.

For one thing, the sound is fucking unbelievably good (unlike the previous live ALL record, 1989's Trailblazer, which is widely considered to be a turd by most accounts, but which I dig, and dig frequently)!

You know, about five or so years ago, among my cohort of punk rock enthusiasts at least, the fact that a band was on the Epitaph label was enough to banish them from the scene. Because at that time, the Epitaph was a) making money hand over fist, which is a no-no among dogmatic punkers, and b) had a roster that seemed to include bands that sounded exactly alike, i.e. exactly like NOFX. Just really crappy generic hardcore with drummers that use double-kick pedals and play what I call "cheater's drums," wherein the lazy drummer plays fourths on the hi-hat when he should be playing eighths. It sounds trivial, but playing lazy on the hi-hat can noticeably detract from a song's momentum. And the reason drummers of some of these latter-day bands do this is because they make the songs way faster than they really need to be. Because that's what simpletons think punk rock is supposed to sound like. Real scholars of punk rock know that there was a brief period in the early 80s where it was considered cool to have the fastest possible songs, which led to a spate of crappy-ass albums (see also D.R.I).

Where the hell was I going with this? I forgot. Oh, right, Epitaph bands. So it was not cool to dig Epitaph bands as recently as about 1997.

But now ALL's on Epitaph and I feel as though I must have grown up a bit, because that fact doesn't bother me at all. I'm not worried about some annoying gutter punk coming over to my house for an after-hours party and seeing an Epitaph band in my record collection and wanting to argue with me about it all night. You laugh, but for me in the mid-90s, this concern was very, very real!

The only thing bothering me is that ALL has their own label called Owned and Operated, so why the hell aren't they on that label? My guess is that Epitaph offers them better distribution so that they can afford to make a living off of being in ALL, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that in my book. If you gave me the choice of having a mediocre ALL where the members all had to work at Quizno's an having an outstanding ALL where the members can dedicate a great deal of time to fine-tuning their shit, I'll take the latter, fucker. Plus, those guys are probably pushing 40, and nothing is sadder than seeing a 40-year-old working at Quizno's.

For the uninitiated, ALL is comprised of 3/4 of the Descendents, one of the all-time greatest pop-punk bands. When Milo of the Descendents went off to graduate school (he's now a post-doctoral fellow in biochemistry at the U of Wisconsin!), the rest of the band kept going as ALL. No, they're not named after the detergent you crazy fucker! "All" is their quest for "the total extent." And coffee plays a big role in the band's aesthetic as well, and it is painfully obvious. The shit is hyperactive and fully realized! And ALL is anything but generic pop-punk. Lots of weird chords and fucked-up beats and bizarre guitar sounds, but they manage to layer real sweet vocal melodies and harmonies on top of this.

And the drummer Bill Stevenson is my second favorite drummer of all time, right after George Hurley of the Minutemen. Bill is a powerhouse drummer, but he puts all these tasty little flourishes all over the place to make the songs that much more interesting to behold. Bill also held the drum throne in Black Flag for quite a while, maybe like 1983 to '85 or so (a long time in Black Flag years). That's him on the "Live '84" album, and he's also on "Slip It In" and "My War". He's got an extremely distinctive drum style; very hyper, very caffienated. He also writes a good majority of ALL's songs, which is a complete mindblow considering how complex and convoluted some of them are. So I really think Bill Stevenson's the shit. Which is why I got all fluttery when I saw him hanging out in the bar before the show.

Oh, I almost forgot! When you buy this live ALL disc, you get a live Descendents disc along with it. I felt like I'd gone to heaven when I discovered this, 'cause the Descendents disc is awful good. Awful good. Except the last two seconds of every song is cut off for some reason. Stoners behind the board is my guess.

HIDE