Social Distortion: Girls, Cars and Loud Guitars

Social Distortion's first album, 1983's Mommy's Little Monster, is a stone-punk-classic but their self-titled major label debut* from 1990 is the better still. By better, I mean while Mommy's Little Monster is, in style, words and music, inextricably linked to 1983 those songs from Social Distortion sound gloriously unstuck in time, as if beamed in from a radio station from a better world.

In-between the mid-eighties major labels scooping up (and subsequent destroying of) Husker Du and The Replacements and The Grunge Frenzy 0f '92 Social D. quietly signed with the big boys at CBS and had a modest hit with "Story of My Life", one of the best singles of the decade. While the lyrics and the melody boast a country simplicity, the execution smacks of punk aggression; it's like Buck Owens and His Clasheroos. It's also that singular kind of song that you'd give days off of your own life just to have been at practice when the author came into the grubby rehearsal room, acoustic guitar in hand, and said, "Okay guys, listen to this new song".

* In-between these two lies Prison Bound which starts of with one of their defining tracks ever but is otherwise not in the in the running for best-Social D. album.

Girls, Cars and Loud Guitars is a bootleg collection of B-sides, live tracks and outtakes from the early nineties that is crucial primarily for those who already own the real thing.


Girls, Cars and Loud Guitars link is in the comments.

Speaking of comments, What is Social D.'s best album?



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