What's in the Bag? Part 2

(Figure One: The Bag - still)

So I'm talking about a musty old bag full of not-so- much that I dug out of the garage (further context and pictures can be found HERE) to whomever is still following this little digression (bless you!)

(Figure Five: The 8-Track)

A commenter asked about the presence of any cassette tapes in the bag and, shockingly, there wasn't a single one. There was, however, this vintage 8-Tracks (ask your grandparents!) of Winnipeg's legendary band, The Guess Who and their album "So Long Banatyne" (named after a famous city street). I bought it for .50 from a junk store because I wanted to stage a re-creation of the cover with this guy who looked EXACTLY like Randy Bachman (who isn't even on this album) for a Guess Who fanatic I knew in Vancouver... (Ah failed ideas I have known so many of you).

Figure Six: The Exes

The items are above are fragments of early relationships. I'm not exactly a pack rat but I do save odd things and then have difficulty throwing them away once they hit a certain level of resonance. The plastic bracket and the plastic vampire teeth on the top are from an early and awkward and intense dalliance (there's an old photo that I've grayed out simply because no matter how hard the photo was to zoom in, it felt weird). The ring box in the middle, is from more complex relationship partner, and has heart-shaped post-it notes and still smells of that perfume twenty years on and goes to show that I have had a few different types in my life. The fork on the bottom was a 'gift' (she stole it from a restaurant called the Four Seasons ) my first (and ne'er to be forgotten) girlfriend. End sappy part.

(Figure Seven: The Stickers)

Yes there were no actual cassette tapes herein but over a dozen different types of blank cassette stickers - man did I kill a lot of music via home-taping back in the day (And no I have no idea why this one image will not fucking turn sideways!)

(Figure Eight: The Needle)

A record needle because while we've got 8-tracks and cassette labels we need some more dated technology - there's gotta be an Edison Cylinder in here somewhere *digs*).

(Figure Nine: Nic-A-Brac)

I have a friend named Nic who travels the world (I've never left the North American continent) and two of these are gifts from those trips (both may be from India) but the third item is a one of those little emblems you could punch out messages on at airports back in the day. The message on this one really says that Nic "does Bob Dylan voices". This was a metallic lie. Nic refused to do Bob Dylan voices so I created an impersonation of "Nic Doing Bob Dylan" which devolved into further ridiculousness like "Nic doing Bob Dylan Doing Iron Maiden" ad nauseum. High school: Your excuse for everything.

Part 3 will come after a slight detour into Mega City Four

Feel free to give us your reasonably kind take on my little Heinrich Schliemann-meets-Marcel-Proust project in the COMMENTS section and, worry not, there's no way with my shutter skills that this blog is gonna decamp over to Flickr.

What`s in the Bag? Part 1

I found the bag last week in my parent's garage. The sun-bleached canvas bag itself is of a mid-nineties vintage, as the band patches of bands sorta popular at the time indicates. As for the contents, it was a mish-mash of not so much keepsakes as little stowaways on my life's journey. These were items of my youth that, when I moved away from Winnipeg in the late nineties, I couldn't bring myself to either throw-out or burden myself with. While pawing through these items of slight significance, I was seized upon by the idea that a record (in the form of shoddily-lit, ill-composed photographs of the items discovered) should be blogged. So for those of you old enough (and perhaps North American enough) to remember the crushing disappointment that was Geraldo Rivera's on-air opening of Al Capone's vault, here's my brief foray into a sort of narcissistic archeology:

(Figure Two: The Stuff)

Here's an aerial view of the shoe box that lay inside the mystery bag.

(Figure Three: The Wires)

The first thing we found is a batch of orphan wires and plugs, not thrilling in anyway but a reminder of the connections we abandon along the way.

(Figure Four: The ID)

Next, I collected a set of items, name-tags, membership cards etc., which once gave proof of my identity to the skeptical ("Do you work here?", "Can I see your card?") On a really sad note the Jumbo Video membership is not in my name, I worked there, but for one 'Billy Bragg' - oh the things we did with the laminator to while away the midnight hours.

On that Bragg-related note (and believe me there are more of those embarrassing fan-boy moments to come), we'll leave off for now. Things can only get more exciting as we delive further into the bag...

Feel free to give us your reasonably kind take on this little excavation work in the COMMENTS section and, worry not, there's no way with my shutter skills that this blog is gonna decamp over to Flickr.

V.A. Revolution No. 9 A Tribute to the Beatles (1991)

So three years after Sergeant Pepper Knew My Father (see HERE) raised the profile of UK indie-pop in 1988, someone must've decided that a sequel was in order. Only Billy Bragg (more HERE) and Frank Sidebottom (R.I.P.) remain in the cast and a new charitable plot was duly crafted ( "All profits raised by this album are being donated to Oxfam to help their relief program in Cambodia. War is over if you want it").


So were back in the pre-Nirvana UK underground and it`s gonna be a mixed bag according to your personal bias. Certainly this album has personal faves (Billy Bragg, Heavenly, Mega City Four, Senseless Things) as well artists I appreciate (Paul Weller solo, John Otway, The Pooh Sticks) plus a dose of artists I cannot for the life of me recall a thing about (everybody else). You`re take on it may well differ...



1 Revolution - Billy Bragg 1:50
2 True Life Hero - Pooh Sticks 2:16
3 She Said, She Said - Driscolls 3:29
4 Across the Universe - Family Cat 4:10
5 I Must Be in Love - Senseless Things 1:57
6 Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown) - Moonflowers 5:24
7 I Am the Walrus - John Otway 3:23
8 All to Much Loves - Young Nightmare 4:33
9 Don't Let Me Down - Paul Weller 4:05
10 If I Needed Someone - Anyways 3:33
11 It Won't Be Long - Heavenly 2:08
12 A Hard Day's Night - Mega City Four 2:55
13 Flying - Frank Sidebottom 2:18
14 Drive My Car - Brilliant Corners 3:27
15 I'm Only Sleeping - Family 3:14
16 Rain - Beatle Hans & The Paisley Pervers 4:40

So which do you reckon is the better tribute album, Revolution No. 9 or Sergeant Pepper Knew My Father. Leave us a COMMENT (which is where you`ll find the Revolution No. 9 link)


P.S. Having brought two of my regular muses, Billy Bragg and Mega City Four together (via The Beatles) you might well expect it's time for another holiday in MC4 and you'd be right but I have a little personal archaeology to drag you through first...


Don't miss

MRML's

Summer Punk

collection HERE

Summer Punk!

(image borrowed from here)

Well by now radio stations are pumping out dance-pop tracks that they are hoping will be designated the song of the summer but for me I always turn to the sometimes kinda literal-minded pop-punk underground for real sounds of the summer season. The songs here are from all over the last three decades and focus on the classical definition of pop-punk: 'bands who really like the Ramones', as opposed to the mainstream definition of; 'bands who really like Blink 182' (NTTAWWT). This coulda been a box set, so if you feel slighted your time to contribute to volume two is almost at hand...

The Apers - "Almost Summer"
Screeching Weasel loving Dutch boys who really know how much a pop songs needs to be both catchy and an expression of painful longing.



The Undertones - "Here Comes the Summer"
Northern Ireland's pop-punk masters shoulda had a monster hit with this one.

Ronnie Mayor - "Can't Wait Till the Summer Comes"
Late seventies UK power-pop is a totally part of the pop-punk continuum.

The Parasites - "First Day of Summer"
One of the best songs from probably the finest album of Dave Parasite's lengthy career.

Ramones - "Rockaway Beach"
You knew THE defining band of pop-punk had to make the list, even if they don't have a song with summer in the title.


The Fastbacks - "In the Summer"
Kurt Bloch remains one of of the most neglected song-writers of his generation and this song is one of my favourites of his.

Surfin' Lungs/Shock Treatment - "Tell 'Em I'm Surfin'"
UK surf legends recorded the vocals while Spanish punk band Shock Treatment recorded the instruments for this little E.P. from 1997.

Hüsker Dü - "Celebrated Summer"
A band who influenced almost every subsequent pop-punk band, without ever playing by any of the genres ultra-stringent rules.

The Barracudas - "Summer Fun"
I love every nano-second of this song by these original UK Beach-punks.

The Kung Fu Monkeys - "Summer School" (almost)
From the twee side of pop-punk comes this fun New York band who've been around forever.

The Ataris - "The Boys of Summer"
Okay just to piss a few people off, one song from the post-Blink school of pop-punk*, showing off one of the tricks that unites the two schools - amping up cheesy pop hits.
*though one could well argue the band had paid their dues earlier on.

Chixdiggit - "Brunette Summer"
It's Chixdiggt, nothing more need be said.

The Queers - "The Sun Always Shines Around You"
Lookout Records called their Queers 'Best Of' compilation, Summer Hits becuase that summery feeling pervades a lot of thier best songs.

Funbug - "Summer Girl" (almost)
"She thinks she's Californian but she comes from Birmingham" - great pop-punk always manages to mask recording limitations with speed, cleverness and hooks.

Ben Weasel - "Summer's Always Gone Too Soon" (alternate Weasel summer song)
Following the debacle at SxSW, it kinda looks like Ben's going through an identity crisis as he tries to decide where his belligerent persona ends and Mr. Ben Foster the man begins. Whatever the result of his troubles, Ben will re-emerge because he's one of the best lyricists this genre has ever produced.

So tell us what you make of the songs on the list and what songs you think might make it on to a Volume Two. (If you wanna put the whole thing on your music-listening device, there's a link in that section as well)

Update: Don't miss the slam-bang summer song summit being held over at Mr. Suave's Mod Mod World

Discount: Love, Billy (Bragg)

Discount were 2nd tier members of the hard-touring, wildly-prolific indie-punk underground of the nineties but by now they are just the first entry on Alison Mosshart's (The Kills, The Dead Weather) resume. So around the time they were releasing split singles with J Church, touring on the cheap and sleeping on floors the band stopped to cover five Billy Bragg songs for this 1998 E.P. on Fueled By Ramen Records, Love, Billy. The covers give a a bashing American pop-punk reading to some less obvious Bragg songs (only "Help Save the Youth of America" is from his foundational period).



You can let us know what you think of these Bragg covers in the COMMENTS section (where you'll find the Love, Billy link).