Thirty Years Of Submachine

 

     I started writing some version of this back in February to keep some demons at bay.  The first sentence of the original draft was: “If the human race does not figure out a way to bring itself to an end by October of this year, Submachine will end up being a band for thirty years.”  I couldn't help but laugh when I read that because here we are at the end of October and we're getting pretty damn close to snuffing ourselves out on multiple fronts.

     Plans to mark the anniversary were being made and then had to be scrapped because a good portion of the population refused to be on their best behavior for two months earlier in the year.  New plans are being made that won't be nearly as sweaty and beer soaked but the occasion will be acknowledged in some way.

     I have been a fan of Submachine since I was but a wee lad and saw their fliers on phone poles around town.  I hadn't even heard any of their music yet and didn't even know where to go to find it but I knew from the looks of those fliers that there was something to what they were doing and I wanted a piece of it.

     Thanks to my local dealer, Brave New World, I had picked up all of their singles over time but still hadn't seen the band with my own eyes because of the under-21 of it all for the clubs and bars that they played.  If there were DIY or house shows that they played, I had no way of knowing when and where those took place since I was on the outside looking in and there was no such thing as the internet yet.

     If my memory is correct, the first time I saw Submachine was at a sparsely attended all-ages show at Club Laga, in the summer of 1997 or 1998, when they played with Crayon-Death.  I say sparsely attended because that has always been the nature of the beast with all-ages club shows in Pittsburgh when there were only local acts on the bill.  Which is why those shows hardly ever happened.  There were plenty of complaints about the lack of all-ages shows but when the time came no one would ever show up to the damned things.

     I don't remember much about it except that it was the early show because there was an overabundance of sunlight still streaming in through the windows of the club.  This was in the days before I would drag my camera and Mini-Disc recorder around with me so I have no documentation of the show.  I do remember having a handbill for the show but it has not survived after multiple apartment moves.

     By this time Submachine's vinyl anthology, Sawed Off Shotglass, had been released on CD so now I could walk around town with all thirty six songs playing on my Disc-Man and mainline those songs directly into my brain.  I played the hell out of that CD and still do.

     After the two beers that I had to mark the occasion of my 21^st birthday, I was finally able to gain entry to the 31^st St. Pub and other clubs for all of the punk and metal shows that my hearing could handle.  Still on the outside, I always posted up in the back of the room or by the soundboard of whatever club I ended up in since I didn't know anyone and the scene was, and still is, very insular.  I was damn near nonexistent except for the “Who the fuck is this asshole?” looks I would get when I'd walk in.  I really wasn't looking to belong to anything back then and I'm probably still not.  I was only there for the music and would go off into the night to search for food and coffee as soon as the last band finished playing.

     I stopped carrying the camera around with me because I had lost the plot and didn't really feel the need to at that point.  Scraping together the funds to have film developed and then stuffing the pictures into a drawer had lost its appeal.  How I regret that now.  A stack of punk photos from the late 90s through 2003 would have been quite the bit of history to sift through.

     During this time, Fresh Out Of Give A Fucks, Live Fast, Die Dumb and, the live DVD/CD, Off The Rails: Loose At The Moose were released.  Needless to say, I took copies of each home the first time I saw them on the shelf at the record store.  “Unhinged,” “Sluff Up My Nards” and “Trocadero Riot” quickly became some of my favorite songs.

     After a hiatus and the addition of stalwart Pittsburgh punk drummer, Greg Mairs, to the rhythm section with Ricky Budway and Jay Nulph, they are louder than ever and can still show the younger punks how it's done on a regular basis.  Their last LP, In Spite Of Everything, and a few recent singles have been the best sonic representations of their sound to date.  As a live band, Submachine can still steal any show that they're a part of.  Jeff Cherep is still one of my favorite punk rock guitar players of all time.  And if there's a room full of people, Alex Peightal will get in their faces while spitting gravelly fire and get the crowd moving in the pit.  Or moving out the door as I witnessed at last year's Halloween show when the band sent the hipster/college student clientele of the Halloween pop-up bar running for the nearest exit which still brings a smile to my face when I think about it.

     Once I decided to start going to shows again and sticking a lens in musicians faces, they were the first band that I made it a point to see as many times as possible.  I missed out on seeing them play too many times before their hiatus so I was not going to make the same mistake again.

     Since then, I have been lucky enough to have befriended the band and help out in any way that I can. Going from the socially awkward kid in the back of the room to the socially awkward coffin dodger next to the speaker stack to take pictures and keep an eye on the drum kit has been a weird ride. And hopefully the ride can resume at some point before humanity calls it a day.

https://submachinepgh.bandcamp.com/

The Stooges Funhouse Box Set

     Back at the end of July, UPS dropped off a massive box on my porch that contained fifteen LPs worth of the Stooges.  This release was the fiftieth anniversary pressing of the Funhouse album.  A recut version of the album itself plus the entirety of the recording sessions that went into the album.  There's a reissue of Have Some Fun: Live At Ungano's which came out a few Record Store Days ago.  There are two singles included along with posters, a slip mat and the requisite book of liner notes and essays.  Almost every inch of this thing has some sort of detail to it.  The box it was shipped in and the packaging within even had artwork of some kind printed on it.

     As soon as I got the email saying the monster was in transit, I pulled every other pressing of Funhouse that I own off of the shelf in preparation of its arrival.  You can keep Christmas and birthdays.  This obsessive record nerd was getting ready to celebrate one of the best records ever made.  It is still odd to me that the Russian bootleg pressing that I have sounds better than the 2005 and 2017 pressings from Rhino and way better than the pressing Sundazed put out years ago.  My guess is the Russian bootleg was a hotter mastering so it hits the needle harder.

     I picked up the CD version of the Funhouse sessions box set years ago and gave it a listen once through but never spent much time with it after that.  This time around, I am on my third listen of the entire thing and I think it's because I now know what went into making the record in the first place.  That and the sides are labeled “One” through “Thirty” so it feels like a challenge has been issued to see if I can get through them all.

     The Stooges had been playing some version the new songs live for a while before they recorded them so there wasn't much time lost to writing in the studio.  They would enter the studio each day as if it were a job site and punched a clock.  Each day they picked a song and went to work on it.  Forging, refining and sharpening each song until they felt they had it.  It was either the last or second to last take of each song that ended up on the album.

     The thing about this behemoth that caught my eye was the newly remastered version of the album itself.  It was pressed on 180gr vinyl and recut at 45rpm instead of the usual 33rpm so it stretches over three sides and has a nifty etching on side four.  Being cut at 45 gives the music some space to spread out within the grooves. So much so that the tone arm would sway back and forth as the record played.  I really wish there was a high resolution download of the new mastering included with the box but I know how to get around that.

     The guitar tones, snare and high hat generated by the Asheton brothers were all more pronounced and sounded like they would cut a motherfucker in a dark alley.  The thing that really grabbed my attention was the clarity of the bass lines.  History has not been kind to Dave Alexander but he was a steadier bass player than he got credit for.

     By the time the band came crashing in after the opening howl of “T.V. Eye,” I knew this thing was worth every penny.  I was hearing new things on a record that I had listened to countless times.  Any thoughts about trying to analyze or be academic with the exercise went out the window.  I hadn't had that feeling since the first time I listened to the new mastering of The Clash that Mick Jones had worked on. By the time I got to “White Riot,” I was in tears.

     A fifteen LP deep dive into one album might seem excessive to some, and it really is.  I've found myself laughing at the absurdity of this stack of records and all of the material that went into making the box set.  It is a magnificent waste of resources in a time when there is a shortage of medical supplies.

     As for the hours and hours of listening to the same seven songs being worked on, there really wasn't any startling revelation of where certain songs came from.  There's a change of phrasing here and a change of tempo there but not a whole lot of scrapping and overhauling the songs.  It was closer to watching bricklayers at work.  “Today we are going to work on 'Loose' until it's done and tomorrow we will work on '1970.'”  Listening to an entire LP of the song “Dirt” was damn near hypnotizing.  Because of the rhythm section and the way the song crawls along it became more of a meditation from take to take.

     At one point while the band was working on “Loose,” I did here Ron Asheton play a riff that eventually ended up on The Weirdness which was released after The Stooges got back together earlier this century.  The fact that he walked around with that riff in his back pocket for about thirty years was mind blowing to me and made me drag The Weirdness off of the shelf for the first time in years.

     That the session tapes survived has to be due solely to a marvelous clerical error.  Tapes take up space and cost money.  Every now and then labels and studios would throw out or record over any tapes found laying around when they ran out of storage or a new executive came in and wanted to rearrange everything.  A lot of music has been lost to history because no one thought it would have any value at the time.  The Funhouse tapes had to have been misplaced or filed on the wrong shelf somewhere because no one at Elektra cared about that band.  The tapes most certainly would have been disposed of if they were where they should have been.

     There are only two people still living that were in the room when Funhouse was recorded.  The man himself, Iggy Pop, and producer Don Gallucci.  Iggy posted an essay about Funhouse here and there is an interview with Gallucci in the liner notes.  Gallucci was smart enough to get out of the way to let The Stooges be The Stooges.  He only made two creative suggestions to the band and both were accepted. Change the opening track from “Loose” to “Down On The Street.”  And the other suggestion was to take the breakdown at the end of “Funhouse” and flesh it out into its own song which became “L.A. Blues.”  I don't think I could imagine Funhouse starting any other way than with “Down On The Street” that song gets straight to the point and serves as a mission statement for the rest of album.  And a weird factoid about Don Gallucci that I learned is that he played keyboard on The Kingsmen's version of “Louie, Louie.”

     The studio was set up as if the band were playing a live show and there was as little isolation used as possible when recording.  This helped prevent the sanitary sound of their first record.  I am so happy that the dirtier, rejected mix of The Stooges that John Cale did finally saw a vinyl pressing earlier this year.

     The Stooges were a dirty Rock 'n' Roll band that you wouldn't want to invite to your house for fear that they would raid your medicine cabinet and set your couch on fire so their records should sound that way too.  They might not have been the best textbook musicians but I don't think the best textbook musicians could have made Funhouse.  Hell, even the backing bands that Iggy put together every so often couldn't contain those songs.  There was something about the Asheton brothers and the space and time in which the album occurred that could not be reproduced.

     There are a lot of albums from this era of rock music that music writers point to as some sort of gold standard.  Even though they are only stating their subjective, personal preference on a topic that really doesn't mean anything in the grand scheme of things, they would be completely wrong unless, by chance, they haven't heard Funhouse.  And if that's the case, maybe they should put their pens down.

West Penn Park, September 26, 2020

     Here are pictures of miscellaneous weird shit that I encountered back on September 26, 2020 while wandering around the woods of Polish Hill before the ill-advised super spreader of a show began.

Throw The Bums Out

     I have never so angrily filled in a bubble in all my life.  My ballot went back into the mail the day after I received it and that was four days before the first debate.

     In all honesty, what is there to debate anymore?  You either stand with this K-Mart brand Lex Luthor that is clearly a white supremacist or you stand against him.  And if you don't take the effort to vote against him, guess what, you're standing with him regardless of all the belly aching and whining that you do.

     Not everyone has the privilege to say they can sit this one out.  The hypothetical list of “others” is rapidly growing and chances are most of us are on this list.  Vote to protect your friends and loved ones. Directly or indirectly, we all know someone that has been affected by the awfulness of the past few years.

     This is no longer the time or the place for the pseudo-intellectual mental gymnastics that lead some people to think that both candidates are equally as bad.  Thinking that there could be a push toward socialism under right-wing fascism is laughable at this point.  Try having your monthly DSA meeting or anarchist potluck while there are roving gangs of racists on the street and drones in the air.  We are no longer in a classroom and academic theory will not cut it out in the wild.

     The current state of electoral politics is not the answer to our problems but there are bigger issues at hand.  And it is possible to do two things.  You can sit around and have discussions until you are blue in the face but you can also take a break from that to cast a ballot.

     Indifference and complacency were contributing factors in what brought us here.  Now is the time to act.  We are being counted on to be unreliable and to remain indifferent and complacent.  Let's show these pigfuckers that they're wrong.  I'm tired of going to my polling place and not having to wait in line.

     Do you remember how it felt on November 9^th, 2016?  Waking up to the news that a huckster had somehow been elected President.  The disbelief that enough people had fallen for the con and the uncertainty of what was to come was growing by the minute.  Do you remember that?

     Do you remember the disgust of the Muslim ban and the children dying in cages?  Do you remember the pain and the anger after Charlottesville, Parkland, Tree Of Life and so many others?  Then add on the tragedies of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd.  And don't forget the forced hysterectomies in our concentration camps.  We have been bombarded with so much awfulness at such incredible speed that it's almost impossible to keep track of it all.

     For everyone that marched in a protest, publicly mourned after a tragedy or just felt despondent and didn't know what to do, now is the time to act.  A show of force at the polls is what is needed right now.  I know it won't solve everything and might feel meaningless but if we don't collectively force a correction, right now, I don't think there will ever be a chance to recover.

     I always keep in mind the over 200,000 people that have died from COVID.  I lost my mother back in February and still haven't recovered from it and that makes me think about how there are over 200,000 families that feel like I do and I feel terrible.  So much grief and suffering that could have been prevented if people would have been seen as more important than the stock market.

     I can't stand Joe Biden and don't agree with a lot of the things that he has done and supported but at least he acts like a human being.  He seems to be a decent man that knows loss and has been humbled by life.  Empathy and feeling the weight of everyday life don't seem like foreign concepts to him.

     On the other hand, we are dealing with people that try to negate what we see and hear with our own eyes and ears.  Attempting to rewrite events that just happened in front of us as if there were no such thing as cameras and video tape.  Let's show them that we see through their bullshit and refuse to be their docile servants.

     One of the weirdest things in all of this is that these assholes finally took off their loosely worn mask when it comes to punishing us in some way shape or form for not being born wealthy.  Somewhere along the way it became a sin to be a part of the proletariat.  Keep in mind that we did not start this class war. Over the course of human history, those that have are willing to do whatever is necessary to keep it from those that don't have.  Greed has been able to become a virtue for people who supposedly follow the teachings of Jesus.  Clearly, these greedheads have not read the Sermon On The Mount but expecting anyone to read anything these days might be a little much.

Registration deadlines are quickly approaching. Check out the link below to check your status.

https://vote.gov/

Killer Of Sheep At West Penn Park On September 26, 2020

     Here are pictures of Killer Of Sheep that I took at West Penn Park on September 26, 2020.  Mower and Necro Heads were also on the bill.

     Chances are I may have gotten West Nile, Poison Ivy and COVID from this show but it was only the second show I've been to all year so it was worth it.

     Be sure to give some attention to the Necro Heads.  Those youngsters are going places.

The Generator (aka The Unsung Hero Of The Day):

The PA:

Killer Of Sheep:

Mower:

Necro Heads: