Everybody Knows We're Fucked

I was on the Homestead promo list the year that "The Wailing Ultimate" came out, so I can tell you that I was pretty excited when I first took it out of the box, until I figured out that it was all previously released material. Still, as a budget sampler from the best indie label ever ("fuckin' Nutri-Grain?!?" --Tom Smith), this filled a need at the time-- meaning that it gave the out-of-touch conventional music writers some help with their catching up, or in putting a stamp on the scene, or whatever. (That's not the real reason why they made this, I'm just making it up.) Merely looking at the line-up that Homestead was able to just casually toss onto one LP, without even including Sonic Youth, can be pretty amazing. Practically every band on this compilation is near-legendary, save maybe for The Reactions, and they have one of the best songs on here. Obviously, the range that Homestead had as a label can make this a somewhat irregular listen-- Naked Raygun stick out like a sore thumb, for instance-- but why be a nit-picker.

I've already posted six of the fourteen songs on "The Wailing Ultimate" from their original formats (LP or 7"-er), so I'm skipping over those ones, except for the Dinosaur track, which might be my all-time favorite Homestead 7"-er by the way. That single came in handy back when I used to work at the record store in town; invariably some hippie would walk in, looking for crappy It's A Beautiful Day records and declaring "all new music stinks", and I'd go "but this sounds just like Neil Young!" and put "Repulsion" on the turntable. Sometimes Mr. Hippie Customer would agree with me, and sometimes he'd say "screw you, man" and walk out. Had I known back then that Antietam sounded just like Jefferson Airplane, I might've played them instead.

This is probably the one and only time I'll get to post a Live Skull track on this blog, even though I liked them a lot; the only other record I still have of theirs is "Dusted", but so does everybody else, it seems. I only saw Live Skull once, at CBGB's, and they were pretty great. Like I've said a bunch of times before, Rey Washam (Scratch Acid) and James Lo (Live Skull) were no doubt the two best drummers that I saw back in the '80s. People were always saying back then that Live Skull sounded just like Sonic Youth, until a couple records later when even Sonic Youth didn't sound like Sonic Youth anymore. Just wait'll I start posting all my Dustdevils records.

One of the obscure references on this record (and there's a lot of them, starting with the liner notes) is the "Blasting Variations big deal" etching in one of the runout grooves, a reference to the SST "Blasting Concept" samplers which "The Wailing Ultimate" sorta takes after. The other runout groove reads "just like Motown for whitey", which probably would've made for a much better title than "The Wailing Ultimate", except that nobody bothered to ask me. Again, I'm only going to post some of the tracks here, but if you want to hear all of them, then I'm sure this is pretty easy to find as files on the internet, or as a $1.99 CD from Amazon-- only the CD version (which I also own) doesn't have the snarky liner notes ("I don't think there's been any band with less soul than Great Plains"). Luckily for you I've scanned all of them in, because this blog hasn't had the full amount of Dave Rick photos that it needs to be taken seriously.




Volcano Suns -

"White Elephant"

Dinosaur -

"Repulsion"

Antietam -

"In a Glass House"

Live Skull -

"Fort Belvedere"

Naked Raygun -

"I Remember"

Big Dipper -

"You're Not Patsy"

The Reactions -

"Don't Look Back"

Boredom Won't Starve As Long As I Feed It

This has long been my favorite Homestead 7-inch, which I think says something when you consider all the great 45's that came out on Homestead back in the mid-to-late 80's (most of which I've posted here already): Big Black, Squirrel Bait, Honor Role, Phantom Tollbooth, Volcano Suns, and so forth. If you were anything like me-- a hardcore punk kid, raised on 70's metal, who had openly admired his dad's Neil Young and Crazy Horse albums and was beginning to see the end of hardcore's reign as the underground's great white art hope-- the emergence of a band like Dinosaur was a flippin' godsend.

I saw Dinosaur's original line-up a bunch of times (even before the Jr. was added), including one show at Wesleyan's Eclectic House that was cut short when the fire alarm went off during Dinosaur's set, only it took them finishing the song they were playing before anyone could hear the alarm-- that's how punishingly loud they were. The strangest Dinosaur show I ever saw, though, was at the Night Shift Cafe in Naugatuck, which must've been around '88 or so. Lou and J. got into a fight onstage and actually started hitting each other, including one of them (I forget now if it was Lou or J.) swinging his guitar, still strapped around his neck, at the other one like a baseball bat. The two pictures you see below (scanned from an old issue of Brushback) are from that show, although I stopped taking pictures once the fight broke out; it was so uncomfortable that I put my camera down, not wanting to turn anyone's meltdown into a National Enquirer moment. There's been times since then when I've kinda wished I had gone ahead and taken a photo or two, though.

Supposedly the on-stage fight was mentioned in the book Our Band Could Be Your Life; unfortunately, when I flipped through the book trying to find it, the writing was so boring that I had to stop reading after a couple of pages.




Dinosaur -

"Repulsion"

(this file is now listen-only)