That's How I Got This Great Tan

Even though their earliest stuff like "Basement Screams" and "Throb Throb" is all nothing short of awesome, I still consider the "Vanilla Blue" single to be Naked Raygun's high-water mark. "Vanilla Blue" also re-adjusted their career-curve a little bit, popping up as it did between "All Rise" and "Jettison", at a point when every Naked Raygun album after "Throb Throb" was incrementally less interesting, making this single even more of a standout.

I first heard this single in sort of an odd way, on a tape that John Stabb of Government Issue had, before the vinyl even came out. GI were in between back-to-back shows at the Anthrax and CBGB's, late in 1987 (a recording of the CB's show eventually became the "Strange Wine" EP), and since I was following the band around for the weekend, we all slept overnight on the hallway floor outside of Scott Munroe's apartment. I guess Naked Raygun and Gov't Issue had just played some shows together, leading to them having "Vanilla Blue" and "Slim" on tape, which John almost couldn't wait to play for us: "You gotta hear this new Naked Raygun song!". Of course, the song was brilliant, with the spaghetti-western intro making for an impossibly good head-fake at the beginning. Then there's the song itself, with Jeff Pezzati's soaring vocal-- it's amazing how long he can hold those notes-- and the unforgettable "Lost control again today" refrain, which strangely comes off as more defiant than desultory.

If there had been an actual song on the b-side, the "Vanilla Blue" single would come close to breaking into my Top Three Best Two-Song U.S. Punk 45s Ever (1. Weirdos "We Got The Neutron Bomb"/"Solitary Confinement", 2. Gang Green "Alcohol"/"Skate To Hell", 3. Last Rights "Chunks"/"So Ends Our Night"); as it is, it falls just outside of it. Not that "Slim" sucks or anything; in fact, I didn't end up seeing the movies "Dr. Strangelove" and "Blazing Saddles" until after I had this record, but when I finally did, it was like I'd seen 'em already. "I am depressed." "Darn near lost a $400 handcart!" "Piss on you, I'm working for Naked Raygun!"




Naked Raygun -

(files taken down by request)













Postscript: When I first started thinking about blogging, I figured that "Vanilla Blue" would be one of the 80's gems that I would post right away once I started a music blog; I mean, it's on swirly colored vinyl and the band released it themselves, so there's gotta only be about 500 or 1000 copies floating around, right? Wrong-- turns out there must've been 10,000 copies made (I think you can even still buy it through the band's web site), and every music blog in the world has already posted it, unless they're just using the bonus tracks from the CD re-issues and just pretending that they have the vinyl. So, since this is a pretty skimpy excuse for a post, as an extra bonus I'm going to add some tracks from a live Naked Raygun set that I've had kicking around for 23-some-odd years-- a crystal-clear soundboard tape from Bielefeld, Germany. I don't know the exact date of this show, but it's "Jettison" era, meaning sometime around 1988. The full set is about an hour long, but I'm posting just the encore they did-- four songs, including a Buzzcocks cover and a Government Issue cover (on their end, Gov't Issue would sometimes cover Naked Raygun's "Treason").

Oh, yeah, and then I also scanned a 10-page Naked Raygun interview from the Fall '88 issue of my favorite West Coast hardcore zine of all time, Ink Disease. You can click on the individual pages to get a bigger view.


Naked Raygun -

(files taken down by request)

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"