JFA

Live 1984 Tour LP

This is one of the first punk records I ever owned which I picked up at either Wrex or Zips on the eastside of Tucson. My early knowledge of punk music came either from my sister or from Thrasher magazine and JFA was one of the more prominent bands featured in the magazine at the time. They were real skaters and they played music that was good to skate to. It was mostly hardcore punk, but borrowed from surf music, George Clinton and Bowie. I got this in the late 80s and it wouldn’t be until the mid-2000s until I heard JFA’s proper studio recordings. I had seen them live a few times, but the records were out of print and easy computer access to old recordings was unheard of. When I finally heard their studio records I thought they sounded so slow and lifeless compared to this live recording that had been seared into my brain for so many years. Sure everything was clear, tightly played and precise, but that was the problem. They lacked of the wild chaos and reckless abandonment that this live recording captured.

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the Vinegar Sting

Coronado Historic District Sampler CD circa 2002

Dick told me that Lenguas Largas have been playing some pretty good shows in Phoenix recently. The only time I ever had a good string of shows there was with the Blacks around 2000 when we would play parties at a house in Tempe occupied by members of the Vinegar Sting and Jack Doyle from Underground Railroad to Candyland. We played with the Vinegar sting a lot. They reminded me of some of the earlier Phoenix bands because there’s an anything goes aesthetic and the Sun City Girls were an obvious influence. Sometimes they did sets of all Sun City Girls songs. They were also informed by the Minutemen and some of the more artsy emo stuff from the 90s, like Harriet the Spy or some of the noisy rhythmic San Diego bands or even the Make Up on a song like “ACU.” It sounds dark but they are fun people. It sounds like they take drugs and that’s because they do. They’ve had to go on hiatus because their love of drugs has landed some members in trouble with the law, but they’ve been playing as recently as last year with new material. Years ago at a show at Cannery Row their drummer Andy did a crazy drummer freak out thing and his snare drum fell off the stage, which was on the second floor, directly onto the head of a girl, who was on the first floor and who was trying her best to ignore the band. Huge gash, blood everywhere and I doubt it’s related but the bar didn’t stay open much longer after that.

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the Teds

the Eighties Are Over 7" 1981

Over 30 posts and I’ve managed to totally ignore Phoenix. Any proper Southern Arizonian is supposed to hate all things Phoenix because we think we’ve figured out how real desert city life is supposed to be or something like that.  Or maybe it’s just some stupid college/sports rivalry that’s seeped over into larger aspects of the culture. I’ve always found the politics of Maricopa County to be fucked, but you cannot deny that Phoenix has produced some of the best bands in the state and the nation. So I thought that I should start giving Phoenix some of its due. If this is a site about the fringe music of this state than you can’t ignore Phoenix because some of the weirdest and wildest shit ever was produced there. Shitty drugs, intense summer heat and poor public transportation makes people weird. I never lived there and have only played up there occasionally over the years, so I don’t know a lot of the people involved, but I do have recordings that I think are great and should be shared. So let’s start at the beginning of Placebo which was the premier punk/weirdo label in Phoenix. This first release by the Teds isn’t as weird as the label would get with Sun City Girls or the Dry Lungs comps. and it’s not as intense as the JFA or Mighty Sphincter stuff. It is however pretty damn good punk with a post punk, new wave and Killed By Death vibe. “Modern Guy” sounds like it could have been on one of the Jam’s early records while “Telly Surveillance” and “Digital Doris” have a dissident, minimalist stiff new wave sound. This is good shit and a good way to set the mood for the record label that Placebo would become. I don't actually own this record. I found it somewhere online and I can't remember where, but I give many thanks to the people that share these type of hard to find gems.

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the Pork Torta

 

Sparky Welding cass. circa 1994

I was offended when the Okmoniks were playing around Tucson and calling themselves “Tucson’s best party band” or something like that. Everybody knows that the best party band in Tucson was, is and always shall be the Pork Torta. Sure the Okmoniks might make you wanna shake your head and throw some beer at the band, but the Pork Torta make you feel like you walked onto the set of a David Lynch film set in a dark bar in the middle of the desert with some wild, emotionally dissident yet highly rhythmic band pounding away as people grind on each other while strobe lights almost make you blackout and the rhythm makes you go crazy. There is nothing normal about this release. It’s their first and it finds the madness unrefined with more of an anything goes attitude than they've had on more recent releases. Different versions of some of these songs appear on later CDs, but here they’re laced with bad acid and lo-fi charm. Guest appearances by Bob Log and Johnny Balls, who is now their bass player. Everything they produce should promptly be purchased by you, now, here

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Head Space

Fragments cass. 1993 

I’ve heard Malignus Youth was a big influence on Head Space and I’ve also heard that Head Space was the big influence on Malignus Youth. They were definitely big influences on each other, but I’ve always thought of Head Space as the elder and more mature of the two groups because their sound didn’t always rely on breakneck speeds and they sometimes went into long drawn out jams reminiscent of the Doors or Santana and other hippie music. Maybe because they were from the hippie town of Bisbee and Malignus was from the military town of Sierra Vista. The melodic vocal arrangements both these bands used were way more complex than most bands that got called punk. With Head Space’s mellower songs it sometimes comes off like 60s folk or psych, which is territory Malignus never ventured near. But there are also moments of blast beat fast-core with melodic rapid fire vocals. It’s complex in a way that most people probably won’t like and sometimes a little heart-on-sleeve hokey like Cap’n Jazz, but I like most of it and I think it’s essential listening to anybody that was interested in Malignus Youth and later Pathos.

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Malignus Youth

Ephemeral--Missa Brevis ('89-'94, released on CD '98)--Practice '88

Most people either loved or hated Malignus Youth. I think they had one of the most unique approaches to the hardcore punk genre ever and expanded the elements of speed and melody in ways no band had done before or has done since. So you know which camp I’m in and a lot of their hardcore fans consider this posthumous release their masterpiece because it contains “the Mass,” songs 18-23, a hardcore/punk interpretation of a Catholic Mass sung mostly in Latin. Yes, it’s weird and a lot of the punks had problems with the religious overtones, but love it or hate it you can’t deny the uniqueness of it. The songs that precede it are some of their great signature songs that never made it to vinyl. I also added a file that I found on Soulseek which contains older jam room versions of songs from their earlier vinyl releases, but without song titles.

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Dover Trench

Exhibition of Speed CD 1991--Demo 1990(?)

I found out about Dover Trench because me and my friends used to buy our skateboards from singer Eli’s  shop, Itchy Foot Moes, back when we were in high school. We’d go see them play all ages shows at Mudbugs opening for bands like Atrophy, Sacred Reich and Testament. They were as good as, if not better than any of those bands and they mixed with the Tucson and Cochise County hardcore/punk scene more than any other metal band at the time (drummer Matt Pimple’s brother would help record the Malignus Youth records). Here is their full length CD and what I think is an incomplete version of their demo. My all time favorite song of theirs, the way lowbrow Tight as a Vice, which I remember being on the demo, is not with my files. There is a hilarious video for that song here. It was filmed at the same place where, many years later, we did the photo shoot for the Blacks Hate You Like Gold LP, out by Gates Pass. The video's just as stupid and awesome as that photo shoot was. Drummer Matt is currently playing in Flying Donkey Punch.

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Absinthe

7" 1996

This is the same Absinthe 7” that has shown up on a couple other blogs. The cover for my copy was a small run limited edition they threw together to play some out of town shows, but the music is the same. This is their second and last release and I like it better than their 10” but only slightly. It’s just as crushing, but there is more of an urgent angst filled madness to these songs. This is the result of a bunch of good bands breaking up (Slag, Groundwork, Spill Blanket and Teeth) whose members took the best qualities of those bands and formed a great band. They were short lived, but were influential to a lot of bands that could never quite reach this level of greatness. There’s You Tube footage of them here in Goleta with Jeff Ugstad on guitar after he replaced Gabe. There has been long talk of a reissue of this record on King of the Monsters or singer Brendon’s Protagonist Records, but nothing has surfaced yet.

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Hobart

1995 demo cass.

After Slag split up, Marty and Nathan called me up and asked me if I would play in their new project, Hobart, and I jumped at the chance. They were still hyped on the aggressive ugly nature of Slag, but we started to incorporate influences from bands like Unwound, Drive Like Jehu and the Treepeople. At least those were the bands we were listening to the time. This doesn’t really sound like any of them, but I think they’re apt reference points. Playing with Marty and Nathan was a rude awakening to how terrible a musician I was. They were years ahead of me and I had to get good and/or fake it real quick like just to keep up. Not too long after we recorded this Nathan would move to the Bay Area and we would nab Absinthe drummer Brandon Ugstad and continue the project for a total of eight years, the longest running band I’ve been in. Each cassette had a unique cover made of random photos brought home by my then roommate, Dan (photographer, above) who worked in a 24 hr. photo place. We made only about 20 of these and gave them away to friends. I took the name for this blog from a line in the song No Man’s Land.

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Slag

feed 7" 1993

In the Scathe post I mentioned what I consider the first wave of heavy hardcore bands in Tucson in the early 90s, (as compared to the fast hardcore bands like Malignus Youth, American Deathtrip, Ice 9 etc.) but I forgot to mention Slag and they were the heaviest. They were really more metal than hardcore and they couldn’t get their records reviewed in Maximum Rock N’ Roll because they were “too metal.” This record is ugly and hate filled with tortured vocals supplied by the whole band, but there are occasional guitar breaks that are kind of melodic, then the rest of the band comes in and crushes all that. Kind of like slower Buzzoven songs with a second guitar player doing occasional melodic riffs. They even play mid-tempo and grind-core fast at times. Guitar player Jerid had played in Groundwork prior to this band. When Slag split up Jerid and bass player Brian would form Absinthe and drummer Nathan and guitarist Marty would form Hobart. Recorded by Iscariot drummer Mark Wyner and released on Ryan Butler’s (Landmine Marathon, Unruh, Wellington, Arcane Recording Studio) Fetus Records.

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Cancer Brides

like fairy tales of modern times CD 2007

Almost 20 years after the unreleased FUCT demo, John and Obie would release this beast. Cancer Brides had Obie playing drums, rather than just singing, and I was told that he wrote most of the music. John stayed on guitar and other Tucson music vets Psychic Mike (Opinion Zero, Schism), Abel (Cosmic Jackhammer), Joey (ZTTF) and Jeff Ghoul (Backstab Gospel) filled out the line up. The music is progressive like FUCT was in their later years, but in a different way. Instead of bar rock jams they go for a more metal sound. Epic metal like Iron Maiden, but with nods to Feel the Darkness era Poison Idea. And yet a song like The Wrong Kill could be a straight up pop song if it wasn’t for Abel’s manic singing style. Other songs like 5X8 are sludgy, heavy and noisy. The guitars on this are huge and add a lot of melody that is juxtaposed nicely with the crazy vocals. I don’t think any of these guys have current active projects, which is a shame. Great artwork by Obie’s wife Paula.

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FUCT

FUCT "the gob demo" unreleased demo circa 1988

Plenty could be written about FUCT because of their longevity, which saw them out-live many of their early contemporaries (UPS, Blood Spasm, Opinion Zero, Civil Order etc.), but also because they went through a sonic transformation from a hardcore-punk band to a band that took a hardcore-punk influence and mixed it with more progressive influences like Jimi Hendrix and Nomeansno. They also maintained the same line up for over a decade, minus their brief existence with Leo as 2nd guitarist, which is rare. This recording finds them in their early years when they were more juiced on RKL and Raw Power (who they toured with) then the straighter rock sounds they would eventually incorporate. This recording has its own interesting history. It was recorded (I believe) by one of the members of What Went Wrong who died after the session. Seven or eight years later me and my friend Dan (who took the above photo) were hanging out in Toxic Ranch when John (gtr player) worked there. He told us that somebody had recently gone through the sound engineer’s stuff and found this recording and gave him a copy. He then taped it for us and I’ve been listening to it ever since. I think I like this era of FUCT their best, when they were playing fast and young and taking drugs and drinking a lot. The recording and playing is a little rough, but it does a good job of capturing the punk-hardcore sound of Tucson in the late 80s. 

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