| 21 March 2000 | K-Tel | 6453-2 |
| DISC 1: 01. Husker Du – Pink Turns To Blue 02. Dinosaur Jr. – Little Furry Things 03. My Dad Is Dead – Too Far Gone 04. The Wedding Present – My Favorite Dress 05. The Chills – I Love My Leather Jacket 06. The Fall – Cruisers Creek 07. Pussy Galore – Sweet Little Hi-Fi 08. Mudhoney – Touch Me I’m Sick 09. Half Japanese – U.S.Teens Are Spoiled Bums 10. Big Dipper – She’s Fetching 11. Nikki Sudden – Jangle Town 12. Eleventh Dream Day – Watching The Candles Burn 13. Giant Sand – Black Venetian Blind 14. Meat Puppets – Swimming Ground 15. Scrawl – I’m Ready DISC 2: |
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| Double CD compilation featuring Sweet Little Hi-Fi by Pussy Galore (originally released on Sugarshit Sharp).
Scroll down for extensive sleeve notes by Scott Becker (who also wrote ‘We Rock So You Don’t Have To’). |
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| Compilation Producers: Scott Becker/Patrick Whalen
1.1. Husker Du – Husker Du 1.2. Dinosaur Jr – Little Furry Things 1.3. My Dad Is Dead – Too Far Gone 1.4. The Wedding Present – My Favourite Dress 1.5. The Chills – I Love My Leather Jacket 1.6. The Fall – Cruisers Creek Writer: Smith/Smith 1.7. Pussy Galore – Sweet Little Hi-Fi 1.8. Mudhoney – Touch Me I’m Sick 1.9. Half Japanese – US Teens Are Spoiled Bums 1.10. Big Dipper – She’s Fetching 1.11. Nikki Sudden – Jangle Town 1.12. Eleventh Dream Day – Watching The Candles Burn 1.13. Giant Sand – Black Venetian Blind 1.14. Meat Puppets – Swimming Ground 1.15. Scrawl – I’m Ready 2.1. The Feelies – Slipping Into Something 2.2. Yo La Tengo – Barnaby, Hardly Working 2.3. The Wipers – Nothing Left To Lose 2.4. Squirrel Bait -Sun God 2.5. The Minutemen – Political Song For Michael Jackson To Sing 2.6. Savage Republic – Andelusia 2.7. The Mekons – Ghosts Of American Astronauts 2.8. Galaxie 500 – Blue Thunder 2.9. Spacemen 3 – Take Me To The Other Side 2.10. The Flaming Lips – Everything’s Explodin’ 2.11. The Melvins – Creepy Smell 2.12. Black Flag – Black Coffee 2.13. Death Of Samantha – Coca-Cola & Licorice 2.14. The Pastels – I’m Alright With You 2.15. The Vaselines – Molly’s Lips |
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Liner Notes: Scott Becker
“Gimme Indie Rock: History Lesson Part I “The how, the why, the where, the who – can these words find the truth?” – d. boon A lot of folks, some of whom I even like, think the 60’s were the Gold Years of rock. Fuck that. I’ll concede that the period framed by the British Invasion and the Woodstock Nation produced a fair share of great bands. The Beatles, the Stones, the Experience, the Airplane-you can name ’em just as well as I can. And loads of strung-out longhairs wrote groovy songs that graying elementary teachers sing for their little tykes to this very day. But scratch your own way past the superficial scrim of the era’s brightest stars and you’ll discover a hollow wasteland. I mean, how many really great discs came out in those days when the LOP-as-statement was ascendant? The number is pretty finite, as you can tell by the way they still clog the playlists of America’s unrepentant classic rock stations. Sure, I atill reach for my copies of Surrealistic Pillow and Highway 61 Revisited, but does anyone ever listen to complete albums by the Strawberry Alarm clock, the Chocolate Watch Band or the Vanilla Fudge? They most certainly do not. And that’s why, in the 90’s, a twerp like Burt Bacharach was considered cool and a band like Iron Butterfly wasn’t. Further, the frequently and deservedly maligned ’70s were a musical black hole simply because rock had turned into a business and rock stardom had become a respectable profession. The music no longer mattered: as pure, crowd-pleasing entertainment, there is no difference whatsoever between ABBA and KISS. Fans deserved their share of the blame, too: you know those Styx and Bob Seger lovers who burned piles of disco records at a major league sporting event? Remember, they were alleging the superiority of their music taste. Meanwhile, the same midwestern radio jocks who egged on the disco-sucks knuckleheads never played useful rock iconoclasts like the New York Dolls, Television and Patti Smith, probably because they came from a city which even the president said could “drop dead.” (As to why all the culprits in this saga are from Michigan or Illinois, maybe that’s just my own bicoastal bias. But I doubt it.) So pop culture atomized into warring factions, while all the cool shit was happening on the fringes: loft jazz and Jamaican dub, German electronic music and Canterbury prog-rock, the early years of hip-hop and punk. That’s why the only people who care about the 70’s today are pot-bellied record collectors and the Hollywood idiots who produce campy, “retro” TV series. You wouldn’t want to share a cell with any of ’em. Still, lots of smart kids were growing up during those years, and the combos they formed in the ’80s made the best,. Most impassioned rock ‘n’ roll ever, From the ’60s they’d learned the value of tunefulness and the life-changing power of a perfect LP (precisely divided into two sides of equal impact). From the ’70s they borrowed the do-it-yerself ethos of punk, applying its lessons to every aspect of their bands: from attitude and attire to self-booked tours and self-run labels. Like communism, it was a good theory, and everyone conveniently forgot that even the Clash was a major label act. So amazing bands sprang out of nowhere, made phenomenal albums and burned out faster than you can say “my distributor didn’t pay me.” Mission of Burma, Dream Syndicate, Au Pairs, Pylon, the Proletariat, Flipper, Method Actors, Bush Tetras, 100 Flowers, Birthday Party – I can’t tell you exactly which one caused the dirty ringing tone that persists in my left ear, but I vaguely recall seeing bands of this calibre on an almost nightly basis. And that was just the early ’80s, By the middle of the decade – as defined by the arbitrary if necessary parameters of this collection’s historical mission – the world of independent rock was in full flower. Mesmerizing bands criss-crossed the country in bands, and chances are that every week a couple of ‘em were playing someplace near whereever you were living at the time. It’s essential to recall that back then, hardly anybody cared. So listen to old gramps here and I’ll tell you why that made the music even better: there was no money in it. The glossy mags didn’t care. The major labels didn’t care. The commercial radio stations didn’t care. And nobody even know what the hell a corporate tour sponsor was. You made those insanely great records and played your heart out onstage just because you wanted to. Yeah, I know. It’s hard to imagine. Fortunately, the music galvanized a few fervent fans – enough of ’em, anyway, to keep the feeble flame alive. Some of us were putting out fanzines or holding down slots at college radio; some of us launched indie labels or even started our own bands. A couple of random dudes in the very latter category became the most famous fans of all: the Melvins’ Buzz Osbourne was the guy who in turn, turned Kurt Cobain on to punk. Kurt was no slouch when it came to forcing his favorites on his own fans, God bless him. Had that not been the case, it is utterly certain the Vaselines’ exceedingly obscure pop genius would have remianed so. On the other hand, the Meat Puppets already had their place in the indie rock pantheon – Kurt just made sure the MTV masses knew it, too. Passed on like secret handshakes, the names of great, neglected, almost-forgotten bands became transformed into legends. Meanwhile, former rock scribes and college DJs have moved up the industry’s ladder of influence and power, forcing even the top brass at a conglomerate like K-tel to sit up and beg for a piece of the action. And so you now hold a compilation of tracks by many of those “legendary” indie rockers of the ’80’s. But let’s be frank. A few come by their greatness honestly: they bought originality and conviction to every note they played. Others merely had their moments, or were guilty by association. If you band was friendly with Thurston Moore, or was on Homestead, or garnered simultaneous attention from Forced Exposure, Matter and Away From the Pulsebeat, you could have been in the club, too. Context was everything. But then, that’s exactly why this set includes the acknowledged poobahs of indie rock alongside some of it’s lost gems. Argue amongst yourselves as to who should have been left off this collection or who else should have been included, but the fact is that it’s merely a matter of a cut-away view. These are just some of the groups who made the records which made the ’80s sound the way thatt I remember them. Black Flag – to cite just one of my favorite acts in here-were loud, rude, and over the top, but they had a sense of control and a singular approach to sound that was the mark of genius. Other groups – the Mekons, the Fall – had their roots in the earliest moments of the ’70s punk explosion, and endured by investigating the promise and possibility that came with punk theory. (If you thought punk was about safety pins and spikey hair, you were dead before the ’80s began.) In fact, as large as punk loomed before every one of these artistes, you could couldn’t call a single one here “punk.” The Melvins or the Minutemen might have worn the handle proudly, but their music was always bigger and therefore better than that. So from Half Jap’s naïve yelp to Squirrel Bait’s ungodly squawk, the contrived primitivism of punk was just another contrairian tactic. Given the truly calculated garbage being spewed by the music industry, indie artifice didn’t seem half bad. Not that some of these bands were afraid to put the “art” in artifice. Savage Republic mashed-up serf music, industrial clatter and Middle Eastern vibes and wound up sounding like nothing else around. My Dad Is Dead put his angry, morose journal on a four-track and released the results, while Nikki Sudden turned his scarves-and-candles romanticism into a persona that was sorta like the anti-Stevie Nicks. Pussy Galore celebrated sex and sludge; while Spacemen 3 worshipped drugs and, uh, harder drugs. In the end, you’d need a whole roomful of records – old-fashion LPs and shelves full of 7-inch vinyl, too – to illustrate what those years were all about. If you were there and have your won mental scrapbook, you’ll surely recall gigs which left you spent and happy in a way that only good sex can approximate. But maybe you were too young then, or heaven knows, not yet a twinkle in the starry sky. For those mere babes among you, indulge me while I rattle off a few of the ’80s moments that made my own life less pathetic: the wipers in a basement dive in Boston… Scrawl during a New York music convention, playing only to folks who cared enough to traipse out to Hoboken… Husker Du inciting a giant mosh pit in a cavernous hall at UCLA… Yo La Tengo in a tender acoustic in-store… Flaming Lips on a stage that seemed to be on fire… or Sonic Youth before an actual bonfire in the goddamn Mojave Desert (sorry, but they couldn’t be here with us today) And the Minutemen, who I must have seen a hundred times. Because every mother-lovin’ moment of the Minutemen onstage was better than heroin, better than Jesus, better than chocolate-covered cherries. And when the best band in the world is just a bunch of local chumps who play in crummy neighbourhood bars every weekend – could life get any better? Believe or not, that’s the way it was in cities across America. And that, kids, is what made the ‘80s such a dandy decade for rock. Okay, I’ve conveniently ignored all that horrible pop and new wave crap that MTV got behind, not to mention those fuckin’ awful hairspray bands. So what? I can’t vouch for anybody else, but I spent those years listening to nothing but good music, because there was plenty of it. Crazy enough, a couple of dog years later some of those old pups soldier on. Having inspired a fair hunk of the indie rock of the ’90s, quite a few of the acts showcased herein still churn out quality noise themselves. Last year, critics and consumers alike salivated over the Flaming Lips’ The Soft Bulletin; this year Yo La Tengo will break hearts with their umpteenth masterpiece, And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out. Scotland’s Pastels continue to shamble about in much the same shy manner; Nikki Sudden and the Chills’ Martin Phillips, too. Giant Sand mastermind Howe Gelb gets less predictable with each passing year, while his desert compadres the Meat Puppets are said to be plotting a comeback. Meanwhile the Mekons, the Fall, Half Japanese and the Melvins all stagger happily on. For that matter, the wrthing spawn of the acts on Gimme Indie Rock could still break you used-CD budget for months on end: Spiritualized, the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Royal Trux, Scenic, Mike Watt, Cobra Verde, Henry Rollins Band, Tortoise, Gastr del Sol, Freakwater, Luna, Bob Mould, Grant Hart, Sebadoh… Dude, it’s history as living cacophony. And as my close personal acquaintance and frequent talk show guest Prof. Byron Coley always says: guh. As usual, he’s absolutely right. Scott Becker Scott Becker is the founder/publisher of OPTION Magazine.” |
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ARTWORK: [unknown]
BARCODE: 022775645323 MATRIX: |
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