This unnecessary addition to the blogosphere is about 7-inch records that have meant something to me over the years. They're not the most obscure or hard to come by, or even the coolest selections - they're just records that I spent a lot of time listening to that evoke certain times in my life. Some folks might share that trip down memory lane with me, while some might hear these for the first time. Either way, enjoy!
Maybe I'll do these more frequently if I try to be a little less verbose....
I moved to Chicago in 1995, during the heady days of pop-punk. While my tastes ran to the Mr. T Experience/Sicko/Screeching Weasel kind of stuff, NOFX had made really speedy pop songs played with great precision the favored style of many bands. I personally usually found that these bands' speed was impressive, but that the speed came at the expense of the song itself, since everything sounded so rushed and not natural.
I'd heard of Lifetime, a New Jersey hardcore outfit, but had never heard them, and was told I would enjoy them. Sometime in 1996, I picked up this 7" (I think it was at the Dummyroom, but it could have been Reckless or Quaker Goes Deaf - I'm so old school) to check them out.
I was immediately worried that this was another good song played way too fast, as they come out of the gate blazing, but just before the halfway point (at 29 seconds!), they slow it way down - what would be "the breakdown" for many bands - and keep it up all the way to the end. This is a headbanging, fist-in-the-air jam for sure.
Flipping the record over, we get an almost Screeching Weasel-y slab of pop punk, with a basic but catchy melody over a wall of guitars and a nice tight rhythm section. Oddly enough, there's not really a verse-chorus structure to the song. It's more like a verse, then a bridge, then a middle eight, but the middle eight lasts from 49 seconds all the way to the end of the song, with the exception of the ending reprise of the verse chords, albeit in "breakdown" form again, just once through the progression. Thus, this song strikes a nifty balance between the predictability of the melody and the unorthodox nature of the structure.
I know a lot of people for whom Lifetime means a lot, but I never liked anything more than this single. I found their albums to be full of the played-way-too-fast-for-their-own-good songs, and never bothered with them. This lil' record still holds up for me, though.
At some point during my sophomore year in college (1990), my friend Jay sent me a mix tape (one of many, many tapes full of awesomeness I’d get from him over the years) that was filled with great pop-punk stuff that was brand-new to me at the time – Green Day, Snuff, Jawbreaker, Cringer, and many others. One band that stuck out in particular, though, was Nuisance. They had a rough-around-the-edges sound, with songs that had a million parts, but a very sort of approachable feel. More ambitious in their construction than most other pop-punk stuff, these songs appealed to the part of me that likes Rush as well as the part of me that likes the Buzzcocks.
Down the road there were full-length albums and a few more singles, but this was the first record I ever heard by Nuisance, and it’s still my favorite.
We open with “Terminal Fuckup”, which starts with a half-time three-chord riff, the guitar strumming lightly enough to let the individual notes come through. After a few repetitions of this, it really kicks in, and the rhythm section (Kyle Henner and Jesse Wickman) really starts to shine, with Jesse’s drumming propelling Kyle’s melodic bass line. Andy Asp’s buzzsaw guitar rides on top of it in a blur of distortion, which his voice soon matches. His voice always seemed to me to fit the music so perfectly – ragged and worn, melodic and laid-back. The song goes through several parts, making it sort of prog-rock-ish,before bringing the opening riff back in and finishing out the song.
Side one doesn’t let up at all, continuing immediately with the hardcore-speed “King Rat”. Even this doesn’t remain pitworthy throughout, though. There’s a detour in the middle for another Northern California mellow riff, then the verse comes back in. After that, though, we get another little proggy riff followed by the ending part, which tightens things up with a metal sort of chugging and some ominous vocals to go with it before the fadeout.
One of my friends loves songs with a million parts, believing that music should “go somewhere”. I think he’d like side two of this record, which is devoted to the 6 ½ minute opus (an eternity in punk time) “Sungod”. The song opens with another slow strummy riff which has a little melodic plucking in it, like we’re sitting around a campfire. It gives way to the main riff, which is anchored by another wonderful melodic bass line and some busy drumming. After a few times through the verses, the first of several new riffs comes in, the guitar and bass blending on a new melody before the guitar begins a weird muted arpeggio riff. After that, we get a loud 6/8 riff that’s only played twice, followed by a Meat Puppets-esque country punk kind of part that segues perfectly back into the opening riff and the body of the song again. After a few times through this main part, a new proggy arpeggio riff introduces the epic ending section, with Andy singing his heart out and the rest of us bobbing our heads along (yes, yes, yes – this rocks!). This was the song that really made Nuisance stand out to me as their own kind of band, not interested in simply rehashing old ways of writing songs. Sure, some of the odd little one-off parts might seem a little goofy in hindsight, but they were going for it, and I was with them, 100%.
The next summer, Jay set up a show in Indiana with our band (Lynyrd’s Innards) opening up for Nuisance.This was such an amazing thing to me at the time, and it really highlighted one of my favorite things about the punk/DIY world – that you could be a tiny band in a tiny town and get to share a stage with one of your favorite bands in the world (though technically there was no stage at the South Haven Community Center, just the bare floor).
The back cover art for their first full-length, “Confusion Hill”, included a stylized question mark which I have tattooed on my shoulder, partly to remind me to never think I’m certain of anything, and partly in homage to what Nuisance meant to me at that time in my life. Years later, I saw Andy playing in Chicago with the band he was in at the time (The Pattern), and was happy to find that he remembered me and the fun we had playing shows with them (we played with them again the summer after the SHCC show). I showed him my tattoo, and he rolled up his sleeve to show me that he had the same one in the same place. It was a beautiful connection across the years and confirmed for me the spirit of DIY that has been so important to me for so much of my life.
When the time came to head off to college (way back in 1989), I left small-town Indiana for the University of Houston. While I was looking forward to whatever the "college experience" was going to be, I was also rather nervous about the whole thing, as I was leaving my familiar region and all of my friends (plus of course the requisite summer-after-graduation girlfriend) for uncharted territory - in Texas of all places. I hoped I'd like the school, I hoped I'd make friends, and I hoped I had a cool roommate. While the first two on the list turned out to be no problem at all, I was not so lucky with hope #3.
Glen was a sophomore, which I thought would be great, as I'd have someone who could kind of show me the ropes and make me privy to all sorts of great information. As it turned out, Glen didn't really speak much (in fact, he ended up only directly addressing me twice the entire year). He only left the room for classes and meals - otherwise, he was there, doing homework or watching terrible TV shows (Family Matters, Harry and the Hendersons, etc.). He didn't talk on the phone, he didn't have friends over to our room, he didn't drink, he didn't listen to music, etc. He also didn't like it if I did anything from that list, meaning that our room was silent at all times, with the exception of the previously mentioned televised entertainment. One time, a friend of mine was hanging out in our room and threw away an empty Pepsi bottle in the trashcan next to Glen's desk. The next day, the bottle had been moved into the can next to my desk. The guy was a borderline sociopath. I'll always remember the mug that he kept on his desk - one of those kinds with a person's name and a little poem about it. His read, "GLEN: Like a secluded valley, hidden from view / You share yourself with precious few." Amen to that.
Anyhow, the only thing Glen did that I liked was go home on the weekends to see his girlfriend. He had arranged his schedule so that he only had a couple of classes on Friday morning, and could then take off to wherever it was that he went. This meant that I would come back to my room after classes were done, and it truly became MY room for the duration of the weekend - the only time that I could actually relax and live normally. My normal way of kicking off this blissful time leads us to the reason for this post.
While I liked Minor Threat just fine, I didn't own any, and didn't listen to them much. When I read about Ian Mackaye's post-Minor Threat band Fugazi in MR&R, though, they sounded pretty interesting. I took a chance and bought the "3 Songs" 7-inch, and fell in love. They were punk, but took a sort of brainy and more adult-seeming approach to it, which instantly appealed to my pretentious "arty" side (a pretty large side, unfortunately).
The first side of the record, "Song Number One," starts with a stuttering guitar riff before everyone comes crashing in with the sort of fists-in-the-air-and-yell-along kind of chord progression I was familiar with from Chicago stalwarts like Naked Raygun at that point. Simple, yet effective. The song is about scene politics, which at that point in life, were important to me. They effectively trashed the notion of trying to be cool, saying that all of these things that seemed so important - haircuts, hometown scenes, 'zines - meant nothing.
Side Two is where my weekend truly began, though. It starts off with the instrumental "Joe Number One," which begins with a dubby sort of bass groove. After a statement of the guitar melody, the drums kick in and a piano doubles the bass riff. After a few repetitions of the melody, along with some dramatic pauses, the "chorus" riff comes in, and we begin nodding along, FEELING it, man. It continues in this sort of mellow vein until the abrupt ending, at which point the opening riff of "Break-In" comes crashing in. While it's akin to the band's hardcore past in its fury and energy, it still has the feel that made Fugazi different to me. The lyrics deal with sex, but in a different way than anything I'd listened to up to this point did, really: "And he's happy because she's got skin / And she's happy just to let him in / When he asks will you let me in? / And from a place where they share skin, they say / Come inside" Much different from "Let me cut your cake with my knife" (which I also love - it's complicated), to be sure.
This record was perfect for my sense of myself becoming an adult and dealing with the world in a new way, but more importantly, it fucking rocked hard, and I could turn it up real loud and flail about the room freely. Whenever I hear these songs, and "Break-In" in particular, I remember the feeling of freedom and possibility that came over me every Friday afternoon, when I had my own place for at least a few days.
