MIX TAPE - 1995

  Besides my old friend, Heather, who I met when I was 5 years old, I only keep in touch with one other friend from the Nascar days of my youth (that reference is so vague that I'm not explaining it...just roll with it). That friend is Angie, who mailed this tape to me at my two room apartment in Huntsville, AL in 1995. No cover, no track listing...just this tape rolled up into a letter, recorded over a battered GEORGE MICHAEL cassingle. Short and to the point. I had no clue that I'd still love every song on this tape 20 years later (20 years!). I had no clue that the Floyd who is mentioned in the first line of the first song would be the same person who now assigns me CD's to review for Maximum Rock N Roll or that that house he made his phone call from (listen to the song) would catch on fire a short distance from where I live now. I didn't know that the third song would still resonate so much harder with me now than it did back then. The last band on the tape, EVERY ALICE ON EARTH, will not be a hit with many (or any) visitors to the blog, but they were a local(ish) band where I grew up and were one the first DIY (I mean this as actual "Do It Yourself", not as an empty slogan used by hardware stores and Pottery Barn) bands I ever saw in my pre-teen years, which made a big impact. In some very, very tiny circles, they are legendary.

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ANOTHER JUAN RIDES THE BUS - Compilation - Tape - 1999

      No long-winded stories today. I wasn't living in the Bay Area when most of these bands were active and hardly saw any of them. To my knowledge, all of these bands are local to the Bay Area and/or nearby, except DBS, who were from Vancouver, BC (I once toured all the way across Canada with them, but that's a story for another time.) . The styles, as well as sound quality, are all over the map on this tape. You've got snotty garage pop (PANTY RAID), hardcore-ish (THE JOCKS), humorous (BOBBY JOE EBOLA and YOUR MOTHER) and lots more. I'll make no excuse for how fucking warbly the sound quality can be or how drastic the volume levels can get. My friend, Morgan, put out this tape in 1999 to showcase a lot of unknown and under-represented bands. Many of them are still some of my favorites to this day, including YOGURT, LOS RABBIS and TOMMY LASORDA. Enjoy.

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This tape comes from the mysterious brown bag of Mike Wilson

GLUE WILL NOT BE SOLD TO CHILDREN - A San Pedro Compilation - Tape - 1998

                                             
    Most of the time, when punks think of San Pedro, CA, the first bands to come to mind are THE MINUTEMEN, FYP or maybe TOYS THAT KILL. Maybe even CAN OF BEANS or NIP DRIVERS (even though they were from Torrance). Did you know that there was a crazy, burgeoning scene laying just below your radar in the late 90's in Pedro? Well, of course you did, but you probably never heard them because most of those bands never played outside of town and never released anything besides the songs on this compilation. The scene revolved around an unnamed record store where the punks hung out and caused trouble. Once, they even built a pyramid out of empty 40 bottles in front of the shitty tattoo parlor next door to them. When the rockabilly dude who ran the place walked out to yell at them, the entire thing collapsed, causing shards of broken glass to slice the dude's vintage suit and eyebrows. This was the beginning of the end for this little local scene and the record store was soon defunct. Many of the bands broke up soon afterwards.

    So this tape is your only exposure to the small geniuses that leaked into the Pedro scene for a short little while. There's the sleaziness of THE MOISTMAKERS, hardcore punk by CARBONATED GENOCIDE, the creepy dudes in CREEP ALERT and the sketchy drug-dealers of Sunken City who played in THE VANS. SWEATS AND TIGHTS kept playing as their acoustic duo at open mic nights for a few years until they moved to Goleta. THE DRIVEBYS were one of the first of these bands to break up after their singer Matt "One Lung" was arrested for first degree murder (Too long of a story for this venue). NOBODY LOVES ME kicked around Pedro playing their brand of low-fi pop until the couple in the band broke up. BACKYARD PARTY played wild, teenage, fucked up skate thrash and refused to play any 21+ venues...until Dan turned 21 and became a barfly. Their best line is "Hop on my board, can't land a trick. Let's see how many times WE CAN FLIP IT!!" JON BENET AND THE COVERGIRLS were fucking awesome and spent most of their time trying to get old men to buy them beers at the liquor store. They had a line up change and became THE JAG OFFS. Their best line is "Don't try to impress us! I think you'd rather undress us!" HATE MY JOB was some sad sack who always came into the record store and played guitar in the corner, so they let him be on the comp. PRIEST SLAPPER was a group of Black Metal dudes who played satanic thrash. I remember seeing them around town when I visited and they seemed really out of place wearing all black and corpse paint among the palm trees and 95 degree weather. THE WAKE UP LATES played kinda shitty street punk. They were cool people though. FLAME RETARDED sucked. THE PINK MC'S were a gay rap group who hung out with the punks because no one else liked them (San Pedro is pretty fucked up).
   Most of the people in these bands became squares and dropped out of punk. Lots of them got jobs at the tattoo shop they used to make fun of. You can still find the guys from BACKYARD PARTY hanging out at Harold's Bar on any given night. HATE MY JOB still plays open mic nights on Tuesdays. PRIEST SLAPPER moved to LA and fizzled out due to drugs...
   I hope you enjoy this tape. It's a brief time capsule into a forgotten part of San Pedro punk history.

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    Wait....are you just gonna believe me? You are, aren't you?  Okay, here's the real story: Back in 1998, my old band THE GRUMPIES were on tour with FYP. At some point, we were driving from like, London, Ontario to Winnepeg, Manitoba...which is about 25 hours of absolutely nothing but beautiful vastness, moose, bears, tiny towns and two lane freeways. Sean (from FYP) and I got on one of our long rambling talks about music and we soon started discussing plans to construct an entire fake punk scene, complete with a record store, back story and compilation tape. I had found a Polaroid on the ground in NYC and wrote CREEP ALERT on it. Thus, that became the first band....

   Tour continued and we kept discussing the plan and constructing bands in our heads. When tour ended, Sean stayed in Pedro and I went home to Chattanooga. A few short months later, this tape and zine showed up in my P.O. Box. He had actually done it! I had forgotten about it, but he had gotten together punks in Pedro to carry out the plan....and a lot of the songs are really good! I even covered the JON BENET song in a band I played with...which begs the question, "Does that make them a real band?" Real or not, I think most of this compilation is great. 

Features members of FYP, TOYS THAT KILL, THE JAG OFFS, THE LEECHES and more..

PETER STUBB - "Blueberry Masturbator" - Tape - 1992

 
   Peter Stubb has gone by many names in his life: Gary League, Dewayne King, Cannibalistic Retard, Gary Lee Austin, Gary Spit and many more. Peter Stubb, for whatever reason, is the one that has stuck around the longest. He began home recording his own songs on cassette sometime in the late 80's, just banging on things and making guitar noises with his mouth. The lyrics could be funny, disturbing and demented. Other times, they were crushingly depressing, especially when he delved into the topics of the reality of his everyday landscape, which included the mental wards and psychological education centers of North Georgia.
   I had heard stories of Peter Stubb throughout the south for a while and got a chance to play a show with him in Chattanooga in late 1995. To put it lightly, it was life changing. Throughout the show, the punks had been flying all over the room, singing defiantly and going nuts. As Peter started to set up to play, most of the people in the room politely sat on the floor in front of him and a hush grew through the building as if something important was about to happen. Peter sat in front of the assembled audience, struggling with some papers and a music stand, his face painted in fucked up, dripping corpse paint and his shoulders flanked by football pads. His battered acoustic guitar was covered in fading stickers and his arms were completely covered in scars from self-inflicted knife wounds. He appeared to be nervous and too anxious to be in front of all these people. All I could think as he was about to strike the first chords was "What the fuck is going on?!" He belted out a quick 40 second song devoted to the love of cunnilingus and the crowd howled. Seconds after finishing that one, he completely changed gears and destroyed the audience with one of the most honestly depressing songs I had ever heard. The punk kid next to me who earlier looked so tough and bulletproof was sobbing like a baby.

    Soon after, I was visiting Chattanooga again and I asked my friend Eric Nelson if he could copy any of Stubb's music for me. He obliged with this tape, "Blueberry Masturbator". He joked around about the less serious songs on the tape but he added, almost gravely, that Peter Stubb is the most honest songwriter that he has ever heard in his life. On the drive back to Alabama, I put it on and got a chance to really immerse myself in it. It starts off almost abruptly with "Social Phobia", which feels as if you just stumbled into an internal monologue that had been occurring long before you arrived. Stubb palm-mutes like crazy in a way that recalls the best RAMONES songs and introduces you to his world of anxious paranoia. The next couple of songs are a complete 180, telling stories of pot heads and objectifying women. While stuff like the latter may offend the ears of my more radical thinking readers (like say, me), I think this is part of the Stubb experience. His songs are uncomfortable, untamed and dark. To only listen to the ones that line up with your political outlook is cheating. "Bodies in the Tub" is about stacking up the dead bodies of his oppressors in his bathtub. "I Don't Care If You Go" is about Stubb's mom. "Crashed and Died" is about a motorcycle wreck in which Peter crashes and dies "like a motherfucker". Towards the end, Stubb launches into some odd speech that is part possessed/part childlike that permeates some of his other songs, but this is it's only appearance on this tape. Just when you thought he wasn't gonna get too serious again, he comes back with "Committed", a crushingly sad song that details his early experiences with the north Georgia mental health system, which I can only imagine is less than stellar. In the song, he sings...

    "One teacher asked me, what would I like to be. I said 'A werewolf...a demon inside of me.' She kinda flipped out. She said I needed help. She said 'How long have you felt this way?'. I said 'I don't know. I'm like this everyday.' She said 'We'l get you help..you can count on it.' Next thing I knew, I was committed."

   Later, he says that they won't let him out until the sanity is back in him, In the next song "Bu-Doing-Schwing", you're finally convinced that Stubb has lost it in this song about hyper-sexualized lust....and his dick. He makes weird sounds with his voice, which recall many of his earlier tapes and the whole thing is just kinda bizarre. Abruptly, Stubb launches into the last two songs, which take you into the lowest depression of the whole tape. "Just One More Time" is about feeling bad about the things that have happened in your life and wishing you could change them. The final song, "They Took It Away" is epic, destructive and possibly the single most depressing song I have ever heard in my life because it is 100% real and nothing but honest. I can't even do it justice by talking about it. You just have to listen to it alone and let his words pull you into the darkness. 

   Long before this release, Peter Stubb had been releasing his own self-recorded tapes and he still continues to this day. Many of his early tapes were one of a kind...he would record a couple of songs, make a cover and just give it to a friend. Others were released in a edition of ten or less and you might find a copy of it that Stubb left in the bathroom at a Dalton, GA Wal-Mart. There are countless tapes of his music all over the place. You never knew what you would find on these tapes, but it was/is always interesting. He's still releasing a few tapes a year and if you send him $4-6 cash in the mail, he will send you a new one. You can find Peter here on his FB page and he'll send you his address to order tapes. 

   I'm putting this up on this site to archive it and for all of his old friends and fans, but mostly I am sharing it in the hopes that someone in a small town in the middle of nowhere will find this and have it change their life in the way it changed mine (as well as many of the people I love).

Thanks to Eric Nelson for everything.

Thanks to Josh Mayfield for being such a dutiful archivist of Stubb's music for so many years. 

Thanks to Peter Stubb for making all of this music and for giving me permission to put this tape online. 

Download "Blueberry Masturbator"

...and here is a link to the short film "I'm Like This Everyday", made by Mitchell Powers in 2008.

RYMODEE - "Live in Bloomington" - Tape - 2003

    If you just scroll down a couple of entries, you'll see this man's year end top ten list. You'll also see that I'm quite fond of the guy. So, yeah, it's RYMODEE from THIS BIKE IS A PIPEBOMB playing solo in Bloomington, IN at what I believe is a house show. If you can ever track down this man's solo LP, do not hesitate to pick it up, because it is excellent. While you're at it, you should also track down the recent LP by his last band ZIPPERS TO NOWHERE.
    I don't really know what else I can say about this recording.... besides that someone starts doing that annoying thing that folk punk kids do when an acoustic performer plays...which is to clap along loudly and out of time. BUT Rymo quashes it fairly quickly within the first song with his constant time changes. Also, I don't know many of the song titles, so you don't get them in this download. I asked Rymodee his thoughts on this tape and he said "It's kind of embarrassing."

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Re-upped Feb 2013

This tape was released years ago by the still relevant and always-interesting Friends and Relatives Records.

EDIT: The show was at Rhino's, an all ages club in Bloomington and the audio was recorded from a camcorder. Thanks to Justin at Friends and Relatives for the info.

ME, YOU & THE BOYS - Live Tape - 2000?

   ME, YOU & THE BOYS was an acoustic project put together by Matty Luv (HICKEY), Shell, Jen (both of 50 MILLION and now SHELLSHAG) and Matt Powell (RUDIMENTS//FAGGZ). I'm pretty sure they never left San Francisco or went on any sort of tour to speak of. A lot of locals around SF were big fans of this group, but they never clicked with me. In my mind, it all ties into the "dark days" of the Mission punk scene that Erick Lyle speaks of in this entry about 50 MILLION, but I thought it might be of interest to fans of the aforementioned bands.
   This sounds like a practice tape recorded by the band on a boombox or something. They play some originals and a VASELINES cover. The tape was dubbed for me by my friend Sarah T (she also took the pic of them playing at Mission Records below). Enjoy.

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Updated 2013

If you think I'm full of shit and this is your favorite band ever, please feel free to tell your own story about them in the comments. I'm sure it's good.
Oh yeah, almost forgot...this was obviously recorded off of a CD and it has a couple little skips in it. It's not too bad though....I think it's only in "78666".

DRAW THE LINES - Olympia Music Compilation - Tape - 2011

   I was tricked into buying this tape, but that's okay because it's really good. You see, I ran into the band DOGJAW a couple of times and our bands even played together in Seattle last year. I like them a lot. They play slow, driving, droning music with two intertwining female voices that are both haunting and commanding. I saw them play at a great house show in SF and wanted to buy something by them. I bought this tape without looking at the track listing and then later realized that it was a compilation of bands from their hometown of Olympia, Washington. Their guitarist, Meg offered my money back when I said something about it, but I decided to keep it because DOGJAW are quality folks and I would expect them to have some quality shit with them on their tour. I was right.
   DOGJAW opens up this tape with two sprawling, beautiful, epic songs that break the ten minute mark (combined). They are followed by CRUDE THOUGHT who blast through 3 fast, driving punk songs. Bay Area locals may be happy to know that CRUDE THOUGHT will be in the area at the end of February with the ultra-hyped (all deserved) HYSTERICS. (also, DOGJAW will be here again in March). Next up is ANASTATICA, who I initially wrote off as being kinda dramatic and hokey, but then they grew on me immediately and became one of my favorite songs on this comp. It's super stripped down, DIY, feminist black metal. Unfortunately, they broke up, so my hopes of headbanging to these songs live, ever so slowly and forcefully are now dashed. They remind me of the best parts (read: all of it) of the acoustic songs by DOOMSDAY CAULDRON. Next up, I feel like DOGJAW (the organizers of this comp, I believe) is trying to pull one over on me by throwing in a French band called BIT PART. They're from France, right? Is there an Olympian BIT PART? I don't know, but whatever nationality they choose, they are fast, punk and great. Side two starts of with HARK HOW THE BELLS, which takes a few songs from their demo, which you can find by clicking on that link. PITTED YOUTH follows it up with a dirge-y, screamy approach that rules. I regret not watching them when my band played with them, but I was just too sweaty and tired to deal with anything (because I'm old). MARGY PEPPER is kinda minimalist and reminds me of early K Records stuff. BROKEN WATER closes out the tape with a ruling song that sounds like it could have been out an outtake from "Daydream Nation" with elements of MY BLOODY VALENTINE, which I'm sure they're not too happy to hear, but that's what it sounds like to me. Deal with it.

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If you'd like to get your own copy of this tape, don't hesitate to write to dogjawolympia@gmail.com and they will hook you up.

IN THAR - CD-R - 2004

    I know what some of you are thinking.."I thought this was a tape blog. Why do you keep posting all of these CD's?" Well, my friend, this isn't a tape blog. I'd like to think it's not even a music blog...but it is. The reason that I keep putting up CD-R releases is because they are fragile. I have CD-R's that are a year or two old and won't play. I have tapes from 1985 that play perfectly. I don't want to discuss the fact that I have a whole other POTENTIAL JOHNS CD of demos from the 90's that won't play because it has one little scratch on it. It's heartbreaking. So, I am trying to save some of these fragile little worthless discs before one tiny little smudge from my clumsy punk living destroys a filing cabinet drawer full of memories....and that brings us to IN THAR.
    My friend, Chris handed this CD to me with a small little pile of tapes years ago and this band completely took me off guard. I was in the middle of a tour that featured many celebrated folk-punk acts and the first acoustic notes of this CD immediately made me clamor for the "stop" button. I had been hearing enough of this stupid bullshit for weeks and how DARE my friend, Chris fuck with me like this. Then, the drums kicked in...not bongos or a bucket or "like, whatever's around, man", but a real live drum set. It sounded fuckin' good! As soon as Osa's staccato violin riff laid itself over the rest of the instruments, I was hooked...and this was all within 20 seconds of the first song. It reminds me of what people can do with acoustic music, as punks and actually make it sound good. Just because you picked up an acoustic guitar, it does not mean that you have to A) sing about bikes and dumpsters, B) act like you are some weird stereotype from the south (I will kill you) or C) suck. You can still write good punk songs and still be tough as nails (if your intention is to not be tough as nails, that is fine too. Have you heard SPOONBOY or CASSETTE? In all honesty, they are also tough in a completely different vein.)
   Members of this band were also in DRUNKEN BOAT, NEW BLOODS and the solo act known as COOL BREEZE. Get into it.

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