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Various: Punk Que? Punk 12” (DRO, 1983; fan club, 2025)

First, I wanted to take a moment to mention the passing of SS Decontrol’s Al Barile. I rarely write eulogies in the Sorry State newsletter unless it’s someone I knew personally, but I was really sad to hear Al lost his battle with cancer. Of course I love SSD’s first two records to the moon and back, but what I really admired about Al Barile was the way he was so dedicated to forging his own path and seeing things his way. For a long time, he was a mysterious figure who kept the punk media world at arm’s length, but when he started giving interviews over the past few years, I feel like I really got a sense of who he was as a person. He had this incredible ability to see past the hangups that ensnare so many of us—ego, ambition, vanity, fear of / concern for what others think—and get right to the heart of the matter. Interviews with Al often seemed kind of awkward because he almost never said what you expected him to say. And it’s not like he was being contrary… he was just accessing a level of truth, honesty, and clarity that most of us will never know. Cheers Al, rest in peace.

My pick for this week’s newsletter is this 1983 compilation of Spanish punk rock, Punk Que? Punk, originally released on the Spanish label DRO in 1983 and recently reproduced by (I presume) an enterprising bootlegger. I read about Punk Que? Punk years ago (where and when is lost to the sands of time) and added the record to my want list, so when I saw we were getting in a reissue, I was stoked to check it out. I did not know I would like it as much as I do, though… it’s been on near-constant rotation since it arrived. Like a lot of 80s Spanish punk, the bands on Punk Que? Punk tend to have a potent combination of energy, power, and melody. As longtime readers will know, I’m a huge fan of 70s punk, and for whatever reason, 80s Spanish punk and hardcore seem to have a lot more 70s punk in their DNA than most scenes. Not that they ignored the worldwide trend toward harder and faster sounds, but they kept the melody and the strong songwriting from the original 70s bands.

Punk Que? Punk features two songs each from seven bands, each band delivering one song on each side. I’d only heard a few of the bands before, which is unsurprising since most of them never made records of their own. Madrid’s Espasmódicos released a 7” and a 12” EP and we carried their discography LP on Beat Generation a while back, so I was familiar with their upbeat, slightly arty punk, which would fit nicely on a mix tape full of Dangerhouse Records singles. Seguridad Social is by far the most prolific band on the comp, having released many LPs and EPs in the 80s and continuing to release music into the 2000s. Coincidentally, I had come across their 1982 cassette ¡¡Konsspiracion!! online a couple months before this comp got re-released and had listened to it a bunch. I checked out several of Seguridad Social’s records, but it seems like they drifted away from punk and toward new wave pretty quickly. Their two songs here, though, are pure punk, but with very strong chorus melodies. I particularly like their song on the b-side, “Cuando Llegue A Casa Te Desatare,” which has a bright, major-key chord progression and a memorable vocal melody, but still sounds tough as nails.

Alongside Seguridad Social, the other standout band for me on Punk Que? Punk is KGB. Very much in the melodic, 70s-influenced mode I associate with classic Spanish punk, KGB’s two tracks here remind me of the Dickies in that they’re fast, tight, and powerful, yet still put vocal melody front and center. “Maroto” is my favorite song on the record, with a massive singalong chorus that would have been right at home on Dawn of the Dickies, but their other track, the curiously titled “Agradable Sobremesa Con Una Japonesa” (“A Pleasant After-Dinner Chat with a Japanese Woman”) isn’t too far behind. KGB released a single on DRO in 1983 that I would really like to get my hands on, and there’s also a 2016 compilation LP on Vomitopunkrock Records with additional tracks. I need to investigate that too.

Most of the other bands on Punk Que? Punk only appeared on compilations, but don’t let this deter you as their quality ranges from very good to excellent. Carne De Psiquiatríco have a couple of tracks with a humorous bent (like “Quiero Ser Guitarra De Siniestro Total,” “I Want to Be the Guitar Player in Siniestro Total”) and a heavy Sex Pistols influence. San Sebastian’s No also sounds kind of like a second-wave UK punk band, while Urgente keeps things similarly raw yet song-oriented. Bilbao’s N.634 is the toughest-sounding band on the comp with simple, primal drums and busy bass playing. It’s kind of UK82-sounding, but with a gluebag griminess that makes me think of the first two Chaos UK singles.

So yeah, all killer and no filler on this one. We still have a few copies in stock as of this writing, so grab one if it sounds up your alley. And someone hook me up with a copy of that KGB single!

Unfortunately, I’ll have to keep things brief this week as I’m running late, but if an abbreviated staff pick doesn’t give you your “Daniel talking about records” fix, you can watch last week’s episode of What Are You Listening To? with me as a guest. I was joined by WAYLT?’s host Mike along with Tom from Static Shock Records and Dave from Sewercide Records. Shoegaze was derided. The gospel of Wire was sung. A good time was had by all. Watch it here.

One record I mentioned in passing on WAYLT? is my staff pick for this week: the debut LP from Finland’s Ratsia, released in 1979 on the Johanna label. Many of you know how great Finnish hardcore is, but their ’77-era punk scene was just as strong. Ratsia is one of my favorites, but there are a ton of great bands: Eppu Normaali, Kollaa Kestää, Loose Prick, and many more. While American punk bands from the 70s often sounded scrappy and raw, many of the Finnish bands were quite professional-sounding, following the lead of bands like the Buzzcocks and Stiff Little Fingers who continued growing after punk’s initial explosion of energy. Like those bands, Ratsia had an artisan’s approach to pop songwriting, and they weren’t afraid of strong production values either. If you’re the kind of punk listener who goes deep into the discographies of the ’77 set rather than just focusing on the earliest stuff, I bet you’ll really appreciate what Ratsia does.

After this self-titled LP, Ratsia released two more albums before they disbanded in 1982. Their second one, Elämän Syke is a little more new wave-sounding, of a piece with the first album but adding more layers and textures, while their final LP, 1982’s Jäljet, takes a turn toward post-punk. There are also four singles along the way, but I haven’t heard those and we’ll see if I ever lay my hands on them. Hopefully I can return to Ratsia’s discography again one day when I have more time and energy to dig in.

I’ve had the Bad Brains on my mind lately. A few weeks ago I picked up a copy of Black Dots at Vinyl Conflict (I bought this on CD when it came out and never owned it on vinyl) so I’d been listening to that a bunch, and then the other night when I was scrolling YouTube I came across this live set from 1987:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-wgzqTKFiE

I don’t know what I expected, but as the band launches into the intro from the I Against I album and the camera lands on HR, stalking the stage and conducting the band with his arms, I saw this glimmer in HR’s eyes and I was just like “oh shit, this is about to pop off.” From there, they segue into “I,” and when HR starts to sing… holy shit, he is on fire.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve watched the footage of the Bad Brains playing at CBGB in 1982… it’s up there with Die Kreuzen’s public access footage as one of the most electrifying punk performances ever caught on video. But it’s such a different event than this Florida show. Not that it’s possible to overshadow the band’s incredible charisma, but the crowd is so into it at CBGB—losing their shit from the very first note—that they’re as much a part of the experience as the band in the video. You’re watching a great band and an audience who know their witnessing greatness and are acting accordingly, creating this feedback loop that propels the CBGB set to incomparable heights. The Florida set couldn’t be more different. The stage is huge; the sound isn’t that great; the setting is bizarre, and the crowd is mostly normies separated from the band by a gigantic barricade. The Bad Brains aren’t feeding off the audience here; they are their own power source.

I know some people consider I Against I the Bad Brains’ finest moment, but to be honest it’s never totally clicked with me. I remember a few months ago I was working the counter at the store while Jeff was in the back and I played a used copy we had in stock. The store was pretty quiet, so I played it loud and listened fairly closely. I hadn’t listened to I Against I in years, and I thought this might be my moment of epiphany, but no dice. A lot of my issue is with Ron St. Germain’s production, which sounds so dated to me… something about the guitar tone reminds me of a TV commercial… it’s just so slick and like corporate sounding. The irony there is that, aside from the Omega Sessions (which is thee greatest Bad Brains studio recording in my humble opinion), Ron St. Germain probably did a better job of capturing the Bad Brains on tape than any of the other producers they worked with. But still, watching this footage from Florida shows he didn’t even get close.

The version of “House of Suffering” on the Florida set in particular annihilates what they released on I Against I. The band’s energy level is a notch higher, and HR’s vocal performance is light years beyond what he does on the album. This live version has so much passion and character, and when you listen to the album version next to it, the vocals sound comparatively flat and lifeless. Beyond that, the song just clicks in a way the album version doesn’t, its main melody landing cleanly and directly like a perfectly placed body shot. The song never really stuck out to me on the album, but here it is a revelation.

After “House of Suffering,” they do a reggae medley of “Day Tripper” by the Beatles into “She’s a Rainbow” by the Rolling Stones (similar to what they do on The Youth Are Getting Restless live album recorded that same year). This should be totally cheesy, but somehow it’s not… I love the way Daryl starts the song playing the “Day Tripper” riff on the bass… I couldn’t place the melody until HR gets to the chorus. I imagine the Bad Brains must have developed this version for occasions just such as this, when they were playing for an audience full of spring breakers. I love the way HR gets lost in the song and improvises on the lyrics and melody. It feels like I’m watching genius at work.

Coincidentally, I started reading Finding Joseph I, Howie Abrams’ biography of HR, a few days ago (I’m about halfway through the book as I write). Abrams’ book charts HR’s ascent and descent better than anything else I’ve read or seen (including the Bad Brains documentary, which is very good), so I have a clearer sense of what version of HR I am watching in 1987. While people uniformly describe HR as smart, charismatic, and brilliant in his early years, signs of instability and darkness started showing in his behavior by 1982. By 1989, it seems like that first version of HR had all but disappeared. In 1987, though, you get a kind of peak. The band still has all of their musical chops, but they’ve been playing together for a full decade and have developed a level of flexibility that matches their power. That’s true of HR as well. The early performances can seem manic, bordering on out of control. The HR we see here is supremely controlled, but just as powerful. In 1982, he’s a machine gun spraying bullets, but in 1987 he’s able to wield the massive weapon that is his talent as if it were as compact and light as a pistol.

If you’re anything like me, you’ll stare at this video slack-jawed until the very last second, when HR’s perfectly timed backflip lands right on the closing beat of “At the Movies.” Fucking hell.

Various: Greetings from Bulgaria cassette (Aon Productions, 1996)

This week I have another item from the big haul I picked up at Vinyl Conflict a couple of weeks ago. Now, I’m not a big collector of vintage cassettes. They’re too easily counterfeited, and even if they are truly what they purport to be, magnetic tape is prone to oxidation and other types of decay and damage that make me wary of sinking money into them. But there have been a few occasions when I’ve lucked into a stash of old tapes, and they’re definitely fun to pore over. While records feel like a mass market medium—you usually have to make at least a few hundred of them, which changes the way the artist interacts with their audience—tapes are more intimate. While a personalized mix tape is like a letter from one person to another, looking at and listening to hand-duplicated tapes can feel like the pre-internet version of eavesdropping on a group chat, getting a window into a small community with its own in-jokes and idioms. I love that so many 80s and 90s metal bands circulated rehearsal tapes, workshopping their ideas and getting feedback from trusted sources before they took their ideas to the masses.

The cassette I’m writing about today is called Greetings from Bulgaria, and it’s one of several hand-duplicated compilation tapes I picked up from Vinyl Conflict. According to Discogs, it was released in 1996, and from what I can tell the tape was compiled by Ivailo Tonchev, the person behind Aon Productions, who primarily released cassettes by Bulgarian bands, though they also put out a couple of compilation 7”s and cassettes by Scandinavian bands like S.O.D. (the Swedish one) and Valse Triste. The “pay no more than £2” note on the j-card flap indicates this copy reached me via Mitsey Distro, a tape distro apparently based in Sheffield. I’m curious about how that connection was formed and how this tape found its way into the world (maybe at some point I’ll find an ad for it in an old MRR when I’m scanning ads for the newsletter), but that information may be lost to the sands of time. It seems, though, that there have always been people like me who are interested in music from off the beaten path, and I probably picked it up used for the same reasons someone would have picked it up from Mitsey Distro thirty years ago.

The tape starts with a recording of an old Bulgarian political song, meant to set the background atmosphere as an example of the only music one could hear in behind-the-iron-curtain Bulgaria. It’s kind of what you’d expect, somewhere between a religious hymn and a military march, and it’s hard to imagine how it might excite anyone. It’s sounds like music not meant to express anything really, but merely to lend authority and mystique to the state. After hearing nothing but that all your life, hearing raw and expressive rock and roll must have felt like a total revelation.

The liner notes don’t say this explicitly, but the tape’s a-side features Bulgarian bands from before the Soviet bloc collapsed in 1989. Most bands have two tracks, and the tape’s liner notes give some basic information about each band. A lot of them sound like second-wave UK punk bands, making the music it seems natural to make when you first pick up electric guitars and drums: basic beats and chord changes and a ton of passion. D.D.T. sounds kind of like Warsaw-era Joy Division, and Aon Productions later released a more extensive compilation of their recordings. U.Z.Z.U. is a little more complex, reminding me of Post Regiment’s early recordings with their commanding vocals and darkly melodic guitar riffs. Review is another standout who actually released an album on the state-run label Балкантон. The recordings are all very raw, and some of the masters are clearly damaged with drop-outs and other problems, but I don’t mind at all. It feels like these are transmissions from another world, and I’m grateful to have them at all.

The b-side of the tape features bands who, by and large, were contemporary with the compilation and presumably still active when it came out in 1996. I hate to say it, but this side of the tape is a lot less interesting. The bands on the a-side are all punk bands and they don’t sound all that different from the punk bands rich western countries produced, but there’s something special there. I’m really projecting here, but I’m guessing maybe the 80s bands had heard a few examples of punk rock, but mostly they knew punk rock was loud, fast, and angry, and they filled in whatever other gaps they needed to make their music with their intuition and with knowledge they inherited from their own cultures and backgrounds. The 90s bands, on the other hand, sound kind of like carbon copies of western bands. Several of them are straight edge bands playing various styles of youth crew and mosh-oriented hardcore, and there’s a band called Just a Product that sounds like they were weaned on the same Lookout! and Epitaph catalogs we Americans were choking down. I was going to shows by 1996, and by and large these bands sound exactly like the local and regional bands I was seeing as a teenager. I’m sure it was great for Bulgarians to have access to so much more music after their 1989 revolution, but I can’t help but feel like something was lost. I guess that’s capitalism’s main rub: it opens up a theoretical world of choice, but somehow that always gets reduced down to just a few generic-ass options.

So yeah, Bulgarian punk… who even knew it was a thing? I’m thrilled to know even this little bit about it, so kudos to the folks who originally made this cassette and to all the people exploring the wide world of music, homogenization be damned!

Various: Finnish Drunks: Punks Is Hippies 12” (1995, no label)

As I mentioned at the top of the newsletter, I had a busy week last week. Poison Ruin and Beton Arme played here in North Carolina on Tuesday, we squeezed in a Scarecrow practice on the same night, and first thing the next morning I was off on a trip to buy a collection. The collection was in the northwestern part of Virginia, so of course I made a pit stop in Richmond on my way back. If you follow Vinyl Conflict’s social media, you know they recently bought a huge punk collection, and their bins and walls were lit up with international hardcore punk. I picked up a big stack for myself that I’m still going through, and I’m sure I’ll cover a bunch of my scores in future staff picks.

Since I was writing about bootlegs just a few weeks ago, this compilation LP seems like a great place to start. I’ve always been partial to LPs that compile several rare punk EPs in their entirety. A few of these compilations were crucial in developing my taste: Dischord’s Four Old 7”s on a 12”; the bootleg New York hardcore LP that compiled seminal EPs by Antidote, Urban Waste, the Abused, and the Mob; and the similar 4-way split with Mecht Mensch, Clitboys, Active Ingredients, and the Catatonics. I listened to all these to death when I first got them. At the time, it was the only way to hear these records, other than friends making mixes for you. And while bootlegs typically pale compared to official reissues, they beat the hell out of a dubbed cassette, especially when reproductions of the original artwork are included.

According to Discogs, Finnish Drunks: Punks Is Hippies came out in 1995, and the LP compiles 5 Finnish hardcore EPs: Mellakka’s Ei and Itsenäisyyspäivä EPs, Äpärät’s Häiriköt Tulee EP, Painajainen’s Todistusaineistoa EP, and Rutto’s Ilmastoitu Painajainen. The LP says “Made in Japan,” and while you should never trust a bootleg’s proclaimed point of origin, there could be some truth to this one. Certainly Finnish Drunks is the type of high-quality record I expect from Japan. The sound quality is excellent—as good as I would expect from an official reissue (which is impressive since this bootleg came out before any of these EPs came out on CD)—and the artwork is clean and well-executed, including insert sheets with full reproductions of the original EPs’ layouts. While all these records save the Painajainen EP have been officially reissued, I’m still going to play the hell out of this LP because it’s so convenient and it looks and sounds so great.

Speaking of reissues, if you want to get the music compiled here, it shouldn’t be too hard. I believe Havoc Records’ Mellakka discography CD is still in print, and just a few years ago Svart Records did a box set containing beautiful reproductions of both their EPs alongside a previously unreleased demo from 1986. Mellakka is one of the greatest Finnish punk bands ever, so these songs should be in your collection in some form or another. Äpärät’s EP got a repress in 2022 on Voltage Records, and the Rutto EP’s reissue on Final Doomsday Records is still in stock at Sorry State (along with their reissue of the band’s other EP). As I mentioned, the Painajainen EP hasn’t been reissued… not sure why, but it’s a missed opportunity… I love the unhinged vocal performance and quirky, Rattus-esque sound on this one.

In 2025, a bootleg like this should be obsolete. Just about everything worth hearing has seen an official reissue, and what hasn’t is usually easy to find on youtube. Yet there’s something about the way this record’s creators put it together, the care they put into selecting these five records and presenting them to their audience, that feels significant to me. And assuming this was made and distributed mostly in Japan, to think this LP may have directly inspired some killer Japanese hardcore in the latter half of the 90s is pretty cool, too.

Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time with unedited recordings of old media. I think I mentioned in a previous staff pick that I read a book about John Peel that had me listening to recordings of his old shows (thankfully there are dozens, if not hundreds, that are easy to find on YouTube), and somehow or another I’ve also gotten into watching old episodes of Headbanger’s Ball. There used to be a ton of these on YouTube, but it looks like at some point most of them were scrubbed from the site. Anyone know where I can watch more episodes?

Last night, rather than doing anything worthwhile, I watched this entire two-hour episode from 1988. This episode is unique because it doesn’t feature a host. Instead, the space normally devoted to Riki Rachtman’s patter is turned over entirely to excerpts from an interview with Axl and Slash from Guns N Roses (Axl is identified as “W. Axl Rose…” I didn’t remember that being a thing). I think the interview is pretty interesting. It’s very candid, and the band talks openly about doing drugs and other things that would have been racy for national TV in the late 80s. Besides the bad boy content you’d expect, they also go into detail about their songwriting process, which is cool to hear. But mostly the interview is kind of cringe, which is honestly refreshingin an age where most everything you see online is very self-aware and polished.

The videos they play on this episode are kind of what you’d expect from 1988… a lot of big hair and power ballads. Poison kicks things off with “Fallen Angel,” a song I hadn’t thought about in decades, but I still remembered every lyric. It’s honestly pretty good as far as Poison songs go, and when you compare it to the other videos in the episode, it’s clear how much Poison had going for them. The video has strong production values (even though it looks like they shot it on the same soundstage as their other videos from the period), and all the band’s members are animated and charismatic. Other artists clearly were not so well-suited to the video age. This episode features the King Diamond track “Welcome Home” (GRANDMAAAAAAA!), but it’s funny how whenever King Diamond himself shows up in the video, he’s out of focus or bathed in special effects. The poofily coiffed band members are rocking out in full view, but it’s almost like they’re trying to hide King Diamond from the camera. He really looks like a relic from a much earlier era of rock. Even a band like Damien, who is like 90% there, just really falls short of the mark. They have a cool set for their miming footage (it looks like the warehouse rehearsal space in Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart” video) and the “plot” part of the video is well-shot (if kind of difficult to follow), but the band just doesn’t have the looks and charisma of a Poison or Guns N Roses.

Other fails are even more pronounced. The Scorpions’ “I Believe in Love” attempts to carve out some kind of niche for geopolitically aware mom rock, but the “Winds of Change” lightning didn’t strike twice. I can’t help but feel bad for all the Russians going to their concert… wouldn’t they rather be watching G’n’R? The Vinnie Vincent Invasion video (a horror movie tie-in a la Dokken’s “Dream Warriors”) isn’t as hilariously try-hard as the one for their song “Boyz Are Gonna Rock,” but there’s something smarmy and obnoxious about VV on camera that instantly tanks his videos. Plus, the director clearly wants to give the pretty-boy singer all the attention, but Vinnie’s name is the one on the checks, resulting in a weird power struggle running through the video. I was unfamiliar with the band Femme Fatale, but their soundstage-shot video is so painfully generic it’s not surprising I don’t remember them. Another band I’d never heard of, Masi, also leans heavily on cliche, but they mix it with incongruously gritty social realist footage and film school cleverness in a way that comes off as clunky and weird. Plus, the band has this mocking tone to their performances that reads as smug. You have to sell the audience the illusion that you care. That’s why Def Leppard’s video is all choppin’ broccoli faces.

A classic part of the Headbanger’s Ball / 120 Minutes experience is staying awake until the end of the episode in case they throw a bone to the real rockers. This episode features a video for “Ace of Spades,” and it’s so fucking cool. Even though Motorhead’s promo clip is from a totally different time and place than the prime hair-era clips, the band is so fucking sick and timelessly cool that they easily outclass everyone else. The very last clip on the episode is “Nursing Home Blues” from D.R.I., which is pretty sick in principle. The song is from Dealing with It, but the video’s footage is from the Crossover tour. It’s cool that it looks like a legit hardcore show, but in that kind of environment you can’t achieve the slickness you get from shooting Poison on a dedicated soundstage. There’s this one ridiculous part of the video during the guitar solo… they must not have gotten any good footage of the guitarist rocking out (it looks like maybe the camera person is stuck behind them), so the camera just hangs for this interminably long shot of the drummer… during the climactic, flashy guitar solo. Womp, Womp.

The commercials are also a trip. This broadcast was from Texas, but the local personalities populating the local commercials are very similar to the ones I would see on my local station in eastern Virginia. More often than not, these local spots are laugh-out-loud hilarious, as they should be. I was amazed how clunky some of the national spots were, though. The ads for VHS tapes of recently released movies were pretty rough, and while the Sports Illustrated ad that airs several times has strong production values, its premise is extremely hokey, and by the second time you’ve seen it, it’s worn well past thin. A speaking of seeing ads too much, the ads for Redken hair products were driving me nuts by the end of this two-hour video. And to think I used to sit in front of MTV for days on end, watching the same ads (and videos… fuck you forever, “Black Hole Sun”) over and over and over and over…

I bet you weren’t expecting a detailed critique of a Headbanger’s Ball episode from 1988 in this week’s newsletter, but that’s where my head is at. I’ll try to get back to some killer punk rock next week.

Morton Feldman: Rothko Chapel / For Frank O'Hara LP (Columbia Odyssey, 1976)

In his last few staff picks, Dominic has been telling you about the big collection we bought a few weeks ago. Last week, after we picked at it for several weeks, it was finally time to box up the less exciting stuff and move it to storage so it wouldn’t be in our way at the warehouse. As I was getting everything together and making a last sweep for good stuff for the store, I unboxed the 4 or 5 boxes of classical records that no one had really paid any attention to. While most of the collection was works by classical and early 20th century composers, I found a couple of minimalist bangers I couldn’t help bringing home. I’m always on the hunt for pleasant, relaxing music to play at home in the evening, so these records have gotten quite a lot of play.

Morton Feldman first came on my radar when I read an excellent book about John Cage a decade ago. Reading a book about John Cage is probably the best way for someone like me to appreciate him, as so many of his innovations were conceptual rather than strictly musical. Cage did for music what painters like Picasso did for visual art, questioning the medium’s fundamental assumptions in order to create something genuinely new. Cage’s contributions to music included his pieces for “prepared piano” (he would stick various items on and between the strings inside a piano to disrupt its normal ways of making sound, decades before Sonic Youth did similar things with their electric guitars) and his embrace of the idea of randomness in composition. Rather than viewing the composer’s intention as the soul of music, Cage relied on the I Ching to generate musical ideas, questioning the notion that the composer’s mind was the source of musical beauty. Morton Feldman was a frequently recurring character in the John Cage book, as the two were close friends who frequently bounced ideas off one another. I remember learning in the book that the two men initially bonded over their love for turn-of-the-20th-century French pianist and composer Erik Satie. Satie’s stark, slow-moving, and meditative compositions clearly pointed the way toward 20th-century minimalism. If you like slow, meditative music, do yourself a favor and pick up the next Satie record you see in a classical dollar bin. His “Gymnopédies” are particularly lovely.

“Rothko Chapel,” the piece that takes up the entire a-side of this LP, is a piece of music Feldman composed for the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas. I’ve never been to the Rothko Chapel (though I’d very much like to), but I’ve spent a good amount of time in a similar space, the Rothko room at the Tate Modern in London. You might be familiar with Rothko’s most famous paintings, which are large canvases featuring fuzzy-edged squares of color, sometimes contrasting, sometimes closely complementary. It’s the kind of thing someone allergic to modern art would look at and say, “I could have painted these sloppy-ass squares,” but I love his work, particularly the darker, earthier pieces he did later in his life (Rothko died by suicide in 1970). When I visited the Rothko room at the Tate, the experience was powerful partially because it was so different from the usual museum experience. Usually galleries are big, open spaces with white walls and crisp lighting meant to reveal the subtleties in the works on display. This can make being in a museum an anxious experience, because it can sometimes feel like you’re on display yourself, being silently judged by the other people in the space. In contrast, the Rothko room is so dim that it allows you to disappear into anonymity, to let go of that self-consciousness and lose yourself in the painting. The paintings themselves invite that with their saturated fields of violet, crimson, and black. You can hardly see them until your eyes adjust to the light; if you want to get the full experience, you need to put in the time to let your body physically acclimate to the space. When that finally happens, you notice your heart rate is slower, the world is quieter, and your experience of the paintings is more intense. From what I understand, the Rothko Chapel in Houston cultivates a similar experience. While it’s called a chapel, the space is non-denominational and not affiliated with any religion. The Chapel is a space meant to foster empathy and understanding, and is sometimes used for conferences devoted to weighty subjects like peace, justice, and human rights that can be highly charged.

Even without the accompaniment of Rothko’s paintings, Feldman’s piece evokes that same feeling. The slow-moving piano figures recall Satie’s work, but as the piece develops, a chorus joins in. While the choral melodies are as earthy as the colors in Rothko’s paintings, the human voices singing in close harmony get me in the feels, evoking the same choked-up feeling I get from a massive church choir, but it’s not ecstatic feeling… it’s deliberate, measured, even cerebral. It makes you feel like if we can just slow down and really listen, we can make the world a better place. Like many of you, lately I’ve been beset by the feeling that the world is crumbling around me, so brief moments of hope like this are even more valuable.

Clinton Heylin: Bootleg: The Secret History of the Other Recording Industry (1996, St. Martin's Griffin)

It’s been a while since I’ve updated you on what I’ve been reading, but the winter lull in punk gigs has me tearing through books. Right now I’m reading one about John Peel that has me listening to recordings of his old radio programs (this book also introduced me to the John Peel wiki, an amazing resource), and perhaps I’ll have more to say about that in a future installment. For now, though, I wanted to share some thoughts on this book about the bootleg record industry I read a few weeks ago.

As someone who was a teenage music fanatic when Napster et al. completely upended the record industry in the late 90s, I’ve long been interested in intellectual property and copyright. I learned more about the topic during my years in academia, where I studied the 18th century Anglophone world. The rapid expansion of printing technology during this period prompted some of the first attempts to articulate and codify intellectual property law. Also, part of my duties as a first-year English teacher included giving students lessons on the basic principles of copyright. Of course, running Sorry State I also bump against this topic with some frequency, and it continues to interest me. I wasn’t sure what to expect from this book, but I dove in with some eagerness.

Right off the bat, Heylin’s book brought several aspects of the bootleg world into clearer focus for me. He distinguishes between three different manifestations of the bootleg trade: counterfeit releases (unauthorized reproductions meant to pass for, or at least closely mimic, the original item), proper bootlegs (collections of live material and/or unreleased studio sessions, compiled and sold by independent manufacturers), and “protection gap” releases (which I’ll get into below). Heylin spends relatively little time on the counterfeit release trade, for a couple of reasons. First, he’s very interested in the quasi-artistic choices bootleggers make as part of their process (sourcing and compiling material, creating artwork and packaging, etc.), while counterfeiters merely seek to mirror another release as closely as possible. Second, from what Heylin says, the counterfeit record industry in the United States was (is?) controlled almost entirely by the mafia, which limits his access to the key players. Certainly no mobster worth their salt is going to squeal to some nobody music writer.

Heylin does, however, gain access to many of the 70s’ and 80s’ most prolific and notorious bootlegers, most of whom agree to go on the record (albeit under pseudonyms). As one might expect, many folks involved in this illicit trade are real characters, and their shenanigans make for great stories. There are plenty of entertaining anecdotes about sourcing studio outtakes from on-the-take record company and recording studio execs, getting corrupt sound guys to wire recording devices straight into the soundboard, and how the bootleggers got their wares manufactured without ringing any alarm bells. Speaking of the latter, there’s a great story about one enterprising bootlegger who, during a crackdown at the LA pressing plants, repurposed a bunch of old farm equipment into a DIY record pressing machine. The jockeying for position among the bootleggers is an interesting tale, mostly because it was a free-for-all with no rules. If someone came out with a successful title, others would rip it off within a matter of weeks, if not days. Often they’d mix and match previously released material from older bootlegs with things they’d source themselves, creating a dense knot of provenance that no fan hoping to find the best version of their favorite artist’s studio outtakes or live set could hope to unwind. When one bootlegger came up with an interesting marketing idea like distinctive artwork or a label name and logo, their competition made sure it didn’t remain an advantage for long. One of the most visible and notorious bootleg labels was called “Trade Mark of Quality,” but so many people used the name and logo that it was anything but.

One thing that surprised me about Heylin’s book is that most of the bootleggers insist what they were doing was perfectly legal. Certainly there’s an element of feigned innocence here, but on many occasions these issues were litigated in the courts, and sometimes the bootleggers came out on top. Part of this is because of the intricacies of copyright law. Even in the United States, which has the most stringent intellectual property laws in the world, the ability to copyright an audio recording was not definitively established until very late in the 1970s. Before that, U.S. copyright law recognized the copyright on a musical composition (lyrics and music / melody), but not an individual recording of that music. (A couple of months ago I was reading Joey Ramone’s brother Mickey Leigh’s book, and there’s a story about the band hiring him to transcribe the music on the first Ramones album for the copyright office… of course none of the actual Ramones could read and write music.) I found the US’s late adoption of recording copyrights shocking, but other countries lagged much further behind, making way for the protection gap releases I referred to above.

Before a few different international conventions solidified international copyright law in the 60s and 70s, each country had its own unique approach to copyright law. Even when countries signed on to these international copyright treaties (which most European nations did), works that predated the treaty weren’t automatically grandfathered in, meaning they were still subjected to the older laws. For instance, in Germany a recording was only eligible for copyright protection if the performer was German or the performance took place in Germany, so a recording of a Pink Floyd show in the US or the UK fair game for German bootleggers. Each country implemented their laws in different ways, so you had a situation where it might be perfectly legal to commercially release a live concert recording in one country, but not in another. Bootleggers were quick to exploit this loophole (the “protection gap”), manufacturing their releases in countries like Germany and Italy that had looser copyright restrictions and (legally) importing the finished product to markets like the UK and the US. Of course, the recording industry worked tirelessly to close these loopholes, but as the iron curtain became more permeable through the 80s, plants in countries like Yugoslavia and Hungary operated completely outside the umbrella of western copyright law. When that line dried up, the bootleggers found manufacturers in Asia. It’s been a decades-long game of cat and mouse.

Heylin, like the bootleggers themselves, is skeptical the law affords record companies the level of control they seek over products relating to their artists, and reading this book made me realize that many of what I took as basic assumptions of music copyright are not as intuitive as I thought. Why should a record company own the copyright on a live concert recording that I made using my equipment at an event that I paid to attend? As Heylin explains, the record companies would have us believe they own that recording and the rights to reproduce it, but the legal reasoning they rely on is shaky, and there are many examples of it not holding up in court.

By the way, I should note this book came out in 1996, so it’s quite out of date in some respects. Heylin does a lot of hand-wringing about how the CD changed the bootleg industry, but the file-sharing revolution that happened just a year or two later totally changed the terms of that debate. Still, Heylin’s examination of the history of copyright law and the bootleg trade is well-researched and authoritative.

If you’re interested in bootlegs and/or copyright, this is a great read. Heylin’s book is dense but lively, and I’ve hardly scratched the surface of all it offers here. It also got me spinning punk’s most infamous and notorious bootleg, the Sex Pistols’ Spunk. Sadly, I don’t have Spunk on vinyl (shame!), but you shouldn’t be surprised to see me do a thorough analysis of it in a future installment.

The Only Ones: The Peel Sessions Album (Strange Fruit Records, 1989)

This week’s piece will (hopefully) be on the shorter side as I’m running late on this week’s newsletter. Thankfully, there isn’t too much to say since I’ve already written about the Only Ones a couple times in my staff picks section, so check those two pieces for more background info on the band. I ran down my take on the band’s studio discography last summer, but I was missing one piece of the Only Ones puzzle: the Peel Sessions! I never really thought about chasing down the Only Ones’ Peel Sessions until I saw Mike talk about this album on an episode of What Are You Listening To? some months back. Mike enthused about this record and I knew I had to have it, but it took me quite a while to find a copy. I ended up having to order this one from Japan.

On the back cover of this record, Only Ones guitarist John Perry notes that, when people want to know what his old band sounds like, he always points them toward the Peel Sessions rather than the studio albums. Like so many bands, the Only Ones benefitted from the quick-and-dirty Peel Sessions approach, which forced bands to record and mix four songs in a single day-long session, albeit with the assistance of the BBC’s world-class audio engineers and equipment (though Perry’s description of the primitive 8-track mixing desk might be construed as a complaint). The Peel Sessions Album compiles tracks from four sessions the Only Ones recorded between 1977 and 1980, and while their choice to jumble up the tracks rather than present them chronologically seems curious, it actually works really well. The uniformly high fidelity makes all the recordings sound of a piece and the band’s lineup stayed the same throughout their run, so there are no jarring transitions. And by starting with a track from the 1980 session—the song “Oh Lucinda” from Baby’s Got a Gun—the record gives a quick kick in the pants to anyone who thinks the group’s later material is totally without merit. Not that every track appears here in its best version. “Another Girl, Another Planet” doesn’t have the kick of the classic single version, and “No Peace for the Wicked” misses the lushly textured production of Only Serpents Shine.

Curiously, this seems to be the only vinyl issue of the Only Ones Peel Sessions. They didn’t have one of the 80s Strange Fruit sessions LPs with the classic cover design, and other issues of their sessions have only been on CD. I actually just ordered one of these CD reissues for myself: a 2002 double disc that pads out this album’s track list considerably, adding the two Peel Sessions tracks omitted on this collection (one each from the band’s two 1978 sessions), a seven-song Radio 1 in Concert session from 1978, and two short sessions recorded for The Old Grey Whistle Test. If there’s anything there worth reporting back to you about, I’ll be sure to do so.

The Zarkons: Riders in the Long Black Parade 12” (1985, Time Coast Records)

A while back I wrote a staff pick about the second album by LA’s the Alley Cats, which my friend Dave Brown of Sewercide Records and Misanthropic Minds so generously sent to me after we talked about it on an episode of What Are You Listening to? I didn’t mention it in my previous staff pick, but some time after releasing Escape from Planet Earth, the Alley Cats changed their name to the Zarkons. Eager to hear the next chapter in the Alley Cats’ story, I set out looking for a copy of the Zarkons’ first album, 1985’s Riders in the Long Black Parade, and after a few months I finally turned one up.

Riders in the Long Black Parade has been on repeat since I got it home. Not only have I been playing it a bunch, but after my wife Jet heard me play it, she’s become obsessed, too. It was too cold last week for Jet to work in her pottery studio, so she’s been doing ceramics work at the dining room table in the evenings. Several times this week I’ve been sitting on the couch in the living room, failing to get up immediately when a side of vinyl finishes. If the silence persists for more than a few minutes, Jet yells, “PUT ON THE ZARKONS ALBUM!” from the other room. I can’t help but oblige.

As much as I enjoyed Escape from Planet Earth, I think I like Riders in the Long Black Parade even better. Why? That brings up my big question about this record: why did the band change their name? The band’s lineup on Riders in the Long Black Parade is the same as the Alley Cats lineup; in fact, the photo of the band on the record’s back cover is exactly the same photo from the sleeve for their “Too Much Junk” single. The name change from the Alley Cats to the Zarkons wasn’t due a change in membership or record label, and I don’t think they really changed up their sound too much either. This sounds like an Alley Cats record. The band’s playing is still razor sharp, and they use the same dual-vocal approach with bassist Dianne Chai and guitarist Randy Stodola trading off on equally strong lead vocals. It’s the logical next step from Escape from Planet Earth in pretty much every way.

However, the Zarkons have honed their sound since their last record as the Alley Cats. One thing I really like about both iterations of the band is that their songs are growers, not showers. The melodies are subtle, but earworm-y. They’re not one of those bands whose songs you’re singing along to by the second time the chorus rolls around, but by that same token you’re not sick of them after you’ve heard them a few times. If pop music often gets described as sweet, the Zarkons / Alley Cats are savory…. hearty… nourishing. The only moment I’m not completely sold on is their cover of Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit,” but I think the problem is more with me than with them. I’ve never understood why so many bands cover that song; I always thought it was kind of silly. Those eastern-sounding guitar lines sure sound good here, though.

When I wrote about Escape from Planet Earth, I mentioned how that record’s artwork was monochromatic and kind of nondescript. Riders in the Long Black Parade totally swings the other way, and I find the artwork captivating. The blood-drippy letters and grim reaper would come off as cliche if the wild fluorescent color scheme didn’t pull so hard in the other direction. Tonally, the record is a little bit new wave and a little bit death rock, and the artwork tips a hat to both worlds rather elegantly.

While Riders in the Long Black Parade seems like a logical continuation of the Alley Cats’ sound, it looks like the Zarkons changed things up when they returned with a second album in 1988, adding a full-time lead vocalist named Renté. (Going down the Discogs rabbit hole for her reveals she contributed vocals to a song by the pre-Minutemen band the Reactionaries… wild!) Reviews of that second album don’t sound promising, but the Allmusic review I found that pans it also calls Riders in the Long Black Parade “pretty dreadful,” so what the fuck do they know? As usual, I’ll keep following the breadcrumb trail and report back in a few months.

45 Grave: Autopsy LP (Restless, 1987)

You might remember Jeff and I, along with some other friends, did a 45 Grave cover set this past Halloween. When I’ve done other Halloween cover sets, it’s been with a band whose discography I knew backwards and forwards, but 45 Grave was a little different. I always liked them, but mostly I wanted to do the cover set because it fit the Halloween theme and because I thought my wife Jet’s singing voice sounded a lot like Dinah Cancer’s. As you might expect, learning a bunch of their songs deepened my appreciation for and understanding of 45 Grave, and my fascination has continued long past the spooky season.

Coincidentally, this past Halloween, the same day we played our cover set, the Goth 101 YouTube channel posted a detailed history of the band. While learning the songs deepened my appreciation for 45 Grave’s music, this well-researched video helped me understand the ins and outs of their complex discography. The main 45 Grave records I was familiar with were the Black Cross 7” and the Sleep in Safety LP, but there’s a lot more out there. 45 Grave formed in 1980 and didn’t release their debut full-length, Sleep in Safety, until 1983. As the YouTube video mentions several times, the members of 45 Grave feel that, by waiting so long to release their first album, they both missed a boat they could have ridden to wider popularity and failed to document the most creatively vital era of the band. Whether getting a record out earlier would have made them more successful is debatable of course, but but thankfully there is some recorded evidence from the band’s earlier era.

The album Autopsy, released in 1987 on Restless Records on CD, cassette, and LP and never reissued since, is the closest you can get to a 45 Grave album from what the band considers their prime era. Autopsy’s packaging is short on info, so it’s not clear when and where these tracks were recorded, but the songs on the a-side clearly come from an earlier era of the band when they were playing primarily at hardcore tempos. Some songs—“Anti Anti Anti” and “Consumers”—are repurposed from guitarist Paul Cutler’s old band the Consumers (whose All My Friends Are Dead collection on In the Red Records is a must-own), and drummer Don Bolles is playing with the same hyperactive power he displayed on the Germs’ album. But while the music is blisteringly fast, it has all the intricate detail and memorable melodies of their later material. In fact, these songs are even faster than contemporary SoCal classics like the Adolescents’ first album and TSOL’s first 12”, and if you’re a fan of those records, these songs are 100% essential.

I suspect the songs on Autopsy’s b-side were recorded later, as they’re notably slower and some of them feature keyboards, presumably from the Screamers’ Paul Roessler, who joined the band later (he’s not mentioned on the jacket, even though the person who played the squeaky toy on “Riboflavin” gets a credit). Later guitarist Pat Smear (Bolles’ bandmate in the Germs) is credited as guitarist, though it’s unclear which tracks on Autopsy he plays on. These b-side tracks include two of 45 Grave’s most well-known songs, “Partytime” and “Riboflavin,” and while they’re mostly a notch or two slower than the a-side tracks, they’ll still worth owning if you love Sleep in Safety.

As I mentioned, Autopsy has never been reissued, and vinyl copies are scarce. This one sat on my want list for a few months before a reasonably priced copy turned up. You can listen to it on YouTube (it’s not on streaming services either), but hopefully we see a fresh reissue at some point. Most of the other significant titles Restless released in the 80s have seen reissues (even if some of them, like the Dead Milkmen’s Big Lizard in My Backyard, are still impossible to find), so hopefully someone out there will navigate whatever rights issues stand in the way and get this one back in the world. When and if that happens, you know we’ll stock it at Sorry State.

For those of us with big record collections, it can be a challenge to dig deep into the stacks rather than just repeatedly playing the same records that are physically and/or mentally accessible. One strategy I’ve been using lately is using the “random item” function on Discogs to suggest things to listen to. I’ll hit that button a few times and make myself a stack of under-appreciated records to listen to over the next few days. Often they get one play before they get re-alphabetized, but sometimes this process gets me stuck on a record I’ve been neglecting. Such was the case with this debut LP from Brazil’s Cólera. I can’t remember the last time I listened to this record, but when I spun it last week, it blew me away. I’ve been playing it constantly since then.

São Paulo’s Cólera is one of the most well-known punk bands from Brazil, starting all the way back in 1979, their lineup coalescing around the brothers Redson (guitar and vocals) and Pierre (drums). They contributed tracks to the essential Brazilian punk compilations Grito Suburbano (1982), SUB (1983), and O Começo do Fim do Mundo (1983), but didn’t release their own record until this one, Tente Mudar o Amanhã, in 1985. While I’m sure this record’s release was a big event, Tente Mudar o Amanhã quickly got overshadowed by the band’s second album, Pela Paz Em Todo o Mundo, which came out a year later in 1986. Pela Paz Em Todo o Mundo not only became Cólera’s best-known album, but one of the best-selling Brazilian independent releases of all time. Cólera released a flood of material in the second half of the 80s, the band apparently remaining creatively vital; there are nearly forty excellent tracks just on those first two albums, and material continued to spill out generously in the years after. They were also the first Brazilian punk band to tour Europe in 1987.

Listening to Tente Mudar o Amanhã, it’s easy to understand why Cólera is so well regarded. As you might expect from a band that started in 1979, there’s a healthy dose of catchy 70s punk influence in Cólera’s sound, but they also seemed determined to match the frenetic energy of the emerging hardcore scene. They construct their songs tightly, with hooky instrumental parts and explosive dynamics, performing them precisely at near-manic tempos. Just this morning it occurred to me that Cólera reminds me a lot of D.O.A. Maybe it’s that both bands are three-pieces, but they both have this perfect interplay between the instruments and vocals. For both bands, the instrumental tracks sound like they would be explosive on their own, but the vocals come in at strategic points that always bump the energy level up a couple of notches. It’s rare to find a stand-alone vocalist with such a perfect sense of how their parts should fit in a song. For a perfect example, see Cólera’s “São Paulo,” perhaps my favorite song here with its brisk tempo, big riff, and mega catchy chorus.

I can’t remember exactly where I got this original copy of Tente Mudar o Amanhã, but I’ve had a couple of good Brazilian scores over the years. I remember in the early years of the store we got an email from someone from Brazil who wanted to buy some current releases from Sorry State and offered to trade us 80s Brazilian vinyl for them. I can’t remember why we didn’t nail down something more specific, but I remember sending him what he wanted and basically saying, “send me back something cool.” One record I remember he sent was an original copy of Sarcófago’s I.N.R.I., which I was totally unfamiliar with at the time. Then a few years ago I had another big Brazilian score when a guy emailed me to say he was a professor from Brazil who was doing research at the University of North Carolina, and he was hoping to subsidize his trip by bringing some rare vinyl from Brazil to the US. I told him Sorry State specialized in punk and metal, and he really came through for us with multiple original copies of the Sepultura / Oversplit split LP, another original I.N.R.I., and a bunch of other cool records. I picked the records up from his office at UNC, just across from a building where I used to teach when I was a grad student there. I remember he offered an original copy of the As Mercenárias LP, but I thought it was too expensive. I kinda regret that.

If you’re into tracking down original Brazilian vinyl, though, you’d best be prepared to loosen your standards on condition. Brazil is sort of like the opposite of Japan, where grading standards are strict and beater copies are few and far between. This copy of Tente Mudar o Amanhã is what I’d call “Brazilian VG+.” It looks pretty decent aside from where a previous owner has customized the band’s logo with a ballpoint pen (I’m not sure what they were going for there), but like nearly every record I’ve ever gotten from Brazil, it smells kind of musty, like it’s spent too much time in a very humid environment. Most of my other Brazilian records look like they’ve spent a chunk of their lives buried underground, been fought over by wild dogs, and otherwise used and abused. I kinda like that, though… the idea that a record has been through some real shit before it found its way into my hands.

So yeah, give it a listen. Tente Mudar o Amanhã is on all the streaming services and it’s been reissued on vinyl and CD numerous times, so it’s easy to hear and well worth your time.