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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.

So let’s jump right in with my top 10 new releases of 2024 (in no particular order, of course).

PURA MANÍA - Extraños Casos De La Vida Real 7” (Roachleg)
PUBLIC ACID - Deadly Struggle LP (Beach Impediment)
INVERTEBRATES - Sick to Survive LP (Beach Impediment)
MARCEL WAVE - Something Looming LP (Feel It)
SUBDUED - Abbatoir LP (La Vida Es Un Mus)
THE CARP - Knock Your Block Off LP (Total Punk)
TOZCOS - Infernal LP (Toxic State)
TIIKERI - Tee Se Itse 7” (self-released)
ALVILDA - C’est Déjà L’heure LP (Static Shock)
STRAW MAN ARMY - Earthworks LP (D4MT Labs / La Vida Es Un Mus)

Maximum Rocknroll asked me to contribute a year-end list again this year, so you’ll have to tune in there for my two cents about each record on my list. It looks like MRR hasn’t run their year-end lists yet, but I’ll drop a link in a future newsletter.

A couple notes about my list this year: 1. Typically I would never be so gauche as to include a release I didn’t own a physical copy of, but like a lot of you I haven’t been able to lay my hands on a copy of the Alvilda LP to call my own. We sold a lot of first and second press copies at Sorry State, but both times I was like, “eh, I’ll place my pre-order tomorrow,” and then suddenly it’s sold out. I didn’t make the same mistake with the 3rd press, but we’re still waiting on those so it’s not in my photo. 2. Last year I wrote a whole essay about my method for crafting my list, but this year it was a lot more from the hip. I looked through a few sources (Sorry State’s Record of the Week, the records I actually bought this year, and what I added to my digital library), made up a short list of around 30 releases I really liked, and pruned that list down to 10. Every year there are some things on the bubble, but I’m pretty happy with the 10 I landed on. For me, a record needs to feel “important” in some kind of way to merit a spot on the list, and I think all 10 of these clear that bar.

If you’re wondering about my shortlist, here are the artists on it. I thought all the releases these bands put out were awesome: Viscount, Nightfeeder, Tia Rosa, The Dark, Excess Blood, Savage Pleasure, Peace de Résistance, Homemade Speed, Class, Naked Roommate, Yellowcake, the Massacred, Guiding Light, Gimic, Thought Control, Paranoid Maniac, Kriegshög, Why Bother?, S.H.I.T., Muro, Bloodstains, Flower.

I also saw a lot of sick gigs this year. Some of my favorite sets were: Tiikeri, Lebenden Toten, Paranoid, KOS, Putkipommi, Meanwhile, Larma, Physique, Mob 47, Personal Damage, Paranoid, Kohti Tuhoa, Slan, Yambag, Deletär, and a bunch more I’m probably forgetting. And there are a ton of incredible bands I got to see multiple times this year, including Public Acid, Invertebrates, Destruct, Ultimate Disaster, Paranoid Maniac, Meat House, Mutant Strain, DE()T, and Vidro. I should get out to gigs more than I do (especially ones I’m not playing), but it feels like my social awkwardness is in full bloom lately.

Now let’s look at my year in record collecting. Every year, friends post pictures on Instagram of their favorite scores of the year, and it always makes me reflect on my collecting philosophy. I rarely buy records on Discogs, and I don’t aggressively pursue certain records the way many people seem to. I’ve always been more of an accumulator, happy to appreciate what the universe puts in my path. Usually that’s more than enough to keep me satisfied and my budget fully blown, and that was certainly the case this year. That being said, if anyone wants to help me get any of these into my collection in 2025, please get in touch:

La Banda Trapera Del Rio: 1st LP
Nerorgasmo 7”
Ratsia: 1st LP (I’d settle for a reissue of this one at this point!)

As for what I found this year, I’ll break it into chunks. (It is both sad and embarrassing that I have to break it into chunks.) Since I rarely go to the other record stores in Raleigh, I’ve developed a habit of splurging when I go out of town. This year Scarecrow toured Scandinavia, and I definitely went hard while we were there. Here are a few of my favorites that I picked up on the trip.

Krunch I’d never really spent much time with, but I played this 7” a ton once I got home. My Totalitär collection pales compared to my bandmates’, but I was stoked to fill this gap. Like Krunch, I didn’t know the Pohjalla compilation well, but it’s stayed close to my turntable. The Hilselp compilation I actually bought online once I got home, but I learned about the record on the trip when we stayed with our friends Markku and Kerttu. It’s one of many records I snapped a pic of that night and checked out online when I got home. When an original copy with the zine popped up on Discogs for a good price, I jumped right on it. Gauze is the one non-Scandinavian record here, but I got it on the trip thanks to my friend Anders. This completes my collection of Gauze OGs! Eppu Normaali… I mean, it’s just an awesome record, and finding it at a flea market in Turku is too perfect a provenance. Finally, the Huvudtvätt / Kurt I Kuvos split LP is probably my favorite record I got this year. It was so cool to find it in Sweden, and it’s even more important to me because it’s Staffan from Vidro’s old band. Every time I look at it, I think of all the great times we’ve had with our (twice!) tourmates in Vidro.

This next batch is kind of a made-up category, but it makes sense to me. These are all classic records that I knew to a degree, but this year I nabbed OG copies that significantly deepened my appreciation. I’ve loved the Feederz’ LP for decades, and we’ve had many copies of the Placebo pressing of Jesus come through over the years (and even one OG copy), but I’ve never taken one home until this year. When I blasted this one at home, it cracked my brain open… I now consider it one of the most unique and best American punk records. The Wipers… I got kinda sick of them for a long time. For a while they were name-checked and poorly imitated so much that I didn’t even want to hear the original. But I picked up this totally beat, water-damaged first pressing and couldn’t get it off the turntable. Alternative had already gotten me with Sealed’s reissue a while back, and finding this minty OG rekindled the love affair. Reagan Youth is another one we’ve had many times at the shop, but this year the invisible voice finally said, “take me home and have your mind blown.” Personality Crisis is a record I was always kinda meh on, but after a bunch of folks (including Jeff!) talked it up on What Are You Listening To?, I gave it another shot. It really clicked this time, so much so that I had to invest a pittance in this charmingly partied-on copy.

This next stack features a few heavy hitters (for me, at least) that came my way this year. Modern Warfare got me so hard it sparked a whole sub-obsession with Bemisbrain Records. Chemotherapy is a record I never thought I’d own, but after flipping out for the reissue a few years ago I couldn’t turn down this nicely priced, minty OG. I think in a previous staff pick I put it out into the universe that I really wanted the Svart Framtid 7”, and this year I finally connected on one. Wretched / Indigesti was, amazingly enough, an extremely generous gift that I’m not allowed to be weird about. And U.B.R. had been high on the want list for a long time and got a lot of play time once it was in my hands.

And now for this fourth (and thankfully final) stack, which collects a few other records that were significant to me for different reasons. It’s crazy it took me this long to find the Zounds LP. I think I’d found all their singles on previous trips to the UK (going back some 20+ years), but the album proved elusive. I swear these never pop up… after waiting for years for a reasonably priced copy I finally had to buy this one from a Japanese seller. Annie Anxiety I’d never listened to before, and it just blew me away (see my staff pick on this record here). The Alley Cats was another gift, and another one that has stayed close to the turntable. And finally, I also wrote a staff pick about this Hugh Mundell record, so you can read that for the full story.

I hope this list hasn’t been too indulgent, but it’s nice to reflect on everything I’m grateful for. Honestly, it’s been kind of a rough holiday season for me personally, so it’s good to feel the warm and fuzzy feelings I get when I think about all the friends all over the world who enhanced my life so much this year. And likewise the friends and family at home whom I get to spend my days with, including my wife Jet, my pets Patti and Tobio, my bandmates, and everyone who works at Sorry State. Cheers everyone, and happy new year!

Hates: Panacea 12” (Faceless Records, 1982)

I’ve been packing a lot of orders lately (thank you!), and I’m realizing that being on my feet, ostensibly with my mind on some routine task but with a little brain power and attention to spare, is a great opportunity for listening to music. A few times lately I’ve brought in a stack from my personal collection to listen to while I’m working, and I realized I enjoyed those records even more at work than I did at home. Usually when I’m listening to records at home, I’m sitting on the couch, and when I’m exercising at the gym or on a walk, I’m listening to music on my phone. Most of the music in my collection sounds better on vinyl, and most of the music in my collection makes you want to move, so I relished the opportunity to feel like I was matching the music’s power and energy. It definitely propelled me faster and further than I would have gone otherwise.

One record that really stuck out this week was Panacea, the 1982 12” EP from Houston’s the Hates. I picked this up at All Day Records in Carrboro a few weeks ago when I was out flyering for the Slant show. I was already familiar with the Hates and this record—we’ve had originals come through the shop from time to time, and we also carried a 2019 reissue on Italy’s Rave Up Records—but it never hit me with the impact that it did this week. A 45rpm 12” EP, this has all the energy and power I associate with the California bands that were on that bubble between 70s-style punk and hardcore: Rhino 39, the Dils, Modern Warfare… that kind of thing. I love the trade-offs between the two singers, the thin and scratchy guitar sound, and the recording’s raw, live feel. The songs are hooky and pop-oriented with hummable choruses, but played almost exclusively at hardcore tempos (the exception is “This Year’s Model,” which, according to something I read online, was usually a fast song the band decided on a whim to slow down for this session).

Panacea also opens with a cover of the song “Houston,” written by Lee Hazlewood and made famous by crooner Dean Martin. I wasn’t familiar with the song, but the chorus’s broad descending melody sounds great at the Hates’ hyper-speed. Their version reminds me of classic Dickies covers like “Eve of Destruction” and “Paranoid,” where there’s a glimmer of the original shining through, but so much of the band’s voice in the execution that you’d hardly know it was a cover if someone didn’t tell you. After listening to versions by Dean Martin and Lee Hazlewood, I appreciate the artistry of the Hates’ version even more.

In case you don’t know about the Hates, they started in 1978, so they’d been around for four years when they released Panacea in 1982. Their first EP, 1979’s No Talk in the Eighties, is well-regarded in KBD collector circles for its four strong punk songs that firmly establish the band’s style, and that the EP ran through three pressings over the years means it doesn’t carry the eye-watering price tag of some KBD rarities. For me, though, the Hates really hit their stride with 1980’s Do the Caryl Chessman EP, where they speed things up and get a little wilder and noisier, while still keeping the Wire-esque minimalism that defined their sound from the start. While Panacea reels things in a hair (there’s nothing like the chaotic guitar solo in the song “Do the Caryl Chessman”), it pretty much picks up right where Caryl Chessman left off.

From what I’ve read online, the Hates’ initial three-piece lineup dissolved shortly after recording Panacea, with the band continuing to release music consistently into the 2020s. I know I have one of their later cassette-only releases somewhere in the chaos of my tape collection (I think it’s either 1992’s New World Oi! or 1993’s Texas Insanity) and I remember liking it, but I wasn’t able to dig it out for a revisit before my deadline.

If you’re into this style, Panacea is well worth a listen. It certainly fit well with the similarly fast and minimal punk I was playing alongside it this week, like the compilation Life Is Ugly So Why Not Kill Yourself, which features a bunch of bands from California whose music has a lot of the same characteristics as Panacea. Same for the Dils compilation album I really dug when it popped up on album shuffle in my car a few days ago.

If you’re ready to jump in, Panacea is available to listen and download on what appears to be an official Hates Bandcamp page, though it only features Panacea and none of the band’s other releases. There’s a message on that site complaining about the sound on the original release and noting the band’s bass player has remastered the tracks, but I think the original record sounds great. It’s exactly the kind of minimal studio recording I love. The tones are all clear (though it’s a little fuzzy, like maybe it was recorded on used tape) and the drums are right up front and powerful. You can hear the bass better on the remastered tracks (LOL!), but I don’t think they really sound better, as the new master mutes the drums’ impact somewhat. I don’t know whether that Rave Up reissue uses that master or not, but even if I prefer the original, the digital version still captures Panacea’s many strengths.

Work has really been kicking my ass lately. We’ve been short-staffed at SSR for a variety of reasons, and it feels like lately I do nothing but work work work. I keep at it every night until I’m totally exhausted, and when I finally get home, I’m so shellshocked that I just want to curl up with a book and enjoy the silence. Here are a couple I’ve been spending time with recently.

Julian Cope: Head On / Repossessed (2000)

Julian Cope is probably most famous as the frontman of the post-punk band the Teardrop Explodes, though I know him mostly as a music critic and historian. I’ve since gone back and checked out Kilimanjaro and enjoyed it, but what lodged Cope’s name in my memory is his pair of books—Krautrocksampler and Japrocksampler—that, respectively, offered capsule histories and buying / listening guides for the 70s German progressive music and 70s Japanese rock scenes. The music in those books totally blew my mind and I’m forever thankful to Cope for helping me to appreciate Amon Düül II’s Yeti and Speed, Glue, & Shinki’s Eve, but his writing is strong enough to keep me interested even with subjects I’m less attached to. This book collects both of Cope’s memoirs, with Head On covering his childhood, participation in the original Liverpool punk scene, and the founding and dissolution of the Teardrop Explodes, while Repossessed picks up where Head On left off, carrying you through the rest of the eighties as Cope establishes a solo music career and grows ever more interested in the antiquarianism that seems to have occupied much of his life since. (The bits about Cope finding his inner collector of vintage toys are particularly interesting.) Cope has done his share of drugs, Herculean amounts of psychedelics in particular, and you’d be silly to take his account of the events he describes in these books as the gospel truth. But his interpretation is so hilariously cracked, so hyperactively preoccupied with a search for deeper meaning, that I couldn’t put this book down.

Tony Wilson: 24 Hour Party People: What the Sleeve Notes Never Tell You (2002)

I put this book on my reading list years ago, apparently not realizing what it was, and a few weeks ago I finally picked up a copy and read it. I’d assumed this was an autobiography by Factory Records founder Tony Wilson, but that’s not precisely what it is. The author is Tony Wilson, but it’s actually a novelization of the 24 Hour Party People movie, which was itself based on Tony’s real life and story as the founder of Factory. So it’s not Wilson telling you his story, it’s Wilson adapting and expanding on the story someone else came up with based on their interpretation of what may or may not have actually happened. How’s that for post-modern? This one took a little while to grab me. I haven’t watched the 24 Hour Party People film in years, but I remember it well enough, and the early chapters at least hew pretty close. I kept wondering to myself, “why the fuck am I reading this?,” particularly since I find Wilson’s prose often pretentious and over-wrought. But I’m glad I stuck with it, as there were some gems and some LOL moments, and it felt a little deeper than the film, which flew through the years at an insane clip. I wouldn’t go out of my way to pick this up, but if you find a cheap used copy or something it’s an enjoyable enough read.

Mickey Leigh: I Slept with Joey Ramone: A Punk Rock Family Memoir (2010)

My friend Seth has been telling me about this book for years (and it’s been on my reading list since then), but I finally dug into this memoir by Joey Ramone’s brother Mickey Leigh. I’d also read Marky Ramone’s memoir Punk Rock Blitzkrieg a few weeks ago, so I’ve been steeped in the Ramones universe and I’m struck by how different that world looks from all its various angles. Both Marky’s and Mickey’s books focus on the band’s shifting power dynamics, and while I thought Marky’s analysis of what transpired during his era of the band was sensitive and thoughtful, Mickey’s book peels back several more layers of the onion. The 80s and 90s eras of the Ramones are much better documented, but Mickey sheds a lot of light on the band’s early days. Tommy Ramone’s story had always intrigued me; I always wondered why he left the band and how he transitioned from being a Ramone into being a producer, and I learned a lot about that from this book. Leigh also charts Joey’s mental state from childhood throughout his whole life, and his perspective on Joey’s OCD and other struggles is very three-dimensional and sensitive. Mostly, though, what stands out about I Slept with Joey Ramone is how well it’s written. Particularly coming from the more mannered prose of Julian Cope and Tony Wilson, Leigh’s writing feels crystal clear and tightly focused, with enough detail to make scenes come alive without getting bogged down in purple prose. It’s just good, journalistic-type writing, and when you pair that with a story about something I’m already interested in, you have one addictive book.

Last week we were in the lead-up to Halloween, and now that’s behind us. I think both the 45 Grave and Misfits cover sets went pretty well. So many people came up to me and said, “you know, I’d never heard of 45 Grave before, but I checked them out and they’re really good!” Since not as many people knew them, the crowd reaction was a little more muted for that set, but I think the band totally nailed all the tricky bits I was worried about. And then after Black Flag (who were pretty good!) came the Misfits set, and people lost their shit. It was so much fun. I don’t think I’d been to a house show in Raleigh in several years, and even though the crowd at this one was totally different from the last one I went to (whenever that was), it still felt like Raleigh… no cool guys, just a bunch of freaks out to have some fun. I hope we can do it again soon.

I had a lot of stress and anxiety leading up to Halloween. Not that I was nervous it wouldn’t go well, but just because I had so much on my plate that I felt really overwhelmed. There was about half a day on Friday when I felt myself decompress when I realized the gig was behind me, but I’ve been pretty much right back into overwhelmed mode with all the stuff going on at Sorry State. I’ll be sticking close to home for the near future, but much of the rest of the staff has time off planned in the coming weeks, so I’ll have a lot of work to cover their duties while they’re gone, and there never seems to be enough time to get my work done in the first place. That’s life, I guess.

Along with the stress of the Halloween show, I was in some negative headspace earlier in October because I read a Henry Rollins book. I heard him on a bunch of podcasts talking about his new book Stay Fanatic Vol 3, and since it sounded like something I’d find interesting, I started reading the first volume in the series. And while there was a lot of information in there I found interesting, I think it pulled me a little too effectively into Hank’s world, which seems very lonely. While I share his passion for punk’s history, the way he approaches it—at least how it comes across in Stay Fanatic—is so solipsistic that it makes me question my own love for music and why I’m so devoted to it. There are so many things that seem interesting about his life, particularly all the traveling he does and all the money he gets to spend on punk records and memorabilia, but reading about it through the texture of his day-to-day experience left me feeling really down. I’m struggling to articulate why it made me feel bad, but it definitely did.

I suppose Rollins’ book popped into my mind because of what I chose as my staff pick this week: the Fall’s very first album, Live at the Witch Trials. Of course, Rollins is a big fan of the Fall. Also, Rollins constantly revisits his favorite records, which is something I don’t do nearly often enough. The Fall are my favorite band, but it had been months since I listened to them. Another thing that made me think of the Rollins book is that he often notes October is his favorite month, and he particularly likes to revisit his favorite records every October. It was actually November 2 when I spun Live at the Witch Trials, but I get the point. While we’ve had a very warm week here in Raleigh, it still feels like fall with the leaves changing and falling and the days getting noticeably shorter (particularly after the time change this weekend). During a colder spell a couple of weeks ago I had to get the fireplace going in my living room, and I felt the pull of winter cosiness. It’ll be here before I know it, and I’ll be sitting there wishing it was over.

Anyway, it’s nice to listen to one of your favorite records during a transitional time like this. While the world is changing around you, your favorite records remind you of who you are. I kind of forgot—or at least lost touch with—how much I love the Fall until I blasted the record. But when I listen to the brilliant closing passage of “Frightened,” the sinister bass line of “Rebellious Jukebox,” the relentless clatter of “No Xmas for John Quays,” and the ethereal poetry of “Live at the Witch Trials,” it hits me somewhere deep. This is what I love. This is who I am.