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The Residents, Chrome & Tuxedomoon covering ‘I Left My Heart in San Francisco.’ Sort of
11.30.2016
09:36 am
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While discussion of the rock music of San Francisco tends to revolve around It’s a Beautiful Dead Airplane and the Holding Messenger Service, all us really good weirdos who read and/or work for Dangerous Minds know that the truly insane stuff landed after the hippie era. The moment in 1972 when The Residents moved to S.F. and established Ralph Records to release their work and the music of other like minded head cases was a bellwether event in freakmusic; Ralph would go on to release underground classics by fellow San Franciscans like Tuxedomoon, Rhythm & Noise, MX-80 Sound, and Voice Farm, all innovators who were too weird to quite fit the mold of the city’s storied punk and hardcore scenes. (They released much excellent non-S.F.-based music too, it merits mentioning, including Art Bears, Snakefinger and Yello.)

Ralph label compilations were always worth picking up—they were doorways to a distinct kind of weirdness no other American label would touch. Releases like Frank Johnson’s Favorites, Potatoes, and the Buy or Die 7” series introduced a much younger me to excellent art-rock oddities well beyond my imagining. But the one that’s stuck with me most is 1979’s Subterranean Modern—which apart from a Schwump 7” in 1976 was the first Ralph release to include artists other than The Residents or Snakefinger—a four-band V/A release that introduced me to Chrome. Their three songs on that comp constituted the total of all music Chrome released on Ralph, and it included a warped, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it “cover” of Tony Bennett’s signature song “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.” Indeed, all four bands on the comp covered that tune in some fashion, the other three being The Residents (naturally), art-punk guitar terrorists MX-80 Sound, and gloomy experimenters Tuxedomoon. Bonus: cool Gary Panter cover art.

Chrome’s version of the song is a noisy psych swirl all of 27 seconds long, fading out as quickly as it fades in, and you can hear someone saying the title if you listen closely enough. The track would eventually resurface on Cleopatra Records’ Chrome Box. MX-80’s is an instrumental that I expect few listeners could peg it for a cover were it not for the title. The Residents’ version is a typically Residentsy transformation, perfectly in step with that band’s many, many, other cover songs, warping the original to the edge of recognizability and drenching it in synthesized menace. Along with the other 3 Residents tracks on this comp, it appeared on the CD reissue of their album Eskimo. Tuxedomoon’s offering is another quickie, a minute-long harmonica rendition of the original underneath a recorded phone call in which a man tries to prove residence in guess which city in order to collect welfare from the state of California. That track eventually re-surfaced on the band’s Pinheads on the Move collection.

Despite the fact that every band pretty much completely jettisoned the actual song they were supposedly covering, the album notes credit the remakes to original composers George Cory and Douglass Cross. It really couldn’t be more obvious that that Chrome, Tuxedomoon and MX-80 bristled against the stipulation of covering that song and contributed piss-takes. In fact, a contemporary NME article explicitly spells it out:

The most controversial aspect of the album is the inclusion of “I Left My Heart In San Francisco,” a rather sickening piece of hackwork popularized by Tony Bennett. None of the groups, with the exception of the Residents, were thrilled about recording the song. Chrome sarcastically included less than a minutes’ worth of white noise as their “interpretation.” Tuxedomoon recorded a one minute conversation between an unemployed transient attempting to qualify for welfare and a welfare office bureaucrat, while the melody to “I Left My Heart In San Francisco” is played on harmonica in the background. MX-80 Sound cut the song as an instrumental, giving it a full force heavy metal reading.

“It’s not that great a song,” says [Residents spokesman Hardy] Fox, “Who wants to do something that you don’t think is too great? It was a challenge. But it is the official San Francisco song. Sanctioned by the city. So we had no choice.”

More after the jump…

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Posted by Ron Kretsch
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11.30.2016
09:36 am
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If Philip K. Dick had a rock band: Chrome’s ‘alien soundtrack’ radio special, 1981
11.04.2014
12:37 pm
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Australian radio aired an unorthodox 45-minute special about the music of Chrome in 1981. Built around a wide-ranging interview with the band’s late singer and founder Damon Edge—who, I learn, spoke with the unmistakable accent of a native Angeleno stoner—the program makes inventive use of the radio documentary format. As you’re listening, the interview tape will suddenly start running backward, and an Australian radio presenter will break in reading from the text included with the Alien Soundtracks album, her voice run through a Chromesque chain of phasers and flangers. It’s a psychedelic sci-fi broadcast mixed and edited in the style of Chrome, and it is totally nuts.

Details about the special are scarce. The Helios Creed tribute site that posted it, helioschrome.com, reports that the show is the work of Australian radio DJ and producer Tony Barrell, who died in 2011. A book about experimental music in Australia names Barrell as one of a few DJs on 2JJ (“Double J”), Australia’s youth-oriented radio station, who championed experimental music and introduced cut-up techniques into the editing of their shows.
 

 
Edge talks about Chrome’s then-recent show in Bologna, Italy, in July 1981: the “classic” lineup’s first live performance, and, wouldn’t you know it, the second-to-last. He also discusses why Chrome is a romantic band, how he and partner Helios Creed approach recording, why punk bores him, and how he learned that Chrome’s music had been used for “brain therapy” with a car crash survivor. Here he is on the origin of the band’s name:

One of the periods I liked, besides the psychedelic movement and some classical movements, was the Surrealistic movement. And I was reading an article about the Shah of Iran in 1930, who had commissioned a Paris Deco artist to invent air conditioning for his car—and that’s how air conditioning was invented, cause the Shah wanted air conditioning! [laughs]—so after that, he was so impressed, he said, “Well, build me this really far-out mansion,” so [the artist] said, “OK,” and the guy stuck a lot of chrome in it. I was just in the doctor’s and I was looking in the magazine, and it just seemed to sort of give me a sense of design, chrome. The metal itself is very high-class, it’s very stated, it’s very minimal, and it has something deeper about it, too, you know. It reflects. . .

A final point. The special gives the misleading impression that none of the names on Chrome’s early albums, other than Edge’s and Creed’s, refer to actual people. Not so: Gary Spain and John Lambdin are real live flesh and blood sons of the earth who played physical instruments in Chrome. “John L. Cyborg” is the fictitious person (although engineer Oliver DiCicco says it was sometimes him).

Now that we’ve cleared that up, let’s go back to the future.

Chrome’s new album is called Feel It Like A Scientist.

Click here for an MP3 of the full program.

Posted by Oliver Hall
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11.04.2014
12:37 pm
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Headsmashing Chrome show live in Hamburg, June 2014
08.05.2014
09:39 am
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I‘m just a few years too young to have seen Chrome’s classic lineup in concert. That still bums me out a little, it’s something I would LOVE to have seen. Chrome’s insane melange of industrial sound collage, punk aggression, and acid-fried rock guitar proved both that “psychedelia” needn’t be encumbered with dreary, anachronous flower-child connotations, and that it wasn’t necessarily punk’s natural enemy. Echoes of brainfuckingly brilliant albums like Half Machine Lip Moves and Red Exposure can still be heard in gnarlier psych bands working today, and in industrial metal, as well, but the guitarist from Chrome’s classic era, Helios Creed, was and is miles beyond most flanger-abusers in terms of conception, nuance, and just straight up advanced weirdness. That his solo output kinda dusts the Chrome stuff that came out after his early ‘80s split with founder/drummer Damon Edge speaks to the fact that Chrome were really only truly great with both of them there.

While I never saw classic Chrome in concert, I did see a bunch of outstanding Helios Creed shows in the ‘90s, so when after Edge’s untimely 1995 death Creed re-claimed the Chrome name for a 1997 album and tour, I HAD to go. What I saw, though, while it was damn cool, wasn’t really different enough from a regular Helios show to convince me that there was any flaw in the “Truly Great Chrome=Creed+Edge” equation. Creed continued releasing Chrome albums on various labels until 2002, when Chrome seemingly went silent for good—until this year.
 

 
A couple of months ago, we at DM were privileged to bring you the debut of the song “Prophecy,” the first new Chrome music released in a dozen years, and a few weeks later, the superb site Consequence of Sound streamed the full LP. It’s really goddamn good, good enough to completely torpedo my belief that a Chrome album needs Creed and Edge to be top-shelf stuff. But still, Creed-only Chrome is characterized by Creed’s idiosyncratic guitar work, just as his solo output is. So when I was offered the chance to talk to Creed about the new Chrome music, I only prepared one question: Really, what’s the difference?

I try to make it two bands, and yeah, for a lot of people there isn’t an obvious difference—like why should I do Chrome when I have the solo thing that’s actually doing better? The difference to me is that Chrome is coming from a different era, and the ‘70s headspace was a lot different. And the alien/sci-fi thing is more prevalent in Chrome. I’m not doing Helios Creed right now—the last thing I did was Galactic Octopi, which was a while ago already.

The new Chrome album was three years in the making, and when we started it, to us it had to be the best Chrome ever made, that was in our heads. If we didn’t have that in our heads, I don’t think it would have been so good. Whether it’s the best one made is a matter of personal taste, but I think it’s up there, and it’s fun to play!

That new album, Feel It Like a Scientist, sees its US release today. Creed alluded to a forthcoming U.S. tour when we spoke, but no dates have been announced as of this posting. Their European tour wrapped up a couple of months ago, and in what could well bear on what we may expect from a U.S. tour, it leaned heavily on classic material. See for yourself—thanks to YouTube user Neonblitz 1968, I found some quite good audience-cam footage of their recent show in Hamburg. Enjoy.
 

 
More after the jump

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Posted by Ron Kretsch
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08.05.2014
09:39 am
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Stream the new Chrome song exclusively on Dangerous Minds
06.03.2014
09:33 am
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The brilliant San Francisco psych/industrial/space-rock/sci-fi band Chrome has been reactivated again.

Formed in 1975 by drummer Damon Edge, the band really came into its own with the addition of Guitarist Helios Creed for their second album, 1977’s Alien Soundtracks. Straddling pre- and post-punk turf, Chrome used the collage and cut-up techniques of industrial music and the heavily effected guitars of the most brain-fried cosmic acid rock to forge a massively tweaked sound that’s still tough to pin into any single rock genre. (God knows I’ve tried, but nobody will accept my insistence that “sounds like a bunch of awesome giant-ass ‘60s TV space robots with eye lasers that grudge-fuck phaser pedals” is a genre, and so Chrome remains orphaned.)
 

 
Edge and Creed would be the band’s core creative duo for four more LPs through 1982 (Half Machine Lip Moves and Red Exposure are especially recommended, as is the recently issued “lost” LP Half Machine From The Sun), after which Edge moved to France, leaving Creed behind and forming a new Chrome lineup that continued until his death in 1995. Afterward, Creed, having enjoyed an extremely fruitful solo career, reassumed the Chrome name, releasing new albums between 1997 and 2002.

But though someone in a band called “Chrome” was making records from 1975-2002, the last dozen years have seen no releases of new material from the band, until now. Feel It Like a Scientist, a 2XLP of new Chrome music, will be released in August 2014. Per Creed from recent interviews:

“I have the best band put together, finally.”

“The album is coming out…it’s how I’ve always wanted Chrome to sound. It’s what I always imagined Chrome could be post Damon, ya know. I’ve been able to take it to the next level.”

 

 
Having heard Feel it Like a Scientist, I have to agree—this feels music like “the next level.” I’ve never been super crazy about any Chrome material that didn’t have both Creed and Edge, but this stuff is worthy. We can’t share the entire LP with you, but we’re sure you’ll enjoy the song “Prophecy,” making its streaming debut today here on DM.
 

 

Posted by Ron Kretsch
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06.03.2014
09:33 am
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‘Half Machine from the Sun’: The great lost Chrome album
11.06.2013
06:39 pm
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The first time I heard Chrome, I was tripping on at least two tabs of blotter acid. A friend of mine from school was a massive Chrome fan. I was a massive Tuxedomoon fan. A third friend present was a budding Residents freak. Although we were all three out of our everlovin’ minds, we could still agree on what to listen to when friend #1 pulled out the Ralph Records compilation, Subterranean Modern, which collected tracks from each of these decidedly avant-garde Bay Area-based groups, plus MX-80 Sound. Talk about a lysergic compromise!

Imagine if you will being exposed to this and then this (these are the two Tuxedomoon tracks) and The Residents’ “Dumbo, The Clown (Who Loved Christmas)” while in a state of, how shall I put it, being extremely tuned in to it. Then he flipped the record over and we were assaulted by Chrome’s “Meet You in the Subway” (see video below) with its primitive, crushing guitar, distorted vocals and almost motorik beat (dig those fuckin’ drums!). It was hooky and it was noisy and it was punky, psychedelic and heavy metal all at the same time. Evil sounding. Violent, even. My face melted off and slid onto the floor.

Chrome sounded like the Stooges channeled through a Philip K. Dick novel.

“Meet You in the Subway” is one of my favorite songs of all time but I hadn’t really listened to Chrome much in recent years. Then I picked up the Chrome box set earlier this year and played the shit out of that for about a month. When I was offered a copy of the “new” Half Machine from the Sun album of Chrome’s “lost” tracks by the publicist working the release, my immediate reaction was “Yes, please.” New vintage Chrome? I’m in!

The tracks on the album date from the era of Half Machine Lip Moves and Red Exposure, which is to say 1979-80. It is quite literally the great lost Chrome album—recorded when these guys were ON FIRE—that no one was waiting for or expected and that I guess even the surviving creator had more or less forgotten about, or considered lost.

Apparently someone had been shopping the tapes around when Helios Creed (his Chrome partner Damon Edge died in 1995) got wind of it and started a successful Pledge Music campaign to raise funds to buy back and complete the tapes for release:

“We had so much material, good tracks went unused. I didn’t even realize the tapes were lost (and sold) due to an unpaid bill! I forgot about them until they were played for me recently, some 30 years later, but listening to the work I was brought right back in time where we had left off. I remembered for instance that I felt ‘Something Rhythmic’ was a special track, maybe even a hit. I guess it wasn’t time to complete these tracks then, because now is their time.”

I’d have to say that he’s probably right about that given the number of times that I’ve played Half Machine from the Sun, but especially “Something Rhythmic (I Can’t Wait)”, since last week.

Half Machine from the Sun is eighteen tracks available as a two-record set—including a collectible colored vinyl version—CD and high quality digital downloads. If you like Chrome, it’s an absolute must.
 

“Something Rhythmic (I Can’t Wait)”
 

“Meet You In The Subway”

Posted by Richard Metzger
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11.06.2013
06:39 pm
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Chrome: Alien Soundtracks
10.19.2011
03:11 pm
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I was exposed to Chrome pretty early on, in both their career and my own as a music fan. A kid in my hometown, one of only a tiny handful of “punkers” (as we were called in the 7th grade), had Alien Soundtracks and we were all pretty sold on it, all of us punkers. They sounded like the Stooges channeled through a Philip K. Dick novel (or A Clockwork Orange, of course). Much later I saw Helios Creed in concert and his psychotic/psychedelic guitar playing turned my body into molecules. Then I’d be solid again. Then molecular. Someone stage-diving kicked me in the eye with their Doc Martens, but it was still a rad experience! Did I mention I was on acid at the time?

Here’s a clip for my top favorite Chrome song, “Meet You In the Subway.” Dig their bezoomny outfits, my droogie brothers!
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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10.19.2011
03:11 pm
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