I first became aware of the British pop-punk band the Flys by way of Superchunk’s 1990 cover of “Night Creatures.” Though obviously a stellar tune, it was many years before I actually heard the Flys. When I finally did, I discovered they had many other awesome songs. Recently, a collection consisting of their entire catalog, along with previously unavailable material, was put out. As this release is the definitive Flys compilation, it seemed like the right time to share some of my favorite tracks.

Up first is “Me and My Buddies,” taken from the Flys’ debut, A Bunch of Five, a DIY EP that came out in December 1977. The song is one of two numbers from the record that, surprisingly, didn’t appear elsewhere, as it’s got loads of punk energy and a super-poppy chorus. Another highlight of the EP, “Love and a Molotov Cocktail,” would be repurposed as the first Flys single for EMI Records in January 1978. Both songs were written and sung by Flys leader, Neil O’Connor.
 

 
“We Don’t Mind the Rave” opens their debut album for EMI, Waikiki Beach Refugees, out in October 1978. If Steve Harley and the Jam had ever collaborated, it probably would’ve sounded like this.
 

 
Though I had recognized the driving “Don’t Moonlight on Me” is catchy, I didn’t realize the song rose to the level of earworm status until I started waking up in the middle of the night with its chorus playing in my head.
 
More buzz for the Flys, after the jump…

 
For decades, Peter Aaron of the Chrome Cranks has been intermittently worked on a compilation that would document Cincinnati’s subterranean music scene of the mid 1970s through the early 1980s. Initially conceived of as a cassette release as far back as 1987, the project has finally seen the light of day as We Were Living in Cincinnati: Punk and Underground Sounds From Ohio’s Queen City (1975-1982). Put out jointly by HoZac Records and Shake-It Records, the collection includes obscure tracks from little-known vinyl releases, as well as previously unreleased recordings. Dangerous Minds has selected a handful of highlights from the set for you to check out.

The anthemic “Long Gone” was, appropriately, the A-side of the Customs 1980 single. The group was formed by guitarist Peter Greenberg—formerly of the Boston band DMZ and later of the Lyres—after he moved to Ohio to go to the University of Cincinnati. “Long Gone” is about getting the hell out of Cincinnati. 
 

 

The Customs, 1979.

“Blonde Debbie,” a lustful power pop/rockabilly tribute to a certain Ms. Harry, is the B-side to the Rockers’ only 45, which came out in 1980.
 

 

Picture sleeve.

“Working Girls” is a driving punk rocker courtesy of Dennis the Menace. This catchy tune is taken from their only record, a self-titled 7-inch EP that was released in 1980. Though their discography is limited, Dennis the Menace were a staple of the Cincy scene.
 

 

Picture sleeve.

“Inside Out” by the Erector Set, a ska punk number that’s simply irresistible, was included on their 1981 single. The group also put out a 12-inch, and opened for some high-profile acts, including Squeeze and U2.

When writing what you’re reading here, this author had been sick for days, but still had to get up and dance like a lunatic when playing “Inside Out.”
 

 

Flyer, 1981.

HoZac/Shake-It has just released We Were Living in Cincinnati on vinyl in a limited edition of 500 copies. The 18-track LP also comes with a bonus download of an additional 15 songs—for free—plus a two-sided poster with photos, band family tree, and liner notes by Peter Aaron. Get We Were Living in Cincinnati via Bandcamp or HoZac’s site.
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Matt Gimmick’s rare 1979 EP, with covers of unreleased Stooges songs, returns (a DM premiere)
Vector Command: The dark and mysterious recordings by former members of Crime —a DM premiere

An early photo of The Star Club

Since getting their start back in Nagoya, Japan in the spring of 1977, Japanese punk band, The Star Club, has put out more than 30 records (their most recent Max Breakers was released in December of 2015), and despite numerous lineup changes over the decades, the band continues to tour and perform with original vocalist, Hikage.
 

Hikage, the long-running vocalist for The Star Club, 1978
 
There were no shortage of punk bands in Japan during the late 70s and early 80s such the influential Blue Hearts, Anarchy, The Stalin, Crack the Marian, noise-punks Outo and hardcore punks, Gauze. Obviously, most of these groups got their inspiration from the punk that was happening thousands of miles away in the UK and New York, as the title of this post alludes to. Over the years, the rotating members of The Star Club even have even used mashups of the names of members of the Sex Pistols and Clash as their own. At one time back in the day, the bass player was known as “Paul Vicious,” the drummer called himself “Topper Cook,” and the guitarist became “Steve Cat Jones.”
 

 
From heavy metal to art, I’m a huge fan of the creative forces that emanate to my ears and eyes by way of Japan. And watching videos of The Star Club performing not only their own music back in the 80s, but the music of their punk idols, pioneers like Sham 69, The Clash and the Ramones, pretty much made my day. I found it especially enjoyable to watch the 80s version of Star Club vocalist Hikage swirling around while spewing out “Bodies” in a shirt not unlike Johnny Lydon’s straight-jacket-looking muslin “Destroy” shirt.
 

The Star Club “Aggressive Teens/Bodies” Australian release, 1986
 
If you dig what follows, I have some good news for you as many of The Star Club’s recordings can be found on Ebay and Discogs. I’ve also posted videos of the Star Club covering “Borstal Breakout” by Sham 69, The Ramones’ “Blitzkrieg Bop,” “Bodies,” by the Sex Pistols, and “I Fought the Law” as famously covered by The Clash (which is a part of the performance in first video below). The first video also includes a short amusing interview with the band, which was recorded at a show The Star Club did under the alias of “Anarchy in the J.A.P” in support of their fifteenth anniversary and cover album of the same name in 1992.
 

The Star Club performing as “Anarchy in the J.A.P” in the early 90s. A brief interview with the band pops up just before their cover of Sham 69’s 1979 single, “If the Kids are United”
 
More from the Star Club, after the jump…

Gregory McLaughlin, Randy Rush - The Front

A pair of eye-opening, no-budget documentaries on the (surprisingly great) glam, punk, and new wave music history of Florida have surfaced. These documentaries, primarily focused on the 1980s hyper-obscuro bands of the Miami scene, are a window into a musical history that, probably because of its geographical distance from the rest of the country, has been virtually ignored.

Punk rock historian, and author of the excellent Crate Digger: An Obsession With Punk Records, Bob Suren, who is constantly alerting me to new old bands I’ve never heard, sent me a link to Greg McLaughlin’s You Tube channel—a veritable treasure trove of Florida new wave and punk history. And get this—most of it’s actually really great.

McLaughlin led The Front, an early ‘80s punky, new-wave-ish quintet from Miami, with a sound reminiscent of San Francisco’s The Mutants or John Foxx era Ultravox. These guys were legitimate outsider weirdos who could have been huge if they had been from New York or LA or, hell, even Athens, GA. McLaughlin’s You Tube channel is chock full of clips of The Front as well as other Florida bands that no one north of Tallahassee’s ever heard of. Most of these bands may have released one or two singles if they were lucky. The Front had two.
 

 
McLaughlin has collected a lot of this footage, as well as interviews, into two documentaries: Invisible Bands and The Front -The Band That Time Forgot. The former chronicles Florida’s DIY music history from ‘60s garage punk bands through ‘80s new wave, power pop, and punk. The latter deals more specifically with McLaughlin’s own band, The Front, but also delves into the ‘80s Florida music scene, with bands such as The Eat, Cichlids, Screamin’ Sneakers, and Charlie Pickett and the Eggs.

Both documentaries are charmingly “no budget,”—fun in spite of their utter lack of any production value. Both could use a lot of fat-trimming, and would benefit greatly from about 30 minutes worth of cuts each. I think this is a problem film makers often face when they are too close to their subject matter.  The Front documentary loses focus about half way through and just starts including footage from loads of ‘80s contemporary local bands. Thankfully, all of the music (from a slew of unknown bands—“Killed By Death” greats, The Eat, are the most famous band featured, if that gives you any frame of reference)  is fantastic, even if the document itself is overlong and disjointed. Some of the footage repeats between the two documentaries, and if you’re not a patient person you may find yourself wanting to skim around a bit, but the music is totally worth it. There are some major gems to be unearthed here.

More after the jump…

 
Sure, this will be a controversial superlative, but fuck it, I’m going out on a limb and declaring right now: Downtown Boys are currently the best active punk band in the United States.

I don’t make such statements carelessly. 

Providence, Rhode Island’s Downtown Boys may not be a household name, even in most punk houses, but they should be. The six-piece utilizes highly danceable manic punk blasts as a soapbox for their confrontational but heartfelt radical political screeds. The self-billed “bilingual political sax dance punk party” draws many influences together to create something that sounds familiar enough to pull you onto its frantic wavelength, but refreshing enough to keep you there. One might detect hints of The Fall, Bikini Kill, The Contortions, and The Ex, as much as the obvious comparison, X Ray Spex, who Downtown Boys share more in common with sonically than simply a saxophone and female singer.
 

 
In an excellent interview on wonderingsound.com, guitarist Joey L DeFrancesco touches on what sets Downtown Boys apart from most “political punk” acts:

We like to dance, and so do most of our friends. It’s something that brings people together. That’s just a good baseline. We aren’t trying to create a distraction from the awful world, but rather help create a new world inside the show space, and hopefully inspire folks to go out and do it in the outside world, too. There’s a power and joy in that, and that goes beyond just going to a club (which is still awesome and valid). Love and rage together are greater than the sum of their parts. Political music is often cheesy or boring, so no one listens to it. It’s ineffective propaganda.

Insert appropriate Emma Goldman misquote here.
 

 
Singer Victoria Ruiz paints a picture of the vibe at a Downtown Boys show—a vibe I can personally vouch for, as I was lucky enough to see them live last year. While most of the crowd waited outside for the by-the-numbers, headlining, cool-guy-hardcore-band, a smaller contingent of folks who had never heard of opening act, Downtown Boys, were at first stunned, and soon bouncing off walls, as the band utterly transformed the room. Ruiz conveyed a depth and realness that is so lacking in most of what passes for “punk” in 2015, and the audience picked up on that bigtime.

Every time we play, I think that we are going pretty deep down into the darkest and brightest places of ourselves, pulling out emotions from our subconscious and conscious desires, dreams and future. We are trying to relate to people. A lot of us in the band have worked in relational organizing, where you build relationships with people in order to create demand for change. It is the same thing with people at shows. We hope to meet people where they are at. It is crazy to look to the audience and be like, ‘Wow — there is a person here singing the lyrics louder than I am, there is a person here slowly unfolding their arms and slowly moving their head, there is a person here who looks likes I did when I was 16 — nerdy, brown and dirtying the cultural hegemonic brainwash.’ [At our shows] I want people to be with us and feel completely relevant and important.

OK. I made a rather bold statement up-top, and so it comes time to provide some musical evidence to back it up….

After the jump, listen to the best punk band in America today…

 
NBC Washington reported on Friday that failed Reagan-assassin, John Hinkley Jr., is interested in starting a band:

A psychiatrist treating the man who shot President Ronald Reagan in 1981 says he wants to start a band and should be allowed to publish his music anonymously.

Dr. Giorgi-Guarnieri testified Friday during court hearings that will ultimately determine whether and under which conditions John Hinckley Jr. will be allowed to live full time outside a mental hospital.

Giorgi-Guarnieri says Hinckley should be allowed to start the band, but not perform publicly.

Hinckley’s lawyer and treatment team say he’s ready to live full time at his 89-year-old mother’s home in Virginia under certain conditions.

Hinckley has been allowed freedom in stages. He spends 17 days a month at his mother’s Williamsburg home. One of his interests is music, and he sings and plays the guitar. He also participates in music therapy.

John Hinckley, Jr., best known as the man who tried to kill President Ronald Reagan in 1981, in a J.D. Salinger and Travis Bickle-inspired attempt to win the affections of a teen-aged Jodie Foster, was found “not guilty by reason of insanity” and has since remained under the care of psychiatrists at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital.
 

Hinckley, who never got that big hit he was looking for, now has a chance to put a band together and give it another shot.
 
The attempt on Reagan’s life was a boon for punk bands looking for song topics in the ‘80s. If Hinckley’s band plans on doing any covers, he might consider looking for some inspiration from those he, himself, inspired.

After the jump, the top five John Hinckley-inspired punk songs…

 
I’m about to describe a very specific First-World-Problem that will sound completely stupid to anyone other than record collectors who have reached a certain level of accumulation -  but they will totally understand this. You know how you sometimes buy records faster than you can play them and you end up with those piles that might end up there for years before you ever get around to re-discovering shit you acquired who-knows-how-long-ago? Yes, it’s a thing that actually happens and it recently happened to me—I was going through a stack of 45s that had been waiting to be played for - who knows? - five years? One of the records I pulled out caught my eye because the cover was so weird. I couldn’t remember where or when I had actually purchased it, but I was damn sure why—this thing looked downright bizarre. It was a three song EP from 1979 by a fella named Gary Quazar, who according to the back cover was responsible for vocals, guitar, base (sic), and synthesizer. As soon as I put the thing on the turntable I was in love, and proceeded to keep flipping sides, playing it over and over all night long. “Base” may not have actually been a misspelling. There may indeed have been some baseing going on in the production of this EP. It’s completely nuts.
 

 
The music of Gary Quazar isn’t easily pigeon-holeable. It’s simultaneously punk, new wave, prog, and metal. You can hear King Crimson and Von LMO and Hawkwind and Middle Class, with vocals that sound like the unholy offspring of DEVO’s “Booji Boy” and the girl from Suburban Lawns. It’s just straight up weird and fast and incredibly out-there, and I’m willing to bet ol’ Gary didn’t really fit in with many “scenes” back in 1979. What do you call this? Sci-fi prog-core? Whatever it is, it’s fucking awesome.

So this record became sort of an instant-obsession, and I went straight to the Internet to find the scoop on Gary. That journey left more questions than answers, as Gary Quazar seems to be a bit of a mystery artist. A search for the specific record only revealed it being on some want-lists and auction results of it having sold a couple of times. Further digging into an alternate spelling of “Gary Quasar” revealed an old myspace page that has some of Gary’s other music recorded under the name “Panty Raid.” I recommend checking those tunes out, even though I don’t think they are quite as wild as the songs on the EP.
 

 
Following the “Gary Quasar” and “Panty Raid” breadcrumbs, I stumbled upon this crazy story about Gary which seems to indicate he was a bit of a, uh, wild-man.

The Gary Quazar saga continues after the jump…

 
I’m no Henry Rollins fan but when he’s good he can be very good, as he is in this short piece on punk rock, Is Punk Back From The Dead?, that was broadcast on British TV recently.

The clip also includes some thoughts on punk from John Holmstrom, Tony James (Generation X), Mark Perry (Sniffin’ Glue) and Toyah Wilcox. The consensus: punk now more than ever!
 

Cherubic Pat Smear of the Germs, and later Nirvana… he hit girls
 
I am as guilty as any young punk of romanticizing the youthful energy of scenes and eras that I was never a part of, so it’s nice to be smacked in the face with reality once in a while. Of course it’s important to cut these kids a lot of slack as they navigated particularly ugly aspects of adolescence, many times through a lot of adversity. However, dear sweet baby Jesus, I hope I was never that much of a sulky, self-righteous, little ass (I know, I know—I probably was) as the youngsters on display in first installment of Penelope Spheeris’ legendary LA punk/metal trilogy The Decline of Western Civilization.

Through thick, grating, under-bitten LA accents, we hear classics such as “I’m a total rebel—I rebel against everything,” and “Everyone shouldn’t be afraid to be as different as they wanna’ be,” followed almost immediately by the same girl saying, “Everyone’s hair should be blue.” And of course, there are the racial epithets, gratuitous use of “poseur,” and various affected attempts at portraying cynicism and apathy.

Regardless, the angst and alienation these kids felt is palpably legitimate; you can’t help but wish you could pinch their bratty little cheeks and tell them that someday they’ll escape, and that it isn’t always going to be this bad. Mainly, however, I’m just happy no one recorded me at sixteen years old, and that I’ll never have to be sixteen years old again.
 

 
Oh Punk Rock, what the hell happened?

Erasure? Huey Lewis and The News? The Fixx?! You really let yourself go, man.
 

 
Thanks to Ben Wilson!
 

Divorce poster design by Croatoan Design
 
Divorce is a femme-thrash four piece from Glasgow, Scotland, quickly picking up a reputation for being one of the best live acts in the UK. I have posted about Divorce on Dangerous Minds before—a fitting tribute, I felt, to the newly-wed future King of England and his blushing bride—and now the band are back with a new 7” release on Milk Records called “Horseheads,” with a strange accompanying video.

Fans of both spiky, angular post-punk and the heavier end of hardcore will find a lot to like here. Drummer Andy Brown describes their influences as “loud, ugly and offensive. Anything that luxuriates in the joys of noise.” He adds that “genres and middle-class whiteboy whining can get fucked.” I second that emotion.

The video for “Horseheads” features a humanoid-chicken pecking at a pentagram-emblazoned snare drum (a nod perhaps to the infamous ‘Chicken Lady’ character from Kids In The Hall?) but as Brown states:

“The fact that there’s no-one dressed as a horse in the video has not gone unnoticed. The song’s not about horses anyway, it was named after the town that our vocalist Jennie comes from in America - only she really knows what it’s all about!”

There is, indeed, a village in upstate New York called Horseheads that describes itself as the “gateway to the Finger Lakes”. Visitors will be glad to know that, as of the 30th of January 2012, the drinking water from well number five is safe and does NOT require a “boil water advisory”. I don’t know what they’re putitng in the water in Horseheads, but I sure am glad it somehow turned out like this:

Divorce “Horseheads”
 

For more info on DIvorce (including upcoming tour dates and current releases) visit the Divorce the Band blog.

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Screw the Royal wedding - listen to Divorce instead

 
One of the best bands of the whole “grunge” era, here’s L7 rocking the fuck out of Letterman (and his band) in 1992 with their stone cold classic “Pretend We’re Dead”. For no other reason than it’s very cool and they look like they’re having a blast:
 

 
Our new partner in art crimes, Nicole Panter, was involved in the formative years of the Pee-wee Herman Show and that got me thinking about Pee-wee’s punk connections. Here’s a clip from Pee-wee’s Playhouse circa 1986 of Pee-wee pogoing with his pal Larry Fishburne (Cowboy Curtis). Music by Mark Mothersbaugh.

I know 1986 ain’t exactly the year punk broke, but, keep in mind, Paul Reubens started working on his Pee-wee character in L.A. in 1978 in the midst of a very vital punk scene and that anarchic spirit suffused his program.
 

 
Punk hysteria on TV. Faux punkers Mayhem play ‘Choke’ on Quincy episode Next Stop, Nowhere.

This Quincy episode aired on December 1, 1982. Some actual albums that were released in 1982: Black Flag - ‘Damaged’  Bad Brains - ‘Bad Brains’ Flipper - ‘Generic’ Exploited - ‘Troops Of Tomorrow’ Fear - ‘The Record’ Husker Du - ‘Everything Falls Apart’ Crass - ‘Christ: The Album’ Minor Threat - ‘Minor Threat’ Replacements - ‘Stink’ Descendents - ‘Milo Goes To College’ Meat Puppets - Bad Religion - ‘How Could Hell Be Any Worse’ Social Distortion - ‘Mommy’s Little Monster’.”  Reverend Dan

“I saw a blind man the other day / took his pencils and ran away”