Gerald V. Casale and Josh Freese in “I’m Gonna Pay U Back,” directed by Davy Force

With the human species seemingly hurtling toward the center of a body-pulping, dream-pulverizing vortex, Dangerous Minds sent one of its bubble-eyed dog boys from the recombo DNA labs in the Valley for a briefing from Jerry Casale. DEVO’s chief strategist, film director, songwriter, singer, and bassist shed light on our dire predicament as few others could. He also discussed his new solo music video, “I’m Gonna Pay U Back,” and revealed his plans for its upcoming 3D sequel, “The Invisible Man,” news that is balm for our awful hurt. A lightly edited transcript follows.

How was the tour, from your point of view? One of the high points of my year for sure was seeing DEVO again.

Where did you see it?

At the YouTube Theater at SoFi Stadium in LA.

You know, that’s an amazing amphitheater. It’s kind of a replacement for the wonderful amphitheater we had that we used to love playing at, that was ripped apart for Harry Potter rides?

The Universal Amphitheatre.

Up in Universal City. So this one kind of approximates that in architectural style, in the stage, in the sound, so, yeah, good venue. They don’t have their management together, that’s for sure. It’s overbearing; in these COVID times, they had so much security going on, it was like warring kind of TSA factions or something. But I thought the show went pretty well.

Well, for a guy like me, Jerry, I guess it’s the closest thing I have to a religious ceremony in my life, that Booji Boy, no matter how many times he dies, keeps coming back to sing “Beautiful World.”

[Laughs] It was hardly a tour, however. It was three measly shows. So, yeah.

I know. I wish there had been more—

Me too.

—but I’m grateful for what I get.

Well, if it were up to me, there would be a lot more.

Is that across the board, in terms of recording and touring and all that stuff?

Of course, of course. I mean, obviously, I founded the band, and I remain as excited and true to the concepts and principles of the collaboration and the experimentation as I was in 1977.
 

DEVO in the lab, 1979 (via DEVO-OBSESSO)
 
Dean Stockwell just died, and I know he was an early champion of the band, so I wanted to ask about your relationship with him. But I also wanted to ask about this weird phenomenon that DEVO seems always to have been, like, one degree of separation from the Black Mountain poets, and I think of Dean Stockwell as being part of that too, since he was friends with Robert Duncan. So if you could talk about that a little bit.

Yeah. Where do we start there? First of all, with Dean Stockwell, he was part of a group of kind of the outsider artist, [Topanga] Canyon people. I mean, he had been with Toni Basil, they were close friends with Neil Young, Dennis Hopper—there was a whole little universe of people there, actors, musicians. So when Toni Basil came to see us play at the Starwood in the summer of 1977 in Los Angeles, and converted, flipped out, she turned Dean and Neil Young on to us. And they, in turn, became very excited and became advocates, and, you know, insisted that we appear in Neil’s movie.

Neil was in the process of that movie [Human Highway] that kept morphing in terms of what it was, and what the message was, and who would act in it, and what the plot was, and we were involved in scenes in that movie early on, and many of the scenes that were shot were then jettisoned, because the whole idea of the movie changed, and it went on for another two years. And that culminated with us doing this vignette inside the movie of being disgruntled nuclear waste workers in Linear Valley, which was a fictitious valley in the film, and we were singing “It Takes a Worried Man” while we loaded leaky barrels of nuclear waste onto the truck and took them to the dumpsite. And that was an idea I’d thrown out that Neil liked, and he gave me his crew, basically, he let me direct that sequence. He gave me the funds in the budget to do a loading dock set, and used his truck—he actually owned that truck—and he made us the uniforms and the custom helmets with the breather packs that went into our noses.

So it was fantastic shooting 35 millimeter film, doing this whole thing that I thought was going to appear intact inside the movie. But of course, no; it was then decided upon some kind of editing whim to chop it up and make it a through line, and keep coming back to it throughout the movie, so it really made no sense [laughs]. But the movie made no sense. It’s an amazing piece. Certainly had a lot of talent behind it and a lot of budget behind it.

What’s funny is, although this never happens, the subsequent re-editing, re-editing, re-editing, new director’s cut, new director’s cut—the last thing that Neil ever did to it was actually the most cohesive and the best, and worked the best. And he also collapsed the movie so it wasn’t some sprawling, two-hour bit, you know, it was concise. And it just suddenly made more sense [laughs], believe it or not, which never happens when people go back and rework something over and over, they keep going down a rabbit hole. But I actually liked it, and I got to speak at a couple of these screenings he had where there were Q&A from the audience about the making of it. So yeah, it was great.
 

DEVO shine as nuclear waste workers in Neil Young’s ‘Human Highway’ (via IMDb)
 
Back to the Black Mountain thing. It started with a poet, Ed Dorn, who had come to the Black Mountain school, he was a poet that liaised with all those poets that were famous at that time, from City Lights—

Ferlinghetti?

You know, like what was his name, somebody Giorno…

John Giorno.

John Giorno; of course, Allen Ginsberg; all these poets. And they had been part of this cadre of people of like-minded sensibilities that started as Beats, basically, in the Sixties. And Ed Dorn became a professor of poetry, English lit, at the University of Boulder, and he had gotten a, whatever it’s called, a guest professorship at Kent State University on the heels of the killings at Kent State. So he came in the following fall on a visiting professorship, set up in a house off-campus.

And immediately, you know, all the academics and hipoisie intelligentsia that were outsider people at Kent State—‘cause it was a tight-knit group of people who didn’t fit into the MBA, fraternity scene, right? We were the artists, we were pursuing fine art programs, pursuing MFAs in English literature and so on—we, of course, gravitated to Ed Dorn, he was a great guy. And Bob Lewis and I, who was an early colleague and, pre-DEVO the band, had, with me, created these DEVO concepts of de-evolution, and I had been applying it to visual art and he had been applying it to poetry, we hung out with Ed in 1971, ’72, and we were spewing all these theories to Ed, and Ed found us completely entertaining, you know, like, these strident kids think they reinvented the wheel. The ideas weren’t foreign to him at all. So he would say, “Oh, if you think that, here, read this!” and “Oh, well by the way, so and so said this!” And he just egged us on.

So he gave us the ammunition. And then Eric Mottram came in that following year from Kings College in England, and he had been friends with all these people, and he had been teaching their works at Kings College in England, and he was a quote “lefty” intellectual. And he brought in people like Jeff Nuttall, who had written Bomb Culture.

So it was just this big lovefest of wonderful ideas and concepts, where you’d been thinking things, other people across the world had been thinking things, and there was this beautiful synchronicity, right? Who knew this could happen at Kent State University? And half of the reason it happened is ‘cause of the killings, and the reaction to the killings, and people banding together, like as a survival tactic, against this pending fascism and Nixonianism. So there’s a long, convoluted answer to your short, concise question.
 
MUCH more after the jump…

Photo of Barry Adamson by Mark David Ford

Multihyphenate musician-soundtrack composer-photographer-filmmaker (and former Bad Seed and member of Magazine) Barry Adamson has now added “memoirist” to that list.

Certainly no moss is growing under the feet of the Moss Side, Manchester-born Adamson. His incredibly evocative, highly detailed and sometimes frankly shocking autobiography, Up Above the City, Down Beneath the Stars was recently published by Omnibus Press, he’s got a new digital EP, Steal Away, just out and has completed a soundtrack for an upcoming documentary about London’s legendary arthouse cinema, the Scala Cinema.

Up Above the City, Down Beneath the Stars is an extremely well-written book, one of the best things I’ve read in ages. And I would be remiss in my duties here not to inform the reader that Adamson is either playing on, or created no fewer than six albums that would easily be in my top fifty: The first three Magazine albums, the first two Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds albums, and his own soundtrack for an imaginary film, Moss Side Story.  The man is a living legend.

I asked Barry Adamson a few questions via email.

First, your memory! How are you able to recall such vivid details about your life? It’s extraordinary!

Thanks! Some things are best forgotten, as the saying goes but throughout most of my life I’ve collected snapshots and angles on my own and the lives of others and stored them, committed them to memory like an archive and I never knew why but perhaps now I do. I thought everybody did this and I think to some extent they do. The amount of people I’d say I was writing a memoir to and then suddenly, they would find things stored away in there own archive. There’s also the noir style which helped me put them into a particular context as well.

There’s a very cinematic quality to so many of the anecdotes recounted in the book. Will you be developing this material further, say, writing a script?

I’ve not thought about that but sometimes, borrowing from Dennis Potter, the scenes in the book become ‘film-like’ to almost thrust the sense of that cinematic quality. I needed (in the same way I do with music) to be able to clearly visualise each sentence, so maybe that’s a factor in how the book’s overall filmic structure formed. It was a gamble to try and write it that way but one I think that paid off.

As far as autobiographies go, this one is a very, very nakedly revealing memoir indeed. I don’t get the sense that you’ve held much of anything back. What made you decide to do this?

I put myself as the central character in my life and decided that if it were a film or perhaps a novel, then you would see all the sides of this character; their challenges, struggles, conflict (on many levels) and light and dark and crap decision making and sitting with him throughout the story, so, difficult as it was at times and I make no bones about it, it really was, I knew that holding back would weaken ‘the story’ and that the filmic arc that I wanted to create around those first thirty years of my life could flatten out to a possible blandness which I didn’t want.

You’ve done a soundtrack to a documentary about London’s legendary repertoire moviehouse, the Scala. I’ve been there a few times myself. One time I saw Warhol’s Chelsea Girls and I was the only one in the cinema when it started, but by the time it was over several homeless people had camped out around the room. It seemed like a fairly sleazy place, did it widely have that reputation?

Well, for me, it was a place of refuge where you were fed this… art, art that you didn’t come across anywhere else. Sleazy. Yes. Glamorous. In it’s own way, yes. The all-nighters were events like no others and the fact that those films imprinted themselves so ferociously into my brain is to me, a sign that what was happening there was something special. Interesting that you remember so clearly what film you saw and the homeless scenario. I was possibly one of them!

Below, the video for “The Climber,” the lead track from the new Steal Away EP

 
When Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds finally played the Ritz in New York City during their Your Funeral… My Trial tour, it was a makeup date, rescheduled for a Sunday in February, after an earlier, sold out Friday show the previous October had been cancelled at the very last minute. On that night, when I got to the venue, there was a large crowd of people dressed in black standing in the street outside. Mick Harvey sat atop a huge cube of equipment covered by a tarp. I asked him “What happened?” and he shrugged and threw his hands up. “We don’t know where Nick is.” (The answer, it was later revealed by the Village Voice, was that Cave had been busted copping dope in Harlem and was then sitting in jail. This was in the days before cell phones, and I am reasonably sure that Mick was fearing something far worse might have happened.)

The rescheduled date came some weeks after the end of the tour and the Sunday show was poorly attended, so it was easy to get near the stage. I stood directly in front of Cave’s mic stand. Now, I don’t want to imply that Nick Cave has mellowed out over the years—because he really hasn’t—but my favorite era of Cave’s work is from Mutiny! through Kicking Against The Pricks. “Junkie Nick Cave,” in other words. It was thrilling, almost scary, being so close to someone so seemingly unhinged and angry. Some of it didn’t necessarily seem like an act. His stage presence was fearsome and impressive, in a Keith Richards “elegantly wasted” meets Antonin Artaud sort of way. Larger than life. Cave wore a blue velvet tuxedo with a ruffle collar shirt and cuffs and he looked dead cool. His performance was so energetic and so physical that it appeared to me that heroin must have exactly the opposite effect on him that it has on most people. Or maybe he had just taken a different sort of vitamin? I don’t know, but I will say this, when the band walked offstage, the house lights stayed off, awaiting their reappearance for an encore. They stayed off for nearly ten minutes and when Cave finally staggered back onstage, his eyes were absolutely bloodshot red and he looked and acted very, very high. It seemed obvious what had caused the delay.

If I haven’t gotten the point across that this was one of the very best concerts that I’ve ever seen, it absolutely was. Cave was then, and still is, the best frontman of our time—and this was an incarnation of the Bad Seeds that included both Blixa Bargeld and Kid Congo Powers—but in the first decade of his career, he was more intense, more dangerous, more… fucking evil, basically. Today’s Nick Cave is more akin to a rambunctious revival preacher, but back then he just seemed homicidal. But, you know, in a good way.
 

 
On the way out I purchased the tour program, a black and white glossy fold-out poster with a green flexi disc attached to the front. The song, titled “Scum,” was an incredibly vitriolic and outrageously spiteful diatribe that was clearly directed towards one person, that person being an NME writer who Cave had briefly been flatmates with named Matt Snow. 

A sample lyric:

He was a miserable shitwringing turd
Like he reminded me of some evil gnome
Shaking hands was like shaking a hot, fat, oily bone.

Here’s another:

His and herpes bath towel type
If you know what I mean
I could not look at him, worm

OUCH!

Here’s how it ends:

I think you fucking traitor, chronic masturbator,
Shitlicker, user, self-abuser, jigger jigger!
What rock did you crawl from?
Which, did you come?
You Judas, Brutus, Vitus, Scum!
Hey four-eyes, come
That’s right, it’s a gun
Face is bubble, blood, and, street
Snowman with six holes clean into his fat fuckin guts

Psychotic drama mounts
Guts well deep then a spring is fount
I unload into his eyes
Blood springs
Dead snow
Blue skies

One needn’t wonder how Nick felt about his former flatmate, does one? Apparently what had ticked him off was a lukewarm review.

Imagine what it must feel like to hear yourself immortalized in song? But THAT song? Oh dear…

Well, apparently Matt Snow took it all in stride, and even thought if was funny, At least this is what he told the Guardian in 2008:

In 1980 my old school buddy Barney Hoskyns was writing for NME and wanted someone to go to gigs with. I became his plus one. The Birthday Party (an early band of Cave’s) were just fantastic, incredibly exciting, wild and feral, and we became part of their scene, which consisted of hanging out, playing records, doing drugs and drinking. I had a straight job and by night morphed into a nocturnal creature. It was an exciting scene to feel vicariously part of. It felt like you were living through a Velvet Underground song. I remember Nick [Cave] setting his hair on fire with a candle: everything was part-Baudelaire, part-Keith Richards. But by 1983 the Birthday Party had broken up and Nick was forming the Bad Seeds. He and his girlfriend Anita were asking for somewhere to crash for a while, and the pair moved in with me. He was still doing heroin but he was discreet. He was a good housemate. It was funny because he was always nagging Anita about her diet, yet he was shooting up! They moved down the road and we lost touch.

I raved about his From Her To Eternity album in NME but then, in a singles review, happened to drop in that the forthcoming - second - Nick Cave album “lacked the same dramatic tension”. A year or so later I found myself interviewing Nick formally for the first time. He kept me and the photographer waiting for hours. The PR was very jumpy. I got a very unusual interview. I asked him what the problem was and he said, “I think you’re an arsehole” and mentioned that he’d written a song developing this theme. Weeks later, I bought for £1 a green seven-inch flexidisc called “Scum.” I think it’s one of his best songs, and very funny. Like Dylan’s Mr Jones, I’d rather be memorialised as the spotlit object of a genius’s scorn than a dusty discographical footnote. My wife to be was a big Nick Cave fan—“Scum” is “our song.”

And there you have it. 
 

 
“Scum” is included on the first volume of B-Sides & Rarities, a 3-CD set of Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds’ er… b-sides and rarities, which has now been joined by a sequel, B-Sides & Rarities Part II, a 2-CD compilation that features previously uncollected tracks from the years 2006-2019. Both sets together comprise a special limited edition seven record vinyl box set, which you can enter below to win.

Listen to “Vortex,” a previously unreleased song featured on Vol II.
 

 
There must be some mythical and hidden cache of chukka-chukka hairy hard rock one-offs from the 1970s, because how else to explain that there is yet another installment—lucky 13!—of the (obviously) long running Brown Acid series. I mean, where do they find this stuff? Or does it find them? And by them, I mean arch crate digging maniacs Lance Barresi—co-owner of the Permanent Records stores in Los Angeles and Chicago—and RidingEasy Records label head Daniel Hall.

Where other archival series like Nuggets and Pebbles eventually got tapped out, Brown Acid is still going strong with their Thirteenth Trip, which is chock full of  long-lost, rare, and unreleased hard rock, heavy psych, and proto-metal tracks from daze gone by.  And they license these songs legitimately and actually pay the artists (who, I would imagine are somewhat bemused to be getting paid for nearly never-heard songs recorded 50 years ago.)

Here’s a stream of the entire thing, featuring never famous names like Dry Ice, Bacchus, Orchis, Good Humore and Max (who were originally called Dawn before Tony Orlando’s lawyers put a stop to that.)

Brown Acid: The Thirteenth Trip will be available to buy on vinyl and CD from RidingEasy Records on October 31. All treats, no tricks…
 

A Japanese movie poster for ‘Halloween II’ (1981).
 
It’s that time of year again! The time when we massacre innocent pumpkins, gorge on candy to the point of regret and worship all things bloody and disgusting. Ah, Halloween, how I’ve missed you.

Before we take a look at the large array of movie posters created for the various films (twelve in all) in director John Carpenter’s Halloween series, let’s talk a little about the film that introduced “The Shape,” aka unstoppable murderer, Michael Myers. If you recall, Halloween was an indie movie, made for a modest $300K. However, John Carpenter spent half of the film’s budget on Panavision cameras, with 100K going to actor Donald Pleasance for his five days on the set. Despite the fact that I and the maths do not play well together, that would leave $50K to actually shoot Halloween. Poor Jamie Lee Curtis was forced to shop at *gasp*, JC Penney for her wardrobe, upon which she dropped less than $100 bucks. The nerve! All of Carpenter’s penny-pinching would pay off when, at the close of Halloween‘s opening week, the film grossed over one million dollars – $1,270,000, to be precise. It has remained as one of the highest-grossing independent films of all time, garnering praise and fans from around the world. Halloween‘s popularity would continue as the series progressed and, over the last four decades, the series has continued to captivate horror fans. This includes the twelfth film in the series, Halloween Kills, which made 50 million dollars at the box office over its opening weekend. The original 1978 film that started it all continues to make money at the box office. Over the weekend of October 13th in 2018, 40 years after its release, Halloween grossed nearly $10K. Sure, that didn’t break any box office records, but it’s a reminder of how revered Carpenter’s first Halloween film is.

Originally, Carpenter titled his film The Babysitter Murders, but thanks to executive producer Irwin Yablans’ suggestion of changing the name (and moving the setting to Halloween night), the world of Halloween would begin its global takeover. The posters in this post were created over the decades to market Carpenter’s Halloween film series not only in the U.S., but in France, Yugoslavia, the UK, Japan, and beyond. Some of which, even if you’re a super-fan, may be new to you. The vast majority are for the OG film, so let’s start chronologically. The evil has RETURNED!
 

A movie poster for ‘Halloween’ (1978) from Argentina.
 

Germany
 

Yugoslavia
 

Italy
 
Many more after the jump…

 
When it came time to record the debut album by now legendary Minneapolis band, the Replacements, it didn’t go so well—repeatedly. It wasn’t easy, but in the end, the classic LP, Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash (1981), was produced. Dangerous Minds is here to tell you how it happened.

In July 1980, Peter Jesperson, the Replacements’ first manager and earliest enthusiast, set up a demo recording/tryout for the group with Paul Stark, Jesperson’s partner at local record label, Twin/Tone. The event took place at Stark’s studio, Blackberry Way. That day, the Replacements tore through a number of their tunes, including “I Bought a Headache” and “Shiftless When Idle,” which both turned out so well these takes were chosen for inclusion on Sorry Ma.

A couple of months later, the formal sessions for Sorry Ma commenced at Blackberry Way. At first, the Replacements were nervous and cautious, so to make them more comfortable, a mobile unit was taken over to the Longhorn Ballroom, where the band had previously played. There the Replacements were recorded live without an audience. The same setup was also done at Sam’s (soon to be renamed First Avenue). It’s unclear what exactly happened, but those recordings didn’t meet expectations, so the tapes were abandoned.
 

 
In January 1981, they were back at Blackberry Way, though this time with engineer Steve Fjelstad replacing Paul Stark, whose personality clashed with the band. This seemed to do the trick, and they were off and running.

Here’s an excerpt from Bob Mehr’s essential biography, Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements, concerning the sessions with Fjelstad now behind the board:

Typically, the Replacements cut fast, knocking out songs after a couple of passes. A track like “Kick Your Door Down” was done in one take, with no overdubs. “Some took longer, depended really on how much alcohol we had in our blood,” said [drummer] Chris Mars. “There’s some that you have to get a certain force [behind]. It’s hard to get that raw sound on a tape.”

Often, their errors turned out to be gems, as on the album take of “Customer.” “The lead was a mistake,” noted Bob Stinson of his spiraling, madcap guitar break. “That’s why we kept it.”

“To me, the soul of rock-and-roll is mistakes. Mistakes and making them work for you,” [singer/rhythm guitarist and songwriter Paul] Westerberg would note. “In general, music that’s flawless is usually uninspired.”

Their collective power as a unit—which seemed to grow exponentially during the late months of 1980—was a mystery even to themselves. They’d finish cutting a track and marvel at some peak they’d reached, never sure of the path they’d taken to get there. “We’d just kinda . . . listen back,” said Mars, “and say, ‘Hey, that was great—how did we do that?’”

 

 
Recording continued for a couple months, with new tunes frequently put to tape. Songs were flowing out of Westerberg, including what would end up as the awesome A-side of the group’s first single, “I’m in Trouble.” All in all, 35 tracks had been laid down when the Sorry Ma sessions wrapped up in March. Once mixing was complete and the album was trimmed to a tight eighteen songs, the Replacements’ debut LP was ready for the world.

The Replacements were most obviously under the sway of punk during the Sorry Ma era, though the influence of pop, blues, and straight-ahead rock n roll is also apparent. Westerberg’s heartfelt, insightful, witty, and frequently funny lyrics, combined with great, catchy tunes and the infectious energy of the band, resulted in a style they dubbed “power trash.”
 

 
When assessing their oeuvre, Sorry Ma has often been overshadowed by subsequent records like Let It Be (1984) and Pleased to Meet Me (1987), But Sorry Ma is where it all started, and, like those albums, is an exceptional LP, worthy of the box set treatment.

The 40th anniversary deluxe edition of the Replacements’ Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash is now available from Rhino Records. The four-CD/one-LP set features a generous 100 tracks, in total, and a whopping 67 of them are previously unreleased. Among the formerly unissued are studio demos, outtakes, alternate takes and mixes, and basements recordings. There’s also a sprightly new live album that was captured for a radio broadcast, though only part of the show aired. Given the impudent title of Unsuitable for Airplay – The Lost KFAI Concert: Live at the 7th St Entry, Minneapolis, MN, 1/23/81, the disc contains otherwise unissued originals and covers, as well as songs that would later turn up on their debut LP. The original Sorry Ma record has been freshly remastered, while the vinyl, christened Deliberate Noise – The Alternate Sorry Ma, replicates the original running order, replacing the album versions with a selection of the demos and alternates. A most-excellent twelve-by-twelve hardcover book, with rarely seen photos and liner notes by Trouble Boys author Bob Mehr, is also included. Overall, this is a truly superb box set and an absolute must-have for ‘Mats fans.

Rhino has an exclusive web bundle, which contains a reproduction of the self-deprecating flyer from the 7th St Entry gig, a repressing of the “I’m in Trouble” single, and more goodies.
 

 
Below are new videos Rhino has produced for Sorry Ma’s “I Hate Music” and “Takin A Ride.” The latter is a tour of the band’s old haunts.
 

 
On September 5th, 1981, a couple of weeks after Sorry Ma hit record stores, two Replacements sets were professionally videotaped by Twin/Tone Records. Here’s a clip of the ‘Mats whipping through four Sorry Ma numbers from set #2:
 

 
Perhaps the biggest champion of Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash is none other than Bob Odenkirk (Saul Goodman on Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul), who has frequently cited the LP as his favorite album of all time.
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
‘Trouble Boys’: The song that ignited the Replacements (with a DM premiere)
The Replacements battle their producer in stormy first attempt to record ‘Don’t Tell a Soul’
Legendary live Replacements recording finally sees the light of day (a DM premiere)

 
In late 1979, when the Replacements first got together, they started out as many bands do—playing cover tunes in the basement. They worked up songs by Johnny Thunders & the Heartbreakers, the Who, the Ramones, Slade, the Kinks, and others, including Dave Edmunds. They rehearsed several times a week, and it was during one practice session, after finishing up a particularly inspired rendering of the Edmunds rocker “Trouble Boys”—a number the troubled members of the Replacements could collectively related to—the foursome realized that they had something. 

The moment is chronicled in Bob Mehr’s indispensable biography of the group, Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements (2016).

During one weeknight rehearsal, as they tore through a version of Dave Edmunds’s “Trouble Boys,” they took the song’s twanging rhythm and gave it a screaming thrust. “There’s trouble boys all around me,” howled [Paul] Westerberg as he and Bob [Stinson] traded lead and rhythm back and forth, while Chris [Mars] and Tommy [Stinson] battered away at the beat.

When the last note rang out and the song was over, there was silence. Looking at one another, they realized, as Paul would recall, “that we had fallen in together.”

 

 
Though “Trouble Boys” was a pivotal song for the Replacements and was played live numerous times by the original lineup, it hasn’t appeared on a Replacements release. That’s about to change, as a live version has been included on Rhino Records’ pending 40th anniversary deluxe edition of the band’s dazzling debut album, Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash. Out October 22nd, the four-CD/one-LP box set features a whopping 67 previously unreleased tracks (!!!) among the very generous 100, in total. Among the formerly unissued are studio demos, outtakes, alternate takes and mixes, and basements recordings. There’s a sprightly new live album that was captured for a radio broadcast, though only part of the show aired. Given the impudent title of Unsuitable for Airplay – The Lost KFAI Concert: Live at the 7th St Entry, Minneapolis, MN, 1/23/81, the disc contains otherwise unissued originals and covers (“Trouble Boys” among them), as well as songs that would later turn up on their debut LP. The punk-inspired Sorry Ma has been freshly remastered, while the vinyl, christened Deliberate Noise – The Alternate Sorry Ma, replicates the original running order, replacing the album versions with a selection of the demos and alternates. A most-excellent twelve-by-twelve hardcover book, with rarely seen photos and liner notes by Trouble Boys author Bob Mehr, is also included. Overall, this is a truly superb set and an absolute must-have for ‘Mats fans. Order your copy through Rhino’s online store or via Amazon.
 

 
Rhino’s exclusive web bundle has a reproduction of the self-deprecating flyer from the 7th St Entry gig, a repressing of their first single, and more goodies. Get all the details here.
 

 
Dangerous Minds is pleased as punch to present the premiere of the fiery live rendition of “Trouble Boys” from the Unsuitable for Airplay CD on the deluxe edition of Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash.
 

 
Two other songs from the show are streaming online: Sorry Ma opener, “Takin A Ride” and the album’s ballad—concerning the notorious Johnny Thunders—“Johnny’s Gonna Die,” that then segues into a cover of the Heartbreakers’ “All by Myself.”
 

 
Rhino has put out three new Sorry Ma videos, including an animated work for the snarling “Shutup.”
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
The Replacements battle their producer in stormy first attempt to record ‘Don’t Tell a Soul’
Legendary live Replacements recording finally sees the light of day (a DM premiere)
Get it on: The Replacements cover glam rock king Marc Bolan on legendary 80s bootleg

Twisted Tug’s doll-sized version of Sid Vicious. It sold for $700.
 
Twisted Tug’s, an artist studio out of San Diego, California specializes in creating “one of a kind edgy art collectibles,” such as horror props, eerie original conceptions and designs, and, as the title of this post indicates, dolls. But not the kind of dolls you might get for your uncool niece—unless of course, she prefers bad guys (and girls) to Barbie. All joking aside, Twisted Tug’s dolls, which are crafted from vintage ventriloquist puppets (YIKES!), are true collector’s items and have garnered praise from their famous fans, including director James Wan (Saw, The Conjuring, Insidious, and most recently Malignant). Another distinction Twisted Tugs’ dolls is that they are true works of art – and true works of art do not come cheap. Tug’s spot-on doll-version of hatchet-loving Annie Wilkes from the film adaptation of Stephen King’s 1987 novel Misery (as played by actress Kathy Bates) sells for $800. Though some consider works of art created in the image of infamous serial killers as poor taste, the fact is the market and fanbase for such things has been around as long as serial killers themselves. Homicidal sicko John Wayne Gacy started painting and sketching while waiting for his execution by lethal injection. Later, many of his works of “art” would be displayed in galleries and at auction would sell for several thousands of dollars, and in one instance, $20K (noted in the 1990 book Murder Casebook, Investigations into the Ultimate Crime, Vol. 4, Part 54, Orgy of Killings (Murder Casebook) by Marshall Cavendish). So while you might not like it, there are plenty of people who dig things that exist in a realm completely removed from what is generally considered an acceptable standard.

Getting back to Twisted Tug’s’ dangerous dolls, yes, you can purchase them, though TT sadly does not take commissions. For more information on how you might obtain one of Twisted Tugs’ insidious dolls, feel free to drop Tug’s a line here. Now, as it is October, the time of year when we celebrate all things grim and gross, let’s take a look at some of the inhabitants of Twisted Tugs’ equally twisted world.
 

Twisted Tug’s Annie Wilkes (as played by actress Kathy Bates) in the 1990 film adaptation of Stephen King’s 1987 novel, ‘Misery.’
 

A frozen version of Jack Torrance (played by actor Jack Nicholson ) in Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film ‘The Shining.’
 

Zelda Goldman (played by actor Andrew Hubatsek) in ‘Pet Sematary’ (1989).
 

Madison Mitchell (played by actress Annabelle Wallis) in James Wan’s 2021 film ‘Malignant.’
 
Many more after the jump…

 
Longtime Dangerous Minds contributing editor Martin Schneider sent me this hilarious clip with the quip:

TIL that the Youngs have turned Kate Bush’s “Babooshka” into a TikTok meme.

I hope Kate Bush has seen this!
 

 
The other day I noticed that every single one of the songs—save for one—on the list of my most played songs on TIDAL was by the Go-Betweens. The #1 most listened to song, however, was “Chaise Longue” by Wet Leg. Believe me when I tell you that I have listened to this song 100s and 100s of times since it came out three months ago. It’s been streamed over three million times and I’m pretty sure my tallied plays alone account for 2-3% of that worldwide total.

This morning, as I was walking the dog and blasting “Chaise Longue” into my ears on repeat for 45 minutes—you think I’m kidding, I’m not kidding—I wondered HOW it would be possible for Wet Leg to follow up on this, their first and so far only song? Topping it seemed unlikely, but could they even come up with something nearly as good as?

My conclusion was “Gosh, I really hope so.”

As luck would have it, I didn’t have to wait long to find out, as their new single “Wet Dream” came out yesterday and it is an absolute humdinger and every bit as infectious as its predecessor. Rhian Teasdale, Wet Leg’s lead vocalist/visionary revealed that the song’s inspiration was, um, autobiographical:

“‘Wet Dream’ is a breakup song; it came about when one of my exes went through a stage of texting me after we’d broken up telling me that ‘he had a dream about me’.”

Extra points for the Buffalo 66 reference!

Wet Leg (Teasdale and Hester Chambers) are going to be playing live all over Europe this fall. A proper tour will take place in 2022.  The video below—which calls to mind the 1970 Czech art film Valerie and Her Week of Wonders and Bjork—was directed by Rhian Teasdale.

Wet Leg. They’re going to be fucking huge.
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Song of the Summer: Wet Leg’s ‘Chaise Longue’ is catchier than the Delta variant