When Dead Kennedys went into the studio in 1981 to record In God We Trust, Inc., their “tribute” EP to the faster, thrashier “hardcore” musical style associated with the Washington, DC punk scene (think Minor Threat) the first sessions were laid down on defective tape stock, so they had to go back to the studio to record it again a few months later.

In 2003, videotapes of the band working out the arrangements and recording the songs during that initial session (taped for a documentary on punk rock) were released as The Lost Tapes on DVD. A raw mix was fed directly into the line inputs of the camera, so the audio is immediate and powerful. Using techniques that did not exist in 1981, five of the eight songs recorded during the first In God We Trust, Inc. session were eventually restored.

For In God We Trust, Inc., the group updated their anti-Jerry Brown screed, “California Über Alles” as a cocktail jazz redux inserting-newly inaugurated President Ronald Reagan’s name in for the young governor who had succeeded him. (Brown was re-elected California’s governor in 2010.) Jello Biafra and the rest of the band, of course, don’t see eye to eye today, but the band captured during that ill-fated studio session was absolutely raw and on fire. Drummer D.H. Peligro had just joined the group at this time and he brought a lot to the DK’s sound.

I bought In God We Trust, Inc. on a music cassette. The b-side was blank and the label bore the words “Home taping is killing record industry profits! We left this side blank so you can help.” LISTEN TO THIS LOUD!

 
Thank you kindly, Mr. Clam!

 
It has begun, as it does creepingly earlier every year - “The Holidays” are here. But in spite of the ecumenical plural, we all know that really just means “Christmastime,” the single most alienating time of year not to be a part of the majority. As a Jewish kid, this was the annual month-long reminder that I wasn’t really a member of The America Club, and as an atheist adult, it’s no less disaffecting. And in recent years, with bloviating jackass loudmouth discord-sowers like John Gibson and Bill O’Reilly ginning up the mass delusion that a “war” against the American hegemonic religion’s single most deeply penetrative auto-fellatiothon could possibly exist - in order to inflame the ignorant passions of Tea Party shitheads and sell books, because values - it’s become an unbearable time of breathless news reports about awful, AWFUL secularists mortally wounding the oh-so-persecuted majority by offering inclusive greetings at cash registers and ruthlessly denying them their totally unconstitutional City Hall creches.

Sometimes it’s enough to make me wish the “War On Christmas” were real and literal, if only just to see all the tacky plastic decorations get blowed up real good. I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe… Inflatable Rudolphs on fire off the shoulder of Orion…

But as thoroughly obnoxious as the inescapable cultural takeover of chintzy display and mandatory cheer is for six goddamn weeks a year, it’s impossible to hate on everything about Christmas. Anyone who doesn’t love gingerbread, I’m not sure I want to know. Horatio Sanz’s wonderful Christmas song from SNL justifies that man’s entire existence. Thirsty Dog Brewing’s Christmas Ale is pretty awesome. And it should go without saying FUCK YEAH, RANKIN-BASS SPECIALS.

And music. Lovely, lovely music. Yeah, there’s a plurality of dreck in the Christmas song canon - wherever there’s an obscene pigpile of cash to be hauled in, you’re going to have plenty of dross to sift through. But babies, bathwater, something something - would you want to live in a world without the Bach Cantatas, the Hallelujah Chorus, or David Bowie and Bing Crosby singing “The Little Drummer Boy?” You would not. Yeah, stuff like “Jingle Bell Rock” and “Santa Baby” is horrid moneygrubbing hackwork that can go pound sand, but the older, more liturgically-slanted Christmas music encompasses some of the greatest musical craft of all time - it was inspired, after all, by someone’s idea of the divine.

Which brings us around to how punk stalwarts Bad Religion have joined Il Volo, Kelly Clarkson, and Susan Boyle in releasing a Christmas album this year. Though I’ve never been a super huge fan of the band’s fairly hidebound hardcore singalongs, I’m not one to hate on them, either, so this news intrigued me. The band’s lyricist and leader Greg Graffin is a man I’ve always abidingly respected - an outspoken atheist with iconoclastic left-wing views, absolutely one of rock music’s great public intellectuals. Would this be a powerful, stinging indictment of the Christmas-Commercial Complex I’ve spent a lifetime growing to despise? It couldn’t possibly be a lamely punked-up novelty covers album a la Me First And The Gimme Gimmes, could it? As it turns out, and much to my further curiosity, the track listing is loaded with reverential, traditional songs. So, um, HUH?

And so I listened. It immediately became clear that this would indeed be WAY better than a Me First type one-dimensional joke; Graffin’s expressively gruff voice is well-suited to the material. But still, the first half of the album actually alternates greatness with meh - the opener, “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” is really, really nice, but “O Come All Ye Faithful” sounds like a punk rock cover of that song conceived by any old random person with a rudimentary understanding of how punk rock is supposed to sound. “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” is propulsive, emotively forceful, and just plain old FANTASTIC, probably the best thing on the album, then “White Christmas” comes on and sounds exactly how you’re already imagining it if you’ve ever heard even one Bad Religion song.
 

Bad Religion - “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing”

Bad Religion - “O Come, O Come Emmanuel”

It picks up. From the much more inventive than expected “Little Drummer Boy” to a straight but admirably executed take on “Angels We Have Heard On High,” the band’s energy never flags, the riffs’ catchiness holds the material aloft, and nothing disappoints. But the finishing move seems like a copout to me. It’s the twenty-year-old song “American Jesus.” A blisteringly ironic excoriation of that xenophobic, destructive, American-exceptionalist form of Christianity that any thinking human should rightly loathe, for sure, but still, heard it twenty years ago and it’s not really even slightly a Christmas song. Andy Wallace remixed it though, so yay?

So the Grinch in me leaves unsatisfied. Am I asking too much of this? Am I demanding that someone else’s album express my agenda? But given the intellects, histories and reputations of the members of this band, am I so wrong for wishing it had just absolutely killed my face off? In the end, it’s a much better than average collection of punk rock Christmas covers. I have every confidence that people who’re more FUCK YEAH about Bad Religion than I am will absolutely love this, and they probably won’t be the only ones. Its tracks will surely assume their rightful place on Christmas mix CDs for decades to come.

Here’s Bad Religion live, from a French television broadcast earlier this year.
 

 
It seems the controversial and ill-starred Black Flag reunion is already falling apart. Via Dying Scene:

Wow! Ron Reyes just posted a lengthy statement on Facebook announcing he has decided to leave Black Flag, stating he believes the band “fell very short indeed and the diminishing ticket sales and crowds are a testament to that.” You can read the full statement below.

It is unclear whether Black Flag’s new album What The…, which features Reyes on vocals, is still going to be released on December 13th via SST Records. If it does see the light of day, it will be the first album released under the Black Flag name since 1985′s In My Head.

That release date of the 13th seems like it may be a typo, by the way. Multiple sources, including the band’s official site, have the date as December 3rd.

Reyes originally joined Black Flag in 1979, after the departure of founding vocalist Keith Morris. After singing on some of the band’s classic material, including the pivotal “Jealous Again” EP (whereon his vocals were credited to the name “Chavo Pederast”), he quit the band mid-gig in 1980, perhaps a foreshadowing of his onstage ouster THIS time around:

On November 24th 2013 the last night of the Australian Hits and Pits tour with two songs left in the set Mike V comes on stage stares me down, takes my mic and says “You’re done, party’s over get off it’s over…” He said something else to me but it was a lie so I won’t repeat it here. So with a sense of great relief that it was finally over I left the stage and walked to the hotel room. They finished the set with Mike V on vocals.

“Mike V” presumably refers to Mike Vallely, the professional skater who has recently collaborated with Black Flag honcho Greg Ginn in the band Good For You.

Black Flag were never strangers to controversy, but their 2013 reunion has drawn HUGE fire from fans for trying to pass off what many have claimed is substandard music as worthy of the band’s name, and for designing one of the single most bafflingly terrible album covers in the history of life on Earth. Underscoring what’s coming to be perceived as Ginn’s utter debasement of his own legacy is the concurrent and far better-received reunion of many of his former bandmates under the name Flag, to which Ginn responded by partaking of one of his apparent favorite extra-musical pastimes, suing his former associates. That went about as well as the reunion seems to be going.

We at DM sincerely wish Reyes the very best of luck in his future endeavors. Here he is raging full-on back in the day, in a scene from The Decline Of Western Civilization.
 

 
Patti Smith has a passion for the Bloomsbury Group, the influential set of upper-middle class writers, artists, philosophers and intellectuals, who came to prominence in England during the early twentieth century and lasted, in various forms, until the 1960s.

The Bloomsbury Group took its name from the district in London where its main associates lived and worked. These included the writers Virginia and Leonard Woolf, E. M. Forster, and Lytton Strachey; the artists Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry, and Dora Carrington; economist John Maynard Keynes; and diarist Frances Partridge.

When not in London, the Bloomsbury Group gathered at their rural retreat Charleston Farmhouse, in Lewes, Sussex—the home of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. In recent years, one of Charleston’s regular visitors has been Patti Smith, who describes the farmhouse as “like home.”

In 2006, Smith was interviewed by the BBC’s Culture Show at Charleston Farmhouse, where she was photographing the “tea cups and saucers,” the bed where Vanessa Bell died, and the personal accoutrements of the artistic life.
 

 
For the past several years, WCSB 89.3 FM, one of Cleveland By God Ohio’s toweringly excellent college radio stations, has thrown an extremely cool Halloween party. They’ve hit upon a winning formula for booking it: the headliner is invariably a beloved classic punk band - past bill-toppers have included The Dickies, The Avengers, and The Angry Samoans. Second on the bill would often be a classic Cleveland underground band reunited for the occasion, then the rest of the bill would be filled in with contemporary worthies. It’s free of charge, and always a very popular night out, with the best, brightest, and weirdest of CLE’s freak-scenesters doing their best to outdo each other in insane costumery and irresponsible drinking.

So OK, I wasn’t present for this, so some of the “specifics” of this post are cobbled from Facebook reportage shared by party-goers during and after the event. If I screwed up any of these pieced-together details, that’s all on me. This year, the party apparently got too popular. After the venue had already hit capacity, there were still hopeful revelers lined up around the block, waiting hours to get in, in costume, in frigid Ohio winter weather. This could be due to the booking of The Dead Milkmen. That band famously went, in a mere 5 years, from being the smartass Philadelphia maestros behind THE surprise underground hit album of the ‘80s with Big Lizard in My Backyard to the 120 Minutes darlings who came astonishingly close to achieving actual mainstream success with Beelzebubba and Metaphysical Graffitti. This would have been a hotly anticipated show even if it wasn’t an admission-free bacchanal. BUT - in Cleveland there always seems to be a “but” - right before they were to take the stage, the power went out in much of the city’s Near-West Side, including the newly-chic Gordon Square neighborhood where the party was being held. The Milkmen attempted a drums-and-a-capella singalong to mollify the capacity crowd - some of whom, being, you know, punks and everything, had reflexively jumped to the conclusion that the police had shut off the power to stop the show and were getting all pissed off - but it really didn’t work, and sadly, the theater was cleared out.

But for all their bird-flipping, wiseass posturing, The Dead Milkmen are clearly some damn cool guys:

Hello Loyal Listeners,

As you all probably know first-hand or have heard, the Gordon Square community of Cleveland was hit with an untimely and unfortunate power outage in the Gordon Square and Ohio City neighborhood on November 2 just before The Dead Milkmen were to take the stage at the 2013 WCSB Halloween Masquarade Ball at the Cleveland Public Theater – something WCSB and The Dead Milkmen felt completely terrible about for everyone involved.

The Dead Milkmen being class acts drove themselves and their equipment up to the WCSB studios and did their ENTIRE SET (encore included) live over the CSB airwaves for the entire city to enjoy. They even stuck around and answered some questions after their inspired performance.To make sure no Dead Milkmen fan missed out on this historic (and odd) evening, we have extracted the audio and posted it here for all to enjoy.

The whole set is posted here. Enjoy.
 

If you don’t love this, I don’t want to know you.

 
If you want an idea just how seriously certain sections of the British Establishment feared Punk Rock then take a look at this incredible piece of archival television from 1977. It’s an edition of the BBC’s Brass Tacks—a current affairs series in which reporter Brian Trueman (perhaps better known now for those classic kids’ TV shows Chorlton and the Wheelies and Danger Mouse) introduced a brief film on Punk and then hosted a live studio debate between some of the youngsters featured in the piece—along with Buzzcocks’ Pete Shelley and Radio One DJ John Peel—arguing the toss with a selection of crusty town councillors, from London, Birmingham, Newcastle and Glasgow. These respectable citizens were out to ban Punk from various inner city venues. Add to this incendiary mix some comment from the press and a Pastor John Cooper, who wanted everyone to come to Jesus.

Okay, this all may sound like the comic ingredients to some grand mockumentary but these fears over the political aspect of Punk Rock and the potential for anarchy on the streets of Britain were very real at the time. As Brian Trueman says in his introduction:

“Punk Rock is more feared than Russian Communism.”

Why? What were these people thinking? What were they really scared of?

Well, to start at the beginning…

Britain in the 1970s was in a mess. It had high unemployment; three-day working weeks; nationwide power cuts that left everyone in the dark; taxation at astronomic levels; food shortages; endless strikes; and a crumbling infrastructure. All of this meant the Labour government feared a revolution was imminent.

To explain why this all came about let’s rewind the tape to a mass demonstration at Grosvenor Square, London, March 1968. This was where an anti-Vietnam War rally erupted into a pitched battle between protesters and police. Outside of the American Embassy 200 people were arrested; 86 were injured; 50 were taken to hospital, half of which were police officers. The Labour government were stunned that a group of protestors could cause such anarchy and disorder,—which (they believed) could have led to a mini-revolution on the streets of London.

In fear of revolution or such anarchy ever happening again, the government decided to take action. At first, ministers considered sending troops out into the streets. But after some reassuring words from Special Branch Chief Inspector Conrad Hepworth Dixon, they were convinced that the boys in blue could handle any civic disorder. Dixon was allowed to set up a new police force: the Special Demonstration Squad.

This was no ordinary police operation, the SDS had permission to be (quite literally) a law unto itself. Its officers could operate under deep cover. Infiltrate left-wing, fringe organizations and youth groups with the sole purpose of working as spies and agents provocateurs. Harold Wilson’s government agreed to pay for this operation directly out of Treasury funds.

The SDS carried on its undercover activities against any organization that they believed threatened Britain’s social order. This included unions, animal rights, anti-Nazi and anti-racist groups.

If that wasn’t worrying enough, the SDS were allegedly involved in the planting incendiary devices at branches of department store Debenhams in Luton, Harrow and Romford in 1987. It is also alleged, one member of the SDS was so deep undercover he was involved in writing the pamphlet that led to the famous “McLibel” trial of the 1990s.

The workings of the SDS were on a “need to know basis.” Only a handful of police knew exactly what this little club were up to. But their activities fuelled genuine fears amongst the British Establishment that there were “Reds under the beds,” and revolution was a literal stone’s throw away.

This was all going on behind-the-scenes. Out front, muppets like the councillors and journalists lined-up on this program, pushed the hysteria of Punk Rock riots and civil disobedience, that reflected the very genuine fears at the heart of the UK Establishment. (Note London councillor Bernard Brook-Partridge mention of “MI5 blacklists.”)

So, that’s the background to this fascinating archive of the year that politicians (and even the BBC) thought Punk Rock was a torch-bearer for bloody revolution.
 

 
When you rip away the white noise of controversy over the competing Black Flag reunions what you’re left with is the music and in this case Flag, featuring Keith Morris, Dez Cadena, Bill Stevenson, Stephen Egerton and Chuck Dukowski deliver a mighty roar that, with or without a name, is farking awesome. Punk rock’s midlife crisis is an amazing thing to behold.

Here’s 15 minutes of Flag performing at New York City’s Irving Plaza a couple of months ago.
 

 
Via Consequence Of Sound

 
When art hero Billy Childish released his “Thatcher’s Children” pastiche/tribute/piss-take to the tune of The Clash’s “London Calling” back in 2008, probably the last thing he thought he would get would be a disgruntled letter from a conservative Clash fan, offended by the way Childish supposedly misrepresented the politics of the notoriously left-wing group. But (apparently) he did receive such a letter and it came from a legal representative of the Universal Music Group. At the end of an otherwise ordinary cease and desist letter, the UMe attorney just couldn’t resist adding the following clueless coda:

On a personal note as a fan of The Clash may i point out that your illegal use of the music of London Calling politicises the original tune in a way never intended by members of the group.

I appreciate that in its formative years The Clash may have been perceived as “anti-establishment” but the anti-right wing message contained in the lyric of Mr Chyldish is both insulting to the memory of Baroness Thatcher and President Reagan, and surely a sentiment that the mature songsmith Strummer would never have condoned. Such association could also jeopordise future commercial interest in London Calling by corporations who both fund and support politics that you misrepresent and hold up to ridicule, thereby depriving his family of income.

Wrong ‘em, boyo! I mean how much more wrong could this child of Thatcher possible be? Surely if Joe Strummer had outlived the Iron Lady, David Cameron would have asked him to speak at her funeral! Afterwards they could kick back at Strummerville!

To commemorate this stupidity of this “Clash fan,” Billy Childish is releasing a limited edition box set of “Thatcher’s Children” featuring a “God Save Margaret Thatcher” poster image he did in collaboration with Sex Pistols artist Jamie Reid and a sleeve that, ahem, strongly alludes to Pennie Smith’s iconic London Calling cover photo of Paul Simonon smashing his bass guitar (the lettering on that was inspired by an Elvis cover, so it’s not like there wasn’t already a precedent for this kind of thing. Quite a long precedent!)

Childish is also including a lithograph of this classically clueless letter from the Tory nincompoop at UMe, who deserves this disrespect, every drop of it… You can order it from L-13. You can also read the full letter there.
 

 
Below: Even better than the original?
 

 
John Lydon may have said The Rolling Stones looked “silly” performing at Glastonbury earlier this year, but the former Sex Pistol and PiL frontman has only praise for Mick Jagger.

In an interview with the Daily Record, Lydon has revealed that Jagger ‘secretly’ paid Sid Vicious’ legal fees, after the Pistol’s bass player had been charged with the murder of girlfriend Nancy Spungen. As Lydon told journalist John Dingwall of the Record:

“Nancy Spungen was a hideous, awful person who killed herself because of the lifestyle and led to the destruction and subsequent death of Sid and the whole fiasco. I tried to help Sid through all of that and feel a certain responsibility because I brought him into the Pistols thinking he could handle the pressure. He couldn’t. The reason people take heroin is because they can’t handle pressure. Poor old Sid.

“Her death is all entangled in mystery. It’s no real mystery, though. If you are going to get yourself involved in drugs and narcotics in that way accidents are going to happen. Sid was a lost case. He was wrapped firmly in Malcolm’s shenanigans. It became ludicrous trying to talk to him through the drug haze because all you would hear was, ‘I’m the real star around here’. Great. Carry on. We all know how that’s going to end. Unfortunately, that is where it ended. I miss him very much. He was a great friend but when you are messing with heroin you’re not a human being. You change and you lose respect for yourself and everybody else.

“The only good news is that I heard Mick Jagger got in there and brought lawyers into it on Sid’s behalf because I don’t think Malcolm lifted a finger. He just didn’t know what to do. For that, I have a good liking of Mick Jagger. There was activity behind the scenes from Mick Jagger so I applaud him. He never used it to advance himself publicity-wise.”

Read the whole interview here.

Below, Sid Vicious near last TV appearance on Efrom Allen’s Underground NY Manhattan Cable show from September 18th, 1978. Vicious appeared alongside Nancy Spungen, Stiv Bators and Cynthia Ross (of The B Girls). Spungen was dead less than a month later.
 

 
Via the Daily Record

 
Henry Rollins ain’t no George Carlin or Lenny Bruce. He takes aim at sitting ducks like people who shop at Walmart and he isn’t particularly funny and his insights are hardly revelations. But for some reason people really dig him. I don’t get it. I personally don’t turn to rock singers for their analytical thinking or wisdom. Not even the smart ones like John Lennon or Frank Zappa. They may be remarkable musicians but their satirical writings tend to be obvious and sophomoric.

Listening today to my old Mothers Of Invention albums, the stuff that seemed so outrageous and cool to me when I was a teenager seems trite to me now. Zappa’s targets were sitting ducks, too, but at least the ducks were relatively fresh. On the other hand, Henry Rollins’ rants seem tired and cliche-ridden. It’s easy to make fun of the defenseless slobs who work at Walmart or hipster douche-baggery, the military and frat boys. We did that shit back in the Sixties. So when I hear Rollins going on about the culture of greed and the idiocy that surrounds us it all sounds tired and worn out. We know this stuff already. It ain’t funny. In fact, at times, I think it’s cruel and hipper-than-thou classism. Rollins may consider himself some kind of edgy philosopher but I find him to be a dim-witted meathead with a slightly better than average vocabulary and a bunch of half-baked ideas who takes on subjects that have already been beaten to a pulp by superior humorists like the genuinely funny Bill Hicks.

Here’s Rollins in his perfect setting as a cartoon character…