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”

 
Maria Bartiromo is a popular finance reporter who has worked for CNN and CNBC television. She was the first reporter to broadcast live from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, has won a slew of journalism awards and is in the Cable Hall of Fame. She’s also someone who Joey Ramone had a heavy crush on. Joey invested in the stock market and was an avid fan of Bartiromo’s and watched her TV appearances religiously.

Joey used to email Bartiromo to ask for stock tips, as she told The Guardian in 2006:

“I started getting emails from him and he would say Maria, what do you think about Intel or what do you think about AOL and I thought who is this person emailing me? It’s crazy, he’s calling himself Joey Ramone. Sure enough it was him and we developed this friendship. And he was attuned to the markets. He really understood his own investment portfolio. Joey Ramone was a fantastic investor.”

He even wrote and recorded an ode to his money muse “Maria Bartiromo” which appeared on his solo album Don’t Worry About Me released posthumously in 2002.

“What’s happening on Wall Street
What’s happening at the stock exchange
I want to know
What’s happening on Squawk Box
What’s happening with my stocks
I want to know
I watch you on the TV every single day
Those eyes make everything OK
I watch her every day
I watch her every night
She’s really out of sight
Maria Bartiromo
Maria Bartiromo
Maria Bartiromo”

 
“He said to me Maria, I wrote a song about you and he said just come down to CBGBs in Manhattan, be there at midnight. I said, Joey, I’m sorry to tell you but I have to be on the air at 6am and I can’t be anywhere at midnight except in my bed, so I didn’t go.” She did, however, send a camera crew. “Sure enough, the cameraman came back with the tape and there’s him and his band with this song Maria Bartiromo and I just love it. It’s a tremendous tribute. I just love that. It’s great, just great.”

In this clip Bartiromo reflects on her friendship with Joey and what it was like to be honored in song by a Ramone.
 

 
Only a smart person names their band The Stupid Set. Right? The Stupid Set, active from 1979 to 1983, were from Bologna, Italy, which is Italy’s oldest student center—also a city famous for its red-tiled roofs, its red pasta sauce, and its red politics.

The Stupid Set’s best-known song was this 1980 deconstruction of the Doors’ “Hello, I Love You,” which bears a very strong similarity to DEVO’s approach in their 1977 cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction.”
 

 
I can’t read Italian, and the Google Translate rendition of the band’s Wikipedia page is not the clearest, but I have to say I’m enjoying the list of related bands that were connected to The Stupid Set: The Center for Metropolitan Scream, the Hi-Fi Bros, Tide Toast, the Marconi Connection, Astro Vitelli and the Cosmos, and so on. I also like that the Smart Set’s label was called Italian Records.

The Stupid Set: “Don’t Be Cold (In The Summer Of Love)”

 
“Hear the Rumble”

 
The video and song for their “Hello, I Love You” do not go where you think they are going to go…

 
The influence of Lou Reed and The Velvet Underground reaches far into the soft and yielding heart of rock and roll. I’ve compiled a short mix of songs by artists that -according to my very subjective take on the matter - have absorbed some of that Velvet energy. These groups may not have consciously set out to write or play a song in the spirit of Lou and the Velvets, but they certainly seem to have fallen under the spell of those magic beams that stream from the halls of the Akashic Record where recordings marked V.U. and L.R. rotate like gleaming Saturnian rings in the infinitesimal blackness of absolute reality. (Might be a little not safe for work.)

01. I’m Going Out Of My Way - Stereolab
02. Failures - Joy Division
03. Bad Vibrations - Black Angels
04. She Cracked - Modern Lovers
05. The Modern Age - The Strokes
06. Down 42nd St. To The Light - East River Pipe
07. Tell Me When It’s Over - Dream Syndicate
08. Blue Flower - Mazzy Star
09. Always The Sun - The Stranglers
10. Leif Erikson - Interpol
11. Hanging Out And Hung Up On The Line - Julian Cope
12. Looking For A Way In - Cornershop
13. Shine A Light - Wolf Parade
14. The Moon - Cat Power
15. Sleepin’ Around - Sonic Youth
 

 
I was 16 years old and living in Fairfax, Virginia when I first heard The Velvet Underground’s debut album. It was 1967 and I was ready for something, anything, to slough off the teenage suburban blues that encased me like dead skin. I had no exact idea of what I was listening to when I listened to that album but whatever wild form of rock and roll it was it dug down deep into me and altered something very essential in my nature.

The Velvet Underground’s music was literally electrifying. Their songs were like subatomic particles saturating my cells and transforming me into some kind of new being. For 18 hours straight I listened to that album while eating bennies (benzedrine). Sitting and spinning in circles on a smooth wooden floor while the music hummed, droned, surged and sparked all around and within me. 

The electronic equivalent of one of William Burroughs word viruses or Rimbaud’s poetry as a “derangement of the senses,” the music of The Velvet Underground infected me and scrambled my brain forever.

I was indoctrinated into the splendid darkness, muttering the Warholian oath of Doctor Frankenstein: “To know death, Otto, you have to fuck life in the gall bladder.” Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, Maureen Tucker and Nico were turning me into a teenage Frankenstein and I was ready to thrust myself into the “meat pit of mortal desire” with a monstrous passion. I was only 16 but I knew how to nasty.

A year earlier, The Fugs had prepped me for the surgery performed by The Velvet Underground and now the transformation was well on its way. I left the comfort and deadly dullness of suburbia for the untamed streets of New York City, landing in an apartment on West Houston street that I shared with a drag queen and a runaway friend of mine that had left the ‘burbs months before me. The streets were teeming with young hippies, rockers and weirdos and I felt immediately at home. This was a world in which we were all waiting for our man, whether he was a drug dealer, guru or lover….or all three. There was a jittery anticipation in the air like when you were about to cop something that would get you high or get you by or just make you thrilled to be alive. And that anticipation was its own high and very much like a song by The Velvet Underground.

Hey baby, don’t you holler, don’t you ball and shout
I’m feeling good, I’m gonna work it on out
I’m feeling good, feeling so fine
until tomorrow, but that’s just some other time
I’m waiting for my man
I’m waiting for my man
I’m waiting for my man
man-man-man-man-man-man-man

As much as I was formed and inspired by The Velvet Underground as an artist, it was Lou Reed specifically that made me want to become a songwriter. The title of his album “Transformer” was truth in advertising, it encouraged me to become something I wanted but never thought I could be: a rock singer.

Lou wasn’t a great singer and neither am I. So what. He made songwriting appear simple. It ain’t. But Lou made the art of song attainable by taking everyday reality and finding within it the riff that made it extraordinary. Like Warhol did with soup cans. The shape, the color, the essential “itness” of it. There is nothing in life that is artless. At certain angles, even shit shines.

Lou wrote about stuff, the stuff of life, the stuff I wanted to write about. The unspeakable stuff, the real stuff. I wasn’t interested in music that soothed the savage breast, I wanted to write savage music about breasts…and cocks and city streets and dark tunnels winding their way underneath those streets. Lou Reed made it all seem possible. You could write about your life while dancing to it. You could be both profane and divine. Lou found the spiritual in the dirty boulevards, Coney Island, hookers, junkies, and the whole of the wild side. Poetry was everywhere, under the mattress with a bag of dope and a blood-stained tee-shirt, in the shadow of the Berlin wall and inside the tenement where

Caroline says
while biting her lip
Life is meant to be more than this
and this is a bum trip

Lou Reed, more than any creative being on the planet, let me know it was possible I could become a rock and roller. And he did that for a lot of people. It has been said that The Velvet Underground spawned more bands than it sold albums. It’s true. Lou opened up the field for millions of us. There are few modern singer/songwriters that haven’t been influenced by his direct way of telling a story in song without hyped-up sentiment or maudlin platitudes. His hard-edged, cynical style, shot through with harsh beauty and tenderness, created a new level of sophistication and adultness in rock that hadn’t much been heard before him. He cut through the cute shit and talked about the raw side of city life like Cole Porter on a cocktail of crystal meth and Seconal. And yet for all the tough guy stance, here was a cat that could write lines like:

Thought of you as my mountain top,
Thought of you as my peak.
Thought of you as everything,
I’ve had but couldn’t keep.
I’ve had but couldn’t keep.
Linger on, your pale blue eyes.
Linger on, your pale blue eyes.

If I could make the world as pure and strange as what I see,
I’d put you in the mirror,
I put in front of me.
I put in front of me.
Linger on, your pale blue eyes.
Linger on, your pale blue eyes.

Beneath the black leather veneer and dismissive smirk of Lou Reed there was something vulnerable and fragile. It was covered up out of necessity. The shit he wrote about, the shit he lived, could kill you. But you can’t write with the insight he did about the darker side of life, the lost souls and broken hearts, without having an incredible sense of empathy and love. On the surface, Reed was a badass. But somewhere a satellite of love was beaming down signals and Reed was there to catch them….and to beam them out to other satellites, of which I was one.
 

 
Guest post by David Kerekes, co-author of Killing For Culture and See No Evil, and author of Mezzogiorno

In the introduction to a new book on the subject of horror film fanzines and the culture they spawned, author John Szpunar deliberates on the place of the zine next to mainstream media. There is a difference, he says, in that the zines had nothing to lose.

I can think of no better example to illustrate this point than a Myra Hindley cut out doll. It’s a pen and ink drawing gracing the back cover of Subhuman #4 (January 1987), which shows one half of the Moors Murderers wearing nothing but her fearsome peroxide bouffant and black panties. A change of dress includes a Nazi uniform along with a bloodstained kitchen knife as accessory.
 

 
Art: Jason Knight
 
The Myra doll isn’t trying to sell anything. It doesn’t relate to a film, nor bear any relation to the content of the zine in question. Its simple purpose is to glower with gentle contempt. In the town I once lived, a short bus ride from the moors of the Moors Murderers, this sort of jape could get you lynched. Who in their right mind would conjure up something as disturbing, disposable and quite as brilliant as a Myra Hindley cut out doll? Disposable is a clue, in deference to the type of horror fanzine one might find in John Szpunar’s book.

To paraphrase the jacket blurb, Xerox Ferox: The Wild World of the Horror Film Fanzine is a book that covers a scene that has influenced generations of writers, filmmakers and fans (myself included; I published it). Fanzines with lurid titles like Gore Gazette, Violent Leisure, Sleazoid Express and Subhuman expressed a sense of freak camaraderie at a time when technology was yet to arrive for its wholesale delivery of freak. Theirs was a literary DIY ethos, not dissimilar to that of punk rock a decade or so earlier (which incidentally often borrowed from film, particularly cult and horror film).
 

 
Psychoholic Slag. Issue 5 (USA). Argento! Argento? Editor: Dave Kosanke.
 
One zine usually opened the door to other zines. Writes John Szpunar of his own education in this respect:

Before long, I was a part of a network of zine and tape traders, and the goods kept rolling in […] I was coming of age with the help of a new generation, and I was having the time of my life.

Avoiding reference to literary content for the moment (irreverent… informed… typo laden), the thing most striking about the horror film zines is, of course, the visual aesthetic. Although some were designed to a comparatively high standard—i.e., pro-zines like CineFan, Little Shoppe of Horrors and Bizarre —many more were low key efforts of short runs that were perhaps given away for the price of postage. The layouts were urgent and witty, overloaded with elements seemingly vying for space before the page ran out. And defining these products was the photocopier, the Xerox of Xerox Ferox, creating an arresting visual dynamic of harsh black and white contrasts that robbed any image of superfluous detail.

It is reassuring to discover that, in the age of the Internet, a small place still exists for the zine practitioner and the horror film culture of the printed page. Examples are out there, being transmitted through the postal network in a matter of days to defy the blogosphere (a term so abhorrent we are destined to use it). For now, however, a random collection of horror fanzine covers rescued from the mailboxes of old and made suitable for framing…

Get a special hardback edition of the remarkable Xerox Ferox here. 800 fully illustrated pages, about $72 plus a couple more to post. Pre-release paperback available here.
 

 
Killer Kung Fu Enema Nurses On Crack Issue 3 (NZ). A genuine Garbage Pail Kids sticker adorns the cover. Image depicts a police raid on the New Zealand home of editor/publisher Peter Hassall, confiscating books, zines and porn.
 

 
Subhuman Issue 5, March/April 1987 (USA). Design: Dawn Doyle. Editor: Cecil Doyle.
 

 
Trash Compactor Volume 2 Issue 4, Winter 1990 (CAN). Design: The Trash Compactor.

 
In this sweet video, the last Ramone standing, Tommy Erdelyi, performs “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend” last year at NYC’s Cutting Room. Tommy performs the song as a kind of mournful, folksy country tune. Technically, it’s not a cover. He wrote it. But he’s doing it in the style of his folk/buegrass duo, Uncle Monk. He’s covering himself.

Ironically, this is the kind of music Hilly Kristal was initially looking to book at CBGB (“country, bluegrass and blues” is what the initials stand for) and instead he got four punk rockers from Queens with Tommy on drums.
 

 
The absolutely terrific documentary MC5: A True Testimonial was made in 2002 but never had a theatrical run and has never been released on DVD. Other than screenings at film festivals, the movie has mostly gone unseen despite receiving stellar reviews. The reasons were legal entanglements that often cripple or doom rockumentaries to obscurity, the details of which I’m not going to get into because they involve friends I don’t want to piss off.

Here’s a rare chance to see MC5: A True Testimonial. It may not last long on YouTube so I suggest watching it now. A finer film on the Motor City 5 will doubtlessly never be made. Kick out the jams, motherfuckers!

Update: Yes, I know the film was booked briefly in NYC and a booking or two in Michigan. But, to me, that doesn’t constitute a “theatrical run.” For all intents and purposes, and I’m sure the film makers would agree, the film was never released in any significant way to theaters.
 

 
My first encounter with Irish punkers The Undertones was seeing them open (with Sam and Dave) for The Clash in September of 1979 and they were shockingly good. Subsequent gigs seen later in ‘79 and early 1980 at Irving Plaza, Trax and Hurrah’s were all stunners. The band was one of the best live acts I’ve seen - tight, intense and loud. Their songs have indelible hooks.  On every level The Undertones are right up there with The Ramones, The Heartbreakers and Suicide Commandos. They were one of John Peel’s favorite bands and had a huge following in the United Kingdom but were mostly ignored in the USA. Too bad.

The band split in 1983. Lead singer Feargal Sharkey (that’s him as a kid on the “Jimmy Jimmy” picture sleeve) released some solo material and went on to a long career in the music industry, while the rest of the band formed That Petrol Emotion in 1985.

The Undertones, Irving Plaza 1980.

I went looking for some live concert footage of this under-appreciated group to share with DM readers and and came upon this stellar video from 1981. It’s from a show in Munich, Germany. If you know the band, you’ll know what you’re in for. If, not this is a great place to start.
 

 
Here’s a terrific documentary on The Undertones.

 
In what looks to be a dream come true for him, Portlandia funnyman Fred Armisen interviews Mick Jones and Paul Simonon as “Ian Rubbish,” one-time member of Clash-wannabe group, Ian Rubbish and The Bizarros.

According to Billboard:

The Clash collaboration represents a full-circle moment of sorts for Armisen. “I first saw The Clash in 1982 at Pier 84 in New York as part of the Dr. Pepper music series, when I was about 14 or 15,” Armisen recalls on the phone from Portland, where he’s filming season 4 of IFC’s “Portlandia.” “And after the show, I was waiting outside the gate and Kosmo Vinyl, who was a tour manager, was pointing people in like, ‘You, you and you.’ And I totally got to talk to Paul Simonon and Joe Strummer. And then a couple weeks later I got to see a dress rehearsal of ‘Saturday Night Live,’ where Ron Howard was hosting, and I totally got to see The Clash play again. It was unreal.”

Ian/Fred even gets to jam with his heros!
 

 
Thank you Jo Caulfield!