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

 
It’s remarkable to consider that Steve Winwood was not yet even 19 years old when he formed Traffic and they recorded Mr. Fantasy in 1967. Of course, he had been playing professionally since his early teens, along with brother Muff Winwood in various bands and was the lead singer of the Spencer Davis Group when he was but fifteen, but Traffic’s sound was especially sophisticated coming from someone so young.

Some of the greatest groups of the 60s and 70s are woefully under-documented on film. I’m not aware, for instance, of an entire Allman Brothers concert film, and I’ve never seen more than a handful of clips of Frank Zappa and the original Mothers of Invention that capture what I always imagined their shows must’ve been like. There are only two sync-sound documents of the Velvet Underground. Even David Bowie didn’t accumulate all that much concert footage during his prime years as a performer. Nor, when you get right down to it—considering the amount of gigging they did—did the Grateful Dead. Except for a few pop shows in the US, Britain, plus The Beat Club in Germany and POP2 in France, many groups would have fallen through the cracks of moving documentation altogether. Full concert films were expensive to mount back then and very rarely green-lighted. There were simply few places to exhibit them theatrically. They lost money.

A group like Traffic, with their jazz/rock fusion sound and 12-minute FM-radio friendly epics like “The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys” would have been a difficult band to book on most TV variety shows of the day, so it was nice to watch the concert documentary of Traffic Live at Santa Monica 1972 and see them in all their jammy, muso glory.

The set begins with a bravura rendition of “The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys.” Jim Capaldi, who co-wrote the song with Steve Winwood had this to say about the lyrics to one of their most notable numbers:

It seemed to sum up all the people of that generation who were just rebels. The ‘Low Spark,’ for me, was the spirit, high-spirited. You know, standing on a street corner. The low rider. The ‘Low Spark’ meaning that strong undercurrent at the street level.

There’s also an outstanding rip through “John Barleycorn” but wait for the final two numbers, a delicate “40,000 Headmen” and a powerful take of “Dear Mr. Fantasy” featuring an awe-inspiring guitar solo from Winwood. The whole set is scorching from start to finish. As this 64-minute long performance is the only extended live footage of the group, good thing it’s so incredible.

Set list:
“The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys”
“Light Up or Leave Me Alone”
“John Barleycorn”
“Rainmaker”
“Glad”
“Freedom Rider”
“40,000 Headmen”
“Dear Mr. Fantasy”

Traffic were at this time: Steve Winwood, vocals, guitar, keyboards, bass; Jim Capaldi, percussion, vocals; Chris Wood, flute, saxophone; Rebop Kwaku Baah, percussion; Roger Hawkins, drums; David Hood,bass.
 

‘School of the Holy Beast’ Japanese
 
We first discovered the extraordinary movie posters of
Westgate Gallery a few years ago.  Their annual Cruel Summer Sale is ending soon, but if you’re into such things and haven’t taken the plunge down their “macabre, salacious” rabbit hole, there’s still time to grab some incredible finds and bargains at 50% Off Listed Prices.  What makes Westgate Gallery stand proudly apart, beyond the insanely wide selection of 100% original pieces from all over the world, is the expertise of its poster concierge Christian McLaughlin, whose obsessively deep knowledge of classic, cult, exploitation horror, XXX-rated and Giallo films—and the posters created to promote them—puts his competitors to shame.  For Christian, offering merely cool, rare and eye-popping “wall-candy” isn’t enough — unlike other higher-end movie-art boutiques online, he wants you to know as much as possible about the actual films behind the posters, and in so many cases, you’ll find a wide variety of artwork you never realized existed for movies you love or have only heard about.

A quick survey of Westgate’s Recent Arrivals section reveals what may be their most impressive selection yet.  Where else can you find four different posters for the
1965 Russ Meyer/Tura Satana psychotic go-go dancer masterpiece Faster, Pussycat! Kill Kill!?  We especially like the German one featuring full-color cartoon Satana art, from a 1980 re-release (they also have the original German release version)… alongside a hella-rare unfolded 40x60” for Dario Argento’s baroque splatter epic Suspiria, notorious Japanese nunsploitation classic School of the Holy Beast (if you think the poster’s wild, wait til you see the movie), a 46x61” and French Grande for minimalist 1974 John Carpenter sci-fi satire Dark Star.  Speaking of dark, how about convicted pedophile/sexual predator Victor Salva’s 1989 debut Clownhouse — produced by Francis Ford Coppola and starring Sam Rockwell?  Like clowns in horror films weren’t effed-up and scary enough already…

If you’re a Rocky Horror Picture Show cultist, a Kenneth Anger fan or both, point your peepers toward the very rare Japanese 20x29” beauties for RHPS and the Magick Lantern Cycle, refrain from drooling and remember they are, like everything else at Westgate, currently 50% Off (Discount Code No Longer Required)!  Christian’s obvious love for Italian shockers means not only choice oversize posters for everything from lurid trash (1974’s Nude For Satan; Jess Franco’s sinister and psychedelic 1969 Venus In Furs, with Eurotrash royalty Klaus Kinski) to arthouse transgression (Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Criterion-approved Salo, 1975), but also reimagined stunners for Michael Crichton’s Westworld (1973) and—let’s get super-obscure!—Eyes of Hell, the trippy 1961 Julian Roffman flick about a shrink and his patients bedeviled by an ancient nightmare-inducing mask that subjects its wearers to extreme hallucinations then turns them into murderers.  When shown in theaters, the mask sequences required 3D glasses… but no special equipment is required to bask in the glory of Sandro Symeoni’s wall-size 55x78”.

Of course one of Westgate Gallery’s specialties is painted/illustrated posters, both foreign and domestic, for adult films from the Golden Age of hardcore (1970-1989ish).  No wonder Robin Bougie tapped WGG for rarities to include in his essential coffee table book Graphic Thrills 2.  These saucy specimens superbly demonstrate the art of the tease — in an era long before anyone with a cell phone could access an endless array of pornography with titles like ‘Busty Stepmom’s Anal Gangbang’, the charmingly naughty 1-sheets for 1979’s Librianna, Bitch of the Black Sea (with its shamelessly phony “Filmed in Russia” claim), Punk Rock (1974), Lialeh (the first African-American porno movie, 1974) and Starship Eros (1980, complete with a C3PO-headed robo-stud) had the tough task of enticing patrons into their local Pussycat cinema while still maintaining enough decorum for exhibition on Main Street USA.

At the moment, Westgate also features a healthy assortment of softcore posters, displaying a wide range of styles from Pop Art (1968’s Big Switch, directed by UK future-horror maverick Pete Walker) to the old-timey carnival vibe of Switcheroo (1969) to the classic grindhouse delights of Ramrodder (a western roughie from smut-filled ’69—wink wink—costarring then-Manson Family members Bobby ‘Cupid’ Beausoleil and Catherine ‘Gypsy’ Share) and 1972’s Harry Novak spoof Please Don’t Eat My Mother, which devotees of Something Weird Video will fondly recall as the unauthorized raunchy redux of Little Shop of Horrors… in which the carnivorous monster plant enjoys a steady diet of nudie starlets, including chipmunk-cheeked fan-fave Rene Bond.

Let us assure you — the above sampling barely scratches the surface of Westgate Gallery’s remarkable collection, now numbering Over 5000 Posters… and be aware that several of their Recent Arrivals we planned to include in this post were snatched up within 48 hours of being listed.  Honestly, what are you waiting for?  Faster, pussycats!  Shop!  Shop!

The Westgate Gallery’s Cruel Summer 2021 50% off sale sees every item in stock at—you guessed it—50% off the (already reasonable) normal price. Discount is automatic at checkout. No code needed. Ends on September 21 at 11:59 PM PST
 

’Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! German Re-release
 

’Suspiria US 40x60
 

’Dark Star French
 

’Clownhouse Japanese
 

’Rocky Horror Picture Show Japanese
 
 
More after the jump…

Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour and director Dario Argento.
 
Let’s get a few fun facts out of the way before we take a look at the eight or so awkward minutes shared between Pink Floyd vocalist and guitarist David Gilmour, drummer Nick Mason and Italian horror master, Dario Argento. For Pink Floyd, 1987 was a new beginning without bassist Roger Waters—a founding member of the Floyd along with Nick Mason. After years of legal hassles, the Waterless version of Pink Floyd released A Momentary Lapse of Reason. The subsequent tour (which started before the album was completed), was full of challenges, legal and otherwise. When it was all said and done, the tour in support of A Momentary Lapse of Reason would be the most successful U.S. rock tour of 1987. And that’s saying something, as David Bowie’s Glass Spider tour played 44 U.S. dates that same year. When it comes to Dario Argento and his relationship with Pink Floyd, we go back to 1975 when Italy’s version of Alfred Hitchcock tried, unsuccessfully, to engage the band to record the soundtrack for Profondo Rosso (aka, Deep Red, and The Hatchet Murders) as they were deep in work on their ninth album, Wish You Were Here. This, of course, didn’t turn out to be a bad thing. It gave us all the gift that is Italian prog-rock pioneers, Goblin, who were engaged to rewrite the score composed by Giorgio Gaslini, who had previously composed the score for Argento’s 1973 film The Five Days. It would also leave room for Argento’s collaboration with Keith Emerson of ELP, who composed the insanely good soundtrack for Argento’s 1980 film Inferno. 

Now, let’s get back to the eight minutes of international time-delayed satellite video connection which had to be translated live in Italy and New York City. You might want to sit down because the combination of Dario Argento and members of Pink Floyd can make one quite dizzy. 

Dario Argento was perpetually busy in the 1970s and 1980s. But he still somehow found time to do a self-hosted television show in Italy called Gli incubi di Dario Argento (The Nightmares of Dario Argento). Only nine episodes of The Nightmares of Dario Argento were filmed as part of the television series Giallo. He was often joined by Italian actress Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni dolled up like Siouxsie Sioux. You may recall, Cataldi-Tassoni was the star of Argento’s 1987 film, Opera. Though it’s a little unclear exactly when this segment aired, Pink Floyd was noted to be in New York City at the time. Since the video shows both Gilmore and Mason staying at the Ritz Carlton’s Central Park location, that would probably put the filming of this magic mushroom moment sometime during their three-night stint at Madison Square Garden. At the beginning of the “interview” Argento praises A Momentary Lapse of Reason, calling the album “stupendous.” Then, Argento’s complex, esoteric questions seem to mystify both Gilmour and Mason—and the live translation, which at times is not accurate, does not help matters one bit. I don’t want to reveal any more of what goes down in this very strange video, but had Roger Waters seen it back in the day, it would have pissed off his already very pissed off self.
 

Dario Argento interviewing David Gilmour and Nick Mason of Pink Floyd in 1987 via satellite. What a world.
 

Another segment of ‘The Nightmares of Dario Argento.’

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Can’t look away: Go behind the scenes of films by Dario Argento, John Carpenter, Tobe Hooper & more
Dario Argento’s horror classic ‘Suspiria’ and the most vicious murder scene ever filmed, 1977
First look at Waxwork’s expanded soundtracks for three Dario Argento classics
Stunning fluorescent stills from Dario Argento’s horror masterpiece ‘Suspiria’
The creeptastic ‘mad puppet’ in Dario Argento’s shocker ‘Deep Red’ will haunt your dreams
Watch Keith Emerson and Dario Argento work on the soundtrack to ‘Inferno’ in 1980
The original ending for Dario Argento’s 1971 thriller, ‘The Cat O’ Nine Tails’ (a DM premiere)
Illustrations of films by Dario Argento, David Cronenberg, Ridley Scott & more from Cinefantastique

 
When I recently wrote about being an analog vinyl snob, I made mention several times in that essay of Tom Port, the proprietor of Better Records. Port claims that the copies he sells of classic albums sound better—much better—than others. He calls them “Hot Stampers” and he sells them to a well-heeled audiophile audience who can afford to spend $500 on, say, the perfect copy of Aqualung. But when I wrote of the Hot Stamper notion, I was not writing from firsthand experience, but because Port’s offerings at Better Records was conceptually an easy thing for the reader to grok. Once the concept of doing a shootout between dozens of copies of the same album to find the best sounding one is understood, the rest of what I was banging on about came into sharper focus.

After he read Extreme Record Collecting: Confessions of an Analog Vinyl Snob, which was crossposted at Robert Brook’s The Broken Record blog, Tom got in touch through Robert and offered to send me a Hot Stamper of Steely Dan’s Aja that had a scratch rendering it unsaleable so that I could see just how much better his Hot Stampers were compared to an average, run of the mill copy of Aja.

Aja was a particularly fortuitous selection, not just because it’s considered by many to be the best sounding album of all time, but because I once had the good fortune to take a tour of the legendary Village Recorder studios in Los Angeles which culminated in getting to listen to the first side of Aja made from a dub of the master tape in the studio it was mixed in, on the very same speakers! Imagine that, right? I still have a strong sense memory of it and with an experience like that under my belt, there was probably no better test of the Hot Stamper concept that he could have sent me.

The record arrived two days later, packaged far better than anything that I have ever been sent by a Discogs dealer. I was excited to get it, I must say. I really wanted to hear an “official” Hot Stamper. This was going to be fun.

So I got super baked and put the record on. The outer groove was dead quiet and clearly it had been properly cleaned. (Pay attention to that subject below, it’s very, very important.) In the second or two before the music started, I wondered how much confirmation bias might be present when someone has spent $500 on a single record album. I imagined that they probably would be more inclined to agree that they possessed one of the world’s very best copies of album X for the simple reason that… it cost a lot more? Of course I hadn’t paid a small fortune for this album, and so I wasn’t quite invested in that way, but I still really wanted for it to sound good. I didn’t want to be disappointed.

When the music began, well, these sorts of thought immediately flew out the window. This record was clearly superior to any Aja on vinyl or CD that I have ever heard BY FAR and I realize that to many of you reading this what I am about to write next might seem pretty daft, but about a minute or two in, the thought occurred to me that this Aja Hot Stamper actually sounded better to me than the dub made from the master tape that I heard at Village Recorders. Yeah it sounded that fucking good, it really did. And if you know how painstakingly edited together that album was, you wouldn’t necessarily expect it to soundstage like a motherfucker either, but it sounded like the Dan were in the room playing live right in front of me. I was truly blown away. Rest assured that if I had paid $299 for this album, it would have been money well spent (although my wife might not see it the same way!)

I asked Tom Port some questions via email.

What is a Hot Stamper? Please define the term and how this concept first occurred to you. Can I presume that it was a slow process and that it dawned on you gradually?

Tom Port: The easiest and shortest version of the answer would be something like “Hot Stampers are pressings that sound dramatically better than the average pressing of a given album.”

My good friend Robert Pincus coined the term more than thirty years ago. We were both fans of the second Blood, Sweat and Tears album, a record that normally does not sound very good, and when he would find a great sounding copy of an album like B,S &T, he would sell it to me as a Hot Stamper so that I could hear a favorite album sound its best. Even back then we knew there were a lot of different stampers for that record—it sold millions of copies and was Number One for 15 weeks in 1969—but there was one set of stampers we had discovered that seemed to be head and shoulders better than all the others. Side one was 1AA and side two was IAJ. Nothing we played could beat a copy of the record with those stampers.

After we’d found more and more 1AA/ IAJ copies—I have a picture on the blog of more than 40 all laid out on the floor—it became obvious that some copies with the right stampers sounded better than other copies with those stampers. We realized that a Hot Stamper not only had to have the right numbers in the dead wax, but it had to have been pressed properly on good vinyl. All of which meant that you actually had to play each copy of the record in order to know how good it sounded. There were no shortcuts. There were no rules of thumb. Every copy was unique and there was no way around that painfully inconvenient fact.
 

 
For the next thirty years we were constantly innovating in order to improve our record testing. We went through hundreds of refinements, coming up with better equipment, better tweaks and room treatments, better cleaning technologies and fluids, better testing protocols, better anything and everything that would bring out the best sound in our records. Our one goal was to make the critical evaluation of multiple copies of the same album as accurate as possible. Whatever system our customer might use to play our record—tubes or transistors, big speakers or small, screens or dynamic drivers—our pressing would be so much better in every way that no matter the system, the Hot Stamper he bought from us would have sound that was dramatically superior to anything he had ever heard.

It was indeed a slow process, and a frustrating one. Lots of technological advancements were needed in order to make our Hot Stamper shootouts repeatable, practical and scalable, and those advancements took decades to come about. When I got started in audio in the ‘70s, there were no stand-alone phono stages, or modern cabling and power cords, or vibration controlling platforms for turntables and equipment. No tonearms with extremely delicate adjustments. No modern record cleaning machines and fluids. Not much in the way of innovative room treatments. A lot of things had to change in order for us to reproduce records at the level we needed to, and we pursued every one of them as far as money and time allowed.

Our first official Hot Stamper offering came along in 2004. We had a killer British pressing of Cat Stevens’ Teaser and the Firecat which we had awarded our highest grade, the equivalent of A+. Having done the shootout, I wrote up the review myself. At the end I said, “Five hundred dollars is a lot for one record, but having played it head to head against a dozen others, I can tell you that this copy is superior to every copy I have ever heard. It’s absolutely worth every penny of the five hundred bucks we are charging for it. If no one wants to pay that, fine, no problem, I will put the record in my own collection and thrill to its amazing sound for the rest of my life.”

As you can imagine, it sold immediately. That told us that the demand was there. To provide the supply, we eventually ended up needing about eight of us working in concert. It takes a crew of people to find a big batch of vintage LPs of the same title, clean them, do the Hot Stamper shootout, then check the playing surfaces on each side from start to finish, and finally describe the sound of each individual record on the website to the best of our ability.

We like to tell our customers exactly how to go about finding their own Hot Stampers, how to clean them, how to do shootouts with scientific rigor, but honestly, if you do it right it’s just a crazy amount of work. However, since it’s the only proven way to find the best sounding records in the world, to us we think it’s worth it.
 

 
Obviously the concept is controversial—to say the least—among record collectors. I’ve noticed an attitude on the Steve Hoffman Forum and elsewhere towards the hot stamper notion where someone almost takes offense, as if it suggests their records are somehow inferior. Any kind of audiophilia brings out the folks who say “I can’t hear it”—never a winning argument to begin with—and accusations of snobbery and snake oil. Was there a lot of pushback when you first started?

There has always been a lot of pushback and the pushback continues to this day, easily found on any audiophile forum you care to name. The psychology behind it is pretty well documented by now. I have read a dozen books about the cognitive biases that feed into confirming that whatever you want to believe is actually true, and written scores of commentaries connecting these ideas to a better way to pursue audio.

All of our work is entirely evidence based. Pressings that sound better than other pressings do not need to be explained. They simply do sound better, and rarely does it take a pair of golden ears to hear the difference.

But it does take a good stereo, and I talk about this issue a great deal as well. Even as recently as the early 2000s, I could easily name dozens of Heavy Vinyl pressings that I very much liked the sound of. Embarrassing as they are, I made a point to keep the old catalogs from those days. They are full of positive reviews for the Heavy Vinyl titles I was recommending at the time. They are undeniable proof of what I really believed back then. Of how mistaken I was. And I had already been in audio for twenty five years by then! After this last twenty years of working on my system and the hundreds of changes it has gone through, I would be very surprised if I could sit through one out of ten of those records now. Their shortcomings have become much too obvious to be ignored.

But… for the first time in a very long time, I actually played two outstanding Heavy Vinyl pressings just this year—the Led Zeppelin II from 2014 and the Chris Bellman cutting of Brothers in Arms, also from 2014. They went head to head against my best White Hot Stamper Shootout Winning pressings. Unlike almost all the other Heavy Vinyl records I have played over the last five to ten years, especially everything Half-Speed Mastered, both of these records sounded, gulp!, very much like good originals. in the case of Zep II, the uptake of my review would be that you simply cannot buy any version of this record outside of a Robert Ludwig original that will be able to hold a candle to the new recut. Yes, it’s that good. Brothers in Arms you can beat, but you have to work at it, and unless it is a favorite album of yours, why would you bother? The new one is probably good enough.

Even more surprising to most anyone reading this interview is the fact that I am happy to be proven wrong about Jimmy Page’s remastering project. I actually have a section on the blog for records we got wrong, with 80 entries to date. Who else points out to the world the records he was wrong about? No record dealer or record reviewer I am familiar with. But being wrong today simply means that I’ve learned something I hadn’t known before, and learning about records is what I’ve been doing for more than fifty years. And for the last 34 of those I’ve done it for a living, five days a week with plenty of weekends thrown in for good measure.

I hated what Page did to the sound of the first album in the Zep series, but I love the sound of the second album. Which just goes to show that records should not be judged by any process other than playing them. We endlessly talk about that subject on the blog. It’s a long-dead horse we just can’t seem to stop beating. Here is a sample:

We talk a lot on our site about the need for basing your audio—whether it be equipment, records, tweaks, cleaning methods or anything else associated with the hobby—on evidence.

In other words, don’t believe what you read, believe what you hear. Don’t take anything on faith, test it with your own two ears and record the data.

The only way to understand this Hot Stamper thing is to hear it for yourself, and that means having multiple copies of your favorite albums, cleaning them all up and shooting them all out on a good stereo. Nobody, but nobody, who takes the time to perform this little exercise can fail to hear exactly what we are talking about when we say no two records sound the same.

Or you can join the other 99% of the audiophiles in the world. They’re the ones who don’t know anything about pressing variations on records. Some very large percentage of that group also doesn’t want to know about any such pressing variations and will happily supply you with all sorts of specious reasoning as to why such variations can’t really amount to much—this without ever doing a single shootout!.

Such is the world of audiophiles. Some audiophiles believe in anything—you know the kind—and some audiophiles believe in nothing, not even what their own two ears are telling them.

But shooting out multiple pressings of records is work, more often than not hard and frustrating work. You can’t do that kind of work and type on a keyboard at the same time. It’s not about sitting at a computer and opining. It’s about sitting in a listening chair and gathering evidence that either confirms or disconfirms the opinions you held. If you haven’t done the work, you shouldn’t have much to say about the subject until after you have done the work. You can’t really talk about the results of an experiment you haven’t run, can you?

 

 
Where do you source your records from?

Local stores, eBay and Discogs are our main sources for records.

Isn’t ordering them from Discogs cheating?

It’s not cheating, it is in fact one of the best ways we know of to get exactly the pressing we are interested in. It’s difficult because many records are listed incorrectly, and most are graded too generously, and usually only visually. But finding a Pink Floyd import with the right stampers is not going to happen locally. That can only be done over the web.The mistake sellers make about us is that they think we buy the record from them and if it doesn’t have the Hot Stamper sound we’re looking for, we return it. That has never happened. Most records do not go into shootouts until many months after we buy them, sometimes years. The only thing we check is that the surfaces are passable and there is no groove distortion. Other than that, we won’t know how good the record sounds until it gets cleaned and played in a shootout. Many of our top dollar titles only get put into shootouts once every one or two years. Any Mingus record would work that way. How many years does it take to find four or five nice copies of Ah Um? Three to five years would be my guess. And we cannot afford to hurry up the process by spending more time looking for clean original pressings. They just don’t come up for sale all that often.

Continues after the jump…

A sculpture of actor Adrian Edmondson in character as Vyvyan Basterd from the UK cult televsion series, ‘The Young Ones.’
 
At Toy-Con in London in 2020, one of the exhibitors was UK sculptor, artist, and toymaker Mike Strict, who we can all thank for making our mid-80s dreams come true by sculpting up figures based on the unforgettable characters from the UK sitcom The Young Ones. Only twelve episodes exist of The Young Ones, but the impact the show made is still felt by its dedicated fan base to this day. Strict chose to create three sculpts/figures of fictional Scumbag University undergrad students Vyvyan Basterd; an angry heavy metal fan and medical student, played by Adrian (Ade) Edmondson; Rick, a sociology student and genuinely unlikable make-believe anarchist, played by the late Rik Mayall; and Neil Wheedon Watkins Pye, the lentil-loving, suicidal hippie played by Nigel Planer.

Usually, Strict is a strictly one-off kind of toy/figure/sculptor, but this time he did create more than one of his Young Ones figures, sold at Toy-Con. It’s not clear how many Strict made, but what I can tell you is that it appears they were all, rather unsurprisingly, sold. However, that does not mean you are out of luck if this is exactly what your collectible collection is missing, as Strict does accept commissions. At Toy-Con, his Rik, Vyvyan, and Neil figures sold for $75 USD—something to keep in mind if you’re going to try to acquire one. Much of Strict’s work is dark and creepy (YAY!) and includes nods to horror films. So if you’ve ever wanted a play-set based on the 1973 film The Wicker Man starring Christopher Lee, then Strict is your man. Or, perhaps you’ve been pining away for a sculpted diorama of Chuck D and Flavor Flav of Public Enemy, featuring their iconic image of a man in a hat caught in the crosshair of a weapons scope. Because, yeah, Strict made one of those in 2019.
 

Rick.
 

Neil and his everpresent pot of lentils.
 

 

 

 
More after the jump…