It seems ridiculous thinking on it now, but back in 1981 when I was applying to colleges, I was genuinely concerned about what my quality of life would be like out of earshot of Boston’s FM radio spectrum. Between college stations WMBR, WERS, WMFU (when I could get it in), WZBC, WHRB, and the commercial WFNX (all still broadcasting), there were various chunks of the day when at least some underground rock was on the air. Some stations had special slants, such as WMBR, which was big on promoting local bands. WZBC out of Boston College in Newton was big on music from the UK as well as the many American bands which were heavily influenced by UK groups. Wire, Gang of Four, and anything on Factory Records seemed to be big influences. I probably heard the Method Actors, Way of the West, and Pell Mell on WZBC. These new sounds kind of shook me out of my Beatles-Who-Kinks-Buzzcocks-Psychedelic Furs-Jam-Pretenders-Devo reverie that was my interior high school soundtrack. Sure there was plenty of what I knew to be New Wave around, but tunes such as these three were not quite as accessible, as easily digestible, as my usual musical diet. More cerebral. I thought I knew cool, but apparently there was a special V.I.P. room of cool that had been kept secret from me.

And I was pretty sure that that room was the live music/bar scene, of which I was too young to be a part of, excepting the rare all-ages show. There were cool people dancing at those shows. And when I turned 20 and could get beyond the bouncer, there was indeed dancing. So I would go and dance my ass off. Really, bands would play and people would dance. Sadly, it’s a totally foreign concept nowadays. Folding your arms and nodding your head slightly just doesn’t cut it. I’m going to make the claim that these three tracks are dance tracks, only because this is the kind of stuff we danced to.

The Method Actors were a duo out of the diverse Athens, GA scene (Pylon, Love Tractor, and REM) who were into the funkier, no-wave side of post-punk. You’ve got to award them points for being way ahead of the curve on the duo thing. “Do the Method” is the only tune of theirs that I’ve ever locked onto with any enthusiasm, mainly for its Feelies speed, Mission of Burma/Tom Verlaine manic yelping vocals, and that great twanging bass (or guitar? Hard to tell) which oscillates sharp and then settles into key each time it’s played. Wish I still had the picture sleeve.

Way of the West I know nothing about. I suspect they were American, but detailed information about them on the web is non-existent, other than that they released a few singles and were apparently great live. Their debut single was “Don’t Say That’s Just for White Boys”, which is ringing some distant memory bells. “See You Shake” is a bit more emotionally flat than “Do the Method”. It has some great 1981-isms: the hi-hat heavy new wave dance beat, the minimal, vaguely pan-Asian guitar figures, the white boy funk bass, and unison vocals sung in a slightly robotic monotone, as though yearning to be the musical equivalent of a Russian Constructivist poster. Pass the clove cigarettes, comrade. This artsy affect is only amplified by one of the great lost goofy 80’s tropes, chanting. Especially chanting reminiscent of revolutionary slogans. Possibly missing from the shorter 7” version, the chanting is featured prominently on this extended mix. Add in overdubbed roto-tom fills and you’ve got yourself a hit. Well, Way of the West didn’t have a hit, but chanting and the overdubbed roto-toms would work their way into Thompson Twins hits. Remember the gal with the tall blonde hair who played those things? Even REM used overdubbed such tom fills on Murmur. So did the Bongos. They’re like carbon dating, really.

Pell Mell is hands down my favorite instrumental band. They had a long, if sporadic, run of nearly 20 years and 5-6 albums (if you count the cassette releases), most notably their three tremendous albums from the 1990’s. They had some line-up changes over the years, including the ’83 addition of future producer Steve Fisk and even later addition of guitarist extraordinaire Dave Spalding, made their way from SST to Geffen to Matador, and were known for writing by mail as the members often lived far away from one another (can anyone verify that factoid?). Hard to believe that at the height of grunge an instrumental band could make it as far as they did. Which wasn’t that far at all. But at least you’ve heard of them, right? Now you can’t turn around without a post-rock instrumental band rooting through your trash can. You should at least own the three 90’s albums Flow, Interstate, and Star City. Pell Mell were brilliant musicians, songwriters, and arrangers. I wish I was in Pell Mell.

Right. Um…now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, I can tell you that “New Saigon” was from their first record, an ep, done when they were starting out in Portland, OR. It’s kind of repetitive. I think that’s the point. I didn’t really understand and appreciate stasis in my rock music back then. It just sort of keeps going. It’s completely emotionless. It’s almost like wallpaper, but with a design that refuses to meld into the background of your attention. But at the same time it’s got hooks. It really challenged my listening habits and assumptions, in the same way that say, PIL’s “Poptones” did. I don’t even mind when it lodges in my head for half a day at a time.

-Andrew Chalfen

From the last half of 1983 to the first half of 1986, America's
college campuses were awash with former new wavers who washed most of the styling gel out of their hair, traded their Flock of Seagulls-inspired togs for jeans and long-sleeved button-down shirts and used their student loan checks to buy 12-string Rickenbackers. Most only managed a few frat parties, a privately-pressed DIY EP or two, and if they were lucky, an opening slot at Goober McCool's when Guadalcanal Diary came through town, before they split up when the bass player decided to go ahead and get his law degree. On behalf of all of those bands, I give you "Statesong" by Attention, the song for which the critical terms "winsome," "Byrdsy" and "adenoidal singer whose bollocks apparently haven't yet dropped" were coined. Big ups to the late night college radio show The Outer Limits on KTXT-FM, Lubbock TX, without which I never would have discovered this song, circa 1985, and to Aaron "Pudman" Milenski, who finally found me a copy of this EP (which I could never locate) at In Your Ear Records in Allston, MA about a decade later.

-Stewart Mason

You could still have regional radio hits in 1980, and the Vapors' "Turning Japanese" was very big in Boulder, Colorado: even Denver's AM Top 40 station KIMN played it regularly, and my station of choice, KBAC, even spun the followup singles "News At Ten" and "Jimmie Jones." They were one of the few though, and so the Vapors are consigned to one-hit wonder novelty status. Shame, because they were really quite good. Originally part of the short-lived Mod revival (the Vapors were the other band managed by John Weller, Paul's da, with some help from Jam bassist Bruce Foxton, who had discovered them), the Vapors quickly outpaced every other band in that circle, and I strongly believe that David Fenton's best songs are every bit a match to the best things Paul Weller was writing for the Jam between All Mod Cons and The Gift. And if you knew just how much I worshiped the Jam in junior high, you'd know that was high praise indeed.

Truthfully, "Here Comes the Judge" is not one of Fenton's best. Indeed, I think it sounds like an early song that was later cannibalized for parts. (The verses sound a lot like "Spring Collection," if you'll notice, and I hear a little "Trains" in there as well.) But it's interesting (and exceedingly rare, only recently finally turning up on CD) and it gives me an excuse to print a photo of this Japanese single sleeve (which is actually from my wife's collection; the emendations are in her handwriting), which features one of my favorite mis-transcribed Japanese lyrics: "Your eyes are hazel/Except it's a cloud."

-Stewart Mason

You might recognize Ellie Marshall as the woman who asked Jonathan Richman questions like "Have you ever been to Bermuda?" or as a guest vocalist on a Big Dipper B-side, but before that she had a band with her three brothers called, appropriately enough, the Marshalls. Besides this single, they made a couple of compilation appearances on the first volume of Bomp's Waves, and The Boston Incest Album, as well as a 45 with Professor Anonymous. I'm thinking there may have been a second Marshalls 45 as well, but perhaps I'm confusing it with the latter.

The Del Fuegos, for a long time, anyway, had the misfortune of being known for their appearance in a Miller Beer television commercial, in which pleasantly disheveled leader (and now successful children’s music maker) Dan Zanes says that “Rock ‘n’ roll is folk music ‘cuz it’s music made by folks” (or something to that effect). Pretty innocuous stuff nowadays, what with iPod commercials and WB teen soaps being every indie band’s dream ticket to a national audience. But back in ’85 thereabouts, to many in the music underground, it was selling out. It just added fuel to heated discussions about major labels and selling your soul. Left of the Dial and all of that. For the Fuegos had signed to Slash/Warner Brothers, and their first record was a radical sonic departure from their live sound and this, their first 7” blast of snarling trash, twang, and (ironically) beer. That first album had BIG production written all over it. The performances seemed meticulous and coached. The old drummer Steve Morrell, famous for his crazed rockabilly moves and playing with trashcan lids, had left, and his replacement’s playing was as wooden as his namesake, Woody. Where was the joyous abandon? It was one of those albums where the huge snare is twice as loud as anything else. For some old-time fans of the Fuegos, the big-time move seemed like a huge letdown (I swear there was almost a Bambino-esque curse on Boston bands going for the gold ring back then). And their first glorious single here illustrates why. It was recorded by Rick Harte, pretty much the only cheap and sympathetic game in town for bands like the Neats, the Lyres, and other A-listers on the scene. The Fuegos were just a trio early on ( younger Zane’s brother Warren “Ork Boy would join up later), and it operated a bit like a rockabilly outfit with a direct musical and lifestyle line to their beloved 1950’s rock ‘n’ roll delinquents.

“I Always Call Her Back” represents what I remember best about checking out bands at the Rat in Kenmore Square in the 80’s. This was a scene of mostly working man bar bands made up of local guys and some transplants like a few of the Scruffy the Cat guys. Leather jackets, biker boots, red bandannas wrapped around ankles, cigarette packs rolled up in the t-shirt sleeve, sailor tattoos, sticky floors, endless bottles of Rolling Rock. It all changed somehow with the Pixies and Forte Apache studios and all those bands full of college kids and trust funders – the Lemonheads, Blake Babies, Fuzzy, Gigalo Aunts, Galaxie 500. Not that there weren’t college kids rocking it previously or townies doing the same after, but there was definitely a paradigm shift which had the unmistakable whiff of the British Invasion making the Brill Building girl groups irrelevant. It also pointed silently but unmistakably to unsettling issues about class divisions in the underground. Talking about class in one’s scene is still pretty taboo to this day.

A funny footnote: The Classic Ruins, another Boston bar band in the mold of the early Del Fuegos, upon seeing that the Fuegos had made a bunch of money from Miller, proceeded to pen a song about their favorite beer, LaBatts, in hopes of snagging sponsorship riches. They didn’t get their TV spot, but judging from the Labatts banner that hung behind the drum kit at their shows, they must’ve scored something.

A footnote to the footnote: Someone please please send me a file or post the Classic Ruins’ tune “Geraldine (I Need Money, More Than I Need You)" from the Chuck Warner Throbbing Lobster compilation Claws! Sheer old school genius.

Andrew Chalfen

The lovely full-color pic sleeve and the fact that it was on EMI probably disqualify this from being a true "DIY" single in the Messthetics/Kugelberg sense, but nonetheless, it does have some of the same charms as many of the best of those records: weird noises, cheap keyboards, etc. I think this was another one that Steve Mitchell at Low-Down Kids pointed us toward. You should really check out his new, revamped web site.

Some old musical cohorts and I were having a boy's night out this week and as a result of one of us having just witnessed a neo-Sabbath metal act called Priestess we had a conversation about “genre bands.” You know, those bands for whom evocation of a specific genre (or more often sub-genre or sub-sub-genre) seems to be their raison d’etre. “Country-swing bands, metal bands, garage bands, it doesn’t matter,” Matt, who had just endured Priestess said, proclaiming his distaste. As an example, he mentioned the Derailers (who were at the time a pretty darned fine honky-tonk outfit who could sound eerily like the Buckaroos ca. 1964), saying that he saw them a few years back, and while he enjoyed the show, he couldn’t ever imagine listening to them at home, because he’d rather listen to “the real thing.” He then started busting on the Chesterfield Kings and the Tell-Tale Hearts, and everyone looked at me because they knew I was going to say “But I like those bands.”

Bret’s rejoinder in defense of the Derailers was that since the members of the band obviously wanted to play country music there was only so much bandwidth they could work within, and that since they probably didn’t care to be a Travis Tritt tribute band, it made perfect sense that they fell into the sound they did. Stephen defended the early garage revival bands, pointing out that very few people even knew what “garage” was at that point since there weren’t a million re-issue compilations yet, and that furthermore they were a reaction to the watered-down aspects of new wave, and in that sense had the same motivation as the Ramones did in the mid-70s, even if they didn’t forge an original sound.

My offering was that my appreciation of “genre” bands varies proportionally with my interest in the genre, and also with the band's ability to write good songs. I like the Derailers, and Little Hits watchers know of my fondness for most of the 80s garage revival bands. My reasoning: Given that I like this specific style of music, why wouldn’t I want to hear a great song in that genre regardless of when it was recorded? If all of the elements I require are there, why should it matter to me if it was recorded in 1966 or 1986 or 2006?

I imagine most people can identify with all of the above positions in one context or another. I know I certainly do. I thank all of my witty, intelligent friends for a terrific evening of mirth and conversation, and for providing a jumping-off point for this awesome 45 by Scotland’s The Green Telescope. (One good thing about neo-garage records; they’re much cheaper than “the real thing.”) The Telescope made a couple of 7” records before becoming the Thanes; you can hear “Make Me Stay” from the equally great “Two by Two” EP on the Children Of Nuggets box. The Thanes are still at it; their recent LP Downbeat and Folked-Up on Screaming Apple is a swell listen. There are also excellent retrospectives on Rev-ola and Corduroy.

Okay, I got into a bit of trouble in the comments a few weeks ago for suggesting that the Slickee Boys were new wave bandwagon jumpers, which turns out not to have been the case. I stand behind this statement for the Monroes, however. This EP is actually not terribly new wave at all, but straightforward early '80s pop/rock in the style of, say, Greg Kihn. But man, that album cover just screams "A&R wants to pitch us as a new wave band, so here we are wrapped in purple satin and surrounded by slanty red lines." I don't know if you can see it in the small version of the photo below, but beardy dude on the right (the one in the second O in the band name) does NOT look very happy about this photo shoot.

"What Do All The People Know?" was a very minor hit: I heard it a few times on KBCO in Boulder in early '83, so I always associate this song with Modern English's "I Melt With You," the English Beat's "I Confess," the Psychedelic Furs' "Love My Way" and Bow Wow Wow's "So You Wanna Hold Me," all of which were huge on that station around then. But much like "Everywhere That I'm Not" by Translator or "A Million Miles Away" by the Plimsouls, this is a song that people remember as being a much bigger hit than it was, turning up regularly on those budget-price "hits of the '80s" comps with some regularity.

-Stewart Mason

When I was a kid I loved those K-Tel compilations like Dumb Ditties and Goofy Greats, and while I've never been a raving fanatic about novelty records as an adult, I do still sometimes get that strange midnight craving for whatever that is in the garbage cans out behind the building where they make the Petula Clark and Platters and Three Dog Night records. I was already familiar with the more famous works of Nervous Norvus (aka Jimmy Drake) like "Transfusion" and "Ape Call," but I'd never heard this, his final Dot single until it was covered by Notorious Sophisticated International Playboy Deke Dickerson. Kory Willis (my boss and musical comrade) and I were so intrigued that we had to track down the original, and to our delight it was truly demented; much, much stranger than Mr. Dickerson's cover would have suggested. While we were spinning it at the house one night, a friend who disdains most music recorded after about 1966 commented "See, this is everything I like about American Music of the 50s. It's a guy playing a ukelele and stomping on the floor, and it came out on a major label."

Speaking of which, Dot records must have been a pretty interesting place to work. On one hand, Pat Boone and the Hilltoppers. On the other, "Love Me" by the Phantom, Sanford Clark, and Nervous Norvous. Wow.

The mellaroonie folks at Norton Records have assembled an exhaustive compilation of the Nervous one's compositions entitled Stone Age Woo: The Zorch Sounds of Nervous Norvus. It includes much biographical hoo-haw and is highly recommended.

"The Fang" is dedicated to the beloved Casey, whose overbite has amused many visitors to our house.

This one is something of a shout-out to my junior high friend Doug Pumphrey, who was absolutely mad for the Swingers, particularly this terrific bit of new wave fluff. The Swingers were a trio led by ex-Split Enz singer Phil Judd, who seems to be following the pure-pop direction that his former band went into after he left: this song is every bit as catchy as "I Got You" or "One Step Ahead," just a little more manic. Great goofy video, too, which was a staple of Boulder public-access channel KBDI's late night video show FM-TV. The Swingers -- who also featured bassist Dwayne Hillman, who later joined Midnight Oil -- didn't last long, releasing only this one album before Judd went solo with a 1983 EP confusingly called The Swinger. Oh, and if you ever get a chance to Netflix the 1982 Australian new wave film Starstruck, directed by Gillian Armstrong, do so: there's a great club scene featuring the Swingers performing their song "One Good Reason." This is an album and a band that just disappeared into the ether, which is particularly unfair because they're really quite terrific.

-Stewart Mason