Search Results for "Art Black"

If Henry Rollins incarnates all the smoldering hatred and intensity of familyman Charlie Manson, then Sky Saxon — the legendary leader of LA’s protopunk Seeds — is a self-made construct of all the qualities Rollins discarded: drug-addled, hippie mystical, stuck in the ’60s, inconsistent and unfocused. The above discography is a necessarily abbreviated listing of…

Prominent among US-worshipping foreigners, London’s Birdhouse managed to amass a sizable following for their slavishly imitative Motor City drone with a 1986 single, “My Birdman.” Burnin’ Up was released as a six-song EP in the UK and a ten-song album in America; except for Vic Maile’s crunching production and an obnoxious slap at metal/rap, the…

Noble philosopher and drooling idiot, transcendent shaman and earthbound sucker, Iggy Pop is in many ways the ultimate embodiment of rock’n’roll. While a similar claim can be made for artists from the Stones to the Clash to the Ramones to Half Japanese, the beast born James Newell Osterberg is a walking, talking one-man melodrama, reflecting…

Lesser-known purveyors of the “Medway Delta” sound, Graham Day’s Prisoners/Prime Movers, alongside Billy Childish’s myriad combos, butted their way into prominence through sheer persistence in the ’80s Chatham (the city between London and Canterbury where the Medway River meets the North Sea) chapter of the Great Garage R&R Manifesto. Less spontaneous than Mr. C and…

Initially another bunch of misfit goodfernaughts in thrall of shock, volume and outrage, Austin, Texas’ Big Boys were well matched with cross-dressing nascent blues revisionists the Dicks on the LP they shared, recorded loud and dirty at their hometown’s premier end-of-the-’70s punk showplace. The self-released Where’s My Towel better indicates the band’s ultimate strengths: Randy…

1979: The Pop Rivets, a Canterbury group of devoted acolytes to punk’s gritty DIY ethos, release Greatest Hits, home-recorded and enclosed in handmade sleeves (later repressed in printed covers; later still retitled for its Hangman reissue). A more mod-oriented and less reserved TV Personalities or Desperate Bicycles, the Rivets (aka Rivits) retrospectively fit neatly in…

Although barely considered worth a footnote today (cross-reference under “singleminded” and “energy OD”), the Hypstrz were nevertheless radical in their own special time and place, blasting through ’60s garagemania in late-’70s Minneapolis, purposefully stamping their frantic rifferama into countless pubescent brains, personalizing punk in a subversively idiosyncratic (and decidedly song-oriented) manner, thereby paving the way…

This aggressively melodic Southern California punk-pop trio got a reputation for its juvenile porn-movie fetishism (the first two albums feature skinflick stars as cover models). But the simple, uptempo music is smarter and catchier than the band’s imagery would suggest, even if the lyrics are stupid as often as they’re clever. Energetic and insistent yet…

Elevated (strung up?) as the newest breed of rock’n’roll hero — martyred chronicler — Lester Bangs was a timely victim for the perennial personality cult, which seized upon his accidental death in April 1982 to resurrect his seminal rock writing for a new fanzine audience. By turns introspective and scathing, his dissection of music was…

For folks who prize unspoiled simplicity in rock’n’roll (and especially in rockabilly), Tav Falco’s Panther Burns may be the ultimate band. On the early records, his voice drenched in echo, Falco goes through a familiar repertoire of Presley-derived whoops, mutters and coos, while an amateurish backing ensemble that often includes Alex Chilton grinds away laboriously…