Unpiano | Music Blog

A week ago, after spending an afternoon looking like an idiot in an old wood-floor rollerskating rink in Glendale, I Netflix’d (that’s a verb now) this awesomely bad roller disco movie, set in Venice during the supposed late 70′s rollerskating craze and featuring a tarted up Linda Blair with some castaway cast of soon-to-be-in-porn actors and actresses that can’t act or act-ress. Its a typical teenage fad movie, like Breakin’ or Thrashin’, with some good-hearted rich girl trying to be down and a struggling out-of-her-league underdog trying to get famous for something you can’t make money at, and his cheeky friends and her shitty parents who don’t understand and all the usual shit. Needless to say, it was awesome, and I sat through the whole thing with my jaw in my lap. My wife said I shook my head through the whole movie, probably at the completely improbable situations, characters and dialogue that danced before me (on skates, and in slutty 70s/80s fashion, of course). It was like an American Apparel boner-fest with badly delivered laugh-out-loud lines and a disco soundtrack. Well, except with this track, which opens the film and totally rips the rest of the original soundtrack double-LP a new asshole. Powerpop by numbers about some supposed “Good Girls” who are clearly sluts, sung by this one-hit L.A. wonder with a rapper’s name.

These two chiefs couldn’t have put together a more career shattering cover shot (my guess is that Donnie & Joe’s mum had something to do with this). Both teenage Emerson brothers in matching white pant-suits, giant collars and a goofy SEARS style backdrop looking like the older of the two is growing out of the back of the younger, like some Siamese twin in a time-warp. Despite their straight-to-the-dollar-bin look, this LP from ’79 is loaded with unexpectedly soulful, psychy pop hits. Heartstring-tugging ballads and trippy, stoney jams all glued together with bright reverb and Donnie’s barely-confident vocals.

Donnie & Joe Emerson – Give Me The Time
Donnie & Joe Emerson – Baby

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I know I’m probably a little late on this, I’m not the most current dude, but a really great way to get introduced to new music is by drinking beer and smoking pot. Blah blah blah “liver disease”, blah blah blah “low sperm count”. How about, “awesome amounts of patience to sift through hours of YouTube threads, blogs and message boards chasing forgotten treasures”? Or “tireless yapping with other record nerds about shit you don’t know about yet”? Just be sure to take notes, because there’s a good chance you’re going to forget a whole lot about what you learned before the morning. Case in point, this 7 inches of reissued wax only found its way into my collection because of a crumpled, beer soaked note I found in a pant pocket after a late nighter, in which the phrase “awesome Sing Sing reissues” was chicken scratched onto a torn chunk of grocery bag. Lo-fi power poppish punk with a hint of TV Personalities, recorded in ’79 and reissued this year. Grab one before they’re gone.

Voice Of The Puppets – I Don’t Want To Know

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This track has been in heavy mix rotation since I stole it off the awesome Mod Punk Archives site years ago. A perfect 60′s revival pop hit (tipping the hat to the Byrds, the Zombies and other post-mod British Invasion rockers), but recorded on the other side of the pond in the mid 80′s by San Diego garage-heads. Comprised of members of better known SoCal garage scene favorites like the Tell-Tale Hearts and the Crawdaddys, the Nashville Ramblers had a short run with little to show for it, but what they did manage to record was so timeless its been a staple of power-pop comps (like Bomp’s “The Roots Of Power Pop” or Rhino’s “Children of Nuggets”) for the last 20 years. Mike Stax’s Ugly Things Records recently reissued a limited edition of the original 7″, snatch one up before they’re gone.

Nashville Ramblers – The Trains

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Bonus:
Nashville Ramblers – The Trains live on “Its Happening”, 1987

A precursor to the legendary New Zealand band the Tall Dwarfs, Toy Love was the short lived punk project by Dwarfs front man Chris Knox and guitarist Alec Bathgate. Amped and gritty, but teetering on the edge of New Wave with strong pop sensibilities, Toy Love is considered one of the first stepping stones to the Dunedin Sound indie-pop scene of the 80s (as documented by the amazing Flying Nun label). The over-amped dirge of Aussie contemporaries like The Scientists or X, mixed with the punk-dying-to-be-pop of the Soft Boys, this ripper was my morning drive “Fuck You, Job” song for a month.

Toy Love – Pull Down The Shades

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//photo by david fowler

The Method were a short lived punk band from 1970s London who released two singles, the first being the ripping Kings On The Corner 7 inch these tracks are from. Chunky bass, bleating sax and a 50′s bubble-gum vibe – how this managed to evade the success of similar sounding jams, like Nick Lowe’s “Heart Of The City” or any one of a handful of Ramones hits is a mystery to me. It took me years to refind these tracks after a hard-drive blowout (and I haven’t had the guts to pony up the 80 bones on the off chance one comes up on E-bay), so grab these and share them before Jesse does that lame thing where he takes down all the tracks I post due to “bandwidth issues” or whatever.

[Jesse's Edit: You have a whole entire year to share them by the way..]

The Method – Dynamo
The Method – Kings On The Corner

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Once when I was on tour, I ended up smoking a bunch of opiated pot after a show in Arcata California. The people we were staying with had a big brown rock of crystalized opium, which they grated over a pipe full of California green. This wasn’t really a great idea, I’ve had better, but it got worse. After getting zooted out of our fucking minds we ended up bombing hills on skateboards, which was a terrible idea. This wasn’t a leisurely roll down an incline. When I say bombing hills, I mean to the point where you get the speed-wobbles really bad then all of a sudden you’re going so fast you’re perfectly stable, a wave a calm giving you a short lived feeling of invincibility – the skateboarding version of breaking the sound barrier. After blowing through intersection after intersection, cheating death about nine too many times, we went back to the house and listened to what the roomates called “opium music”, which turned out to be Ben Harper or some bullshit. If you’re going to call anything “opium music” you’d better be listening to something that’s the equivalent of slipping into a big, comfy, ice-cream coated coma, like this vocal version of a track from the trippy-ass Jan Hammer Group off their 1977 release Melodies. Later they popped their collars and went on to score the Miami Vice series, but half a decade before they blew smoke and minds with this gem.

Jan Hammer Group – Don’t You Know

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The power-trio line-up of the U.K.’s hard rock shredders Groundhogs hit gold with their 1971 release of the LP Split. Mostly consisting of a four part title track (apparently inspired by a panic attack lead axeman Tony McPhee had a year earlier), it was the track “Cherry Red” that earned the record a ton of attention and landed the band on tour with the Rolling Stones that year. Originating from the whitey English blues scene that birthed Cream and a bunch of other bands I can’t stand, Groundhogs turned up the volume, dumbed down the riffs and went hog-wild with the hard psych that put them on the same hot, dirty highway as drug addled proto-metal contemporaries like Hawkwind and the Pink Fairies.

The Groundhogs – Cherry Red

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//illustration by A. Hillhouse

The thing that always threw me about this awesome Thin Lizzy classic is how “there’s going to be a jailbreak, somewhere in the town”. Somewhere? I kinda figured the jailbreak would happen at the jail, but maybe that’s why these geniuses wrote a pile of killer proto-metal glam hits in the 70′s and I write for my friends blog.

Thin Lizzy – Jailbreak

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I still can’t believe this dude wrote “Do They Know Its Christmas?”.

Boomtown Rats – Lookin’ After No. 1

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