Send My Conscience Home in a Taxi

(The sound in this is appalling.)

Jello Biafra of Dead Kennedy's fame has got himself a new band - well, newish, they're a good four years old at this point. They delight the name of Jello Biafra and the Guantanamo School of Medicine!

And they're touring, will be here in Melbourne on May 11th and 12th. And I've decided I have to go.

Jello apparently hasn't played music in Australia since the Dead Kennedy's toured in 1983. The word "infamous" was used to describe said tour. Wow, just blundered across this rather awesome article by Jello himself about their tour of Australia. He really got into the local music scene!

Jello hasn't had a band since the Dead Kennedy's broke up, but turns up on loads of other people's records. Well, he and the guys from Ministry did have a side project called Lard, but they played maybe six live shows in their entire existence.

More recently he's done two albums with The Melvins - another of my favourite bands. This outfit is sometimes referred to as "The Jelvins". If they toured, I'd be first in line for tickets and then leaning against the door of the venue. Yes, I might be into them.


"Monkey Wrenching world orders is how we party."

So I will make sure Deb and Pip are both sane, well fed and ready to go to sleep, and I will race over to the Corner Hotel, and pretend like I'm 24 and dancing at a gig.

And maybe one day I'll make it to 70000 Tons of Metal, a Metal festival on a cruise ship. I imagine you'd be able to smell the stench of all them metalheads from several kilometres down wind....!

There seems to be a whole whack of big, dare I say, dinosaur bands touring here to Australia next year. So far I've seen posters for Kiss supported by Mötley Crüe (note Heavy Metal Umlats) and I believe Thin Lizzy. How the hell is Thin Lizzy still performing given that lead singer, bass player and founder Phil Lynott has been dead since 1986?

Also seen on various posters - Neil Young and Crazy Horse, George Clinton and P-Funk. Also Black Sabbath, with what appears to be their original line-up, well, at least Ozzy Osbourne and guitarist Tommy Iommi are in the band.

And Bruce Springsteen and indeed Iggy and the Stooges. Oh, and Blondie supported by, of all bands, the Stranglers and Australian legends The Saints. I'd go see that gig for the support acts!

The 1970's called, they want their music back.

The thing is, I'd like to see some of these gigs - Iggy at least - but what else is happening early next year? We're having a baby in early February, which will make late night rock gigs a bit of a problem for at least the first half of next year!

Almost forgot to mention, Deb and my favourite artist of the moment, Amanda Palmer is scheduled to play on our baby's due date. Actually, I should say "was scheduled", looks like she's moved the dates back because one of her good friends is very sick. Deb was seriously talking about going to the gig, and hoping that the music might bring on labour!


And last but not least, a band I have been buying CD's by since 1990, a band who's logo I am seriously considering for my next tattoo, Einstürzende Neubauten are going to be here in mid February. I have never seen them live, damn it!

My theory for the reason that there's such an influx of huge bands? The strong Australian dollar, and Australia having one of the few economies in the world that's not cactus. These gigs will all sell out for sure, and Ozzy can buy himself a few more tons of whatever drug he's doing these days, and Iggy can play all the rounds of golf he wants...!

Saturday, April 21st, was International Independent Record Store Day. I got excited about this in a bigger way that usual, partly because I feel a need to get some new music, and also because of a certain nostalgia about how we used to buy and discover music.

I confess I'm one of those who is causing the death of the record store. I really like music, but of late I've routinely bought albums off eBay or digitally online, even from iTunes when I can't avoid it. My complete collection of MP3s (and FLAC and ogg and the like) numbers about 35,000 tracks now. My tastes are fairly specific and sometimes quite obscure - anyone else heard of, say, the Slugfuckers? Coa? And also diverse, from Ani DiFranco to John Zorn via early Einstürzende Neubauten and James Brown! So I find I rarely listen to the radio and have struggled in the past to find things I really wanted in an actual store. I also have poor impulse control, so frequently I would hear about a band and inside of five minutes be buying their stuff online.

But this year, I realised that I needed some new music, that my tastes have become ridiculously inclusive, although still not the stuff that gets played on the radio, and that we need record stores. And that several had opened in the northside of town that I'd never been to.

Retailing is struggling in Australia, but record stores are struggling more than most. The market has changed, technology has changed, and it's nerds like me who are partly to blame.

I made a list of all the stores I wanted to visit, concentrating on stores I've never been to or rarely get to, because they're on the wrong side of town, south of the river. Then I made this also map, a huge all-day loop around town visiting about ten stores! Then it all went to shit, my cat was sick so the middle of my day I had to stop and take him to the vet.

And then my day started sadly. The first two places I tried to visit before having, Trash Parlour in West Brunswick and Round and Round records in Brunswick were both closed. Clearly the info on the Record Store Day website was dated...



Round and Round used to be down on Sydney Road. Looking around, I came across a place called Title, which turned out to be quite good. I picked up a CD by a band called Essendon Airport.



At that point I went racing across to Thornbury looking for a place called Thornbury Records. I totally got the address wrong, but instead stumbled into a place called The Music Jungle.


The chap with the grey hair was playing guitar outside. I'd been past this store before, and it turned out to be something of a delight. I had to physically restrain myself from buying a wad of vinyl by The Last Poets, and a 12" single of... this!


At that point I had to drag my kitty to the vet.

Turned out has a slightly infected ear, poor thing.

After rendering Marvin home, I finally started on my journey south. I popped into the White Rabbit Record Bar in Kensington.

Which also has food much to my delight. Caught up with recumbenteer briefly, and picked up a DVD of George Clinton and P-Funk!

Hopped on Citylink, realising too late that my sister's car which I was driving didn't have an etag *slaps head*. Made it to Greville Records, a store I like a lot, but which I haven't been to in at least five years. When I told the proprietor that I bought records on eBay, he did this!


Around the corner I stumbled upon a place called Obese Records (I was going to post a link, but their website does something of which I don't approve - plays music!), which specialised in Hip-Hop and the like, and also sold an extensive range of spray paint!

I was pleased to encounter quite a fat guy working there, their name does not lie :-)

By this stage, it was approaching 5.30PM, so I rushed literally around the corner to a place called Licorice Pie Records, a place that sells only vinyl. I picked up three vinyl albums, and again had to physically restrain myself from buying loads more. I don't even know if my record player actually works!


And then finally I made my way home. My original plan to visit about ten stores hadn't quite happened, and I'd also managed to visit two stores that weren't on my list at all. However, they both turned out to be excellent discoveries. My eventual haul, which trust me could have been MUCH larger, looked like this:

Three 12" singles by Foetus, eight assorted CDs, including two by James Brown, and one double album for Deb - The Best of Burlesque! - and a DVD.

I had a great time. I made a list of things to look out for, thinking I'd struggle to find anything. Not so - only James Brown was on my list, the rest of these were just fortunate finds. In a few months, when my bank balance has recovered, I might do another small tour, visit some of the places I didn't make it to, restock with even more new music.

Gil Scott-Heron died overnight. He was only 62, but apparently had a ferocious drug habit.

This is from his most recent (and hence last) album:

Althuogh you probably know him better for "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised":

(Sorry, that video is a bit shit, but the song is all there.)

I'm listening to the numerous albums of his in my collection. And then I'll have to listen to all the music I have that he influnced.

(Found this on Flickr. My shitting iPhone photos aren't worth uploading!)

Yo my Digga's, Public Enemy rolled into town again over the Christmas break. There were the headlining band at the Falls Festival, but luckily for me they also did a side-show at the Corner Hotel on December 29th.

This is the fourth time I've seen PE, I saw them in 1992 at Festival Hall with Ice-T, then in 1998 at the Palace in St. Kilda, with The Avalanches when they were still a functioning live band. Then in 2007 at the Espy Hotel. I'm pretty sure that's it - I do know they were here in 1990 and 2002, but I definitely didn't see them at either of those gigs.

Their show was typically chaotic - lots of stops and starts, lots of random chatting to the crowd. They also tour these days with a band of sorts, a guitarist, bass player and a drummer. None of whom, it has to be said, are much good. There are really only two members of the band - Chuck D and Flavor Flav, and most of the music seemed to come from backing tapes with the occasional scratching from their "new" DJ, DJ Lord. The way the mix was done I could barely hear the instruments (this might also have been because of the industrial earplugs I wear to gigs these days).

At one point I counted ten people on stage - Chuck and Flavor, the bass player, guitarist and drummer, DJ Lord, two members of the S1W (Security of the First World, whose job mostly seems to be dancing), a random bearded guy who seemed to be part of their crew, and a random Korean MC who seemed to be part of their entourage. The stage at the Corner is big, but it's not that big! They also dragged a few other randoms onto the stage during the gig - one of the members of 2 Live Crew (I think it was Fresh Kid Ice), said chaps son, and another guy who I can't remember at all now. They also dragged four random Australian MC's from the audience and had them do their thing.

Lots of their songs started well, then sort of petered out with random ramblings and redundant introductions of the band - I think the guitarist was introduced at least four times.

OK, so, having done all that whinging, I did enjoy the show. It was based around their 1989/1990 album "Fear of a Black Planet", which was also the first album of theirs I got into. It has some dull tracks on it, but it also has "Fear of a Black Planet", "Welcome To the Terrordome", "911 Is A Joke" and "Fight the Power" on it. All of which they performed. Whatever else one can say about them, they have written some great songs, so it was great to hear them performed (again).

They have done at least five albums since them, which barely seem to rate a mention - which is pity, some of their recent work has been incendiary, such as "Son of Bush". And indeed this track:


But only three of the songs they played dated from post 1990 - and one of those was from 1991. Which was a pity, it must be a bit dull playing stuff that one wrote in the 1980's. It's a bit like seeing Bob Dylan, who is about as animated as a wax-work, trying to work through things he wrote when he was 25...

So, I suppose I'll probably go see them again when they roll through town in two or three years time, but I doubt they'll have changed much... Seeing as I'm the same angry suburban white boy who was buying their stuff on vinyl :-)

Henry on stage in Melbourne (not taken by me).

A week or so back (Thursday 15th and Friday 16th of April in fact) I went to see Henry Rollins do his spoken word thing. Yes, two nights running... Eep.

Me and Henry go way backs (hey, all his fans are on first name terms!). I first saw him do a spoken word gig in February of 1992 in a tiny little venue in Collingwood. Damn... That's eighteen years ago! Then I saw him again in 1997, and I think there was a long gap then till I saw him do a gig in Geelong of all places in early... Must have been 2006. And he must come out here every two years because he played the Comedy Theatre in early 2008. A gig I found memorable because I was very sick with food poisoning, and was throwing up not an hour before the show started.

So that's what, four gigs over 16 years? I also saw his band play once in what must have been 1994 or so. And I have most of his (spoken word) albums.

But this was the first time I had the intestinal fortitude to sign up for two of his gigs two nights running. In fact, he did three days in a row, on the Saturday night he signed up for what must have been a small show at a theatre in Thornbury of all places. I was out of town - Sister's birthday, shesh! - so I couldn't make it to the third one...!

Henry leads an interesting life, then gets on stage and talks about it. This time around he told a cool story about introducing The Stooges (in MP3 form) to some teenagers he met in central Sri Lanka, getting work acting in a show called Sons of Anarchy (which I will have to look up), doing a stint as a judge on another TV show called "RuPaul's Drag Race", giving a graduation address at a small college in northern California, how he cried when Barack Obama was elected, and a whole pile of other stories I can barely recall now.

One of the funniest stories he told was about his guide when he was travelling recently in... I think it was Laos. This guy was called Ai, which lead him to make the existential statement "I am Ai!". He had a great turn of phrase this guy. One morning instead of "Good morning" he said "What is your life???". Later they stopped in a forest to "biologic the tree" which meant to take a piss! And told Henry that when he got back to the US they would call him "Mr Curve" because they had driven through so many mountains with windy roads... You couldn't make this shit up...

On Thursday night, he went on stage at about 9.20, and we got out of there at about midnight. Then I rode my bike home! I'm hardcore/an idiot. Friday was about the same, maybe ten minutes shorter - so in all I got about five hours of Henry Rollins in two days. The second show was about 70% the same as the first one - I have no idea how he does it - although some of the details of the stories he told differed. It was still ace to see both gigs, even if I was completely exhausted by Saturday... when I drove down to Geelong. I don't know how to slow down...

The other night I made it to a gig for the first time in ages. The What Is Music festival made one of it's infrequent appearances here. Most festivals seem to have a schedule, yearly or biannually or whatever. What is music seems to occur more or less at random. Every eighteen months or two years or just whenever the organisers feel like it.

The session I made it to was at the East Brunswick.

I'm actually not entirely sure who I saw, aside from Oren Ambarchi and Matt Skitz, mostly because I recognise Oren from WIM? festivals going back at least a decade. He was in a band called Phlegm many years ago. When I showed up a guy was playing a set of pedals and other odd bits and pieces so vigorously he ended up breaking something over his head, and then bleeding.

Oren Ambarchi and Matt Skitz where on next. The Matt character is a short manic drummer, who played a twin-bass drum kit like he was possessed. Oren was basically doing perverted things to a Gibson Les Paul, to make it make oodles of noise. Luckily I'd bought some earplugs, because it was so loud my corneas where vibrating so much I could hardly focus! The rest of my body was humming a bit to - something like how I imagine a Sunn O))) concert would be. I like a good loud gig :-)

The other acts seemed mostly to be guys playing laptops, which I don't have much patience for. I get to see people sitting at laptops all day in my office... Not really exciting to see at a gig... Ah well.

Sorry for the late notice, as it were.

Saturday April 18th is Record Store Day. A really neat idea to remind everyone that there are still independent record stores out there.

I probably won't have time to visit any, but my life would be a lot duller without Peril Underground, Missing Link, Collectors Corner, Basement Records, Discurio and Polyester. Not to mention the now-defunct Gaslight Records and Au-Go-Go. So go there and buy something obscure :-)

OK, enough of the one line entries (I blame Twitter)!

I have a minor dilemma.

I'm a big fan of a chap called Eddie Perfect, who I think is a bit of a musical genius. I happened across him almost by accident three or four years ago when he was doing a show at the Malthouse called "Drink Pepsi Bitch!" He's funny, he's clever and he has a great voice. I also have the CD's from a couple of his earlier shows "Welcome to the Inside of Ed's Head" and "Angry Eddie". I hum his tunes, and I've also seen him with his band perform at Trades Hall, and he was in the production of "Keating! The Musical We Had To Have" that I saw in '07... Anyway, I like the guy.

(Listen/watch some of his stuff on myspace. Yuck I hate that site...)

He's cute too.... OK, this is all getting a bit gay :-)

Anyway, he has chosen for his latest subject, a certain Shane Warne who, I believe, plays, or played, a game called Cricket. I hate cricket, and I have a fairly low opinion of cricketers. Well, I'm sure some of them are decent enough blokes, but damn, to get paid heaps to throw a ball at someone...

So, Shane Warne the Musical has been playing since December, and seems to be getting pretty good reviews. Eddie (we're on first name terms because I chatted to him after a show once :-) has spent most of the past three years on it... And stars in the show... Which all begs the question, given I like the performer, but find the subject matter at least disinteresting, if not downright annoying, should I go see the show?

[Poll #1352512]

I should also mention that I'm pretty broke right now, trying to save for an overseas trip, amongst other things!