During the course of my informal research into the history of LA punk, I've heard a lot of unfortunate stories about bands that never got signed to a record deal and disappeared without a trace. One of the things that punk was supposed to accomplish was freeing these smaller bands from the tyranny of major labels; a crusade that achieved a few notable successes, but largely failed to live up to the hype.

If you're in a band and thinking that signing with a major label is going to make you rich, I'd strongly suggest reading some of these articles from the June 1994 issue of MAXIMUMROCKANDROLL. Steve Albini's The Problem With Music and Lee Diamond's By the Power of Satan will be of particular interest to aspiring rock stars.

I've always felt that the music biz was a pit of greased weasels, but after reading these essays, I think that's being unfair to the weasels.

Thanks to rone (AKA: the King of Power Pop)

Posted by MrBaliHai at 7:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

This post at my friend Jonathan's 'blog about the Birdaphone led me to the Spike Jones Fan site, which in turn brought me to Thomas Pynchon's (?!) liner notes for the album, Spiked! The Music of Spike Jones, then finally to this musical postcard at the Internet Museum of Flexi/Cardboard/Oddity Records.

I never did find a picture of a Birdaphone.

Spike caricature courtesy of the Wondrous Wayno

Posted by MrBaliHai at 9:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Seems like I can't turn around these days without finding another website dedicated to Flipside Magazine or LA punk in general. Here's the best one I've seen so far, the "official" Flipside memorial maintained by Michele, a former staff writer, who obviously created this site as a labor of love (along with some serious sweat!).

There's an awful lot of cool eye candy here: a database of the first 44 issues, an excellent gallery of fliers, and an extremely cool database of early live shows in the LA area.

The section that's most interesting for me is the photo retrospective because there are pictures here of people I haven't seen for almost 30 years: Al, X-8, and Pooch, to name but a few.

Speaking of Pooch, I stumbled across his band's website last night, and listened to a couple of their songs. Fun stuff. Al also dropped me a nice e-mail a few days ago.

Lest anyone should think I'm an old punk fart wallowing in nostalgia, let me point you to Alice Bag's blog where her most recent entry addresses her reasons for documenting the early days of LA's punk scene, which mirror mine to a great degree.

Posted by MrBaliHai at 12:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Accusations that rock 'n' roll is the Devil's music have been around ever since Elvis first twitched his hips onstage, but these claims were scoffed at by the non-religious, and vigorously denied by the performers themselves. However, in the last couple of years it's become increasingly clear that in the '70s at least, a lot of rock's biggest names, while not worshipping Old Scratch directly, were indeed attracted to, and heavily influenced by the English occultist, Aleister Crowley.

Peter-R. Koenig claims that David Bowie was one acolyte who never bothered to disguise his admiration for the Great Beast, at least in his lyrics.

Posted by MrBaliHai at 9:04 AM | Permalink

Punk History Canada has a pretty astonishing gallery of album covers, band photos, buttons, gig posters, and fanzines from the Great White North. And kudos to these canucks for coming up with one of the most offensive band names I've seen in quite a while. Betcha they didn't get much radio play.

Posted by MrBaliHai at 9:14 PM | Permalink

Photographer Theresa Kereakes was one of my contemporaries on the LA scene back in the day, and like a lot of us greying punks, she's started blogging about it. Lots of great posts here about behind-the-scenemakers like Greg Shaw and Kim Fowley. Thanks for sharing, Theresa!

Found by The Cartoonist, somewhere in Schlectfingerdorf

Posted by MrBaliHai at 8:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

M.Ace links to guitarist Phil Manzanera's very fine Roxy Music Archive. I suggest you read it along with this excellent fan site, These Vintage Years.

Posted by MrBaliHai at 10:34 AM | Permalink