Rocket From the Crypt are playing locally tonight, at a big ol' to-do in a ballroom with the Creepy Creeps and Beehive and the Barracudas. "Wait, WTF?" you say? Rocket played their last gig on Halloween, in 2005? You have the proof, the CD/DVD of that final show. So do I. Apparently there's something in the blood because Rocket From the Crypt apparently will not die. Fine with me, I dig 'em.
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It's the night you've been prepping for and some of the more hardcore of you are cracking your knuckles and getting ready to run this whole thing right off the road. Hat's off to you and your soon to be disheveled costume, hat's off to you and your miserable day after. You are warriors...of some sort. Here's three more numbers all from the same era, all with the same title, but definitely different factions.
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Here's two more mixes to keep your mess going. As long as you've go music you can go all night right? Seriously, why do you think they give you sick days? It's not so you can nurse a cold. You can do that at work and get paid for it. Sick days were invented for the all day hangover, and you can tell your boss I said that.
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Can you imagine that there are kids growing up today who aren't even cognizant of the Cramps? That's a scary thought. They're one done band that I will continue to force on younger folk, and not just because of their music, but also because of all the music they kept alive. Seriously, how many of the Lux and Ivy's Favorites would still be getting spins if they didn't drag them out of obscurity. They did us a service.
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This is a good exercise in contrasting and comparing. The Munsters theme, in four versions. All are different, from surf to jazz organ, and you might be surprised by which version you end up liking the most. The original un-aired pilot for the TV show is down there too. Some of the actors are different and you'll note that it's in color. The resulting TV show was done in black and white. Go figure.
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Here they come, the last minute cavalcade of Halloween tunes from years past. As you true blue party monsters know, weekend parties are for amateurs. It's not over until the last guy shows up at work hungover on Tuesday morning. So get 'em now ghouls.
First up is the perennial favorite It's Monster Surfing Time. The LP cover above tells you just about all you'll need to know. Really, it's the ultimate cash-in, monsters and surf music, both in one fell swoop. There are details, some. The band members aren't named, but five of the songs were written by a J.South, leading to speculation that Joe "Games People Play" South had something to do with it. In the end, who cares? It's good clean fun, it's no Eddie and the Showmen, but it works. Just add some booze as catalyst.
NOTE: When you click on the link at Rock 'n' Soul Ichiban you'll be
taken to MediaFire. Click only on the green "Download" button. If there
is no green button, just clear your browsing history and cookies and try
it again. Likewise if you've been there before and just didn't bother
to download it. Just remember, green button only, clear history. Now go
give them hell.
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Holy shit, it's Saturday night on Halloween weekend! I might be too late, but if your party ain't in high gear, or you're one of the brave souls that rips it up on Sunday or Monday nights, mornings be damned, here's the annual posting of Reverend Tom Frost's Bloody Halloween Mixes, twenty of them. That's right, twenty. If you stream them back to back their good for almost a solid day of ghoulish misbehavior. Do it up right. Make a mess.
Reverend Tom Frost
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Knowing my predilection towards quick and easy posts and my willingness to just throw anything up here to keep this thing chugging down the road, I'm kind of amazed that I haven't ever posted the Mummies. It's such a no-brainer, particularly at Halloween.
One thing you need to get over about the Mummies is their get-ups. You might say that it's a gimmick. I say it's immaterial. If they want to get all tangled up in that shit, fine, good for them. How many of you wear the same stuff to work every day? Let's end it there. These guys are fighting the good fight. Raw garage, cheaply recorded. Not the retro every-detail-in-place type. More like the Wailers or Sonics playing a frat house after the school burned down, and the jocks and academics went running home to Mommy, leaving nothing but beer, busted up equipment and drunk horny kids. It is sloppy, it is of questionable fidelity, and it isn't for everyone. But I can get all up into this stuff. This kind of noise is humbling. It is so much the essence of what rock 'n' roll really is and should be, without regard to polish, it makes half of your record collection look silly.
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Here's more party fuel, Ghouls With Attitude. Mixes like this one will be
probably be around forever. This one certainly won't die. It's been floating around since at least 2004, hosted on one blog one year, and somewhere else the following year, and
so on. It's almost like old school tape swappers.
This mix is old stuff, fifties and sixties for the most part. There's a
more than a few corny "Monster Mash" ripoffs, some that are a bit more
rockin', a token Criswell cut, and all sorts of B-movie radio spots.
Good stuff. Some of it can seem silly or stupid but keep listening. You
will succumb. It's like some sort of Stockholm Syndrome
thing, There's links to it below, on some bare bones type page, with
individual song files, and a separate file for the artwork and credits.
There's also a link to a page that has it in two zip files. Here's a few
samples.
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Ghouls With Attitude - Both discs in separate downloadsat Spock's Record Round-Up Scroll down. NOTE:
Once at File Factory, scroll down to the bottom. If you're a fellow
tightwad, you'll want to look for the red "slow dowload" button. I
haven't tried them, but the slow download speed for the first disc is 23
minutes. Maybe later...
As hard as it is to believe now, there was a time when the first three Stooges LPs were all out of print, nearly impossible to find. If you wanted them you'd have to find them used, more than likely in a thrift store. And this was roughly five years after Raw Power came out, so the first LP and Funhouse were long gone. Used record stores weren't as common as they'd become later, and collector types would comb the pages of Goldmine. But if you were a regular Creem reading teenager, you'd have to be on the lookout. Thankfully, my friend Ed was that kind of guy. Even though he had the Stooges LPs, he'd pick up extra copies when he ran across them. That's how I got the first Stooges LP, I bought one of his extra copies. Actually, he may have given it to me, because he was that kinda guy. He still is.
I was thinking about that the other night, the period when I was first getting into that LP, and how the sound seemed so much more menacing then the punk bands that almost universally cited the Stooges as an influence. Even when compared to other iconic bands. Take for instance, the New York Dolls' Too Much Too Soon, a perfectly fine proto-punk rock 'n' roll album, and the Ramones first LP, an absolute template for hundreds of punk bands, and compare those two landmark LPs to the Stooges Funhouse. Gads is right. Holy fuckin' shit. Completely different ball game. This is apples and rotten oranges. I think there might be a punk rock version of the Beatles/Stones thing buried in there. You're a Ramones person or a Stooges person. Of course you can like both, just like you can like both the Beatles or the Stones, but you're going to lean one way or the other. In another time I may have considered myself a Ramones person, but after many listenings and much dissecting over the years, I am definitely now a Stooges person. So where does that leave the Dolls? Well, they'll just have to be the Who or the Kinks in this equation.
Jim Jarmusch has a new film out about the Stooges. If you know him, you know his movies are always worth checking out, so one on the Stooges should be pretty good. What few glimpses there are of old footage there is in the trailer looks like it's been cleaned up pretty well, especially when compared to earlier versions. The film opens in selected cities this Friday and then goes all over the place. Don't fret if it doesn't get to you, it'll end up on DVD soon enough. If you have Iggy on the brain, and need some other sort of fix, he's on Austin City Limits this Friday. Yee haw.
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Halloween is coming, so it's time for the annual scary mix glut. Here's some mixes that should just about cover you for about four hours of drinking, cavorting and what have you. Most of them are from the early-mid sixties, some novelty, some instrumentals with scary names. Way more Halloween themed songs that you could round up on your own before Friday, when all of this dressing up nonsense kicks into high gear.
A note about downloading at Mediafire: If you see a green "download" button, or a green "captcha" button, that's where the goods are. If you don't see them or it says "permission denied", close the page, clear your browsing history and cookies. Don't click on any of the decoy buttons, including the cleverly also green arrow button decoy. It's not as if you click on the wrong button and it's doomsday. It's just annoying pop-ups. Visit the Grey Haus links to preview the song lists.
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For whatever reason, Mick Collins always seemed like the kind of guy you could sit around and drink beer and talk shop with. A no hang ups, unpretentious sort of guy, with taste, semi-chops and lack of preciousness. Never met the guy, and, short of videos, I've never seen him live. But the common thread that runs through the Gories, the Dirtbombs and all the other bands he's been in is a non-retro, capture the spirit but leave the button downs and pointy shoes at home, sort of thing. It just seems that way. Just a general impression, but enough of one to lump him in the one of us category.
After seeing a mention of the Gories in a book today, it was gonna be a Gories night, but it turned into a Gories and Dirtbombs night, then the Oblivians snuck in (Collins wasn't in that band but they hit the same vein), and then a chance encounter with a mix at Adult Swim of all places, Garage Swim, which isn't all garage but raw enough to get you halfway there. It being Saturday night, I'm theoretically off the clock, so these will have to do.
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I don't know anything about the Black Cult, nor do I really give a shit. As of this moment, all I know is that they have a song that I like, and it's the only song by them I've heard, one for one, batting a thousand. They're in the book, as it were. (a nod to the Crippler), a walk-on at the end of the season (as long as were throwing around baseball metaphors). If I stop now they have a perfect record. Yeah. Maybe later.
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Here's a good Andre Williams starter kit. Groove Addict posted two LPs, one is a compilation of hie early 45s (late 50s) and the other is a 1995 LP released right about the time he was cleaning up his act. You can hear what the years have done to his voice, which wasn't exactly Al Green to begin with.
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I suppose I should know who these guys are, but I don't actively follow current hip hop. Doesn't matter. It could be Pat Boone, with a title like "Fuck Donald Trump", I'm listening. This one is worthy, catchy as all get out. Not that it takes much for "Fuck Donald Trump" to play on repeat in my head.
If you are a jazz dabbler and don't know what this type of jazz is compared to that type of jazz, you might be surprised when you realize that it's not all squawking saxophones blowing all over the place. "Oh that's free jazz" you say. You're partially right. Free jazz itself can be broken down further, but I don't know enough about jazz to really know any more than that. But the defunct site Destination: Out apparently does. Here's their free jazz primer, with a couple of the thirteen songs that they posted, two very different examples.
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The next Stones album is apparently going to be all blues covers. Whatever. I'm not going to bag on them for that. Here's the first song they've released from the imaginatively titled LP "Blue and Lonesone", a cover of Little Walter's "Just Your Fool". For comparison, for those of you unfamiliar with Little Walter, some of his stuff. Yeah.
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The Mystery Suggester just hepped me to this one yesterday and, as always, she was right. This smokes. After a short piano intro, the first thing you notice is the guitar tone. The clickety clack sort of chicken pickin', kind of Bakersfield if you know what I mean. Then those drums come in, something about the sound on them. Turn it up. It's as if you're in the room with the drummer, but he's way over there, banging the shit out of them. When the piano returns and is playing off the drums, forget it, this sucker takes off. After another verse, a guitar solo, more banging, more pounding, then the fade out. I could certainly listen to this all day. Alas, apparently Roy Jones was a one and done guy because I can't find any reference beyond a single 45. But a mighty slab it is.
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Of all the covers to do, why this one? What, are we Aerosmith now? Jeez. I can think of plenty of other Beatles songs that they could have done that would not have reminded me of fucking Aerosmith, the band that has always so desperately wanted to be the '72-era Stones. They should've known better.
Sometimes album covers work, even when they're so primitive they shouldn't. I took one look at Lowell Fulsom's In A Heavy Bag album cover and it screamed off, meaning something was going to be a little off about it, not off in a bad way, just off as in unusual. And there is something off about it. It's a sparse production, clean and funky, but you will no doubt notice the separation. Look Ma, I'm stereo!
That's not to diminish the quality of the music. Fulsom was a west coaster, but this sucker is vintage 1969 Muscle Shoals, with some tasteful picking, and horns coming out of this channel and other stuff coming out from that one. Sounds just as gloriously off as the album cover. Oh hell yeah.
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While I'm usually not one for psychedelic pop, when there's something new at Office Naps, I am going to listen. I don't care if it was titled "hyphenated dog shit", the host of the site, Little Danny has such impeccable taste that I defer. Maybe not impeccable taste to you, but taste that's a lot like mine, and far more academic. And it's the stuff I'm too lazy to got seek out on my own, as in old B-side shit, oddball, obscure, vocal, jazz, beatnik, surf, all the stuff that only a buddy would turn you onto. Ergo, Office Naps is my buddy, I dutifully tip my cap to Little Danny, whatever the hell his real name is. A good ol' fashioned Hee Haw salute.
When you go there to check the mix, do some digging around, The archive is in the left column and there's a ton of older posts, going back years You really need to bookmark it and dig through it little by little, that's what it's there for.
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If you're working for "the hardest working man in show business", a workaholic in need of an endless supply of funky grooves behind him, you have no choice other than to be a ultra tight well oiled machine. The J.B.s were, integral to James Brown's sound in the seventies, as well as Lyn Collins, Marva Whitney, Bobby Byrd and others in his funky family. This shit is tight.
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If you're given a pair of bongos, like most people you would bang on them and goof around, doing the parody of beatniks thing or something like that. Rarely does someone just handed a pair of bongos decide that they will become the bongo man. That's what sets Preston Epps apart from me or you. After becoming familiar with conga drums, a women handed him bongos and suggested that he try them, and he never looked back. So it is that when people think of bongos, they think of Epps.
You can't get a lot of hits out of bongos, but that didn't stop Epps from trying, and he did manage a couple before going into studio work. The biggee was "Bongo Rock". One thing's for sure, when you play bongos and the song is yours, you have half the title taken care of.
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You'll get the gist of this one by the end of the first verse. The intro starts with a nice driving beat, then a rhythm guitar with an ample amount of distortion, the kind that a kid in his bedroom would have, trying to make his shitty little practice amp sound like a Marshall stack. The two together would be enough, but the you get organ on top of that. Some of you would say that adds to it, but I like that guitar tone, a lot, so the organ seems in the way. The vocals come in, in an nonthreatening pitch that sounds like the Vogues' "Five O'Clock World" singer gone rouge. The dude comes in singing with conviction, about food. He really means it man. Wait to you get to the end of the first verse, "Cook a little thing called chocolate pie!!!" Sold. I don't care what the rest sounds like. The whole thing reminds me of band in a skit from Saturday Night Live, just corny as shit, the exaggerated delivery.
It's a bit of a hassle to download, so a streaming version is down there too. It you take in the referenced SNL video, watch it to the end. It gets more chocolate pie as it goes on. Of course all of this is pure shit, evidence of how ludicrous the whole game is.
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There's a handful of rock 'n' roll artists that should be considered required listening if you want to have any inkling of where that crap it is that you listen to came from. One of those artists is Little Richard, the screaming, shouting, piano pounding Georgia motherfucking peach. Without getting too into it, thus relieving myself of the dutiful gushing the man deserves, let's just leave it this: he's in the top five of OG rockers, no question. He may not have kept up the Grade A shit for years on end, but he did it when it needed being done.
I've posted his stuff before, but I just ran into a thirty two song compilation, including all of his Specialty whoppers. You've got no excuse. If you don't eat these up, you need to face it, you're a poseur.
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