It took me a couple of days to go, “Wait, fifteen minute long wandering harp based compositions would have been better?”

“And all I could do while I listened to this dude tell me how punk rock saved his life was thing, Wow. Why did my friend waste all his time going to chemotherapy? I guess we should have just played him a bunch of shitty Black Flag records.” -Chuck Klosterman excerpted from Sex, Drugs & Cocoa Puffs

**Original post**

Sometimes reality and our senses just don’t add up. Take today for instance, I want to call it a complete waste because I didn’t get anything done that I wanted to get done. In actuality today was pretty important. My health insurance expires today and I decided to go to the doctor and get something that I thought was kind of important taken care of. What would have otherwise cost me 160-360 dollars instead cost forty and the medication I was put on cost ten instead of another 150. I probably should have seen to this all yesterday because my insurance company is blocking the second half of my antibiotic cycle until they talk to the doctors, which will be tomorrow when I’m no longer under their policy. But hey, what can you do. After lots of discomforting tests and waiting I heard the diagnosis. It’s not that bad but it was still scarier than I expected and it started out with “You’re a young healthy guy so the chance you have cancer is like one percent but we feel that it would be irresponsible not to test for it…” At this point I was not really smiling anymore and began looking for things to do with my hands. By the time we actually started going into my medicine I thought the room felt a little hot. When I heard that it would last for a month and involved regular timing, I decided standing up would be a good choice. If there’s one thing I do not like it is remembering to do things on a regular basis. There was a little more information (about possible side effects like vomiting, blurred, vision, lethargy) and then I found out that while standing up seemed like a good idea, it was also physically impossible. My vision wasn’t in focus anymore (the medicine was apparently already working and I hadn’t even tried it yet) and I found myself clinging to consciousness for dear life pride. I would like to make it clear that I did not faint. I only practically fainted. I was aware of every long breath I took during that time, and was aware that they were taking my blood pressure; which, by the way, did not help to relax me. I heard them kidding the new girl about putting her to work her first day and wasn’t embarrassed at all. Eventually I moved over to the padded table/seat thing and I was rewarded for my weak constitution with some candy. Harry Potter parallels aside I did not feel much like a hero or even very privileged. The doctor informed me that the candy was normally reserved for children under ten, to which I replied that they should guard the trays better because I could reach the counter and had already taken two pieces before coming into the consultation room.

When I decided to walk to the pharmacy to get my prescription filled I spent quite a decent stretch musicless. It was warm but none of my warm weather music felt right for my mental state and I began to think, what if I did have cancer? What the hell would I play? I decided to spend the walk trying to make my “cancer playlist” and I decided that it was best not to have anything really introspective and nothing that left a lot of space for dwelling. Pop music would also be a bad choice because it would be mocking me with it’s shallow happiness. I have had a pretty stagnant iPod for the last few months and this is by no means and incredibly creative list. My room mate, Doc, pores over his playlists and listens for good transitions and cohesiveness; this is definitely not that. This is an approximation of my fleeting fancy and most of the time I listened to multiple songs by each artist, if not entire albums.

–> This sign means I couldn’t find the song anywhere and supplied the following track in its stead.

Here it is on Blip.fm apologies in advance for the shitty track quality on some of the tracks.

Arrested – Government Warning
We Live Despite Their Schemes – Ink & Dagger –> Newspaper Tragedies
Mass For The Dead – Torches To Rome –> Idle Heroes
Volcano – Turbo Fruits Every mix has that one song that just strikes you and doesn’t fit. This is it.
Building Burning (Re-edit) – Tyvek
Driving Through Natchez – Yaphet Kotto –> The Heavy Burden
Walking Disease – Trash Talk * Full Discography, with songs that are like 40 seconds long you could afford it
The Easy Way – Swamp Thing * All of Youth Is Sick
Dead Is Dead – Pulling Teeth
NYC – Portraits of Past
The Process of Suffocation – Pestilence
A Hole Into – Navio Forge –> Yellow and Fed
Assassins – Nachmystium
It’s Opposite Day, I Love You – Mustaphamond – couldn’t find a damn thing.
Born Dead, Buried Alive – Hypocrisy

Things that occurred to me later
Chancre – Grade
Tires, Tires, Globally – Get Fucked

Full disclosure: I’ve interviewed members of Tyvek before and that’s the piece that got me on TMT so they hold a special place in my heart and I consider Sam of Trash Talk a friend. I believe that 100% objective people will agree that both still kick ass. Not that anyone gains anything by being on a playlist I make but I nagged Sean Bonner about personal connections the other day and feel like I should play by my own rules.

That's a picture of Jay Reatard holding a lyric sheet while performing with Beck. It'll make sense later.

I plan not to make the same mistake here so I’ll explain that, at my school anyways, there was a clearly established pattern when it came to age and skateboarding. Pretty much every male kid skateboarded at some point in elementary school and maybe dabbled in it a little through middle school. Generally, by mid seventh grade, the herd thinned out considerably either due to frustration or pressure from a coach not to injure one’s self and miss out on part of a real sport’s season because you were messing around on some kid’s toy. This point was absolute bliss and lasted for about three to three and a half years until kids were lured away by friends with cars or their drug habits became too serious to accommodate serious physical activity. During one’s senior year though, with what seemed like the real world pressing from every direction and the prospect of all your friends being scattered across the country in relatively no time at all, a large chunk of that class would say, “Remember skateboarding? Now that was real fun.” Decks would be reclaimed and the familiar clatters, scrapes, and whoops would ring out from the senior parking lot, with the new additions of hoods crunching and then popping back out. Needless to say, people were thrilled.

I’m currently having a similar experience with my music. As I feel compelled to be on a constant search for the new, all I actually want to do is sit down with music that is familiar. I was recently hanging out with a couple of bands that will not be named out of respect for their credibility who had, as part of one of those little tour jokes that tend to seem absolutely idiotic to anyone who wasn’t on that particular tour, procured a number of cheap nu metal cd’s popular during middle school. I’m talking Korn, Limp Bizkit, Deftones etc. Even though they listen to much different and more advanced material now, they couldn’t really knock it. They were enjoying it and recalling facts they thought they’d long forgotten. Absolutely no one experiences music like a teenager. Period. That is a fact. While revisiting some of own old favorites I realized that I still knew pretty much every single word of some of these albums. It made me stop and think about the last album I’d taken the time to learn, not just walked around with on my iPod or played while I cooked dinner or read a magazine. Maybe it’s the fact that I get so much music digitally now that’s partially responsible for this change in behavior, but I seem to recall a decline in lyrical content being included in album packaging before that.

There are some times when progress must march on, for our own good, but this is not one of them. Reclaim the feeling of lying on your floor holding a cover booklet over your head. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to learn the words to a whole album. Bonus points if it involves unintelligible vocals.

*You can view the video here
**For those who don’t believe that Andrew W.K. doesn’t gives assignments, I have proof in tweet form. Proof in tweet form, if you didn’t know, is the fastest growing type of proof in existence today.

My search for more information on Adkins led me to the Born Bad series.  Most people generally point to Nuggets as the definitive series for the rockabilly/garage style revival that’s coming around (you can’t read a Strange Boys review that doesn’t mention it) but I’ve found the original series to be pretty much impossible to get my hands on (I can’t even find the tracklist).  I do have the Original Artyfacts from the First Psychadelic Era set however and if it does in fact pull a lot of its material from the original series than I can say Born Bad feels much earthier and relevant to the stuff bands like The Strange Boys and King Khan & The BBQ are putting out.  Physical copies of Born Bad aren’t exactly just lying around either but you can find them online. I can’t vouch for the quality or safety of that site because I didn’t download them but it looks trustworthy in my opinion.

If you want to take a look at the full tracklist to see if it’s worth it (which it is) or for some jumping off points you can find it broken down by volume here

Check out this list of compilations if you’re looking for a resource to find out about more bands.

This couldn’t have come at a better time because I’ve been wanting to find more stuff related to bands like The Mummies and The Phantom Surfers and Thee Cormans (who really fall more on the surf/psych side of things but I just wanted to link them.)

Since this post has a lot to do with hard to find records this link from Sean Bonner for hard to find punk records seems appropriate

This post sure was link heavy but I don’t want them to start calling me the “dead-end of the internet” like they are Wikipedia over that whole “no follow” thing. But that’s for another post.