A few days ago a friend of mine was telling me about this Hasil Adkins who people generally identify as being a pre-cursor to The Cramps.  The Documentary clocks in at around a half hour and is well worth a watch; full of stuff like comical shootouts, a dance that no one can properly identify, general debauchery and delightful drunken vaguery.  He’s the type of character I spent my entire time in Texas hoping I’d meet.  The kind of lovable scoundrel who’s prosecuting attorneys smirk when they think about him only the south seems to produce. 

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.

A few days ago a friend of mine was telling me about this Hasil Adkins who people generally identify as being a pre-cursor to The Cramps.  The Documentary clocks in at around a half hour and is well worth a watch; full of stuff like comical shootouts, a dance that no one can properly ...