Movie of the Week - A Box Full of Rocks: The El Cajon Years of Lester Bangs

A big tip 'o the cap to Joe Carducci (who recently started blogging again over at Gas Giant - HIGHLY recommended interesting tidbits, links & tips of a historical bent) for pointing to the full stream of this Lester doc on YouTube.

I first learned of this film almost two years ago, and then promptly forgot about it. I'm happy to have the opportunity to watch it in full now.

More Joe Carducci - The Sleepers and Life Against Dementia

As mentioned last Thursday, Joe Carducci will be out & about in the city this week promoting his work. He just posted the following over at the New Vulgate, and I thought it worth reposting here:

I return to John Allen’s WFMU show on Wednesday. Last time we did a five-hour history of L.A. punk; this time we’ll do a three-hour San Francisco special focusing on The Sleepers, Negative Trend, Toiling Midgets, and Flipper. The show streams live on Wednesday Oct. 10 6am eastern, at "WFMU.org".

Then on Friday Oct. 12 7:30pm I'll be at "Book Thug Nation" 100 N. Third Ave, Brooklyn to read from my new book, Life Against Dementia, and answer questions about my old books and older record labels.

I moved to Berkeley from Portland with Systematic Record Distribution after Christmas 1979 and the first band I checked out was Flipper; they were playing small bars like Dew Drop Inn in Berkeley, and Sound of Music in SF. It was hard to recall the effect of their early messed-up rock minimalism so I bought a small recorder and began taping their shows. I caught some crazed gigs as they moved on to bigger clubs and halls. I also collected some tapes of The Sleepers, Toiling Midgets, and others. Turns out Aaron at Book Thug and I met in Berkeley at Krishna Copy where I printed Systematic mail order catalogs and he was doing a little micro-fanzine that I understood to be mostly about Flipper. This grew into Cometbus.



When John asked for some Sleepers I started going through my old tapes. Amazing to hear those musicians and their audiences again. SF had one of the deeper music scenes coming out of the 1970s but The City's urban provincialism, plus drugs, politics, and Rolling Stone leaving town shrunk its profile fast. Flipper had been a name rejected by The Sleepers back in 1977; Sleepers vocalist Ricky Williams was in Flipper at the beginning and he went on to sing for Toiling Midgets, formed by Craig Gray who had been in Negative Trend with Will Shatter who explained Flipper's loose noisy sound on Tim Yohannon's KPFA show: "We want to experiment with the music without becoming an art band." On the evidence of today's "indie rock" stasis, you'd have to judge those art bands won out.



So we will toast the vanquished. About a third of the show will feature unreleased versions, live rants, audience participation, crimes in progress, etc., from a San Francisco on fire, 1980-1982.



The WFMU blog will post my liner notes, "The Sleepers - Against the Day," for the November 13 vinyl re-release of The Sleepers "Painless Nights" album by "Superior Viaduct".

Joe Carducci invades NYC and WFMU

Best known as the author of Rock and The Pop Narcotic, Friend of the blog, Joe Carducci, will be in New York next week for some readings as well as an appearance on John Allen's WFMU show. Besides his books, he is also known for his tireless work at SST during its peak years in the 1980's. He's one interesting dude.

Here are all of the details:

Reading & book signing:
Book Thug Nation
http://bookthugnation.com/pages/about
100 N. 3rd St., Brooklyn
on Friday, October 12, 7:30pm


He'll be reading from (the links go to Joe's very own book dealing/publishing website - order direct!):

LIFE AGAINST DEMENTIA - Essays, Reviews, Interviews 1975-2011
"The learning is profound, the critique is total." - James Parker

ENTER NAOMI - SST, L.A. and All That...
"I was totally consumed by it to the point that I was one of those douchebags that reads whilst walking along." - Layla Gibbon

WYOMING STORIES - Yeung Girl, The Winter Hand, Homo Vampyrus
"I like how you write." - Budd Boetticher

ROCK AND THE POP NARCOTIC - Testament for the Electric Church
"#1 atop the Stolen-by-a-supposed-friend chart twenty-years running!" - Rentrak

On October 10, he'll be a guest on John Allen's WFMU show from 6:00AM to 9:00AM. Here's the 2008 2-parter John & Joe did that's the only audio chronology of L.A. Punk extant in cyberspace:
http://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/29352
http://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/29667

Guess what? Corporate Rock Still Sucks...

Or, how the snake keeps eating its own tail. Over at the New Vulgate, Joe Carducci chimes in & adds some much needed perspective on the Nirvana Nevermind anniversary, the recent issue of Billboard magazine memorializing the grunge scene, along with SST Records & the early days of the alternative & independent label//distribution scene.

There still is a Billboard magazine, but somehow its recent cover story on the 20th anniversary of not so much Seattle or grunge or Sub-Pop, but of Geffen Records’ release of Nirvana’s “Nevermind”, or rather its platinum breakthrough, made me wonder if the dead are now memorializing the living -- they seemed so much more alive than we, after all. It isn’t a very good issue, but the wonder is that the magazine staff managed to cough up any kind of major themed effort. And given there is no current cultural activity that warrants the effort it would have to be part of a celebration of some contrived numeric anniversary of some major copyright property. This may be why the lead names touted on the cover do not include Bruce Pavitt or Jack Endino.

“How we won. What we saw. What we lost.” Sounds like Billboard itself is speaking from the grave. If it really wants to know what we lost they might have observed the thirtieth of SST Records back in ’08 if the recording of Black Flag’s debut 45 is the marker, or this November if the “Damaged” album’s release is the ancient totemic idol. Admittedly Greg Ginn is not the conventional copyright holder to get behind an advertorial trade paper synergy…. Which brings to mind the question, Is this Billboard issue, “The Lessons of Grunge,” the first editorial cover story in years, or just another vanity cover purchased by the grunge industry? Just asking. The issue itself is thicker than usual, tho I can’t say I pick up the issues as I used to. Continued here.


Its interesting to note, if only to me, that I agree with him on Alice In Chains. And also, my favorite Sub Pop band at the time was always The Fluid...underrated, unreissued, and definitely not platinum. And not from Seattle.