April 1981: Some Albums we missed

 

Adolescents : Kids of The Black Hole

On their debut, releasedx in April of 1981, Adolescents reveal the nihilism of the American suburbs during the Reagan era. Morning in America? More like a nightmare for kids who need something to believe. The highlights are "Kids of The Black Hole", which describes a party house for punk rockers:"House of the filthy, house not a home House of destruction where the lurkers roamed House that belonged to all the homeless kids Kids of the Black Hole" ,  "Amoeba" and "Wrecking Crew". The band couldn't keep its line-up together long enough to tour the album. 

The Cramps : Goo Goo Muck

Without Alex Chilton producing or the charismatic Bryan Gregory on guitar, The Cramps sound tired on their sophomore album Psychedelic Jungle. The highlight is "Goo Goo Muck", a cover of an obscure 1962 single by Ronnie Cook and the Gaylads. During the recording The Cramps and IRS chief Miles Copeland began a legal battle that prevented The Cramps from releasing another album until 1983's Smell of Female.

Stiff Little Fingers : Just Fade Away 

 

Also in April 1981, Belfast's Stiff Little Fingers released Go For It, the band's third album and front man Jake Burns' favorite. It's a bit more adventurous musically than the others ( the brass section on "Silver Living") and lyrically ( domestic violence on "Hits And Misses"). Perhaps more than any other band, SLF provided the blueprint for the sound of the American punk-rock bands of the 90's.

The Flesh Eaters : Divine Horseman

Chris D. recruited LA indie heavyweights John Doe and DJ Bonebrake ( from X) , Dave Alvin and Bill Bateman ( from The Blasters) and Steve Berlin for this descent into madness. Village Voice critic Richard Meltzer wrote Chris D. " has lowered the boom...putting the TNT to the whole fragile whatsis of musically accompanied language per se ...BLABBERMOUTH LOCKJAW OF THE SOUL, which you gotta admit is kinda neat". Also kinda neat: following author Chris Desjardins on GoodReads. He's into the classic mid century pulp novels.

Van Halen : Unchained

On April 29 1981, Van Halen releases Fair Warning, a double platinum album. At this point listening to a Van Halen song means biding your time through misogynistic lyrics (She looks so fuckin' good/ So sexy and so frail/ Something got the bite on me /I'm goin' straight to hell) and David Lee Roth shrieks just to hear Eddie Van Halen rip through a solo. 

The Cramps' "Drug Train" is NME's Single of the Week

The Cramps : Drug Train

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In September of 1980 IRS Records released The Cramps' Alex Chilton produced single "Drug Train" in the UK, backed with a cover of Charlie Feathers' "I Can't Hardly Stand It". This is the last track to feature the cigarette swallowing Bryan Gregory on guitar. It sounds like a party, but apparently Gregory was more interested in either drugs or the occult. Depends on whom you ask. In December of 1980 Kid Congo Powers, a former president of The Ramones fan club, would join the band.

In the US the single was "Garbageman" b/w "Drug Train".

I like the way a Otto Luck reviews the single on Rate Your Music:

When a clearly-agitated and bug-eyed Lux adamantly proclaims, “You ain’t no punk, you punk” to kick off “Garbageman,” it’s probably best to nod your head and say, “Yessir!”, thanking God and all the muses that he’s going to let you live. For now. 

 It’s just about impossible to overrate this rigomortized Cramps mind splitter, which surfs out of nowheresville on the back of the sinister dark-hearted twelve strings of Bryan Gregory and Poison Ivy Rorschach and the jungle pulse laid down by Nick Knox, perhaps the coolest drummer EVER. It wouldn’t surprise me if autopsies of all three revealed battery acid in their veins.

 Spiritedly rudimentary, “Garbageman” is deliberate musical primitivism from a band who look to be cursed with bad genes and broken chromosomes and sound like they invented whatever genre you may want to lump them under. And if they didn’t, well…you tell ‘em, not me.

The making of URGH ! A MUSIC WAR

Oingo Boingo : Ain't This The Life

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On the weekend of August 16 British filmmakers, working with IRS Records and FBI Booking Agency,  showed up at various Los Angeles venues to shoot performances that would appear in a 1981 concert movie called Urgh! A Music War. 

It all began on a Friday night at Santa Monica Civc Center with sets from Chelsea ("I'm On Fire") and the Dead Kennedys ("Bleed For Me"). X followed with a version of "Beyond and Black", followed by The Cramps playing "Tear It Up" with their new guitarist Julien Hechtlinger, aka Julien Grindsnatch. 

  The next night featured Stiv Bators, who didn't make the cut. Wall of Voodoo followed with "Back In Flesh". The Members("Offshore Banking Business")  were next and then came Pere Ubu with "Birdies". David Thomas looked like a junior banking executive.

Magazine followed with a version of "Model Worker". Said a reviewer from Sounds "Howard Devoto was looking like an over-intelligent lift-operator from another world dropped into a disco".

On Sunday night the filmmakers moved to the Whiskey A-Go-Go to film The Surf Punks performing "My Beach", followed by The Go-Go's with "We Got The Beat". 

The Alley Cats took the stage that night to play  "Nothing Means Nothing Anymore" and a band called Oingo Boingo with "Ain't This the Life".

In San Francisco they would catch Devo on stage. 

The following weekend the crew would be in New York City catching performances by The Fleshtones, Joan Jett and, most memorably,  Klaus Nomi performing "Total Eclipse". The movie would be released in 1981 along with a soundtrack by A+M Records which may why The Police, shot in September along with the likes of XTC and Echo and the Bunnymen, get three songs on the soundtrack. 

Both Talking Heads and The B-52's both turned down offers to appear in the movie.  

The Cramps release their slithering, stunning debut album

The Cramps :  Garbageman

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On April 1, 1980 The Cramps released Songs The Lord Taught Us, described by the NME's Paul Rambali in this way: "It shivers ands shakes, it slithers and crawls and it throbs and trembles". Only 9 of the 13 tracks on this psychobilly stunner are original, including "Garbageman" which announces the band's trash aesthetic with the lines "You ain't no punk, you punk/ You wanna talk about the real junk? " 

The legendary video below was shot at midnight in a crypt near Shepperton, Middlesex in ten minutes.

With the help of producer Alex Chilton, Songs was recorded the summer before at the Sam C Phillips Recording Studio in Memphis. "We just kept pinching ourselves," guitarist Poison Ivy says. "We couldn't believe we were there. " The sessions were a mess.  The label ran out of money. The engineers wanted nothing to do with Chilton. Eventually after months an dmonth of mixinng, the album came out with what Lux Interior refers to as "swimmy sounding".

Creem's Robot A Hull  was one of the critics who loved the album, declaring:

"The album recalls every forgotten sleazy diner, every stinking bus terminal, every weather-beaten drive-in you've been in or dreamt of. It unleashes a noise so loud, so uncontrolled, so jittering and shivering with the nightmares of a thousand-and-one restless nights, that one may be moved to run in panic, switch on the lights, and cower in the nearest closet.

The Village Voice's Robert Christgau wasn't so pleased. He graded the album a B-, writing:

From the time they stormed a jaded--hence novelty-hungry--CBGB two or three years ago, they've been a joke that wears thin before it's over. "TV Set" and "Garbage Man" and a couple of others are everything they're supposed to be--archetypically rockin', outrageously funny. But when the songs are neither or even only one, the band's inability to sing, play, produce, or prance around your living room detracts significantly from your pleasure. Then you stop listening altogether.

The Cramps toured England with The Fall, whose frontman Mark E Smith told Lux he "shouldn't bother with all that Kiss theatrical shit. You don't need it". But The Cramps were always about putting on the best live show possible. They won over England. ( the debut ranks #15 on NME's Top Albums of 1980 list)

 Next would come an American tour . And then in May, guitarist Bryan Gregory quit the band.

Where The Broken Hearts Stay

The Cramps : Lonesome Town

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On June 20, 1979, as The Cramps wrapped up a U.K. tour with The Police, IRS Records released Gravest Hits, a 12" EP compiling both sides of their first two 1978 Vengeance singles, "Surfin' Bird" and "Human Fly", with an added fifth track, a cover version of "Lonesome Town".

The U.K. tour had been a critical smash with Max Bell of NME writing:

Everything about The Cramps is perfect, from their swinging light bulb and voodoo incantations right down to their backline rockabilly maelstrom.London has not witnessed a classier New York export since The Ramones.

After a June 8 show at Manchester Free Trade Hall, future Smiths frontman Stephen Morrissey wrote to Sounds :

The Cramps are worth their weight in gold for making The Police seem like a great big sloppy bowl of mush. The Police, hardly dabbling in degrees of the unexpected, presented a farcical imitation of their Rock Goes To College thing--several people clapped, but then, I suppose someone has to. The Cramps were enough to restore faith in the most spiritless. They have it all, and their drummer is the most compelling in rock history. Back to The Cramps or perish.

When the Cramps returned to New York in July they signed with IRS and began recording their debut album with Alex Chilton producing.

Live at Napa State Mental Hospital

“We’re The Cramps, and we’re from New York City, and we drove 3,000 miles to play for you people.”

The Cramps : Strychnine

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On June 13, 1978 The Cramps performed a psycho-billy concert for the enthusiastic residents of Napa State Mental Hospital. 

Lux Interior:

We always wanted to play at a mental institution because we always had a problem with audiences not being quite what we'd like them to be. We thought if we went to a mental institution, the audience would contribute --and they really did! There were male and female inmates humping each other on the ground. It was the most bizarre show we've ever done. Those people just went crazy -- doing everything you'd imagine people in mental institution would do. There were people licking the walls, people laying on top of each other and coming up and talking to us while we were playing , but mainly it was people dancing the weirdest dances you've ever seen.

It also strikes me as an incredible humane gesture by the Cramps. Is there anything that make people feel more free, or lifts them form their troubles than music? Residents were allowed to share the stage, even the microphone, with the band. There was so little separation between audience and performers, some patients thought The Cramps had come from the T Ward, where terminal patients lived. 11 patients escaped briefly during the show, perhaps seeking even a greater sense of freedom.

The Nomads, a punk band out of the Bay Area, also performed a set that day.

The Birth of Psychobilly

The Cramps : The Way I Walk

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In April of 1978, The Cramps released 6000 copies of "Surfin' Bird/ The Way I Walk", their Alex Chilton produced debut single on their own Vengence label.

The band had been frustrated by lack of major label interest.

"Putting that single out was like our big flying fuck you," said guitarist Poison Ivy. "The Way I Walk is representative of our sound but Surfin' Bird? The attitude is, but the music isn't."

The Ramones has covered Surfin'Bird on their 1977 Rocket to Russia album. More recently, Robert Gordon had covered The Way I Walk on an album released in March.

The singles were recorded in Memphis at Ardent Studios where Chilton had made his Big Star albums. 

"He's done the most reckless suicidal things and gotten clean away," vocalist Lux Interior said. "He's probably fucked every chick in the state. Literally. And this chicks' boyfriends are out to get him".

With Chilton at the board, The Cramps also recorded TV Set, Domino and Lonesome Town, all available on the 1979 EP Gravest Hits.