The only omission I’ve noticed so far is the Cows. Some might complain about a few he’d leave out, or others they feel don’t belong or have much to do with the other bands. It’s a tricky job deciding what bands to include and what to leave out. Silky was a steamy musical muff dive as history lesson.” “ Williams was backslapped into making Silky, which was not only a fine comeback of sweaty-sack, juke-joint foot-stomp and gut-busting innuendo (if a song called “Let Me Put It In” qualifies as innuendo), but simultaneously yanked many a garage purist’s ear back further into the R&B base of the genre. Much like the music he covers, Davidson churns out gleefully bad metaphors like recycled riffs, and while it makes for some frequently awkward phrasing, it’s a fun read. He also interviews pretty much all they key people behind important labels like Crypt, Sympathy for the Record Industry and In The Red. But he also manages to get a lot of good interviews from key participants, but presented in fanzine-style Q&A format rather than an integrated oral history like Please Kill Me.
Over a decade of touring with the New Bomb Turks certainly gave him plenty of stories to use, which he does inject in nearly every chapter. Better late than never, we have Eric Davidson of the New Bomb Turks to playfully coin the term “gunk punk” for his 2010 book, We Never Learn: The Gunk Punk Undergut, 1988-2001.Ĭoming from Columbus, Ohio, Davidson could have easily tipped the balance to focus on bands from Ohio, and his own band. Terms like trash rock and garage punk were thrown about some, and who knows what might have happened with some Malcolm McClaren/Sub Pop style marketing. But mainly the scene with no name remained underground. What made them an antidote to self-important post-grunge mainstream rockers, mall punk and mook rock also makes them sound kind of timeless today.īefore The Hives and The White Stripes blew up, there were a few bands that had some success and fleeting major label support, such as Rocket From The Crypt, The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, The Supersuckers, The Muffs and The Donnas. But 15-20 years later when they’re not around anymore, it’s a blast to revisit the music of these trashy, funny, most often drunk bands. Starting in the late 80s, I heard and enjoyed some records by The Lazy Cowgirls, Didjits, Cosmic Psychos, Dwarves, The Oblivians and New Bomb Turks, but mostly enjoyed their live shows, and considered their recordings no more significant than mementos. Or maybe it’s just the generally raw and sloppy nature of their recordings that kept them mostly off the college charts. Perhaps it’s why it took so long for a handful of bands to get half the attention as some bands associated with grunge did. There wasn’t really any genre name for them, because they seemed too disparate in sound and style to be considered a movement. In the 80s there was no shortage of bands that referenced 60s Nuggets type bangers and 70s MC5/Stooges/New York Dolls, like The Scientists, The Cramps, DMZ, Hoodoo Gurus, The Lime Spiders, The Godfathers and The Lyres.
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