By Dave Cantor

“I was from New York, so I was a real hustler,” Paul Collins says of his past, wrangling shows for The Nerves, a West Coast pop ensemble equally indebted to sixties rock and the nascent punk scene’s jittery energy. “And I’m still a hustler.”

Collins hasn’t dealt with major label executives or high-powered promotion folks during much of his career. He didn’t while drumming in The Nerves and only needed to do so for a brief time as frontman for The Beat. So maintaining a tenacious attitude while continuing to figure out how to book international tours for his sundry projects has become a necessity. He’s had ample practice. Read the rest of this entry »

By Dave Cantor

Whatever punk is, the music coalesced during the seventies. Arguments can be made that work by Arthur Lee and Love, the MC5 or the Stooges during the sixties were the movement’s first recorded curios. But it took a renaissance of serial killers during the following decade to create a national climate in which ugly music could proliferate. Dean Corll’s Houston killing spree, Son of Sam and the cultish murders Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole were involved with all nabbed headlines. But the crimes John Wayne Gacy was eventually convicted of stunned a nation and invigorated a clutch of area suburbanites. The Mentally Ill was formed in Deerfield during 1979 for no other reason than to record a single channeling the killer clown’s energy into music. It worked, and creeped out a lot of people. Read the rest of this entry »

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The 1990s and early 2000s, especially, were a crucial time for Victor Villarreal. After successful runs with punk pioneers Cap’n Jazz and Owls, among others, he disappeared from the scene he helped establish to focus on other, non-musical endeavors. His seven-plus-year absence ended in the summer of 2009 when the Chicago guitarist resurfaced in DeKalb, a small college town an hour and a half westward, with a handful of strings and headful of new solo material—his first ever to feature his own vocals. Villarreal played a couple of shows to support “Alive,” his debut album, before reuniting with his old bandmates a year later to tour with Cap’n Jazz. The months thereafter were quiet for him, and aside from an odd release here and there and a number of appearances supporting fellow Chicago outfit Joan of Arc on guitar, nobody really knew what Villarreal had been up to. Read the rest of this entry »

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If every song Heavy Times played sounded like “Coffin Dirge,” the troupe wouldn’t be any better known, but it would be notable as one of the creepier acts out there. Taking the almost-instrumental track as the band’s pinnacle is completely anathema to growth. But over Heavy Times’ few releases, as it simultaneously draws influence from first wave punk acts and the contemporary garage scene, no single approach has suited the band in totality. During straight punk bangers, hearing Reader contributor Luca Cimarusti pound out frustration on the drum set, it’s clear he picked up sticks to play at a certain BPM. Read the rest of this entry »

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The Spits’ decade-old career based on the angriest pop melodies possible is a remarkable thing. Throwing out three-chords in endless succession with only the slightest variation sounds, in theory, like a very troubling thing. But with the Wood brothers snarling hate-fuck lyrics, each song takes on a visceral nastiness absent from just about every other punk band kicking around on the planet. Issuing its fifth self-titled long-player this year, also referred to as “V,” the band seems to retain its ability to gussy up simplicity and truck it out simply for the fun of dispensing downer rock tracks—“My Life Sucks” is followed quickly by a track called “I’m Scum.” Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Perou

By Arvo Zylo

The first thing to know about lead musician Genesis Breyer P-Orridge is that s/he (the preferred non-gender identification) is a combination of two people who address themselves as “we.” Breyer P-Orridge had a longstanding, fruitful and intimate relationship with a woman named Lady Jaye. In search of a way to consummate their love for each other and unsatisfied with simply saying “till death do us part,” they wanted to actually consume one another. And, in essence, they did. They went to plastic surgeons and exchanged each other’s skin, made each other’s cheekbones look alike, got breast implants for the same size cup, and so forth. Since Lady Jaye passed on from stomach cancer in 2007, Breyer P-Orridge considers h/erself an embodiment of both people, and to some extent, a connection to Lady Jaye’s place on the other side. Breyer P-Orridge and Lady Jaye called their project “Pandrogyne,” and part of the intent was to transcend the trappings of the body and to nullify the concept of gender. Some people consider themselves to be a man stuck inside of a woman’s body, or a woman stuck inside of a man’s body, but to Genesis, s/he is simply “stuck in a body.” It’s not transgender as much as it is post-gender. Read the rest of this entry »

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Without Fishbone, Sublime and No Doubt would have wound up being drug-addled SoCal footnotes. Whatever eventually became the American conception of ska music didn’t begin with Angelo Moore and Norwood, but their group’s all-inclusive approach to songwriting influenced a generation of weird bands. It’d actually be reasonably easy to round up Fishbone’s Jamaican-related efforts onto a single disc–the six-minute “Party at Ground Zero” being an epic accomplishment made even more stunning by the fact that the song was issued as a part of the band’s first EP back in 1985. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Kathy Ward

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We all have access to Google, so let’s dispense with the historical round-up that accompanies anything written about Cleveland’s Rocket from the Tombs. Singer/moaner David Thomas collects Richard Lloyd and Pere Ubu drummer Steve Mehlman to fill out this reconstituted Rocket lineup, which somehow still includes Cheetah Chrome and Mirrors’ Craig Bell. Turning in this year’s “Barfly” counts as the band’s first proper full-length even after Chicago’s Smog Veil Records dug up demos and would-be album tracks dating to 1974 for the insurmountable “The Day the Earth Met …” With three decades separating recording endeavors, it’s not a tremendous surprise that “Barfly” bears only the slightest similarity to all those early punk classics. Read the rest of this entry »

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From the beginning, Naked Raygun sounded dissimilar from punk at large as well as from its Chicago brethren mining the same sort of influences from London and New York. A majority of the ensembles trolling squalid bars during the early eighties in Chicago dealt in some heavy-handed, macho hard rock, dashed with some noisy, punky stance. Naked Raygun, while well suited to such an environment, issued a few weird and strangled shrieks not at odds with the scene and punk in general. Read the rest of this entry »

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The Sex Pistols will always remain the standard bearer for UK-based punk dating back to the genre’s inception. They were a good band—yeah, good. Steve Jones kinda rules. Still, with the Pistols’ one album and the slew of bad press they got, there’re a number of reasonably compelling arguments for The Damned to become the more historically revered group. If one dismisses the fact that the more dour and frequently black-clad ensemble issued the first independent single of the punk era on that side of the Atlantic, drummer Rat Scabies’ presence alone almost makes the case for The Damned’s superiority. Read the rest of this entry »