Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise and Fall of SST Records by Jim Ruland

 I spent a lot of time as a teenager listening to music released on the SST label.  Black Flag, Minutemen, Husker Du, Descendents, Bad Brains and many more released music via SST in the halcyon days of the 1980s.  Then it all went wrong.  The good bands stopped releasing music or moved to another label and eventually SST ground to a halt.

This book highlights how successful SST actually were at their peak and documents the fall.  It's not totally clear what precipitated the fall but the departure of key team members such as Chuck Dukowski and Mugger seems to have played a part.  Greg Ginn is often cast as a pantomime villain in events although I'm  not sure how accurate this is.  Certainly, early on, he did a lot of good for these bands and gave them a step up to better things.

I was an American hardcore/alternative enthusiast when I was younger but this book contained viewpoints I was unfamiliar with and has introduced some music that I did not know.  I was left pining for a world where SST signed Nirvana and managed to keep Sonic Youth happy/release Daydream Nation.  That may have been an exciting world.

What does the future for the SST bands hold?  Will we see reissues and remasters with unreleased material?  Has it all been lost?  Do they even have decent tapes of the 1982 Black Flag demoes. 

Ian MacKaye took a very different, archivist approach with Dischord and we will have much of the DC scene for posterity.  The LA scene may just be degenerating, covered in some green mould.

A music course at East Kilbride Art Centre approximately 25 years ago

I was using Twitter this evening and said 'hi' to Davie Scott of the band The  Pearlfishers. He had tweeted a link about Brian Wilson and that brought back memories of a music production course that I attended about 25 years ago (roughly) that Davie taught in the East Kilbride art centre. I loved that course, I learnt a lot and even though I seldom make music nowadays it was a valuable experience.

At that time there was a small digital recording studio in the Art Centre and Davie recorded local bands like Gods Boyfriend. I was a music addict back then and I played in my juvenile punk band with some of my pals. My best friend from school and I signed up to the course to learn more about making music and it was great.

Davie had done some good stuff with the Pearlfishers as well as his earlier group (love and money I think  CORRECTION - hearts and minds!) and he was spreading the gospel of perfect pop to the grunge addled minds of EK. He was not the only person of interesting the course.  There was an older guy, a drummer, a contemporary of the Jesus and Mary Chain, who had apparently played in an early permutation of the Mary Chain and some band with the guy out of the Wildhearts and sadly suffered from mental health problems.  The bloke was a really nice guy with great stories but in retrospect some of his stories may have been delusions.  Back then I didn't know much about mental health problems and in the 25 years since then I've learned more through my various professional studies and personal contacts. I like to think that his story was true and he did play with the Mary Chain and that Never Understand was indeed about him trying to explain his psychotic episodes to William Reid.

Davie Scott himself is a man with a deep love and understanding of music and he was able to clearly explain this to the class. Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys was his hero and he taught us about various production techniques, arrangements and the rivalry between Wilson and the Beatles. I remember one session when Davie went through God Only Knows from Pet Sounds chord by chord, explaining harmonies, melodies, lyrics and arrangements, presenting to us a great argument that Wilson had created the perfect pop song. He may be right although 'Wouldn't it be nice' is a bit more catchy.

Music has been important in my life. It is not all of my life but it has been a major theme and a source of pleasure. I've played my guitar a few times this week for the first time in ages, just for fun. I always mean to write and record some songs  again but real life and its associated pressures always gets in the way.  I have a lot of passions, my girlfriend, music, comic books, neurology, art. I'm a lucky man.  I'm lucky to have had such a rich life so far.

East Kilbride was special at times. I remember playing concerts in the Arts Centre, seeing the great Alex Chilton of  Big Star play there and seeing my pals play there. My teenage life was at times electric and colourful and it is nice o remembered the good bits.

The workings of Bob Dylan

There were Bob Dylan records in the house when I was a kid.  My parents were not and are not hippies.  Quite the opposite to be honest but they were of that generation and they were of that age and they bought those records and I listened to them.

Dylan, Johnny Cash, Simon & Garfunkel and Leonard Cohen.  I never really got Leonard Cohen.

Dylan had the funny voice and the strange words and the stories.  The tapes my parents had were from the seventies when he was past his best but I liked them.  I liked the live at Budokhan tape and over the years I tracked down the rest of his stuff, listened to much of it, read books about him and learned to play some of his songs.  Dylan taught me you could sing in your own voice and forget about what anyone else thought.

As the years have gone by we have managed to see how Dylan worked.  He re-worked his songs time and time again with massive evolutions and mutations between takes.  You can put together your own version of classic albums using mp3s and those version may, for you, supersede the original.

He was recently put up for a Nobel prize for literature, an unheard-of thing for a writer of pop songs.  Songs that have soundtracked much of the past 50 years.  Songs that have twisted the concept of pop. I saw him once, playing in Glasgow maybe 20 years ago.  If I remember properly it was pretty good.

The Death of the Record Shop

Society has changed.  People have changed.  A lot of the stuff that I loved as a kid has gone.  Sadly, record shops are dying out.

HMV, a mighty giant, has been fatally wounded.  HMV used to be dominant in the field.  It was the alpha-shop.  It wiped out all opposition.  HMV was the same everywhere; East Kilbride, Argyle Street, Coventry, Birmingham, Leicester.  The HMV brand was everywhere.  In the early '90s it was modern and cool (in a corporate way).  The good stuff was often overpriced but they punted a lot of landfill CDs in their sales.  I spent a lot of money there.

Over the past 5 years or so HMV hadn't been looking so good.  They had lost their way.  They wanted to sell iPods and stereo systems.  They had less music (or at least they seemed to have less).  I would walk into HMV and realise I didn't have a reason to be there.  I could buy my disposible media from Amazon and I didn't need to wander around HMV to do it.  If I wanted anything cool I could go to Monorail or Fopp (although Fopp has been an indie stalking horse for HMV for years now).

When I  was a teenager I loved trudging about record shops to buy  second  hand Husker Du  lps and Butthole Surfers tapes.  I would bump into people I know.  It gave you something to do.  Life goes on and now I have plenty to do but I feel that teenagers of the  future will miss out on something.  I guess elderly trainspotters feel that the teenagers today are missing out on the steam trains of the '40s and '50s.

HMV is fucked.  I will try and spend some money in Monorail this month.  I bought some stuff in Fopp last month.  I'm probably pissing in the wind.

Required Records - Gulag Orkestar by Beirut

I kinda got lazy and stopped writing the Required Records blog (http://drphunkrecords.blogspot.com/ ) about a year ago. I never really wrote on that page much anyway which is sad because I love CDs and I love writing about music. I've decided instead to just do all my writing on this page for ease.

Gulag Orkestar (combined on CD with the Lon Gisland ep) is a great record. I picked it up randomly about a year ago from Avalanche Records in Glasgow. I liked the cover, a faded photograph of two women and a car. The photos were apparently found in the back of a library book. I might have read something about the band on the internet before then but I'm not sure.

The music is very folky, unlike most of the indie and alternative stuff that I listen to. Many of the songs have little or no guitar on them and much of the instrumentation is entirely acoustic. Zach Condon (the main Beirut guy) has clearly been very influenced by Eastern European music and makes use of time signatures that are unfamiliar to Western ears. He is backed by some good musicians including Jeremy Barnes (of Neutral Milk Hotel and Hawk and a Hacksaw fame).

A lot of people seem to have an immediate response to this CD because it sounds very different to much of what you hear on the radio or TV. It has a more natural sounding production. The stand-out track is probably Elephant Gun from the Lon Gisland EP although it's all good.

I recommend this record to anyone with jaded ears.

Try http://www.beirutband.com/ for more