Tag Archives: reissues

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The Gits – Frenching the Bully

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The Gits – Frenching the Bully (Broken Rekids)

A fierce, powerful, slash and burn punk unit who hailed from Seattle via Ohio, The Gits were defined by the steely barbs and arresting passion of vocalist Mia Zapata. The tube-shattering electricity that surged through guitarist Joe Spleen and bassist Matt Dresdner’s instruments was matched and throttled only by the exposed nerve of their singer, who delivered first-person, hardcore-style rants that galvanized an entire generation of riot grrrls, but left her personal identity and desires honestly, brazenly exposed. In a sick and impossibly sad twist of irony, The Gits’ rock revolution was shattered on July 7, 1993, when Zapata was raped and murdered outside a Seattle pub. She was 27. Zapata’s death ended The Gits’ promising rise, which had begun with 1992’s Frenching the Bully and was set to continue with Enter: The Conquering Chicken. But it also rallied a shaken music community. The Home Alive organization was formed to foster awareness and education of self-defense. 7 Year Bitch paid tribute through angry tears to their fallen friend on 1994’s Viva Zapata! And the women of Sleater-Kinney and Le Tigre, to name only a few, continued to make vital music that furthered Zapata’s legacy in a flurry of power chords and pointed lyrics.

Now, in the wake of an arrest in the case (thanks to DNA evidence), Bay Area indie Broken Rekids has reissued The Gits’ landmark debut. The back cover bears a simple statement: “Frenching the Bully – Remixed, remastered, and back in the hands of The Gits.” Drummer Steve Moriarty has said news of the arrest prompted him to play The Gits’ records really loud; this spectacular reissue makes that experience even more rewarding. Never a grunge band per se, The Gits always cut a line between street punk and hardcore – the former in the music, the latter in the lyrics. “Another Shot of Whiskey”, “Absynthe”, and “Slaughter of Bruce” kick with renewed kinetics, while “It All Dies Anyway” recalls Patti Smith while Zapata’s words burn with renewed passion. “Is death the only way to get attention?”

The renewed Frenching the Bully includes nine live tracks, culled from a 1993 date in Portland, Oregon. Its additional studio tracks are telling reminders of Zapata’s power. The hardcore screed “Spear and Magic Helmet” burns like white phosphorus on exposed skin, but it’s the single version of Bully‘s “While You’re Twisting, I’m Still Breathing” that’s left tellingly until the end. “I’ll keep coming back slightly stronger…I’ll keep breathing,” Mia Zapata sings. “I’ll keep breathing.”

JTL

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Mission of Burma – Signals, Calls and Marches

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Mission of Burma – Signals, Calls and Marches (Rykodisc)

I was a year old when this EP was originally released. I was five when Mission of Burma broke up. The first time I was made aware of them was when I heard Moby’s cover of “That’s When I Reach for My Revolver” on Animal Rights. But I have spent the better part of this week wandering around downtown hollering “This Is Not A Photograph!” in my head, with my own mental approximation of Roger Miller’s Boston-via-England vocal delivery.

I get the same feeling when listening to this collection of eight bits of angular, melodic noise that I did when I first heard the Clash and the Ramones: I wondered how I had existed this long without having them in my life. I wondered why I didn’t pay attention when I sat around listening to my snotty rock friends talk about Fugazi’s influences. These songs walk the line between noise and beauty. For every dissonant chord, punk sneering (“Outlaw”), and railing against “Fame and fortune,” we turn a corner and find harmonized, lovely voices within the same song. This is to say nothing about the sensitivity to be found in the lyrics, as illustrated beautifully on “Red”: “There’s a window in my head / there’s a window in my heart / I look out of it as I’m sleeping / and then I am torn apart.” We then turn another corner to be confronted with the beautiful guitar and ooh-ooh crooning of “All World Cowboy Romance.” You can hear everything within Mission of Burma.

For those of you who wish to be purists but don’t have the budget to accumulate this band’s entire discography, this reissue of their 1981 EP is a fine place to start as it adds “Academy Fight Song” and “Max Ernst,” the a- and b-side of their first single. Perhaps you even already own the reissue and it’s moldering at the back of your closet someplace. For the love of God, un-molder it. Give it to your little brother who thinks that Avril and Sum 41 are the pinnacle of punk. Wave it in front of your neighbor who has never forgiven you for engaging her in that debate about George Michael’s greatest hits. (You know you love them too; it’s okay, we’re all friends here.) But the bottom line is extremely simple: listen to it.

It will reaffirm what you loved about music in the first place. It will make it okay to breathe again. It may even change your life.

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Breaking Up With a Radio Sweetheart

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We know musicians through a finite, bounded set of experiences. Primary are the artifacts, the recordings. Secondarily, there are the live performances that we attend. Although the attendance at a concert is more immediate and arguably more compelling than the playing of a disc, I’d like to suggest that the disc is primary because one has the opportunity to return to it again and again; a live performance, no matter how moving, exists as a memory trace that becomes fainter and fainter with time, as it is obscured by other experiences that we’ve had since the musical event.

The recording that we obtain is something that has been carefully vetted, selected, and certified (regardless of how raw it may sound). A set of people made a decision that defines (1) what the collection of compositions grouped is and (2) what version of the performance of those compositions will be released. In other words, if musicians were to perform 12 compositions in a studio, there is a decision made of, say, which two need to be left off for commercial (e.g., deemed to be not as good as the others) or technological (i.e., the density of the recording medium is limited in terms of the amount of data it can hold) constraints. What’s more, it is likely that there isn’t a single take of all 12 compositions, that the musicians have done several versions of each. In some cases, the attempt is made to improve upon a given rendering (i.e., to eliminate a flub from a previous take; to add some instrumentation for a better sound). In other cases, there are variant versions of a given composition (e.g., acoustic and electric; a capella and instrumental). Decisions are made as to how the musicians will be presented to us and so we come to know the musicians (or, more precisely, their sound) as a result.

Continue reading Breaking Up With a Radio Sweetheart →

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Ozzy: That’s the Way It Wasn’t

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You remember Winston Smith, don’t you? Sure, he’s the protagonist of George Orwell’s 1984, but do you remember what he did for a living? He worked in the so-called “Ministry of Truth,” changing history by rewriting newspapers and books and any other media that needed updating to reflect the prevailing mindset of Oceana’s totalitarian regime.

Not unlike Ozzy and Elvis.

By now you’ve probably heard about the “reissue” of some of Ozzy Osbourne’s back catalog earlier this year. Problem is, they are not reissues at all. These new versions of the old albums have had the original Bob Daisley bass and Lee Kerslake drum tracks removed; the remastered songs now feature members of Ozzy’s current touring band. Apparently this was done because of ongoing legal disputes over royalties among these former bandmates.

Regardless of motive, this transgression of history is wrong, for reasons that shouldn’t need explaining.

As is what was done to the documentary, Elvis: That’s the Way It Is when it was re-edited and released on DVD about a year ago. While the Ozzy debacle is annoying and typical of the corporate entertainment industry, the new Elvis movie is even more disappointing because its ruination was carried out in the name of the fan. Yeah, you and me and every other music geek were catered to when they unearthed the extra thirty minutes of footage and remastered the sound to create this concert film. Only problem is, the original movie was a heck of a lot more than a concert.

That’s the Way It Is was a strange document of a strange time, something of a foil to Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. It was a true documentary—of the entire process of putting post-Comeback Special Elvis Presley into the Las Vegas show scene, a fascinating idea for 1970, especially considering E’s only other appearance there, in the late-1950s, had bombed. (Remember too, this was long before a stint in the desert on the road to eternal life in Branson, Mo., was the natural washed-up pop star progression we think of now.) Sure, on outward appearances That’s the Way It Is was a concert flick, but there was a lot more to the goofy film and its oddball interviews with unnamed and frequently creepy fans and hangers-on. Most of this fell to the cutting room recycle bin for the digital release in favor of more concert footage, little of which adds much of anything to the film as a film. No, the new footage amounts to more rocks for the fan cum crackhead, while eliminating much of what worked in the original film—the reflections of Elvis in the eyes of all who beheld him. The effect leaves Elvis looking as two-dimensional as his postage stamp.

The most important legacy of my much-played VHS dub of That’s the Way It Is is that even the non-Elvis fanatics I’ve shown it to have come away with a better understanding of why this era of Elvis’ long and tumultuous career was perhaps his best. As the availability of the original version of the film wanes, as old videotapes get eaten by dirty players or thrown away after garage sales, this very real historical document will disappear. Sure, we’ll have many more copies of a fancy new DVD to replace it, but without the historical context of the original edit there will be little to learn from it.

Reissues, remastering, lost footage, unreleased tracks—they’re all worthy endeavors, but full-scale revision leads us down a dangerous path indeed. Remember Winston Smith?

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STRAIGHT OUTTA BELLEVILLE

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Uncle Tupelo Gets the Reissue Treatment

It’s unclear what strain of moonshine was mixed with how many parts distortion and Hank Willliams to create Uncle Tupelo. But ten+ years removed from their existence, the work that its founding members have gone on to produce validates Tupelo’s recordings as not simply lucky noise labeled “genius” or “important” by hipster reactionaries. In its earnest mixture of ragged black T-shirt punk and Appalachian rhythms of hope and despair, fellow songwriters Jay Farrar and Jeff Tweedy captured the day-to-day of Midwestern America, which they then harvested into themes: bored, drunk, and looking for a way out.

We’ll never know, but the band’s particular alchemy may have been experimented with elsewhere, in some uncharted American basement. After all, it’s not like they invented a new, never-before-seen color. Nevertheless, it is the music of Uncle Tupelo that’s knee-deep at the alt.country water source, heading up a bucket brigade that has led to “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” and No Depression magazine, Winona-dater Ryan Adams’ career, and Universal Music’s newly-minted Lost Highway Records. While not directly responsible for any of these examples, Tupelo’s early catalog is constantly cited as the progenitor of all things y’allternative.

Farrar and Tweedy know this. Ever since their parting of ways after the Anodyne tour of 1993, the two have followed separate musical paths united by an oft-stated wish: Don’t make us the two-headed Moses of Insurgent Country. The work of Son Volt and Wilco is steeped in the same American musical landscape that inspired Uncle Tupelo, but the two songwriters have been conscious of letting their respective post-breakup work develop on its own. To that end, Tweedy’s Wilco has emerged as an Americana tableau art-rock experiment, while Farrar has played it a little closer to the vest with Son Volt, travelling down dark highways reminiscent of his Tupelo days. (Lately however, Farrar has diversified a little. “Sebastopol,” his current solo project, is an airy mix of pop-ish arrangements and the Bakersfield sound.)

Part of what keeps the vitality (and legend) of Uncle Tupelo’s early work alive is that three out of their four records are out of print, and have been for quite a while. Rockville Records is no more, and Tweedy and Farrar had to jump through some hoops to regain the rights to 1990’s No Depression, 1991’s Still Feel Gone, and March 16-20, 1992, their last for the erstwhile label before Anodyne, the 1993 swan song, released on Sire Records. Rights secured, March 19 sees the release of Uncle Tupelo 89/93: An Anthology, a retrospective to be followed by remastered, repackaged additions of Uncle Tupelo’s entire Rockville catalog, with bonus tracks and outtakes to boot.

The tracklist, according to the Columbia/Legacy press release:

1. No Depression

2. Screen Door

3. Graveyard Shift

4. Whiskey Bottle

5. Outdone

6. I Got Drunk

7. I Wanna Be Your Dog (Prev. Unreleased)

8. Gun

9. Still Be Around

10. Looking For A Way Out (Acoustic Version)

11. Watch Me Fall

12. Sauget Wind

13. Black Eye

14. Moonshiner

15. Fatal Wound

16. Grindstone

17. Effigy

18. The Long Cut

19. Chickamauga

20. New Madrid

21. We’ve Been Had

This is an extremely comprehensive song list. It embodies the highs, the lows, the beer-soaked rock and roll moments, and the puke-stained tear jerkers, all of which define Uncle Tupelo’s influential sound. And for fans of “California Stars,” the compilation will likely achieve what the press release boasts: “So if you haven’t heard them – or maybe just heard of them – now’s the time to re-discover on of the most important bands of our time…”

Cynical comments aside, it will be interesting to see what the reissue of Uncle Tupelo’s catalog will do for the band’s confusing legacy as heroes of a genre they unwittingly created. And how will the re-issues effect the Farrar and Tweedy’s current fanbases? Will the re-emergence of the old material, in conjunction with, say, the long-delayed physical release of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, finally give Wilco the boost into the big time that is allegedly always around the corner? Probably not, and that’s by choice. Wilco left their old label for a reason, and it wasn’t because Reprise was encouraging their avant-garde take on Americana. But whatever happens, and whatever Uncle Tupelo’s legacy really is, the upcoming reissues will be important as documents to four years’ worth of incredibly honest, rocking, sad music, that deserves to be listened to on its own merits, and not built up as some sort of golden calf in a cowboy hat.

JTL