Found a bunch more splits in the basement—ten bands for the price of five.
Exit, “Turn Me On, Dead Man”/ 30 Amp, “Punk Virtuoso.” A very impressive West Coast punk split seven-inch, with all the packaging clichés associated with the era: doodles, superhero images, parodies of little ads in the backs of comic books… The sides could scarcely be more dissimilar. Exit’s “Punk Virtuso” is a well-written screed about poseurs, while 30 Amp’s “Turn Me On, Dead Man” uses the famous “Paul is Dead” audio clue as the title for a relentless drone (literally, one long burst of feedback) so rich and scary and well-recorded that it terrified my pet dogs.
Gone Daddy Finch, “Anything Done Tomorrow”/Gravelbed, “Driving High”. Speedy Midwestern indie pop with tinges of rockabilly. Int he ‘90s, it seemed that every other band touring through the poorer clubs in town had this sound. Did the Clinton administration cause it? (Nope. Never had saxophones.)
Eugene Chadbourne with Jello Biafra, “Overpopulation and Art”/ Eugene Chadbourne with Jimmy Carl Black, “Night of the Living Dead”/”Jicarillo Fence Dispute”. Chadbourne was a god to many musicians I respected. This 33 1/3 rpm seven-inch from 1994 is not his finest few minutes, but it certainly demonstrates his diversity, and the range of other artists who stood in awe in him. The Biafra collaboration is a sound collage which begins with a ‘phone message from a nurse telling Chadbourne his semen sample had no sperm in it. Largely spoken-art, with a prevailing theme of misunderstood artists, it ignores Chadbourne’s natural gifts as a musical improviser. That’s what the Jimmy Carl Black side is for—lots of experimental banjo, and not much getting in the way, led off with a variation of Black Uhuru’s anthemic “I am the living dread.”
Black Pig Liberation Front. “The Revolution of Everyday Life, Part Two”/ DOS with Denis Mahoney, The Revolution of Everyday Life, Part One.” Elegantly pressed on mottled vinyl inside a slick art-photo sleeve, this is a souvenir of an adorably pretentious era in sea-coast Connecticut rock. (The two-part, two-band opus is subtitled “a poprocket record of the literary renaissance.”) Gradual, moody, calming yet strident (when the lecturing vocals come in and out), the DOS side is the higher-concept issue-laden soundscape. It’s neatly teamed with Black Pig Liberation Front’s friendlier theory-jam, which sounds like it’s taking place around a hazy bong.
Robin Williams, “I Yam What I Yam”/Shelley Duvall, “He Needs Me.” Harry Nilsson’s songs for Robert Altman’s Popeye movie are so bizarre, you’d think he’d never scored a movie before, let alone written The Point. Having Nilsson’s atypically simple melodies overorchestrated by the brilliant Van Dyke Parks is a multi-styled mindfuck as colossal as was wrought by Thimble Theater, the absurb comic strip melodrama which unleashed Popeye back in 1929. The volatile Williams is actually cowed into submission by the swelling accompaniment, while Duvall shrill wail rises comically above it.