During the peak of my Arts Editorship at the New Haven Advocate—back in the early and mid-‘90s when a thing like Myspace was science fiction, demo tapes were required to get a gig, and major labels signed anyone of promise—I was receiving upwards of 100 CDs a week in the mail. Marriage and housebuying became an opportunity to winnow a staggering collection down to the manageable couple of thousand I have now. A lot of bands still communicated through cassette tape—I still have hundreds of those, but they’re hard to sort and display, and remain boxed up and hard to get at.
Vinyl singles, however, I’ve always found hard to part with or stash far away from view. I’ve lost or misplaced hundreds—a box of treasures, including my original Sex Pistols singles and lots of early punk rarities, were donated to a pirate radio station and left behind when the operator moved on. What I’ve retained, especially from the Advocate arts-desk years but also from flea markets and small-club merch tables, is the smallest collection of music I have on any specific playback medium, yet perhaps the most diverse. Since I’ve never winnowed it down, see, it’s not so much about my tastes as about time, place and circumstance.
Here’s the first batch, snatched at random from a stack of a couple hundred singles I am committed to converting to mp3s via my Ion Profile USB turntable (around 70 bucks at CostCo; just saw a smaller Ion USB turntable at a Bed Bath & Beyond close-out sale for a mere $25.)
1. Holiday, Permission Slip/Fifteen Dollars.
This was a smart, couth Yale band, a bit too aware of their talent but nice guys nonetheless, and more eager to play off-campus than most of their college-indie ilk. They moved west, if memory serves, and kept recording. But this slab, released on the Yale P.O. Box-based label Tasty Bits, stood out in the New Haven scene at the time for being so reserved and refined yet still raw enough to entice all those Pavement worshippers around then. (I got the same vibe from another Yale band of slightly earlier vintage: Drastic Yellow Plastic, whose “Roadkill Messiah” was a stand-out on Caffeine Disk’s Blood From the Streets of New Haven local comp CD). The single came on red vinyl, with a liner-note slip and a small sticker-sized (but not a sticker) slip of paper with the Holiday logo on it.
2. Can Kickers, Dark Molly.
This one isn’t all that old, but sounds properly bog-ancient. Vinyl is the most appropriate medium for New London’s scarpering scrapers of rustic fleet-folk wonderments. My copy of this five-song 33rpm EP has developed pops and squeaks and crackles which only add to the flavor. As if a title like “Rebel Radish” isn’t already sharp enough.
3. New Vaudeville Band, Amy/Peek-a-Boo.
I don’t know which is supposed to be the A-side here. It isn’t even scratched in the vinyl. I could look it up, but I don’t really want to know. The whole thing, of course, reeks of also-ran, a follow-up to what anyone could recognize as the one-hit-wonder fluke “Winchester Cathedral.” Imagine trying to figure out how to keep a mainstream British Ragtime revival going! I passionately adore failed follow-up projects. The sound of desperation is just heavenly.
4. Bug, I Read Her Diary/ Dream World.
The 1994 vinyl debut (I believe) of Jeffrey Greene and Daniel Greene, the Hamilton College classmates who share a surname yet who are otherwise unrelated, who gravitated to New Haven and recorded this 33rpm, translucent-puce vinyl single live in their apartment, whereupon it was mixed and mastered by Mike “Whirltone” Arafeh for the Middletown-based Coffee House Records. The label denotes “Diary” as the “super smash A side” while Dream World is the “super groovy B side,” hit-speak which mocks the record’s then-out-of-fashion lo-fi languor.
The joke turned out to be on them, as the boys of Bug ended up having a longer and livelier career (recording a Peel Session, getting the godlike Mark Mulcahy to be their drummer) than all the slicker bands in the scene at the time who actually dreamed of chart success.
I remember when Bug told me they had to change their name because there were other Bug bands out there complaining. They’d decided on “Butterflies of Love.” I told them that just that week I’d received a vinyl single by a band called Butterflies. “Yes,” ex-Bug said, “but we’re the Butterflies of Love.”
My copy has a scratch on the Dream World side, which comes just as the rangy guitar playing gets hauntingly experimental and out of control. So it fits.
5. Jennifer Trynin, Better Than Nothing/Too Bad You’re Such a Loser.
I was, she told me at the time, the very first journalist to interview Jen Trynin. Our phone conversation was full of coincidences. She mentioned that she was auditioning bassists so she could play out more, and the most eager candidate (whom she ultimately picked) turned out to be a guy who I’d gone to high school with. I knew she was friends was someone who was friends with some New Haven bands, but it turned out we had lots of people and fave bands in common. Many of those connections revolved around the pop-friendly Q Division Studios, whose co-founder Mike Deneen produced Trynin’s records and became her husband. She would go on to frustratingly fleeting national fame, which she ably chronicled in her 2006 memoir-of-sorts Everything I’m Cracked Up to Be.
Trynin played Rudy’s and Cheri’s and—well after she’d gotten signed to Warner Brothers, whose Squint Records imprint put out this single—Toad’s Place and The Tune Inn, where I reconnected with her momentarily and bought this single at the Tune Inn record shop for an exorbitant $4.99.
Jen Trynin coincidence still occur in my life. I was humming “Too Bad You’re Such a Loser” while washing dishes, the very night that I later went downstairs to fetch and sort all these old singles. I had completely forgotten that this great album track was ever on a single, or that I owned it, let alone that it came on marbled blue vinyl.
6. Shirley & Lee, I Feel Good/Now That It’s Over.
Leonard Lee and Shirley Goodman’s lesser-in-all-respects follow-up to their immortal “Let the Good Times Roll.” Both sides are penned by Mr. Lee. My copy’s on the Aladdin label out of Beverly Hills, California, which was alone in seeing the potential of rowdy New Orleans R&B to jostle all the romantic crooners on the pop charts in the syrupy mid-1950s, packaging Shirley & Lee as “the sweethearts of rock & roll.”
7. David Brooks, Virginia Hellhole/Rust Red Shore.
History-minded New Haven-based popsmith David Brooks turned his interest in obscure Civil War tragedies into this captivating single, recorded in Philadelphia and released on the Bus Stop label in 1992. The cover photo shows “ruins of the Gallego flour mills in Richmond, VA set ablaze by the evacuating town authorities preventing the capture of provision by the invading union forces,” which the illustration for the flipside is of “the sidewheel steamer, Sultana and her cargo of released Federal prisoner of war,” a photo “taken nineteen hours before her boilers exploded shortly before dawn of April 27, 1865, north of Memphis on the Mississippi. Throughout the next month, Union Army corpses bobbed up downstream and further confused the death toll of the accident which was estimated at no less than 1238.” Highest compliment to the songwriting is that it matches both the doom-laden and the sensational sides of those storylines. David Brooks stopped being The Streams a few years after this release, went to a cool culinary school, then took over management of Judie’s European Baker/restaurant (famed for its French bread) on Grove
8. Dean Martin, Innamorata/The Lady With the Big Umbrella. This Dino sub-classic belonged to a “Miss Barbara Paolillo” of Thornton of Hamden; she affixed an address label to the record. “Innamorata” is one of the overblown Martin productions which appears to mock his “That’s Amore” success as much attempts to replicate it. The truly flip flipside is a goofy bit of “lalalalala”-aced doggerel with a Spanish beat and a kickin’ horn section. This side is deeply worn and scratched, suggesting that Miss Paolillo preferred it, or in any case played it harder, than “Innamorata.” Perhaps she used an umbrella tip for a stereo needle.
9. Broken, At the Border EP: At the Border, Hollow Threats, Broken ‘R’ Dicks, Die.
At the Border and Hollow Threats bleed into each other with a feedback screech, though they are very different songs with different sentiments. One is about immigration and travel-visa annoyances, the other bellows “I don’t owe you anything” and harks back to vocalist Jim Martin’s earlier New Haven classic hardcore/punk band, Malachi Krunch. While the bands aren’t profoundly different song-wise, the main distinction being the change in guitarists from Teo Baldwin to Jason Gorman, I vastly preffered Malachi Krunch to Broken, and tried several times to get the old band to reunite under for various New Haven Advocate-sponsored events. I just felt that, for all its anger, Malachi Krunch (named for a hot-rod stunt on the Happy Days TV show) was a funner, more comical and satiric outfit than Broken, whose blunt title promised violence and hopelessness. (When Malachi Krunch finally did reunite, just last summer, it was to honor the late Wally Gates, who’d briefly joined the band in its last throes.) This 2007 EP has some of the silliness I miss from Malachi Krunch, thanks largely to the self-deprecating track “Broken ‘R’ Dicks.”
10. Jiker , Kitty Pool 45: Brawl at da Hut/Mike Prendergast
You’ve got to love a band that puts a collective title on a 2-song 45 as if it were an EP or album, probably just to justify the cover art of a cat sitting on a pool table.
Brawl at da Hut kicks off with a riff that sounds like the band might assault you with a cover of “Gonna Fly Now,” but veers into a rap about Pizza Hut, carried largely by those horns and a hip-hop beat. Mike Prendergast is the complementary traditional slow-ska tune, an instrumental even. Recorded in New York by a band which frequently headlined skankfests at the Tune Inn, the club which released this disk on its own Elevator Music label. The numerous scratches on my green-vinyl copy only add to the crazy beats.