Before “Manic Monday” and before “Walk Like an Egyptian,” The Bangles were actually The Bangs. Even before that, in the late 70s, sisters Vicki and Debbie Peterson (guitars and drums) were playing around LA. A couple of years later a gal named Susanna Hoffs answered an add for a guitarist placed by Vicki and Debbie’s ex-guitarist and current housemate. Susanna didn’t hit it off with the ex-guitarist, but did so with our girls, Vicki and Debbie.

They got together, did a bit of jamming and discovered themselves in a band. They quickly added a bass player (Annette Zilinskas) and called themselves The Bangs.

Their sound was a melodic blend of punk and the Mamas and The Papas. The LA Paisley Underground scene was pretty big and they fit in well with bands like The Three O’Clock, Green on Red and The Dream Syndicate.

In 1981, they recorded a 7″ and released it on their own label. It’s a very far cry of the mom-friendly “Walk Like and Egyptian” and I think you’ll dig it.

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Getting Out of Hand

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Call On Me

Their next release, a 5 song EP, simply entitled The Bangles was recorded as The Bangs, but they changed their name due to some New Jersey band with the same name. It was released in 1982 by Faulty Products, a subsidiary of IRS records. Faulty Products went under and the EP went out of print.

It still contained much of the guitar-driven Beatles sound that made the 7″ so fun.

They did an LP with Columbia Records that met with little notice, but the album after that was the one that broke them into the mainstream.

The Bangles seemed to look back exactly once. That was on the Rick Ruben-produced Less Than Zero soundtrack that included their minor hit, but really fun version of “Hazy Shade of Winter” which somehow managed to not make it onto my Covers to Keep You Warm mix.

Most folks reading this know about the series of mix CDs that I post here and give out at Christmas. I started out just making mixes in place of Christmas Cards and then moved onto making “In Between Mixes” just for the hell of it. These are posted here and given out in person as CDs to a small group of friends. Most folks just get them here.

The last mix was quite a bit of fun to make and from what I’ve been hearing, it was quite a bit of fun to listen to. Thanks!

So far, I’ve released three Christmas mixes and three In Between Mixes. I’ve got two more In Betweens to put out (on August and October 15) and then it’s time for another Christmas mix (early December).

I’ve decided that for the whole year of 2010, I’ll be releasing one mix per month. A lot of these mixes will be taken directly from my vinyl collection. Some of the mixes to look forward to include a mix of the first singles of 80’s bands, songs about days/months/seasons, mellow Pet Shop Boys songs, remixes, early and mid-80’s rap and a bunch of other fun stuff.

The next mix should be a fun one. It’s called True Till College: XbeerX! and contains my favorite drinking songs. What’s a teetotaler doing making a mix of drinking songs? Who knows. I don’t drink, but I guess it doesn’t mean that drinking isn’t fun or musical. Drinking isn’t for me, but the songs sure are!

It’ll feature music by The Handsome Family, They Might Be Giants, The Pogues, Frank Sinatra, Johnny Paycheck and a whole bunch of others. That’ll be yours in a little over two weeks on Aug 15.

I’m also considering hosting my mixes on another server like megaupload.com. Hosting them here somehow seems like it’s going to end badly.

I’m still not sure if I’ll be using zip or rar files. Everyone can open zip files, but rar has better, more accurate compression. I should probably just use zip.

We just finished up the very first season of the TV classic Little House on the Prairie. I’ve been wanting to watch this for years now and have finally gotten the chance. There are 10 seasons, this is the first.

A couple of weeks before we started with the first episode, I was told in no uncertain terms that this was crap, that the entire series was horrible. I nearly took it as a dare and immediately rented it.

You know the basic story, everyone does. Set during “the [post-Civil War] pioneer days,” Ma and Pa Ingalls move to the small town of Walnut Grove with their three kids, Mary, Laura and Carrie and try to make a life for themselves. The town is quaint and life is hard, but rewarding. Repeat with variation for about 200 episodes and you’ve got your show. Sort of.

One thing you don’t think of when you do think of Little House is “surprise.” You think that it’s a quaint little show, that whatever trivial problems that arise in the first act of each episode are cleared up and back to normal by the time the end credits roll and that everything in between is predictable and white-washed.

What surprised me about Little House was that it was often unpredictable. At the beginning of each episode, we’d try to plot out the fates of each character. Sometimes we’d nail it, but usually there would be an odd (in a good way) turn in the storytelling. This was always appreciated and earned my respect in even the really hokey episodes.

Ah yes, while it’s a great show, there was some hoke. It was the 70s, hoke had to be inserted or penalties would have to be paid. The hoke mostly came in the still-quite-likable character of Mr. Edwards, Pa’s best friend.

See, Mr. Edwards is a load. He’s sort of a wanderer who does odd jobs and lives, first in the Ingalls’s barn and then random other places. He truly loves the Ingalls Family, but mostly he is a very enjoyable and one dimensional cartoon character.

But even he has a bit of complexity to him. Everyone on this show does. Nobody, not even Pa, always does the right thing. They, like most folk, always mean to, but sometimes come up a bit short.

There are no truly “evil” people on Little House. Even the racist law man hunting down a Sioux and the alcoholic father who beats his kid deserve redemption.

The only people who are never really redeemed are Mrs and Nellie Olsen, the arch nemeses of Ma and Laura. Their fun rivalry peppers the show and provides some of the subplots, but it never drives the story.

So what does drive the story? Mostly the desire and then the attempt to do right. It’s not good enough for your heart to be in the right place, you have to put up or shut up. If I take one thing from Little House, it’s that. You can wish and dream that what you want will happen, but without putting your shoulder to the plow (in this show, that’s often literal), it’s all but pointless.

It’s not that I don’t have some complaints about the show, but mostly those are the fault of the 70s. Continuity wasn’t a real big issue for TV shows then. Some things stuck around from one episode to another (like the bell that was made for the church), but other things, mostly guest starring towns folk, did not.

One thing that was never really made clear was just how many people lived in and around Walnut Grove. With nearly every new episode, we met a new character, which shouldn’t be surprising since this was a pioneer town with new people moving in all the time. But by the next episode, they were gone. Some came back later, like Johnny Johnson, and some became regular characters, like Mr. Kennedy. Most were never spoken of again.

Most shows (even today) try their best to match up the season in the TV show with the season in which it aired. If it’s Christmas in real life, it’s also Christmas in Walnut Grove. They did this a bit with Little House, but more often than not, the episodes encompassed a very long time frame. One two-part episode takes place over the course of ten months.

Though we do thoroughly enjoy watching it, that doesn’t mean we can’t riff on it. The 70s production values alone provide much fodder. But what gets our goat most is the youngest daughter Carrie. She was probably three or four during the first season and speaks very little. But when she does it’s loud, completely incomprehensible and annoying. We’ve developed a running gag of when the family is in trouble, there’s always the option to kill and eat Carrie. Except in the episode with the racist law man. I was out for blood. Even Nellie Olsen is tolerable, though there are times when I wish that Laura would just punch ol’ Nellie right in the nose!

Little House is, of course, a simple show. It really is good, wholesome, family entertainment. Still, there are some “hidden” bits within that hint of something a bit stranger. One episode, directed by Michael Landon (who played Pa), featured a saloon in which there was an automatic player-piano (the kind that play themselves). At the piano sat a piano player, staring at the keys, not playing, not pretending to play, not moving. He just sat there. The piano player wasn’t focused upon long as the action moved to another section of the saloon, but he caught my eye. In a later scene, they end with a shot panning back to the piano player, still sitting at the piano that now plays itself. He still isn’t playing or moving, but this time he is silently crying to himself.

That, folks, is brilliant. David Lynch wouldn’t be pulling off stuff like that until the next decade. Who would have thought Little House would throw it in there?

And I guess that’s why I like the show. It’s not bad TV, it’s not horrible or even predictable. It’s a good show with good writing about a time in our history that was both harder and easier than the life we now lead. It makes us thankful for today, when we have all that we do, but also a little wistful for the price we had to pay to get here.

Well, what I mostly know about Squeeze is that they have really fun harmonies and great, swinging songs. Sure, they were from the ‘77 punk thing, but even their first album is a very far cry from anything sounding like the Sex Pistols.

Up until the other day, I always thought that Squeeze’s first single, released in February 1978, was “Take Me I’m Yours,” a great song by any evaluation, but not punk rock. That’s fine by me, of course, but it’s not actually their first release.

“Take Me I’m Yours” was the first single off their first album, UK Squeeze in ‘78. But Squeeze put out a 7″ before that.

The EP entitled Packet of Three came out in July of 1977. It featured “Cat on the Wall” as the A-side and a double B-side with “Night Ride” and “Back Track.” All three of these songs are rockin’ punk songs (you know, as far as Squeeze is concerned).

This EP as well as their first EP was produced by John Cale from the Velvet Underground. Fun, huh? Want to hear?

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Cat on the Wall

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Night Ride

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Back Track

Incidentally, Squeeze nearly released a 7″ before Packet of Three for the song “Take Me I’m Yours.” It was to come out in January of ‘77, but was canceled. It would have had an amazingly titled song called “No Disco Kid, No” for the B-side. I don’t know what this early (probably very punk-sounding) version of “Take Me I’m Yours” would have sounded like and you have no idea how much I’d really, really love to hear “No Disco Kid, No.”

Sadly, the recalled 7″ seems lost, but thankfully Packet of Three is readily available and I’ll be picking it up soonishly.

More info on this release is here.

I doubt anyone has watched it aside from me, but the NBC show Kings starring Ian McShane was some of the best television I’ve ever seen.

What’s strange is that at first. the premise seems silly. It’s a modern retelling of the Biblical story of David. Everything is modern, except for religion and a very theocratic society and monarchy.

Ian McShane (Al Swearengen in Deadwood) is brilliant as King Silas (King Saul in the original). He plays the not-quite-evil King perfectly. I could watch McShane act all day.

The story starts out with David, a soldier in a war against neighboring Gath where he single handedly (with a grenade) defeats a Goliath-Class tank after saving King Silas’s son Jonathan. Sounds pretty hokey, eh? Strange thing is, it’s not.

It all could have very easily spiraled down into some courtly soap opera, but it doesn’t even come close. The writing is far too good for that. McShane is miles above it.

Let me be clear on this – this isn’t a preachy and hokey Christian movie like Left Behind. This is (was?) classically done. This is the thinking-man’s Biblical retelling. How this ever ended up on network television is beyond me. HBO or Showtime would have been much better suited for such a show.

But it’s over now. Nobody watched it – NBC scheduled it away, advertised it horribly (a butterfly ad during the Super Bowl?!). It’s not officially canceled just yet, but it’s not looking good.

Kings started off very well and just got better. By the last handful of episodes, it became some of the best television I had ever watched. This comes highly recommended. Maybe it’s not for everyone, but if you liked Deadwood, you’ll like this.

Thankfully, you can watch every episode on Hulu and I strongly suggest you do. There are 13 episodes, all worth seeing (in order, of course – start with the first).

The DVDs come out in September.

Sometime between discovering the Sex Pistols and The Clash The Jam (probably 1988ish), I came across a compilation called British Airwaves. It featured 18 songs by 18 bands that I had never heard of before.

This period of my life was punctuated with seeking out music that was entirely new to me. Previously, I had been a fan of Duran Duran, 80’s hip hop and Pink Floyd. However, off-beat and underground stuff was beginning to seep in.

In seventh grade (‘87-88) I was introduced to The Cure, Sex Pistols and the Dead Kennedys. The Dead Milkmen showed up the year before. By 1988, I was fully submerged in music that nobody else liked. I loved it.

Even so, this comp came out of nowhere. I was probably milling about the mall record store, Listening Booth, and saw this. There were no punk compilations at this point (at the mall). The only thing you could get were the Pistols, DK and a few of the more popular bands. I wasn’t so much interested in that, so when I found this, I hardly thought twice at buying it (on cassette, no less – the CD wasn’t available).

British Airwaves is filled with post-punk circa 1985. But I had no frame of reference. I never followed early punk into post-punk. This was sort of like punk, but a bit mellower. Sort of. It was weird and I loved it.

My favorites were by 1000 Mexicans, The Renees, The Bomb Party and Hagar the Womb. What’s strange is that I’ve never searched out anything more by these bands.

So in that way, this comp wasn’t really life-changing for me. It was, however, loved. I listened to it for years until I finally lost it. A decade or more has passed and I had completely forgotten the title (but not the music). I searched for various things, trying to remember titles or artists. Nothing came to mind. Except a song about whiskey.

I found it sort of randomly. I was looking through discogs.com and stumbled onto the listing. “Hm, I had that once… wait… oh my god! This is it!”

I was pretty thrilled. It’s been a long time since I’ve heard it. Maybe 15 years. That didn’t stop me from singing along with “Harry was a babysitter, first he hit her then he bit her!” Pretty thrilling, eh?

So here are a few songs for you to listen to. And feel free to nab this way-out-of-print comp here.

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The Renees – Drink Problem

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1000 Mexicans – Last Pop Song

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Bomb Party – Harry Was A Babysitter

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Hagar The Womb – A Song Of Deep Hate

It would be fun to get this on vinyl.

Did you know that Seattle has its very own monument to your friend and mine – electricity? It’s true! How many other cities can claim such a thing?

At the Seattle City Light building near 98th and Stone, there is a bench and coffee table dedicated to lightbulbs, on/off switches and receptacles.

The sides of the bench are lined with 14 switches and topped with 14 bulbs. The center of the bench features three larger-than-life switches and bulbs.

The coffee table has crudely etched receptacles on top of it.

Sadly, the switches are permanently either on or off, you can’t change them. But no matter since the lights can’t turn on – they’re made of cast aluminum.

I don’t really know who put them there or why, but it’s a nice little-known oddity.

Thanks, Seattle!