BACK ONLINE!

Hey... if any of you are still following, I finally succumbed to your demands and re-uploaded all of the stuff i've posted here. All the downloads below are once again active. Sorry it took me so long. Hopefully, I'll get some more stuff posted up here again soon.

I'm just noticing that the links to the things I'm posting don't stay active for long. In fact, nothing is available except for the last post. I'm working on a way to keep these up, but in the meantime, if anyone wants any of it, let me know and I'll upload it.

Joey Tampon and the Toxic Shocks

Joey Tampon the Toxic Shocks - S/T 7" [Recess Records, 1997]

Joey Tampon's is a name that's already been mentioned here, will come up quite a few more times in this blog, and is by far one of the most enigmatic figures in Southern punk of the early to late 90's.

Joey was a staple of the Huntsville punk scene for the whole stretch of the 1990's, playing in too many bands to count, including, but not limited to: 15E, The Slackers, Shitboy from Outerspace, The Radioactives, The 3D's, The 45's, Puddle, and probably a bunch more I'm forgetting or don't even know about.

Joey is probably most notorious for his eponymous outfit Joey Tampon and the Toxic Shocks - a snotty, minimalist DIY punk trio featuring Neil Delbaccio on bass (Burning Radios, The Wops), and Greg Addison on drums (The Grumpies, Rice Harvester, Jarvis). A quick google search shows the legacy of this band is alive and well, the centerpiece being this self-titled 7" released on the ubiquitous Recess Records. I recall them touring extensively, piled inside a Ford Festiva with their gear strapped to the roof. During their live shows, Joey often wore a self-styled full body tampon costume while playing. Their songs were based on pretty traditional punk themes of the day. When Joey wasn't griping about the fashion choices of undesirable others ("Duckheads are for Fuckheads"), or the oppressive wrath of Johnny Law ("Magnum P.I.G."), he was raging against the machine with anti-authoritarian, anti-conformity, anti-corporate rants like "Everything's a Product" and "I'm Not Going to Kill Myself For You".

Musically, the Toxic Shocks had a solid bassist, and one of the best punk rock drummers in town, but the defining characteristics of their sound was derived from the fact that Joey couldn't play the guitar for shit. This coupled with his signature nasally yelp results in a reckless, slapdash kamikaze collection of minute long anthems that are surprisingly inventive at times. Speaking on song length, Joey is an incredibly economical dude. Like his previous band The Slackers, Joey managed to squeeze no less then 5 songs on each side, making a total of 10 in the 11.5 minutes allotted.

After the band broke up, Joey started exploring his love of surf and garage rock with bands like The Radioactives and The 3D's. Shortly after the turn of the century, Joey Tampon - a man with the word "fuck" tattooed on his body at least 3 times - did a completely 180 transformation, became a born again christian, a hardcore republican, and eventually a Baptist minister. Maybe having a kid changed him just that much, or maybe it's just switching one dogma for another, but I wouldn't expect to hear anymore punk rock out of Joey Tampon. Though apparently, he's really into bluegrass music now.

The Grumpies

The Grumpies - S/T 7" [Shredder Records, 1997]

Intro:
I'm istening to this 7" right now, and thinking the Grumpies are just as awesome to me know as they were to me in 1996. Given that most of you were not going to see the Grumpies - particularly the shows in Huntsville - around that time, then you have no frame of reference, and so I'll do my best to iterate to you just how awesome this band was to the vast majority of punk rock fans in the area at that time: um... we fucking loved them. We went to every single show they played (and they played all the time), I wore out several copies of their demo cassette in my car (I still have a 3rd generation dub, recorded over a copy of the Neville Brothers' "Yellow Moon" that is barely playable), and over 10 years later I'm still spinning this 7" on heavy rotation.

Bio:
The Grumpies were from Starkville, Mississippi. Their singer/guitarist Jayson (last names are often neglected to be mentioned in punk rock liner notes) was formerly in White Trash Superman (posted on this blog a few weeks ago). Their bassist and second singer Amy, told me once at a show that she had been playing bass approximately six months before joining the band [debate could be raised here on whether females are naturally better musicians, or that the best punk rock is performed by amateurs]. They also had a drummer named Vince who was mad man on the skins. At one point, Vince left or was fired from the band and Greg of Huntsville's Rice Harvester/Toxic Shocks fame joined up with them.

Descripto:
What you'll soon find out, if you're not listening already, is that The Grumpies sound something like if the Chipmunks (featuring one Chipette) got amped up on coffee and amphetamines and played cute, quirky and ultra catchy punk rock at warp speed. In fact, most people I've played this band for were convinced I was playing the record too fast. Having seen them live more times than I can count, I can attest that the record is just fine. They're voices are really just that high.

As a bonus, I'm adding this video I found on a Grumpies fansite:

The Crumbs

I have to firstly apologize for the lapse in updates. Things have been a little crazy as of late - plus I'm notorious for starting up projects and neglecting them. But I'm forcing myself to make a post tonight.



The Crumbs - I Fell in Love with an Alien Girl... [Recess Records, 1995]

It seems like I had heard of Miami's The Crumbs long before I actually heard them. They played Huntsville (with the Slackers, I believe) but it was on a school night and my jerkface parents wouldn't let me go. I read reviews of this 7" well before I was able to buy it. I really liked the titles of the songs, the band name, the artwork, and pop punk* in general was the shit I lived for, so I decided I liked it long before I bought it and couldn't wait to get my hands on it. Once our local record store (Sunburst, R.I.P) got in stock, I was among the first to snatch it up. Well, it didn't live up to all that I'd grown to expect, but I still listened to it on repeat, ad nauseum. Singer Raf Classic sometimes sounds like a deaf Turkish immigrant straining to shit a melody. But the songs are very solid, and you kind of get used to it.



*I should point out for the younger generation that the pop punk of over a decade ago is a slightly different animal than what most associate with the term now. I'm speaking more of bands such as The Queers, Screeching Weasel, and The Mr. T Experience who employed a much thinner production quality, much simpler arrangements, many many nods to the Ramones, and gave us just a little more attitude than your Blink 182's and Good Charlottes and Paramores. Don't get me wrong, they still sang about some whiny shit. There was plenty bitching and moaning and longing for all the girls that neglected to mirror their affection and admiration. They were just a hell of a lot more punk rock about it.

The Slackers

The Slackers:
Where Were You in '92? (Fay-Get Records, 1994)
Circle A Your Day - (Nation of Kids, 1995)
Split with Fun Girls from Mt. Pilot (House O'Pain, 1996)
+ 1 Bonus track

I don't have the greatest explanation as to why, but it seems no band truly epitomizes Huntsville's concept of punk rock like The Slackers. Maybe it's because most of their members were crucial components of so many other important bands, or that their style and attitude mapped out the template we'd see in most other bands after them for several years to come.

Either way, at the time, you could not have convinced me there were any cooler four guys on Earth aside from these chaps. On the front lines you had the prematurely balding, righteously outspoken, homemade tattoo gallery and bassist/singer Joey Tampon (15E, Shitboy from Outerspace) whose comically nasal outbursts were glued together with the barnacle encrusted, gravel filled, razor blade gargling vocal chords of Heiko Schrepel whose snarling growl was tailor made for this band. On guitar, you had a very young Robert Daniel (The Peeps) who occasionally chimed in on vocals, and like Schrepel and Tampon, seems to have shared a good bit of writing duties. Of course, holding it all down on drums was Matt Seward, brother to Andrew Seward of Against Me!.

Lyrically, The Slackers covered all the hot button issues of the day. Every tune was an unrelenting attack on figures of authority, the pompous bourgeoisie, conformity, society on the whole (but most especially in the South), poseur punks, and of course, those fucking audacious, fancy pants, limousine-riding, money making rockstars (which is semi-ironic considering Heiko went on grace the Vans WARP Tour and Hot Topic stores across the country as the bassist for One Man Army). Semi-irony aside, these dudes sing it with a burning, urgent conviction and enough "fuck you!'s" to make for a pretty entertaining drinking game.

As it usually works in punk rock, the game is all about instant gratification - or at least "ASAP" gratification. You start a band because you want to play shows and put out records. So as soon as you know 4 or 5 songs, it's time to get on stage and into the studio - which explains why so many of the first E.P.'s by these bands are really sloppy. That's probably the case with "Where We You in '92?" which I would guess was definitely not recorded to a click track. But with "Circle A Your Day", they're starting to get the hang of it, and by the time their last recordings came out, they were a pretty tight band - not to mention economical. The Slackers wasted not an inch of vinyl, cramming never less than 4 songs on a side. For the most part, this is their whole discography aside from a few other compilation tracks and 9 or so unreleased songs that NOK! was later selling as part of a box set. All together, they equal up to about half an hour of music.

The bonus track here is (again) from Recess Records' "Play at Your Own Risk, Vol. 2". Rumors around this time were that The Slackers were in talks with San Francisco punk staple Lookout! Records about putting out a record, but the band's demise came when they ventured out to San Fran - a one show tour - to play that coveted mecca of all things punk in the 90's - Gilman Street. Legend has it that they were kicked out and banned as a result of Robert repeating an offensive lesbian joke throughout their set. I'm not entirely clear on the details or exact cause of this next incident, but according to a story Joey told me while we were on tour together as The 3D's, there was an altercation and they ended up leaving a scared and teary-eyed Heiko behind in Oakland, California, and traveled all the way back to Alabama without him. The band played their last show at The Tip Top Cafe shortly after, having members of the audience come on stage and sing in place of Schrepel (I used to have this on video tape but loaned it to Joey and never got it back).

Matt Seward moved away to go to school at Montevallo. Robert Daniel was playing with in the Peeps at the same time as The Slackers and continued doing so afterward. He started a short-lived rock n roll band called The Deadlines, replaced me as the guitarist of The 3D's, and now plays with The Counter Clockwise. Joey "Tampon" Tacon started many more bands, including The 3D's, The Radioactives, and Joey Tampon and the Toxic Shocks before finding Jesus and becoming a Baptist minister. Heiko came back to Huntsville briefly to get some clothes, sell off the remainder of his possessions, and moved back to California for good. As mentioned before, several years later he was on the WARP Tour as the bassist for One Man Army. According to his Wikipedia page, he's now playing with U.S. Bombs.

White Trash Superman

White Trash Superman - Couldn't If I Tried b/w Wheaties (We Did It Ourselves Records, 1994?)
I don't know a whole lot about White Trash Superman besides the fact that I love this record, their singer/guitarist Jayson went on to form The Grumpies (who'll be covered later on), and they came from the college town of Starkville, Mississippi.
I only saw WTS once sometime in the summer of 1995. They played a pizza shop called J. Gregry's (Jack, didn't you guys play this show?) and I remember then being not quite simple, fast, or sloppy to be what most in Huntsville at that would consider "punk rock". I recall my friend Trey saying something to me in that respect and saying something back at him like "Yeah... I think this is like... 'indie rock'"

One night, probably more than a year later, I was cleaning out my car to find someone (still not sure who, but if you want it back, sorry!) left this in my back seat. Side A sounds like Dinosaur Jr. on a pop punk binge. It's a song that beckons to be listened to repeatedly and will remain in rotation inside your head for days to come. Side B starts out slow, sounding a hell of a lot like Pavement before picking up the pace to morph into something more along the lines of Superchunk.

With a little research, I was able to snag their other 7" "Punk Rock Hero" (which is in this in the file you're downloading) off their Myspace where you can also get these tracks. Although, i recommend you download them here, as i've got them all tagged with cover art and all.