Demented Ravings of the Mr T Experience

ODIN XXVIII

And we’re back gain, with the twenty-eighth collation of the Songs for Odin posts since the last time they were collated. That was all the way back in August. I skipped a few weeks in the interim, which is why there are fewer than you’d expect in this edition. It can’t be helped and it doesn’t matter anyway (and you probably didn’t notice, anyway, if anyone is in fact reading this now.) Eventually, I started back up again and herein lies the result.

If you’re new here: Song for Odin is this thing where I post a video of a song (usually a live version from the archives or found on the internet) and type up some commentary on it. It’s style as “for Odin” because I do on Wednesday, that is, Wodnesdæg, because I’m cute like that. Except for the aforementioned gap, I’ve been doing this pretty much every single week since November of 2017. And with this batch we’ve reached the 153rd entry, covering 121 different songs. (The count is different because there are multiple entries for some songs.)

Why? It passes the time. Also: slight OCD.

Details about how and why I started doing this can be found in the intro to the first installment; and the Odin conceit is explained, somewhat, in the intro to the second. The subsequent installments may be found here: three; four; five; six; seven; eight; nine; ten; eleven; twelve; thirteen; fourteen; fifteen; sixteen; seventeen; eighteen; nineteen; twenty; twenty-one; twenty-two; twenty-three; twenty-four; twenty-five; twenty-six; twenty-seven.

[links in preceding paragraph updated, 12.29.2020 — ed.]

There’s a YouTube playlist of all the Songs for Odin posted so far, with their write-ups linked in the description space of each respective video.

Table of contents: “My Stupid Life,” Tapin’ Up My Heart,” “She Said Yeah,” “The Dustbin of History,” “I Wanna Ramone You,” “New Girlfriend.”

Let’s begin.

1 “My Stupid Life”

Sometimes the chaos works: “I’ve been doing nothing in particular, I’ve been figuring out what I was gonna do…” Well, if you noticed (and if you didn’t) Song for Odin took last week off. It was tempting to take this week off as well, I’m not gonna lie. However, there are still more songs to go and a bit more to say about some of them, probably, and I have a strong suspicion that if I skip too many weeks I’ll just wind up dropping the whole thing. So, we continue. And as the The Mr T Experience… and the Women Who Love Them re-issue (RAD-013) is still emerging (the vinyl mailing is happening as I type) it seems apt to “feature” another song off it. So here’s “My Stupid Life”, live in Atlanta, September 15, 1996.

As I believe I’ve mentioned before, the roots of this song go back further than the others on this release, at least as far back as the early stages of Our Bodies Our Selves when it was still vaguely conceived as a loose concept album revolving around children’s literature. (Yes, it really was… it obviously didn’t happen that way and that’s probably a good thing.) Hence the reference to Maurice Sendak’s Pierre.

Also, it is more along the lines of the naive, casual, and frankly chaotic way I used to approach songwriting, where I would just free associate on a general topic and hope for the best. Sometimes all the non sequiturs more or less clicked, randomly, though often they didn’t, quite. I think “My Stupid Life” does click, and in fact clicks better than most. As with a lot of the inadvertently successful songs of this middle period (such as it was) it was helped along by the fact that the topic concerned confusion, chaos, inarticulateness, vague angst and regret… that sort of thing. The song not only describes its subject but is also an example of it. It would have fit in quite well with Milk Milk Lemonade in that regard — and I can hear, in my head, how it might have come out sonically and arrangement-wise had we done it that way, at that time. Not better, certainly, but interestingly different and probably as good as anything of its type among the others.

But, as I see now and as I was learning at the time, you can’t do every song that way. And each of the other songs on …atWWLT reflects a deliberate, concerted effort to raise the bar, to make the lyrics serve, support, and the develop the song rather than just lay there as a sort of “garnish”. It’s a much more reliable way to compose, but it also makes the writing around a thousand times more challenging. I’m not saying the other seven songs are perfect by any means. But if you compare “My Stupid Life” to the track that precedes it (“Tapin’ Up My Heart”) it’s pretty clear that having a coherent plan and sticking to it can produce better, or at least more interesting, results. At the very least, you can do songs about something other than not knowing what you’re doing.

This was a good thing, a good change. That said, though, sometimes the chaos works, especially if you’re sincere about it, and the commitment and sheer energy of the playing do carry it through, here. I’m glad they weren’t all like this, but I’ll admit I’m also glad this one was like this. This song appeared in this Odin “series” a year ago, and you can go there if you’d like to read more typing about the song or see a different live version of it.

And, that’ll wrap it up, I reckon. It wasn’t nearly as hard as I thought it would be, as the chorus girl said to the archbishop. Take care of yourselves and wish everybody luck with everything because I’m sure we’ll all need it. Peace.

notes:

— studio recording remastered on YouTube.

— Sounds Rad re-issue second pressing order link.

— Original post on minds.com.

2 “Tapin’ Up My Heart”

Delicate like an angel’s wings: So, yeah, the Sounds Rad remastered re-issue of The Mr T Experience… and the Women Who Love Them (RAD-013) has just “come out,” meaning you can hear it at the digital places and continue to wait for the Covid-hampered pressing process to result in the much nicer pretty vinyl discs to be mailed to you. (Won’t be long now, I’m told, so just sit tight.) There’s a CD as well if you’re into that.

And if you’ve ever found yourself wondering what “Tapin’ Up My Heart” might be like captured on a camcorder from the rafters of a 20,000 seat sports arena in Rome, well here it is:

That’s the Roma PalaEUR and the reason we were there was opening for Green Day on a European tour in March of 1996.

Apologies for the sound. It is all that’s available, and it does get across the weirdness of the roar of that size of crowd and the sheer absurdity of bellowing out all those complicated “poetic” words in the naked breaks to a non-English-speaking audience. That’s natural stadium reverb, from, like a real stadium not a plug-in, and if it doesn’t sound perfect, well, neither did JFK at the Brandenburg Gate, probably.

Oh but I should say: my friends, it is Wodnesdæg once again, time for me to do a song and dance about a song as I’ve doing once a week for nearly three years now. I figured since the RAD-013 process has begun I might as well “do” another song from it, since, as far as I can tell, it can’t hurt.

So back to Italia, 1996: Love Is Dead had just come out a couple months before. It was to become our most popular thing, the one we’d be remembered for if at all, but we didn’t yet know that that’s what was going to happen. And the audience didn’t know it either, or us from Adam. The …atWWLT ep was only a couple of years old at this time, but two years was a long time in punk rock years back then, and this was already “the old stuff,” of which there was quite a lot in this set. We had a very strictly enforced thirty minutes, from 7:30 to 8 PM, to play our 14 songs, which allowed for very little nonsense, and we were paid ten dollars a minute for it.

In other words, it had international incident written all over it, but somehow, to one’s surprise, it basically turned out sort almost alright.

I’ve posted a few songs from the set before (see link in notes below) and you can check out the “minor secrets” write-ups for more on the background of this tour and the unremitting strangeness of taking the small club stage act and planting it unreconstructed as-was squarely in a 20,000 seat arena and just letting what happened happen. (For both us and them at that time, really, but they were obviously a lot better at it — just speaking for myself, I was freaked out the entire time and it never got easy or comfortable with it.)

Coincidentally, I just happened upon a bit of a contemporaneous article quoting me on the subject:

It’s virtually impossible to talk about decade-old San Fran-East Bay prank-pop-punksters MTX without mentioning Green Day, who MTX are touring with in Europe. And it’s a pretty safe bet that Green Day wouldn’t exist without the Mr. T Experience, who first bombarded the airwaves with 1986’s Everyone’s Entitled to Their Own Opinion, featuring the single “Danny Partridge Got Busted.”

MTX have played with their homies before, but as Dr. Frank notes, “not since they turned into this big, real band, and we stayed a dumb little band… Back in ’89 we brought them into our homes — the pizza place, the laundromat, the living room…they’re bringing us into their arena! As long as we don’t misbehave and track mud all over the place, they’ll sort of tolerate us.”

(I have no idea where this article originally appeared by the way, and no recollection of it, or of saying that stuff. This text is from a site including several such, rather garbled and seemingly accidentally preserved, the detritus of somebody’s old website, looks like: the title of the file appears to be “mom.”)

Anyway, they did. Sort of tolerate us, I mean. And thank God for that. We weren’t all that tolerable, as I remember. We were lucky to be there at all, or: anywhere.

That’s all. Don’t forget RAD-013, and see you next week, I reckon.

notes:

— studio recording, remastered, on YouTube:

— ..and the Women Who Love Them, the playlist.

— Sounds Rad link if you’d like to acquire the second pressing.

— playlist of songs posted from this show so far.

— Original post on Minds.com.

3 “She Said Yeah”

Fun is all you need (even when everything’s gone a bit apocalyptic): How do you do, fellow kids? It’s just little old me, Song for Odin, coming at you with a live Mr T Experience song plus some typing about it. (Song for Odin does this every Wodnesdæg, hence the name.)

The sky right now is the most absurd color, like in a space-scape, and I’m feeling a bit like a red shirt or, like, Ammi Pierce or Charles Dexter Ward. It’s 9 AM but it looks like 8 PM, and kind of orangey-purple. And it’s getting weirder and weirder by the moment. But, rock and roll dreams will come through, and I expect we’ll all survive, yeah? Give it a shot, anyway. Struggle manfully on and so forth.

Anyway, here we go and today it is: MTX live at Gilman, August 10, 1996, covering a favorite Ripoffs song, by our old bandmate Jon von:

I recently included this in a listicle of “songs we intended to cover in the ‘90s” for Brooklyn Vegan.

Quoting myself:

I always loved this song by former bandmate Jon Von and his post-MTX outfit and we used to cover it live on occasion in the ’94 — ’98 era. It was preliminarily on the agenda for a couple of recording projects but we were always running out of time and it never wound up getting done.

Not sure it needed to be done by us, but it would have been a good time I bet.

As it says there, we played the song fairly frequently in those days, always as a set-closer (as here) but this is the only video document of it I’ve come across.

This, by the way, is not of course the 1950s Larry Williams song of the same name whose cover by the Rolling Stones made it famous in 1965. However, that is also a song we’d played around with with an eye to maybe covering — I don’t believe it ever reached the stage of actually being played at a show. And it really woulda just been a case of covering the cover, which usually isn’t such a hot idea. But it would have been fun nonetheless, and fun is worth something in and of itself. That song, incidentally, was co-written by Sonny Bono under the pseudonym Don Christy: not a lot of people know that!

Anyway, like I said, it’s not clear that this version needed to be done by this version of us, but we had a good time doing it and sometimes fun is all you need. Song for Odin will return next week, most likely. Till then, we’ll try to hold it together if you will.

notes:

— original by the Ripoffs, on YouTube.

— a flier for this show.

— this show on The List.

— that other “She Said Yeah”, done by Larry Williams.

— Original post on minds.com.

3 “The Dustbin of History”

Welcome to obsolescence: Er, ahem. It’s Wednesday, that is Wodnesdæg, and time for a Song for Odin, that thing I (usually) do where I post a video for a song with some typing about it. I’ve skipped it for the past three weeks because reasons. But now we’re back, so yay. We’ll see how it goes.

So here’s the MTX of 1997 doing “The Dustbin of History” at the Euclid Tavern in Cleveland.

“That’s one of our least popular songs” I say at the end, which is not quite true as of now — I know from more recent requests and commentary and from the Mtx forever polling that a fair few people seem to like it quite a lot. And even back then, you can tell people were digging it to a degree.

But in a more general way, probably the way I was getting at, there is a dividing line between the Love Is Dead era and what came before. Love Is Dead was popular and approved of in a way that everything on the previous side of the line just wasn’t, and doing “the old stuff” seemed to beg the audience’s indulgence in a new way. The album this song is from, Our Bodies Our Selves, was released in 1993, only four years previously; but, as I’ve noted before with regard to back catalog tunes in the set in the ’90s “pop punk” heyday, it really felt like a serious excavation, an extreme measure, to dig these up and attempt to re-animate them. I guess four years really is a long time in the life of a band, but thirty years later you have a different perspective on it.

Anyway, Revenge Is Sweet and So Are You had just come out, while we were on the road if I remember correctly. And in its capacity as an effective Love Is Dead II, its songs were an easy sell to the suddenly more numerous and more engaged fans and comrades. Our Bodies Our Selves, though, was a different story. A lot of people like it now, but it took a long time to get there. It was released with little fanfare and noted by very few people in the “punk” world, let alone the regular world (if there’s a difference, which I doubt.) The band, as a band, was in a transition that felt very much like a disintegration. Very few shows were played. I wasn’t sure what to do with my life, but it was becoming pretty clear that it wasn’t going to be this. I was studying Greek, looking into graduate schools. (Which, thank god, never came to anything.)

And yet Our Bodies Our Selves bubbled under the surface on a slow boil, without our realizing. It’s certainly not without its flaws, some of them very pronounced, and much of its character is owed to its chaotic nature and the inadvertent effects thereof. It seems to be balanced precariously on a very fine edge, always in danger of tipping over and crashing but never quite doing so. Somehow, it captured something, and that something is unique. Which certainly doesn’t happen every day.

Even after seven years and nearly as many albums I was still learning how to write songs properly, and still skidding around all over the place. But despite some spills and other mishaps, this album contains several my very best songs, skidded into like lucky, unexpectedly elegant accidents. I mean: “Martyr,” “Somebody Who Cares,” the instrumental “Bridge to Taribithia,” and, I daresay, even “Even Hitler Had a Girlfriend.” (And of course “More than Toast” and the other Gun Crazy songs, whether they “count” or not.)

And, though it’s considerably more of a mess than most of those, I’d include “The Dustbin of History” as one of those providential wrecks. I certainly could have tried harder with the lyrics, as so often.

And therein lies a tale, kind of. Because I knew it at the time. Tightening it up and making it more pointed and such was probably beyond me, but I was aware it needed to be done. (And that awareness itself was probably the biggest step towards the getting-my-songwriting-act-together that was to ensue.) But I delayed the vocals till the last moment, hoping for some kind of miracle improvement of my songwriting “chops.” When the time came to commit to the lyrics on the lyric sheet in the printed packaging (which had to be completed long before the recording, the way things were for us at that time) I submitted instead the text of a paranoid UFO pamphlet some crazy person handed me in Berkeley. You may have noticed this: “… small mouths inside larger artificial mouths…” I sang the essentially unfinished words in their current state when the vocal session could be delayed no longer, as I’d done so many times before, often without quite realizing it.

And somehow, the inarticulateness, the vague allusions to nebulous, unspecified things that may or may not be there, the wordplay in aid of nothing you can identify, the mixed metaphors, the grasping at sublimity, the ineffective cloak of irony and faux-erudition… everything collides and collapses, leaving a rather beautiful shambles, the kind you couldn’t do if you tried to do it on purpose. (I’ve tried.) What the hell is it about? Beats me. It’s about a feeling, and the feeling is real, the song the most and least that can be said about it. That’s why I (still) like it. It’s weird.

That’s all I got here, the return of Odin. I’m gonna try to keep it up. Check back next week to see. Bless.

notes:

— studio recording on YouTube.

— Our Bodies Our Selves on discogs.

— Original post on minds.com.

4 “Alternative Is Here to Stay”

Itching Powder Records… what might have been: Another Wednesday has rolled along, and it’s time for a Song for Odin, which today is “Alternative Is Here to Stay,” live at Emo’s in Austin, November 1995 on one of our several short tours with the Dickies.

You can read more about the context and background of these shows in previous write-ups of songs in the set if you like. (See notes below.)

As you may have noticed, Sounds Radical is re-issuing the old “Alternative Is Here to Stay” / “New Girlfriend” single, remastered, as a very limited edition seven inch, on red and black smoke vinyl. (RAD-014–7) Release date: 11/12/20. The “dibs” link is live as of noon EDT. [Still up and active as of press time — ed.] Once again, Justin Perkins did a great job resuscitating what was left of this source material, and Well Made Records did some stellar cutting as well. The sound will knock you out. As has become customary, Chris Appelgren has recreated and tweaked his original design. It’s like the intervening twenty-five years didn’t even happen.

This seven inch was an important turning point in the MTX plotline, and was and is loved by a great many people, including me. It was the first release from the Doctor-Jim-Joel trio line-up, from a small batch of songs recorded at Sound and Vision in San Francisco in 1994, self-funded because we just weren’t “feeling the love” from Lookout and I couldn’t face the prospect of asking for yet another tiny but begrudged recording budget at that weird time. It was my intention to release it myself, more as a “fuck you” to the world than any kind of real business enterprise, like so much of what I did in those days. It was to be a 12" e.p.: “Alternative…”, “New Girlfriend,” “Unpack Your Adjectives”, and “Semi-OK.” (“You Today” was recorded later, as a bonus track for the eventual CD single.) Itching Powder Records — what might have been…

However, in the meantime, Green Day exploded and East Bay “pop punk” was suddenly viable and even almost sort of hip, and many of the disgruntled Lookout bands were at least edging toward contemplating the option of jumping ship to the seemingly better ships that were, theoretically, suddenly available to be jumped to. This in turn sparked a Lookout program of, I guess you’d call it “outreach,” sending emissaries out to various bands to appease them, make them feel gruntled enough to stay aboard, which in our case meant Larry Livermore flying out to our show in Seattle with Sicko and being all nice and such. I’d announced the A side song as “our new single,” still more an aspiration than a reality as no concrete plans had been made. Larry talked me into doing it as a single on Lookout instead of starting my own competing shambles of a label with it; and even I wasn’t dumb enough to refuse that offer, considering my own limitations, of which I was well aware. So the die, as they say, was cast. If die means what I think it does. We stayed on Lookout, if only just barely. Like I said, weird times.

As for the song itself, “Alternative…” was a Song for Odin once before (in May, 2019), the write-up of which dealt with the paradox of enduring obsolescence among other things. Here’s a snip:

And it is a funny joke, still. (So I like to think.) I love: “we’ll alternate all night long,” and “Alternative is something more than number 1, 2, 3, and 4, it’s 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9, Alternative is doing fine…” The bit about Tom Cruise and Anne Rice is a bit ungainly but is based on an actual conversation with a girl who was so bitter about the betrayal of Tom Cruise being cast in the film of her beloved Interview with the Vampire that she actually started weeping and punching the wall as she was telling me about it. Now, *that’s* alternative.

True story. Anyway, I’m really glad we were able to rescue and re-issue these recordings and that it came out so well. Stay tuned for more, because there’s more to come.

notes:

— studio recording, original (not new) master, on YouTube.

— re-issue “dibs” link again.

— more on that Emo’s show and Dickies’ tours.

— playlist of songs from that Emo’s set posted so far.

— original post on minds.com.

5 Dr Frank — “I Wanna Ramone You”

I ramone, you ramone, he she or it ramones: Welcome, friends, to another Wodnesdæg, and another Song for Odin, that thing we do where we post a video of a song and type up some “minor secrets” about it. We here at Song for Odin are well aware it’s a pretty dumb thing to do, but, like most such things, we do it anyway for some reason.

And what we have today is Dr Frank doing “I Wanna Ramone You” live, solo-acoustic at Jeugdhuis Kroenkel in Nijlen, Belgium, on September 23, 2012. (This was the second night of the Dr Frank / Kepi / Stefan Tijs “art tour”, more about which you can read at the links in the notes below.)

Outside of the original song that preceded the novel by a decade, this was the first of the King Dork songs to be written, way back in 2005 or so.

It grew directly out of the text, more or less spontaneously. I’d been writing the bit in the book about “ramoning” and immediately a tune suggested itself and soon it was a song. This is what planted the idea of writing songs in the voice of the book’s narrator Tom Henderson to go along with the book. This would ultimately lead to the release of an album of such songs in 2016, first as a digital download with the paperback edition of the King Dork sequel King Dork Approximately, and then as a genuine physical release on Sounds Radical the following year.

But that took a whole lot of doing to get from there to there. The idea of doing proper full band recordings of the King Dork songs was more or less an impossible dream, though I certainly did dream it. I just didn’t have the resources to make it happen, nor was the band really together at the time. The best I could do was to record rudimentary acoustic versions of some of these songs. They were included with the audiobook of King Dork and among other Random House promo materials. These versions (of the present song, plus “King Dork,” “Thinking of Suicide,” “Still not Done Loving You Mama,” and, believe it or not “Gooey Glasses”) were recorded at quite an unusual recording session after hours at this great big audiobook factory complex in Sherman Oaks, California. That whole scene was a trip, and maybe I’ll write more about it and how the audiobook sausage is made one of these days.

(And by the way, just concidentally, the pic on my Medium profile page is from that recording session, if for some reason you want to see what it looked like.)

These versions were meant to suggest the grandeur of the future project that was to become actual, but I’m sure they suggested it only to myself. They’re not very impressive in this form. But I used to play them from time to time anyway, as I did here. Two years later, I did manage to pull together a proper recording of the song “King Dork Approximately” to accompany the publication of that book. This was the recording session that re-launched the band after ten years of lying fallow, leading to playing a whole bunch of live shows and finally recording the “balbum.”

Like I said, it took a lot of doing, and I’m still pretty amazed we pulled it off.

As for the song, well, here’s how I summarized its conceit and conception in a Random House questionnaire when the first book came out:

There are three strands all tangled up in this song. Strand A: Tom is doing research on the life and times of his mysteriously deceased father, and part of that involves poring over ancient texts like the Bible and The Catcher in the Rye. It’s a long story, but in the course of this research he inadvertently learns that the French verb ramoner (which literally means “to scrub out a chimney”) can be used as a sexual metaphor. As a rock and roller, he of course immediately thinks of the Ramones, and, voilà, a new English euphemism for sex is born — I ramone, you ramone, he, she or it ramones… (This is useful to him, as it gives him a much cooler metaphor for sex than any of the other ones available; and it proved useful to the author, i.e., me, as well, for pretty much the same reason.) Strand B: Tom is taking Advanced French, which he describes as “a form of the French language in which only the present tense is used. Primarily employed for telling time and for describing the activities of this one guy named Jean and this other guy named Claude.” So in writing his song about the timeless power of love, he decides to include some sophisticated, romantic French phrases in the lyrics. Strand C: He has this pretty big crush on a girl from a neighboring town, so he writes a song about her. (As one does in those situations.) “I Wanna Ramone You” is the result, one of his first full-on love songs.

And they let me do it anyway! That stuff about the verb ramoner is totally true, and I was floored when I learned about it (from a French girl who was helping me with my inquiries.) How could it be, I thought, that no one had ever exploited this cross-cultural pun for rock and roll purposes before me? Apparently no one else was, er, worldly enough to notice it and stupid enough to do it, at least as far as I know. I thought it would take the world by storm and enter common parlance, people saying “come on baby let’s ramone” on sitcoms and such. It didn’t quite do that. But it served its various purposes, chief among them being a pretty fun, funny song, which is pretty much everything.

So there you go. Till next time, then. Have yourself a scary little Halloween month, if you can.

notes:

— King Dork Approximately the Album studio version:

(As you’ll notice, this track is mislabelled as “Thinking of Suicide” because the original sequence of the two songs was switched after it had been set in stone by the Orchard. We were able to switch the titles but not the files. We were also able to fix it on Spotify, but it appears to be permanently wrong on YouTube. Nevertheless, this is the song.)

— KDATA in YouTube playlist form

— King Dork and King Dork Approximately (and Andromeda Klein) may be acquired from Sounds Radical here.

— KDATA is still in print at Sounds Rad as well.

— previous SfO write-up of “Who Needs Happiness…” from this set with some background on this tour.

— and a bit more on the tour from this one on “Ba Ba Ba Ba Ba”.

— The original post on minds.com is here.

6 “New Girlfriend”

A-wigglin and a-gigglin and a-bakin a pie: Song for Odin time, ladies and gentlemen and otherwise, and I figure since I already posted the A side on YouTube earlier this week I might as well do the B side here and now.

And here it is, the newly mastered “New Girlfriend” from the Sounds Rad re-issue of the “Alternative Is Here to Stay” re-issue:

The “dibs” emails went out on Monday and the response has been great, so thanks very much for that, everyone. My understanding is that the actual pressing is happening today, if it hasn’t already happened. [It did — ed.] These will go out mid-November. (The official release date is November 12.) This is for the limited “de-luxe” version with the custom box and etc. — stay tuned for more news on the subsequent less “luxe” pressing to come.

If there are any left after the “dibs” smoke has cleared, Sounds Rad is going to offer them to the general public for pre-order, while they last, first come first served beginning Friday, Oct. 30. The general public: that means you, probably, and here’s that link. This is your last chance. Countdown!

“New Girlfriend” was a Song for Odin once before back in April, 2019 and here’s a snip of what I said back then:

This has always been among the most crowd-pleasing songs, for reasons that aren’t hard to fathom: it’s short, to the point, catchy, energetic, silly, funny, and just ever so slightly… edgy, un-PC, I suppose you’d say. Like “Will You Still Love Me When I Don’t Love You,” “God Bless America”, and (believe it or not) “Mr Ramones” this song was originally a throwaway tune to play solo during a broken string break on stage just so there was something to do instead of, or in addition to, just standing around awkwardly.

Also, as the post notes, it was the first song where I was allowed to have the guitars as loud as I wanted them. “Objectionable” lyrics could have that effect, kind of a symbiosis I suppose.

So yeah, I love the guitar sound, and I love it even more in the re-master. It’s a great vinyl cut as well: the sound just explodes out of the speakers. You’ll see what I mean when you get one.

Can’t think of much to add to that right now, and I gotta run anyway. I hope you all have a great Hallowe’en and such.

notes:

— more on the the re-issue, from a SfO post on “Alternative Is Here to Stay”.

— Original post on minds.com.