Wounded but Pressing On

The Dr Frank Weakly Reader for 9.04.2020

In re: the title — our friend Toby tweeted a link to the song “Love Manifesto” with this caption:

I don’t think I’ll ever get sick of listening to The Mr. T Experience. I found my first MTX cd 27 years ago, and I was hooked. I still am. They’re everything that good punk is — funny, intelligent, flippant, and wounded but pressing on.

That’s a rather generous assessment, which I appreciate of course; seems to me the last bit captures the situation precisely.

Anyhow, welcome to another edition of the Dr Frank Weakly Reader, that thing I do where I re-capitulate the week’s Dr Frank and MTX web activity to serve as a sort of index for future Dr Frank- and MTX-ologists, should there be any besides me. If you’re searching for something, it helps to specify a field, and in this social media ravaged internet-scape there’s no index at all, in any field, if you don’t make your own. Very DIY. Very make your own fucking index. Tim Yohannan would be proud, probably.

FRONT BURNER

— The struggle continues: and by struggle, I mean the Covid-complexified, slow-developing process of conceiving, manufacturing, assembling, and delivering Sounds Radical’s hand-crafted, artisanal re-issue of The Mr T Experience… and the Women Who Love Them. As you can see from the pic of Sounds Rad HQ at the head, the mailing is happening even as we speak. I got mine and it’s great.

The mastering began exactly one year ago, and of course it was a long time coming before that, locating and transferring the tapes etc…

And now, here we are:

You can still get it from Sounds Radical if you like. My understanding is that we’re currently nearing the end of the second 150 gram pressing “commercial” edition; the third one, on red vinyl, has already been pressed.

Records are great.

— Also, Mtx forever: still a thing.

MISTY WATER-COLORED MEMORIES OF THE MTX

— Hey Killer, stay punk: Matt still has his old Love Is Dead poster.

— LK 49, i.e. Milk Milk Lemonade: that guy who has been posting pics of his complete Lookout Record catalog collection one by one reached number forty-nine, from 1992.

It had already been a long, strange trip, but of course it got longer and, by some measures, stranger. Here’s a thing I wrote about it on the occasion of its twenty-seven-year anniversary.

Snip:

“It is the strangest sounding record we’ve ever done, and quite possibly the strangest-sounding thing Lookout every put out.” Yep.

— She’s the One: Athena posted this on the FB. I’d almost forgotten about it:

— Odin returns, after nodding last week, with “My Stupid Life,” live in Atlanta, September, 1997:

“Minor secrets” write-up, concerning the evolution of songwriting approaches and how …and the Women Who Love Them was a sort of turning point, here. Songs for Odin playlist here.

And, while we’re at it, might as well add the re-mastered version, which sounds pretty terrific:

THE DR FRANK

— I am podcasted: talking about the re-issues, mostly, on the Dying Scene Quarantine Chats.

And in case you missed it last week, I was on the Car Con Carne podcast as well, covering some of the same ground but differently.

PICTURE BOOK

— Roman Calendar: Gustave Moreau’s Beheading of John the Baptist, oil on canvas version; Margaret Ward; Saint Raymond Nonnatus; Saint Joshua; King Saint Stephen of Hungary (redux, “Novus Ordo” calendar); Gregory the Great, with copyists, composing chants seems like; Saint Rosalia, La Santuzza (The Little Saint) patron of Palermo, in her cave…

— Behold: Elisabeth Bathory by Agostino Arrivabene; PIEFACE; an archer in red; I almost feel like I’m still in high school; Suds, Sex, and Slaughter — a Rube Goldebergian True Crime cover; …and this hides my yawns; a Ouija tombstone…

IN THE NEWS

— Obit: Cathy Smith was apparently most noted by the world for her role in the death of John Belushi, but most noted by me because Gordon Lightfoot’s “Sundown” was written about her.

Anyway, she’s dead at 73, after what seems to have been a rather wild and crazy life.

FIN

And that’ll do it for this Weakly Reader. But for those who’ve made it this far down the page, here’s Delores Wells, Playboy’s Playmate of the Month for June 1960, photo by Don Bronstein:

See you next week.