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Pop Rock Nation

Author: David Middleton

  • FORTY-FIVE REVOLUTIONS PER MINUTE #7: Gary Gilmore Girls

    SISTER DOUBLE HAPPINESS  “Don’t Worry” b/w “Wheels A’ Spinning” (Sub Pop Records SP77, October 1990)

    “Hey Loser.  Wanna find some action?  Tired of being left out?  Here at SUB POP we’ve just started a special club for lonely record collectors like yourself:  THE SUB POP SINGLES CLUB.  Every month we’ll send you a limited edition 45.  All you have to do is SEND US YOUR MONEY.  $35.00 for a full year, $20.00 for 6 months.  Your subscription begins the month we receive your $$$.”

    Yes, I was a Sub Pop loser.  I mean, c’mon…it was inevitable, right?  Make an offer like that to a vinyl fetishist working in a little indie store at the height of the grunge boom…fucking BLAMMO, you are going to get your sales on, Seattleites!  At what amounts to roughly $2.92 per single (or $3.33 if you go for the 6-month sub), and with at least 2 tracks per platter, we’re talkin’ ’round $1.46 per track.  Consider that nowadays people are paying 99 cents apiece for these shitty, pathetic, tinny-sounding little downloads with no artwork or sweet colored vinyl to look at.  PFFT!  I’ll take my Singles Club & go home, thanks.  Wish it was still around, I’d still be a member, dammit.

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  • FORTY-FIVE REVOLUTIONS PER MINUTE #6: Reaching Out To Capture A Marmoset

    OTHER BRIGHT COLORS  “Stands To Reason” b/w “Circle Square” (1985)

    Sporting no visible label name or serial number of any sort, Other Bright Colors’ first and only 7-inch appeared magically in stores around the fall of 1985.  This was, as you can guess, a fertile time period for young indie bands in the southeastern US.  Early ’80’s LA punk stalwarts Black Flag had forged a giant path, like a modern-day Lewis & Clark, through the Deep South and the Great Northwest and back again, paving the way for what would become the American Indie Revolution. 

    Soon, kids nationwide were turning burned-out churches and abandoned VFW halls into punk co-ops, creating fanzines and record labels from Xerox paper and glue, and galvanizing bored drop-outs everywhere to stand up and say, “Fuck, we can do this, too!”  Suddenly, it was as if there was a flood of little black plastic discs raining down from the sky.  The “45-as-art” concept that started when Television’s “Little Johnny Jewel” hit the stands in ’74 had now come full-circle.  This was our CNN.  Or maybe not, but whatever it was, it was glorious.  Anyway…

    Hailing from Chapel Hill, NC, Other Bright Colors quickly gained a foothold in the greater East Coast rock clubs with this sweet little teaser of a single.  I remember the thing that caught my eye about it was the way the artwork, a simple handwritten scrawl over orange-and-flesh backdrop with sepia-tone “band frolicking through nature” photo on back, seemed both very D.I.Y. and very professional at the same time.  And the rich music contained on the plastic held even more mystery.

    OTHER BRIGHT COLORS \”Stands To Reason\” on YouTube

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  • Special Edition Live: Mark Lawrence

     

    MARK LAWRENCE live at Googie’s Lounge, NYC, October 1st 2008

    On an almost daily basis, I wonder how up-and-coming singer-songwriters manage to do it these days.  You can release your own CD, upload your tracks to the internet, then get in a car with as few people as possible and hit the road, I suppose.  Can you be a one-man business in this modern world, selling your own T-shirts and booking your own gigs and driving yourself from town to town?  I guess.  I’ve often dreamed of getting a CDL and becoming a self-contained trucking & entertainment industry myself, performing my favorite Marty Robbins tunes at truck stops ’round the country after dispatching giant cords of lumber, a pot-bellied pig named Porky my only traveling companion.  Joe Six-Packs and Hockey Moms nationwide could band together and order my 8-Track hits comps from K-Tel!  Well, a former beauty queen from The Last Frontier can dream, can’t she?  Oh, nevermind…

    The thing is, all these thoughts just wash right out of my mind when I witness an actual performance by a great singer-songwriter, if only because the magic of a great performance tends to sweep me up into a world where the technical aspect of being a performer no longer matters.  Who cares how the magician does the trick, if the illusion is breathtaking enough, right?  Well this is how I felt last Wednesday night when I caught a set by Mark Lawrence at Googie’s Lounge, a small cabaret perched above The Living Room on Ludlow Street in lower Manhattan.

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