Photo Credit: Gus Philippas.

LA based punk rock quintet The Linda Lindas appeared at WFUV for an interview and live performance of 3 songs taken from their new album No Obligation: “Too Many Things,” “All in My Head,” and “Resolution/Revolution,”  as well as one song from their debut album, Growing Up: “Fine.” Hear them along with the chat HERE.

ALPHABETLAND is the first new studio album by X in 35 years featuring all four original members (and X’s first full venture since 1993’s Hey Zeus!) and it compares well with anything previously recorded by the celebrated Los Angeles quartet. Founding member, singer, and bassist John Doe chatted with me about that overdue return and more in this recent WFUV radio interview.

New Documentary Film & Book On H.R. Of Bad Brains – Event at Saint Vitus Bar on January 24, 2017

One of the Bad Brains CDs in my collection has a sticker on it with two well chosen quotes about the band:

“If you want to hear real excitement, real energy, real soul…listen to the Bad Brains” – Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers

“The Bad Brains influenced me more than any other band in the world.” – Adam Yauch, Beastie Boys

It was brilliant to be able to get a chat with Bad Brains’ frontman H.R. in Brooklyn last week along with James Lathos and Howie Abrams who have devoted years to exploring his music, personality, and spirituality.  Lathos, who directed the documentary, told me straight up he is not a filmmaker. He builds houses in Florida for a living.  However, he is a maniacal H.R. and Bad Brains fan who used to write for a skate mag and had become friendly with his future documentary subject in their common hometown of Washington D.C.  Abrams has roots in New York City and, while researching a book he had a notion about doing, heard that interviews for a film had been going on.  He reached out to Lathos and the two decided to team up with the best bits captured on video going into the flick while the oral history allowed for transcripts of the most compelling conversations.  Lathos emphasized that the movie is not just blowing smoke (about how genius H.R. is) but looks at the struggles that he has had to endure.  

Pick up the book that’s out now and keep your eye on this website for the latest screenings about Finding Joseph I and future release info.

So, can we hope for another Bad Brains record with H.R. at the helm?  The answer is YES!  Enjoy these bonus bits from the powwow in which H.R. points to studio sessions planned for the fall as well as gives a nod to The Ramones and CBGB…

The Damned Celebrate Forty Years At Gramercy Theatre – Saturday 10-29-16 as well as Sunday 10-30-16

The Damned vini, vidi, vici’d two sold out shows at a grand old theatre.  The interview occurred in between sets on Saturday night which is the most manic time imaginable to conduct an interview.  Singer Dave Vanian and guitarist Captain Sensible’s comments struck me as perfect.  They spoke of the DIY spirit of punk and the breadth of its impact.  They spoke about the importance of punk without taking themselves seriously.  

Damned Damned Damned will be re-issued next year by the way and a limited edition pressing of New Rose was just unleashed to mark it’s 40th birthday.  They’ll be playing Damned Damned Damned in its entirety on a big tour next year!

The first time I heard The Damned was on the brilliant and short lived British comedy series The Young Ones.   (I have the DVDs!) MTV used to show episodes when I was in high school in the mid 80’s.  It induced a big grin when Dave introduced Nasty by mentioning what a pleasure it was to appear on the pioneering show whose musical guests also included Motorhead and Madness.  It was also lucky that Nasty was one of the songs I was given permission to shoot.  Dave said his favorite part of the experience was when Alexei Sayle did his thing about being a driving instructor from Johannesburg…

The funniest bit I couldn’t put on TV because of an F bomb but through the miracle that is the interwebs, here is it is along with two other bonus bits.  The subjects include why the debut album Damned Damned Damned holds up so well and the scoop on a new album.

Steve Aoki Talks Hardcore Roots, New Documentary

I met the great character that is Steve Aoki at The Roxy Hotel in Tribeca on August 22nd, 2016. He was in New York to do a handful of interviews about the new documentary film, Steve Aoki: I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead, that was released on Netflix last week.

I spoke to him briefly about the movie but, as both the main produced piece above as well as the bonus bits below attest to, we really got carried away talking about punk and hardcore bands. I asked him if he modeled Dim Mak Records on Ian MacKaye’s DC based Dischord and the answer was yes. He said that the models for his label were Dischord along with Revelation Records which is based much closer to Steve’s home base, in Huntington Beach. Even if Dim Mak, that he started as a 19 year old out of a dorm room, were his only accomplishment, one might applaud Aoki’s great success. The label’s twenty year anniversary will be celebrated at this year’s Electric Zoo Festival with its own stage featuring only its artists on Saturday, September 3rd. Steve Aoki will anchor the Dim Mak stage and play last.

His remarkable run with Dim Mak, of course, is just the tip of Aoki’s accomplishments’ iceberg. His drive, clearly, was inherited from his father Rocky Aoki who was an entrepreneur as well as a daredevil for the ages. The minutes spent introducing him and the relationship between father and son in I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead are among the flick’s most rewarding. Among the bonus bits of our conversation below are Steve’s reaction to the documentary and some comments about Rocky and New York City where he lived.

Also below, enjoy tidbits about the tremendous rock bands who turned up for Dim Mak Tuesdsays as well as details about Aoki’s record collection, his take on and experience with DIY culture, and first DJ gig…

D Generation Celebrate Comeback Album At Irving Plaza – July 30, 2016

“We always liked bands that had melodic kind of pop songs; groups like The Replacements and Cheap Trick and T-Rex. You’re taking something really nasty with the melody and the two are fighting against each other and you get something out of it. Some of our favorite bands live always had a little more edge than their records. They stepped it up, the rawness, the underproduction of a live show…” – Jesse Malin

Sitting down with Jesse Malin, Danny Sage, and Howie Pyro shortly before they took the stage at Irving Plaza on Saturday, I asked if they had any rituals that they employed while writing the first new D Generation album in seventeen years. Jesse immediately countered with, “Is fighting a ritual?” There then are the twin tensions, musical and interpersonal, that are the heartbeat of this essential New York City band.

Even though they broke up in ’99, Malin, Sage, and Pyro – along with Richard Bacchus and Michael Wildwood – continued to guest on each other’s albums and remain in each other’s lives. These were the five who made their self-titled debut in ’94 and whose roots together went back to Queens in the early 80s. Malin and Sage, based in the Whitestone neighborhood, made their first marks on record and on stage together in the hardcore outfit Heart Attack. The five had done a one-off reunion in 2008 and a tour in 2011/2012. However sessions for a new record in 2012 with Ryan Adams producing were aborted and months on the calendar kept flipping by.

The new album was recorded in the most appropriate place imaginable, a bar in the East Village. A tiny studio exists within Hifi on Avenue A and that’s where the fellows captured, Nothing is Anywhere. It was done with a lot of bleed and a lot of blood as Sage, who produced it, remarked. Malin noted that they had learned a lot from guys like Ric Ocasek and Tony Visconti (who produced No Lunch and Through The Darkness respectively) but getting back to the garage so to speak resulted in something more raw and more real. The tracks recorded at Hifi were originally planned to be demos but Sage, working with the group’s front of house engineer Mark Lewis, recognized the album was done and that it’s what we’ve been waiting for.

Ramones Live At WFUV And At Queens Museum – always but especially this week at WFUV…til July 31, 2016 at Queens Museum

This week WFUV is celebrating the Ramones as an essential artist. I’ll be doing a 30 minute set of their music on the air at 90.7 FM NYC and WFUV.org from about 2 to 2:30.

New York City had bottomed out. Gerald Ford told us to drop dead. White flight was at its height. The time was the mid 70s and the neighborhood was Forest Hills in Queens. Beat On The Brat was coming out of the garage.

John William Cummings who became known to the world as Johnny Ramone was pursuing a life of delinquency with some enthusiasm. He was a Yankees fan living in the borough of The Mets. It’s safe to assume the attraction was pissing people off. He was smart and he played guitar and a vision for a band was beginning to coalesce in his mind. It involved a sound and a look and an attitude. His machine gun down-strokes and power chords suggested a profound disgust with Emerson, Lake, and Palmer. A four foot statue of his likeness now sits upon a two foot base in Hollywood Forever Cemetery.Joey Ramone came into the world as Jeffrey Ross Hyman. He had a serious case of OCD and combined being painfully shy with being uncomfortably tall. He was the object of some derision and perhaps not unlike the cartoon character he inspired.

However, and here come two understatements, he could sing and when he stepped onto a stage, he was transformed. He became the voice of American punk. He raged. He crooned. He owned every word from the bored to the giddy to the angry to the brokenhearted. He wrote Sheena Is a Punk Rocker. He sang great in the studio but was better, as his band was, live. Joey Ramone Place is the most stolen street sign in the city according to the NYPD.

Douglas Glenn Colvin was a military kid and moved to Forest Hills from Berlin at the age of 15. Eight years later, he would adopt the monikerDee Dee Ramone. He sang and played the bass but struggled to do both at the same time. It was Dee Dee, the high school dropout, who would be their most essential songwriter. D – U – M – B¦everyone’s accusin’ me! The Ramones without him is unthinkable. His energy raised the stakes in any room and doubled that on stage. He sought recreational drugs perhaps to quell some exquisite inner pain or to combat mental illness or he just liked them. He wrote 53^rd& 3^rd about a closet case turning a trick as a male prostitute at the titular intersection in Manhattan. He also hitched us a ride to Rockaway Beach. He came up with the name Ramones. He was the one counting off: 1, 2, 3, 4!

Thomas Erdelyi was savvy enough as a teenager to get himself a job as an assistant engineer at The Record Plant on 44^th Street in Manhattan. He got the idea of The Ramones and initially was the manager. He showed potential drummers what they were looking for but no one could do it like him. He became Tommy Ramone. He wrote Blitzkrieg Bop. He produced. While they were Johnny’s band everywhere else, in the studio they were Tommy’s band. He produced Tim for The Replacements who, of course and like so many others, couldn’t have existed without the former Forest Hills High Schoolers. Tommy was the last of the original quartet to die, two years ago in 2014 after Joey in 2001, Dee Dee in 2002, and Johnny in 2004.

The Bowery was skid row and The Ramones could get gigs at a joint named CBGB where bikers hung out. Arturo Vega heard what future manager Danny Fields and Robert Christgau from the Village Voice and Seymour Stein at Sire heard. Vega became a benefactor and his loft on East Second Street became a home-base. He then became logo designer and lighting director and very likely the only thing that kept them together for twenty-two years. His t-shirt turned on more people to the band than any media ever did. He attended every show but two in over 2200 Ramones performances.

Life on the road was not for Tommy so after playing drums on the first three records, he left the group in 1978. This was the end of the most significant era when The Ramones invented punk. It goes without saying it wasn’t in a vacuum. The Stooges united them. Five boroughs forebears The New York Dolls, The Velvet Underground and Lou Reed, and The Heartbreakers were essential. It seemed for a minute at the beginning that the band would break through on the radio but then The Sex Pistols came along and gave punk a bad name. Beating on the brat with a baseball bat wasn’t necessarily something a sheepish PD wanted to be associated with anyway.

They somehow never got a moment like the Grateful Dead got with Touch of Grey. The eleven albums that followed, ending with Adios Amigosin 1995, added quantity to the body of work but the blueprint didn’t change. The time signature wasn’t about to shift from 4/4. Their pop side that was always present may have been intermittently pushed to the front in an always futile attempt to sell more records. Imagine Phil Spector produced one for them, 1980’s End of the Century, and they still didn’t make significant progress commercially.

Johnny and Joey were not natural allies. If conflict is the engine of creativity and innovation and drama, it was their relationship that defined the group and supplied the angst crucial to voicing angst. Johnny was the group’s disciplinarian and general in what more than a few observers recalled as a military like organization. Even his allies characterized him as controlling. Joey, universally described as sweet, may be the most loved NYC musical personality.= He appeared at a campaign event for Jerry Brown while Johnny was a Reagan man and a Bush man and even another Bush man.

When Johnny stole Joey’s girl (Linda Daniele) and then they married making her Linda Ramone, it would have killed 99 bands out of 100. The Ramones were the 100th. They shared a name. Through Marky (drums from ’78 to ’83 & ’87 to the end in ’96) and Richie (drums ’83 to ’87) and even Elvis (better known as Clem Burke who sat in for a handful of shows) and C.J. (bass ’89 to ’96 after Dee Dee left) the marriage of Joey and Johnny through every bus ride and every club and motel room, and long after they stopped talking to each other, endured.

As their music has endured. Just as it immediately became part of the DNA of The Clash, it somewhere along the line became part of the DNA of New York. Sometime after that it became part of the DNA of American music. It’s obviously part of the DNA of WFUV. The Ramones are this week’s essential artist. Hey! Ho! Let’s Go Ramones and The Birth of Punk, a dynamite exhibit at the Queens Museum runs through the end of this month. It’s got the gig posters and album covers and comic books and clothing and instruments and other bric a brac. It will horrify you by reminding of Dee Dee’s career as a hip hop artist as well.

Dropkick Murphys Celebrate 20 Years At Webster Hall 3-9 (and 3-10) 2016

Twenty years; not bad for a band that was started on a bet!  The man who took that bet was Dropkick Murphys founder as well as bassman and vocalist Ken Casey.  The band formed in Quincy (part of Greater Boston) and has become one of the bands most associated with Beantown.  Casey sat down for a chat prior to the show on Wednesday and spoke about the band’s DIY roots, why the Dropkicks career trajectory has been steadily upward, and that whole Boston/New York thing.

In addition to the NY1 report above that includes an Agnostic Front reference (AF!), here’s some bonus interview footage in which Casey gives a nod to another essential Boston group the Mighty Mighty Bosstones.  He also talks about record-making and reveals that the game plan for the next record is to hole up in West Texas!

The Violent Femmes have a long history with New York (Brian Ritchie lived here for a decade, Gordon Gano longer than that, and Brian Viglione now) and a longer history making distinctive music – some visceral, some cerebral – always honest.  The veteran proto-alt-rockers tore it up at Rough Trade on Tuesday after Gano and Ritchie spoke about the new stuff and the new guy, drummer Brian Viglione. Their new EP is titled Happy New Year.

Despite being attacked by a bouncer on Thursday, London’s Palma Violets tore it up in their inimitable way at SXSW in Austin on Friday.

This was the third (of the 4 times) I had a chance to chat with this band.  The first one reveals just how quickly they were recognized as an exciting group.  The second one has them talking covers.  This chat at SXSW suggests that hard work went into the forthcoming album to be released in May, Danger in the Club, and an increasing comfort level in the studio.

Bonus: The 4th interview (a substantial chat with Chilli and Will) including live performances at WFUV is HERE.