All this and more....

[Chris J. Valas <cv%linus@mitre-bedford.ARPA>]

Erotica:  I once had sex in a graveyard after an Iggy Pop show in
Detroit; does this count?  Oh.

The best erotic record I ever heard was a 25-minute recording of a
human heartbeat played loud.  If you played it at 33, you went to
sleep, but at 45, yow!  The only problem is that at 45, the side ends
too soon.  In college it was no problem because I had a truly shitty
J.C. Penneys stereo and I could leave the arm up.  It would play over
and over and over and.... so on until you died.  Or rolled over and
zzzzzz.

-=-

Chemicals:  What's the matter with mentioning drugs?  I thought the
hippy era made the social acceptability of drug talk a non-subject.
What's the matter, are all you neo-conservative wankers getting hot
under the collar just because Hof and the boys do it up before going
to shows?  Not to turn this into a diatribe (these are words that
begin with a D) but I subscribe to this mailing list expressly to
avoid meta-conversations about this sort of shit.  This is a
personality forum (as much as anything else) and you subscribe by
choice.  Try not to bum if the pioneers here are a little rougher
around the cerebellum than you choose to be.

-=-

Now for Vinyl:  I finally had the time to really listen to the
Minutemen's latest, _Three Way Tie for Last_.  (Drug disclaimer:  yes,
I was high.)  This is one of very few records which really impressed
me in the last year.  The M-men have slowed their attack since _What
Makes A Man Start Fires?_ and have sharpened the musical interplay
since the interim sprawl of _Double Nickels on the Dime_.  This is
evident in the stutter-stop chorus of "Lost" -- a Meat Puppets tune,
and in D. Boones free-wheeling, relaxed guitar on "The Big Stick."
They now wear their influences proudly on their sleeves, particularly a
standout cover of CCR's "Have You Ever Seen the Rain?"  While it would
be surprising to find this song on any of their other records, its
presence here, at the close of side one, is so logical that their
intent is obvious.  They make their point in a number of different
songs and, as if to rub our noses in the inevitability of history,
they point to this track, "*That's* what we're talking about, and
we're not the first to say it, either."

Although this no-nonsense stance on the stupidity of war and
politics is typical to their Calif. background, they nimbly avoid the
anti-nuke abyss into which several less intelligent bands have
gleefully leapt.  The intelligence of the Minutemen is the key to this
record.  This is most evident on "Spoken Word Piece", a Burroughs-like
monologue by Mike Watt about the posturing interplay of 'conservative
man, liberal man' which is on top of a recording of a helicopter
gunship crew in action in Vietnam.  (Rumor has it that the recording
was obtained from a flexi-disc in a copy of Soldier of Fortune
magazine.  Enough said.)  The final sounds on the track, after Watt
has stopped talking, seem to be the helicopter's rotors fading into
the distance, modulated to sound like machine-gun fire.  A more
sinister possibility is that the sounds are actual bursts of gunfire
which were triggering the VOX mikes used by the crew.  This is a
chilling commentary on the end result of knee-jerk rhetoric.  Somebody
ought to make this record required listening at the State Department
and the White House.  Or put Reagan in the gunship....  

The more I listen to this record, the more it sucks that D. Boone is
history.  The Minutemen were a band committed to the notion that young
men will always die in "old men's wars" until the lessons of history
can be delivered in time to save them.  They undertook to be the
delivery service.  So don't wait for the Brownshirts to usurp control
of your little brother's mind -- buy two copies of _Three Way Tie for
Last_ and give one to him.  Do it now before you come home for
vacation and catch him in shiny jackboots.

"And I want to know, have you ever seen the rain?"

No artifice,

Chris J. Valas         {decvax,utzoo,philabs,allegra,genrad}!linus!cv
			or.... linus!cv@mitre-bedford.arpa