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The Young Turds were a Washington, DC punk-era band with a vision, heart, garage rock sincerity, noir-ish humor, and about an LP's worth of tunes never committed to vinyl (with one exception). Emerging in Fairfax County, Virginia in the late '70s, they played many dates there as well as in DC proper, sharing the stage with better-known groups of the time. Their song "Murder One" (.mp3 below) appeared on the seminal compilation 30 Seconds Over DC (Limp Records, 1978) along with such giants as the Slickee Boys, White Boy, Da Moronics, and 1/2 Japanese. They also shared a bill with District legends the Bad Brains, at a Yippee-sponsored "Smoke-In" on the Washington Mall. By late 1980 they were gone; eventually they morphed into other bands (see below) but the "Turd thing" was unique.
A reviewer at the time called them a "zoned-out Roxy Music" but their sound really has more in common with Cleveland bands such as the Electric Eels, albeit not as extreme or angsty. At least one member, sax player Kevin Landes, had some music theory and you can hear it in songs like "One Mad Act" and "Hold at All Costs." What sounds today like a Klezmer influence was most likely unconscious. Whatever ambitions the group had to rise above three-chord rock, their sound is very raw and home-schooled, like so many of the groups of that DIY era. Landes and his brother Kerry had a Rodgers & Hart-style songwriting collaboration going back to their childhoods (or perhaps Siegel & Shuster, as manifested in comic book-themed tunes they occasionally still played as adults, such as "Gorilla Boss"). This collaboration spilled over into the Turds' songwriting. "One Mad Act" dramatizes the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, partly in tribute to the Landes's father, who had a voluminous basement library of Lincolnabilia.
Three of the songs below are covers. The one by the King is obvious, but you might not know that "Green Slime" is the theme of the 60s sci-fi film of the same name, or that "Tapeworm of Love" ("eating my heart out over you") is by Brute Force, a quirky singer/songwriter the Landeses were fond of. Many of the songs were about murder and violence, as befitted the end of the '70s, an era of social turbulence and malaise that continued until President Reagan brought Morning back to America in the '80s, or so the story goes. Kerry Landes's murky singing style made the lyrics difficult to understand but occasional snatches ("teenage boy with a deranged mind/cruising for burgers is not hard to find") give you a pretty good idea what's going on.
Below is a selection of .mp3s. Except for "Murder One," from the Limp compilation, the songs were ripped from a cassette of a reel-to-reel master, originally recorded in a bandmember's friend's basement studio. A few minor blemishes can be heard on the ancient cassette tape.
"Green Slime" [2:09 min. - 2.9 MB]
"Berserker" [2:55 min. - 4.2 MB]
"Hold at All Costs" [3:59 min. - 5.8 MB]
"Tapeworm of Love" [2:38 min. - 3.7 MB]
"One Mad Act" [5:16 min. - 7.5 MB]
"Burn1ng Love" [2:21 min. - 3.3 MB]
"Vigilante" [5:12 min. - 7.5 MB]
"Murder One" [3:09 min. - 4.5 MB]
Personnel are Kevin Landes (saxophone), Steve Walker (rhythm guitar), Kerry Landes (vocals), Paul Ragan (lead guitar), Tim Carter (bass), and Tom Payne (sensible drums). The Turds dissolved sometime in 1980, but various members continued playing in DC bands. Carter, Landes, and Walker formed The French Are From Hell (still active) after one of them (Carter?) saw an appalling documentary about the ostensible Gallic taste for munching live birds, and Carter, Payne, and Walker were mainstays of the Assbeaters, fronted by singer, novelist, and zine-producer Mark Mellon, which survived until fairly recently (.mp3s of taped material to follow). The text of this post is being published as a separate tribute page--hopefully I can get some photos and other information and will add to it and post updates here.
UPDATE: Some photos of bandmembers have been added.
UPDATE 2: I just noticed the links to the .mp3s in this post and on the tribute page weren't working. They have been fixed now.
UPDATE 3: Two song titles were corrected after I found my notes off the tape case.
UPDATE 4: Re-recorded all the .mp3s at higher volume and a 192 kbps streaming rate instead of 128 kbps.
UPDATE 5, Oct. 2010: The ending of "Vigilante" had annoying dropouts in one channel. I did my best to fix it--the panning still goes a little haywire but the volume is more uniform in both channels.
The Battle Your Teachers Fought For You
Clem Greenberg is chainsmoking, but more nervously than usual. He has just punched out a long-haired conceptualist, in the best Cedar Tavern tradition. The young man lies on the ground, groaning.
Other conceptualists arrive. "What did you do to him, man?"
"I said his work was minuh," which is how Clem pronounced "minor." "He hit me, I hit him back, and there he lies, the putz."
"'Minuh'? What are you, the Rule Man?" one of the kids asks.
"No, that's your projection. I just interpret; I've been doing it since the '30s. I can't be blamed for having a cult. Artists won't leave me alone."
"Rule Man! Rule Man!" one of the kids screams. A group of them are now standing around Clem in a menacing circle.
"Will you shut up with that, already? What I do is describe, not prescribe."
"You know who you are, you fascist? You're Nixon, man!"
"NIX-on! NIX-on!" the group chants.
Someone whips out a knife. The kids converge on him. Clem goes down fighting, but he never gets up.
Thickeye has piqued my interest to go see William Pope.L's show at Artists Space. The video work looks particularly interesting. Actually that's not a very good word: try wrenching, heartbreaking, black-humorous (in a dual sense)... I say that based not on seeing the work but checking out this web page discussing Pope.L's "crawl pieces" such as The Great White Way: 22 miles, 5 years, 1 street, 2002, then reading Thickeye's description:
I really liked his old school performance stuff [...] which includes portions of his Great White Way wherein he crawls around portions of Manhattan wearing a suit and tie. While I had read about this before and seen still images they do not convey the degree to which this performance is about time, tedium and the agony of the slow. It's really painful to watch the pace as he crawls, flowers in hand, his glasses falling partially off, and hanging from his sweaty face. While the piece is about race and the "other" in many obvious ways, for me, the portion that most interestingly touched on the layers of otherness was when two other black men, seeing him crawling (and presumably the camera man) attempt to get him to stand up. While I could not hear what they were saying (though there is sound included) as a silent act to me they did not want him exhibiting his otherness, brandishing it with such bravado, bringing attention to their own (from both inside themselves and outside). I will probably write a more formal review of the show after I go for a visit during a more mellow time. The best part was probably getting one of his business cards that has his name and "friendliest black artist in America."The "formal review" did get written and appears on The Blowup Review site. It's well worth reading, but good luck finding it in that unlinkable frame-o-rama (hint: look over on the right and use that scroller).
UPDATE: D'oh, I assumed because the Pope.L exhibit was on the front page of the Artists Space website, that it was still up. It closed Feb. 21.
UPDATE 2: The Pope.L "crawling" performances have a lot in common with Momoyo Torimitsu's robotic dummies of bellycrawling salarymen (currently at Deitch Projects--see photo in the comments to this post). Momoyo used to walk one around the city streets wearing a nurse's uniform, which was a nice macabre touch. I first saw her work around '96 or '97. When did Pope.L start crawling? Did he know Momoyo's work or vice versa? Is anyone else asking these questions?
"Show Us Your Gnomes."
I know a woman who works at an uptown, blue-chip-type gallery in NYC. She tells the story of a major Abstract Expressionist artist--she won't say who--that for decades had been selling nonrepresentational paintings for the big bucks. One day he invited her to his studio and said, "You know, I have this body of work I rarely show anyone that I've been doing for a few years now. It's really different from my abstract work but I'd like for you to look at it and tell me if you think it has any potential." So the woman looks at it and at this point in the telling of her story she literally screams and says "Oh, my god, it was these GNOMES! These horrid cutesy drawings of little men! Etc Etc sarcasm abuse..."
I find this story really poignant and compelling. The gnomes are probably the guy's real art, what he actually feels and cares about. But his market is this fake art that may very well have emerged from a place of sincerity 40 years ago but now is just a simulacrum he's doomed to repeat because it's his "job." So he's stuck. By not revealing the gnomes sooner, and attempting to gather support among critics and fellow artists (say, by covertly sponsoring shows with portentous titles like "Unpacking Little Men: The Content Paradox"), they're forever his dirty secret, bringing him only ridicule from the guardians of uptown taste. As the dealer's scream implies, to loose them on the world now would be a devastating career ender.
This gave me the idea for a curated exhibition called "Show Us Your Gnomes." It would consist of work artists are hiding from the public because they find themselves locked into a "signature" style or sensibility. It would essentially be a free pass for them to exhibit their gnomes, or gnome-equivalents, before it's too late. Work they care about but find embarrassing that might actually turn out to be more important than their accepted work. Talk about a minefield. (Pictures accompanying this post found by searching "gnomes" under Google/Images. For illustrative purposes only. That top one's pretty good.)
UPDATE: Edited slightly to reorder sentences and remove a gratuitous classist swipe.
UPDATE 2: This is not an actual call for work, just an idea.
We're discussing nuclear explosions in Japanese animation here and Richard Box's latter day "lightning field" of bulbs fluorescing around a giant electric pylon here. Regarding American consumption of the former, in videos with apocalyptic themes and spectacular battles, Sally says "culturally it's a disturbing kind of acquisitiveness--buying products of catharsis from the culture that we inflicted with the suffering that we feared." Regarding Box's work, where the array of light bulbs on the ground mysteriously glows in response to powerline flux, I suggest the artist is hitching a p.r. ride on electricity-related health fears just as others say his piece hitches a free ride on the power lines: "The piece looks lovely but it owes a big debt to someone else's work [Walter De Maria's], and the science around it appears to be more unsettled than unsettling."
"Daddy, tell me about Powell's meltdown again."
This story has been much repeated, but I just love rereading it, so here it is again. The subject is a recent public flip-out by soon-to-be-ex-Secretary of State Colin Powell, who as you recall went before the UN last year and lied and lied and lied about the pressing need to go to war. This is from James Ridgeway in the Village Voice:
Last week, Powell tried hard to regain the righteous high road with testimony in Congress, but when Ohio congressman Sherrod Brown mentioned Bush's AWOL problems as an aside in one question, Powell sprang into a generalissimo pose, ordering Brown, "Don't go there," as if the congressman were some dumb enlisted peon.
Then, as Powell was ruminating about how hard he tried to understand the pre-war intelligence—"I went to live at the CIA for four days"—he broke off and stared at a committee staff person sitting behind the congresspeople. "Are you shaking your head for something, young man, back there?" Powell intoned. "Are you part of these proceedings?"
Sherrod Brown, who has been in Congress 12 years, jumped to the staffer's defense: "Mr. Chairman, I've never heard a witness reprimand a staff person in the middle of a question."
Powell snapped, "I seldom come to a meeting where I am talking to a congressman and I have people aligned behind you giving editorial comment by head shakes."
Powell just doesn't seem to get it. He's not in some army camp. This is the people's house, and any member of Congress can ask whatever he or she pleases.
Who does Powell think he is? Douglas MacArthur?
A new, old review--written in 1982--has been added to the Doris Piserchia Website:
Mister Justice, 1973.My exhaustive, spoiler-ridden explication of the novel is here. Thanks to Joanna for finding the Trombetta review.Crammed into half an Ace double and never reprinted, Mister Justice remains in a class by itself: hardboiled America, sci-fi style. Here the 2030s appear as a mutated 1930s, complete with an economic catastrophe that threatens evolution itself. The Shadow, the Green Hornet, the Untouchables - they never had what Mr. Justice has going for him. Sprung from humanity's threatened altruistic genes, this masked vigilante has the ability to travel into the past, where he can witness, but not prevent, murders.
He then returns to the present, where he arranges an "eye for an eye" treatment for the slayers, including full-scale gangland rub-outs. But he can't easily dispose of one Arthur Bingle, global crime archon who has the same powers as Mr. J. and then some. Bingle feels about the human race in general what Mr. Justice feels about criminals, and he plans to thin us out and "empty the world." With the help of his powers, his syndicates of henchmen and corrupt cops, and his dreadful lady friend Godiva - she of the constrictor thighs - Bingle gets the drop on humanity. But justice is just a matter of time. Piserchia relates this furious folktale with Chandler soul, Hammett snap, and not a trace of camp.
Jim Trombetta, "The Coolest Sci-Fi," from The Catalog of Cool (1982), edited by Gene Sculatti, p. 87.