Phast Phreddie Sez

To be honest, my own memories of April 1975 are kinda hazy. I do remember around that time my father taking me and my older brother to see "Tommy" on account of how into pinball we both were. I have scanned for you an excerpt from the near perfect The Back Door Man issue number two from that month. BOC cover and one of the best pieces written on the Dictators' "Go Girl Crazy" to be found anywhere. There is an ad for Spider Records on Crenshaw Boulevard offering a free game of pinball with a purchase of the soundtrack and also a free play of pinball at the store if you brought in your movie ticket stub. It took another decade for me to put my mitts on an actual copy of BDM (Stiv on cover and Phred Patterson's prescient review of "The Modern Dance" (worthy of a post here soon). What can you say about the staff faves? All killer, no filler. I doubt that if you sampled the staff of NME or Sounds in early 1975 you would even approximate the taste that runneth over here. Maybe Denim Delinquent, Gulcher, Rock Scene and Bomp could come close . . . for 1975 it didn't get any better than this. True rock animals. I was thinking about whether to give a rambling and incomplete list of "staff faves" like that of BDM, but figured I would only be repeating their lists in large part. So onto favourite releases/live highlights of 2012 (and some I finally got to hear in 2012), so here in no particular order are some: Bill Direen and the Bilders/George Henderson at the Whammy Bar with Bill in VU guitar hero mode, Hot Knives reissue cd Grown Up Wrong, Yuck live at Laneway Festival in Silo Park, Peter Kolovos' "Black Colors" triple (!@) lp on Thin Wrist, Monoshock's reactivation and the 2011 International Hello lp on Holy Mountain, anything put out by the West Coast garage mafia (the THREE Ty Segall records, Thee Oh Sees live in NZ in early 2012, Tim Presley/White Fences and "Twins"), Heather Leigh Murray at the Audio Foundation, Dean Roberts/Tim Barnes/Hermione Johnson trio at the Audio Foundation, Lee "Scratch" Perry "Disco Devil: The Jamaican Discomixes" cd, Blues Control at the Audio Foundation and honorable mention of the Richard Youngs/Alastair Galbraith double bill at the Classic which I never got around to writing about in 2012. More on this issue of BDM from '75 soon, including an official 1975 obit for the Imperial Dogs, which describes them as the "ultimate avant punk band of all time."