Fire Party / Fidelity Jones pic and more Hand Bob stuff

Ok, I'm back. I got the laptop going finally, which is a relief. You don't realize how much you depend on these things until you don't have one. A lesson I learned the hard way: back up your damn files. Otherwise, you'll be crying when you lose those 50 gigs of your precious porn or all of your utterly hilarious "All Your Base Are Belong To Us" clips or whatever. If I had backed the thing up recently, this wouldn't have been half as big of a deal.

I still don't have everything restored, and I lost some of the stuff I had scanned recently, so in the meantime here's a photo Mcbane dug up of Fire Party and Fidelity Jones at Jenkins/Fontenot Central. That's Mike with the gray hat and Jon is looking like he's about 15. This would have been after their 1989 Haricot's show (Lafayette).



Carl from Hand Bob the Spoon has got a few more tracks added to their soundclick page. Check out the Christmas song, it's fucking awesome!

Sorry, I've been experiencing technical difficulties.

I know I haven't posted anything for a while, but the site isn't dead. I was on vacation for about a week, and then when I got back my laptop tanked, so I'm currently without computer access. Actually I can use Scott's when he's not here, but that's like never, and I suck on macs. To make matters even more awesome, I can read my email on the optonline account, but can't reply or compose new mails. Wonderful. Anyway, I do have a bunch of stuff to put up once I get my computer working. Curtis sent a ton of music (mostly NOLA stuff) and I got a bunch from Badger at Orbis Quintus. I scanned a bunch of t-shirt, flyer, and silkscreen stuff while I was at my parents' house as well. Whenever Scott gets back, I'll see if he can show me how to save stuff on this damn thing. Mcbane sent a cool photo of Fidelity Jones and Fire Party at Jon's mom's house.

Three Guys Plumbing page

I made a page for Three Guys Plumbing. The two tracks that were on the misc. page are now there, plus two more. Three Guys Plumbing was Jason Trahan of Urbosleeks and Rare Avis, and Dave Mouton and Dave Clayton. Three guitars and mucho silliness. Not actually much plumbing though.

This site on 60's Texas garage bands has some cool stuff on old Houston clubs. "A zonk out every nite! That's where it's at, babies!" I think it would be interesting to make a similar thing on old Acadiana zydeco and blues clubs.

By the way, the old Hekatomic pages changed URLs, so any of the flyer links from the band index page to them are broken at the moment. I'll fix them pretty soon. If you want to see the flyers now, they're here.

some new tracks, and Bobby Novosad is a Chuck E. Cheese robot

I uploaded some more songs from the KRVS "What Scene?" comp. I put the Frigg, Rare Avis, and Urbosleeks tracks on their respective pages.
Frigg (Get Used To It)
Rare Avis (The Old Queen)
Urbosleeks (Song in G)
I also added a Liplovers tune (Gok) and a Jean Torres tune (Vegetables) to the misc. mp3 page. Liplovers was Jean and Micheline (sp?). That page is getting pretty large, there are almost twenty tracks from various old local bands now. If anybody was in any of those bands and doesn't like having your music on there, let me know and I'll be happy to take it down. Most of the bands I know at least one person in the band, and I don't figure anyone will mind, but I realize I could be overstepping my bounds.

I don't remember if I posted this already, but I saw that Mitch Reed is playing fiddle in Chari Vari, a Cajun band from around Lafayette somewhere. Mitch was the guy who played electric bass for the LHS band in the late 80's. It was cool, he would be marching around playing his bass and some other kid would follow him around with his amp and a bunch of batteries on a wagon or something. We used to take jazz lessons from the same guy, Jerry Fudge (Lafayette's only jazz-instructing obscenity-mumbling ship captain.) Mitch is a damn good bass player.

Sorry to bring this up again, but I am still amazed by Bobby Novosad's celebrity photo section. He has the exact same expression (of excruciating anal pain) in every single picture. I can think of only two possible explanations:
1. Repeated plastic surgery has stretched his face to the point where it is about to rip off of his skull, leaving it perpetually frozen in that grimace/smile.
2. He is no longer alive.
I don't know about you, but I think there's some serious Weekend At Bernie's shit going on over at KSMB. Check out this picture I made to illustrate this:



As evidence of hypothesis #2, consider this photo of zombie-Novosad in a not even remotely lifelike pose with some hot chick:



Yeah, he's definitely dead.

Urbosleeks photos from Louis

Louis sent me a bunch of Urbosleeks photos a few days ago and I forgot to post them. There are some good ones from Metropolis and The Bayou in Baton Rouge. These are just about the only photos I've seen from Metropolis. Except this one of The Shaz. Also, a flyer from a Skatenigs / Urbosleeks show. There are a whole bunch more. I put them all in the bands folder, just scroll down to the U's. There's also one that says it's from Toys, looks like it must have been when Toys was by Brother's? I thought I moved up north, but Louis has me beat. He's in Newfoundland. (Going back to his pre-Cajun roots?)

Urbosleeks at Metropolis ca. 1995?


Urbosleeks at The Bayou (Baton Rouge)


Jason Robira


Skatenigs / Urbosleeks flyer 1995

Some photos of old ramps

I was digging through some stuff and found a few photos of old ramps. The first one is the one on 8th Street, the 2nd is the old spine in New Iberia. It must be from before it was layered with metal. I don't know how I got the third photo, but for some reason I think it was in New Iberia. Maybe I got it from Dave Wattigny or Greg Derouen.


Dave W on the 8th Street ramp 


New Iberia spine 


I think this one was in New Iberia 

More photos from Madelyn

Madelyn put up some more photos on her site. They are all located on this page. For example, she has some photos of a Zen Bastards show at that house on Main St. There must have been two different shows there because in the photos that Margaret sent, they're all wearing different clothes.





There are also some pics of a Zen Bastards show at Combined Effort in Baton Rouge. I'm not sure who the band is in the one photo. She said it was some kind of Oi band.







She has a lot more photos, so check them out. I recognized several of the people in them like Tracy Thorn, Saul from New Iberia, and Brett Drake. Does anybody know who this guy in the hat is? He was apparently a DJ at KRVS.



By the way, Kenny Vallot of the Zen Bastards, Chronicles of Hate, and Resent has a site in case you want to see what he's up to. He also has a page with his 4 track ideas circa 1991-93 if you want to listen. It's nice to see more and more old stuff going up on the web.

Heads of State interview

I finished the Heads of State interview. It's here. It was from a 1993 zine called Blackblock that Andy Perrin, Joseph Eakins, and Miguel made. There are some scans from the mag on the zine page.

I know that's not Big Mike on the image I added on the right side of the page, but until I can get hold of an actual photo of him, Felix's awe-inspiring mullet will have to do. Sometimes I wonder if Big Mike actually existed or if he was just a figment of everyone's drug-induced collective hallucinations. If he is still around, I still say we should dip him in bronze and set him up on the strip as statuary. You know, give the strip back some of it's class from the olden days. While we're at it, we could also bronze the late-nite hamburger guy, some of the cockroaches from Changes, and maybe have a concrete bust of Lil' Murder on the steps of the Loose Caboose (in the pose or Rodin's "The Thinker"). Or maybe not.

Kamala! JYD! Skandar Akbar! Come back!

Ok, let me start off by saying that I never got into wrestling as a kid. In my defense, I moved to Lafayette from Ohio (where there was no wrestling) in 1984 (I think), and by that point Midsouth had gotten pretty watered down from it's glory days and was pretty much in pre-WWF mode. I couldn't get past the obvious pre-planned aspect of the events, and also the whole grabbing a dude by his dick and lifting him over your head thing bothered me a little. (Now it's all good, I do it all the time.)

A few years ago I was talking with a guy I worked with who was quite a bit older than me (RIP, Clayton) about the old days of wrestling. He told me that Midsouth used to have events at what I think is that building next to the University underpass that's now a flea market. It sounded crazy, they were just a ring with a bunch of folding chairs set up around it, guys cutting their heads, flying out into the audience, etc. He said a lot of the times the security guys had to protect the wrestlers from the audience. It made me understand the whole appeal of wrestling back in the day.

It wasn't about whether it was real. It was about the entertainment. Sure it was fake. Sure it was planned out. But the guys were still beating the crap out of each other in the ring. They were really cutting their heads and that was really their blood splattering all over the place. I mean nowadays people pay $30 to see idiots like Steve-O staple his ass and cut his tongue with a razor blade and everybody acts like it's the most insane thing they ever saw. These guys did the equivalent every week for 30 years.

So anyway, that's what led me to start looking up the old wrestlers on the web. So here are a few photos I'd like to share (not necessarily all Midsouth). In this order, I give you: Kamala and some other fatty doing the nasty dance; Rowdy Roddy, everyone's favorite kilt-wearing bagpipe-playing asshole; Ric Flair in his earlier hippier days; Andre the Giant with a bushel o'babes.







If you need a refresher course, Kamala was also known as The Ugandan Giant from Parts Unknown. If this seems like a contradiction in terms being that his title states where he's from, and also that it's not known where he's from, consider that Midsouth management probably had no idea where Uganda was. To prove this, I present the court with Exhibit A, Akeem the African Dream, who happens to be white and looks a lot like Bob Seger. Apparently most wrestling managers think Africa is a truckstop on I-20 near Memphis, so the odds of them having any idea where Uganda is are very slim. Rowdy Roddy Piper was the star of "They Live", the 80's schlockfest about lizard faced aliens that could only be seen with "Rowdy Roddy Ray-bans" available from Rowdy RodCo for $19.95. Ric Flair was the 50 year old guy with bleach blonde hair who was always yelling "WHOOOOOO!!" for any or no reason whatsoever. Please check out the Ric Flair soundboard. Andre is of course the guy who is on the stickers that adorn every stickerable object in half of the known world.

Who I was really looking for was Junkyard Dog. JYD was the shit back in the day. Every retarded 7th grade after-school fight began with a pre-fight prologue where each combatant described the JYD moves he was about to unleash on his opponent. (Usually the pre-fight shit-talking lasted about 20 minutes, actual fight about 20 seconds.) JYDs latter days were apparently a pretty sad spectacle, with him showing up in Cafe 101 of all places, trying to sign autographs on napkins for money, and failing that, borrowing money from the employees then disappearing. He died in 1998 in a car wreck in Mississippi. Here he is in his glory days.






But the coolest thing I found by far is The Sheikh. He apparently was big in the late 50, 60's, and early 70's, so he would have been pretty much done by the 80's. But his pictures attest to his utter awesomeness.



The Sheik, king of crazy facial expressions. Yes, he is stabbing the other guy in the face with something. 


The Sheik again. Yes, he is sawing away on the bald guys head with a knife. 


This time he is gnawing on the other guy's face. By the way, this is the best magazine cover ever. Titillating match, indeed. 


The Sheik and his manager. The manager guy was supposed to be the incarnation of evil. Only in professional wrestling could a character resembling a Devo roadie be used to personify evil. 


Now, meet me in the commons area after class, bruh, I'm going to DDT you like JYD did to Ted Dibiase at Blackham Coliseum, cooz!

B-boy Document flyers & Jetbunny cover

Here's some more stuff Reneetoufee sent. Two flyers for B-boy document, which was a hiphop thing at Le Cafe in 1997, and The cover of Jetbunny mag with Frigg on it. I'd completely forgotten the name of Wes's show on KRVS, but I gather from the flyers that it was 4 Elements.


B-boy Document Nov. 1997 


B-boy Document Dec. 1997 


Frigg on the cover of Jetbunny 

Stephen Williams and Sound mp3s

I uploaded a few more songs to the mp3 page. There are two tracks from Stephen Williams' stuff, one called Zigzag Wanderer and another with Richard Grant, Charles Babineaux, and Rob Lejeune called Slow Burn Victims' Rights. I also put up a track by Sound which is off of a KRVS compilation. I believe Sound was Brian Fruge, Zack and Christina, and I don't know who else. There is a bunch more stuff on that KRVS cd so I'll put some more up later.

photos from Smut Not Art

Reneetoufee dug up an old flyer for Smut Not Art, which was a hiphop/graffiti thing put on by Wes and Renee in 1997 and held at the relatively short lived Le Cafe. It also featured Ronnie and Scott as the Nihilist Stormtroopers. Le Cafe was located on Lee Ave. in a small buiding next to the Greyhound station and was owned by Jake Cole. Wes used to have a hiphop show on KRVS after the Fringe. (I forgot the name of it.) He was also known for his in-depth discussions (i.e. arguments) with Jody Jeansonne (sp?) outside of Metropolis over such topics of importance as whether Dolby D from K Jammin CB was legit or not.

If anybody wants to say hi / harass Wes, here's his myspace page. I dig the booty dance photo.


Smut Not Art flyer 


Dana, Wes, Ivan at Smut Not Art 


Bernard, Rick, & friends at Smut Not Art 

Hand Bob the Spoon site

Carl from Hand Bob the Spoon has put up a soundclick site with a couple of tracks. The main page is here, and the music page with mp3s is here. Check it out, it had been like 10 years since I heard those guys! April and Carl are both now professors up North, and I should also point out that Hand Bob featured a young Chadwick of future Frigg-a-go-go fame. (He was such a nice boy then. What happened?)


Chadwick Power! 

Son of a bitching whore!

I borrowed a cool book of cajun phrases from Reneetoufee. It's got the basics, like "fils de putain" (son of a bitch), the improved "fils de putain de garce" (son of a bitching whore), and "va a la merde" (go to shit), but it's also got some pretty cool obscure ones. Here are just a few (with translations):

"si on peut pas teter maman, il faut teter memere." - If one can't suckle Mama, one suckles Grandma. (It means, you take what you can get.)

"chier sa crotte de noces." - To shit one's wedding turd. (To try hard and not succeed.)

"c'est l'heure de voir a couper tes culottes." - It's time to see about cutting your pants. (You need to be put in your place.)

"serieux comme une manne de tripes" - as serious as a bushel of intestines. (That's pretty serious!)

"tirer une poignette." - To pull a fistfull. (to masturbate)

"s'insulter les foies" - To insult one's liver. (to drink too much.)

The book is called Tonnere Mes Chiens! by Amanda Lafleur. Great book. As you may have gathered, I'm a fan of the toilet humor.

music sources

About the CD I sent to the radio stations, here's a list of where I got the stuff from if anyone wants to listen or download the stuff.

Amazing Nuns - here (Bronson is in it)
Bas Clas - here, and here (70's through the 80's band from Lafayette)
Black Bayou Construktion - here
Dege Legg, Collapsar, Amazing Nuns, Dirty Cajuns, Liquidrone, The Transmission, etc. etc. etc. - here
Brown Idol, Icepick Revival, Meat Dingys, Megatron Jones, Oktober Groundfly, Rage, Smites, Strawboss, Three Guys Plumbing, etc. etc. etc. - here
Buns - here (Baton Rouge late 70's early 80's)
Collapsar - here (ex-Icepick)
Die Rotzz - here (New Orleans punk)
Dirty Cajuns - here (Drew from the Rinky Dink)
Frigg - here
Full Hank - here
Rare Avis - here
Urbosleeks - here
Hekatomic Cherries - here
Icepick Revival - here and here
Lord Waverly - here (New Orleans)
One Man Machine - here (Bernard from Metropolis)
Sanpakus - here
Santeria - here
Toxin III - here (late 70's early 80's from Crowley)
Thunderpants - here (ex-hekatomics)
The Transmission - here
Walter Ghoul's Lavender Brigade - here (Baton Rouge)
Zenbilly - here (Baton Rouge, ex-full hank)
Zoomers - here (late 70's early 80's Baton Rouge)
Zuider Zee - here (mid 70's from Lafayette)

I made some index sheets to go with it, so maybe I'll convert it to html. I doubt it though. It ended up being 3 cds worth and was kind of a pain in the ass.

But speaking of old Louisiana stuff, check out this site which has 3 tracks from an old NOLA compilation and two others. The Skinnies track is badass! And I finally got to hear the Shitdogs. Strange Reaction is a very cool site. I found all kinds of obscure stuff. Like a Big Black track that was only distributed with a magazine, Black Flag demos, a cool Red Cross EP, the first Bad Brains "Pay to Cum", etc. etc. etc.

Toxin III pics, & Happy 4th O' July!

Happy 4th of July, people! The day we get (have) to celebrate Dubya's favorite word, freedom. Our freedom from the British (even though these days, they're the ones who ought to be celebrating that). And our freedom to march into other countries after making bullshit accusations and pile people up into human ass pyramids. And my freedom to say that I think the country is being run by a bunch of incompetent assholes. (And let me just send out a big screw you to the FBI and CIA agents who are tapping me and Jah One's phones.)

Anyway, Chris sent some kickass photos of Toxin III and Snufflix. I assume the downtown chateau one is from the show that we have the flyer for. And the one with the sheriff if awesome. Here's the lineup from Chris for the sheriff photo:

Sheriff photo (L to R) Keith LeBlanc (Bass/Vox/Snufflix), Me (Guitar/Snufflix - Guitar/Vox/Toxin III), Ronnie Stevens (guitar/Toxin III), Sheriff, Cecil Doyle (Bass/Toxin III), Paul 'Chachi' Richardson (Drums/Snufflix/Toxin III)


Toxin III @ Downtown Chateau 


Chris Cart 


Toxin III, Snufflix, and the long arm of the law 

We posted some photos of George Brown earlier. He's now in the Roebucks and they have a myspace page if you want to check them out.

Otis interview and an article on the Pain Teens at the Bluebird

I put up an article on the 92 Pain Teens / Bubba Daddy show, and a circa 1989 Otis interview from AGKL #3. The Pain Teens article doesn't have much to it, but the Otis interview is good. They give Dana a pretty hard time. I'll eventually do the same for a Heads of State interview from another zine. (I have to completely retype it. It was printed with like a 1980 TRS-80 dot matrix printer or something and my scanner's OCR software can't recognize it.) I'll maybe do the Fugazi interview too. Somebody probably still has a Jesus Lizard and a couple of other interviews somewhere. I remember transcribing them years ago for some zine that never happened. The Jesus Lizard one was funny, because Yow kept saying "wait, I have something to say", then grabbing the mic and farting in it.

I heard from Louis about the ramps we were discussing (Sugar's, Louis's, Mt. Taco, etc.). From Louis:

"As I understood it, The Great Lafayette Ramp Saga goes: It started out as the Sugar's Ramp and was reportedly a Danny Hall creation. It then moved out to the Acadiana Mall for a while, near to where the newer movie theatres were built. Next, it was Mt. Taco, and when they moved, a bunch of us street skaters got it. Chad Simon came over one day, and asked if he could have it -- and they carted it off to use at John Wayne. Who knows, parts of it could still be in use somewhere."

I sent some cds to some radio stations

I compiled a cd of Louisiana punk/alternative stuff for my friend Liz at WFMU. While I was putting it together, I figured that some of the Louisiana college stations might be interested in it as well. Anyway, I finally got off my ass and sent it out today and yesterday. I still need to drop off Liz's copy, and I'm waiting for a mailing address for WTUL, but if all goes according to plan, the following stations will eventually have a copy: WFMU (New York - independent), KRVS (Lafayette - UL), KLSU (Baton Rouge - LSU), WTUL (New Orleans - Tulane), KSLU (Hammond - SLU), KTRU (Houston - Rice), KVRX (Austin - UT), and I'm going to try to get Deshazo to give a copy to his friends at the pirate station in Austin. Liz has already played Sanpakus on WFMU, and I think there's a good chance that some of the stuff will get played at least on KRVS and KLSU. So if you are/were in any of the following bands, you might get a little airplay:

Amazing Nuns, Bas Clas, Black Bayou Construktion, Brown Idol, Buns, Collapsar, Dege Legg, Die Rotzz, Dirty Cajuns, Frigg-a-go-go, Full Hank, Hekatomic Cherries, Icepick Revival, Liquidrone, Lord Waverly, Meat Dingys, Megatron Jones, Oktober Groundfly, One Man Machine, Rage, Rare Avis, Sanpakus, Santeria, The Smites, Strawboss, Three Guys Plumbing, Thunderpants, Toxin III, The Transmission, Urbosleeks, Walter Ghoul's Lavender Brigade, Zenbilly, The Zoomers, Zuider Zee.

If anybody has a problem with this, it's a little late, but let me know and I won't send out your stuff anymore. Why did I do this? I don't know, I just want to promote Louisiana underground music a little bit. If anybody is freaked out, I swear there's no ulterior motive behind it. I just want to get the music out there.