Punk rock history was made on April 13, 1966 when Nicky Mollash walked into a Safeway supermarket on La Cienega Boulevard to purchase some Gleem toothpaste so he could look his best for a photo shoot at Pandora’s Box, a then popular hangout on the Sunset Strip. Mollash picked up a tube that was incorrectly priced at a whopping $5.99. When the gum chewing, non-plussed cashier, evidently a stranger to both retail and fluoride, demanded he pay the denoted price or put it back on the shelf, an irate Mollash completely lost it and started a small scale mini-mart riot, threatening the checkout girl, Procter and Gamble, its shareholders and of course, The Man for once again keeping him downer than he ought to be. The Evolution VI’s volatile lead singer was already smarting from being refused service at Bob Dalton’s Restaurant the night before, mostly because the feathers from his ostrich vest were landing on other patrons’ Porterhouse steaks.

Once the Channel 3 Action News Team reported this story, Mollash blew off the photo shoot, electing instead to dash off to his girlfriend’s house for a pity screw. Following that, he commemorated the day’s harrowing events by penning “Real Revolting”, which the group speedily recorded the next night while Mollash’s bile over the gunk caked on his pearly whites still churned inside of him. As blistering a rant of monetary outrage as this track was, Mollash (who has since mellowed about rock music and dental care) prefers the stereo version that appeared on the Here Comes The Evolution VI album because “Someone forgot to include bass and drum cymbals on the single version.” Still, some punk audio purists maintain the only true version of the song is the first take of the song found on initial German mono pressings of the Hier Kommt Die Evolution VI LP, which breaks into a fistfight during the harmonica solo and dissolves into plate throwing and name-calling thereafter.

The group’s collective moment in the spotlight proved to be profoundly brief, but some members continued to garner notoriety in a post-Evolution VI world. Drummer Bobby Munsey became an injury law specialist whose omnipresent Munsey, Rimbaldo & Associates billboards stare down on the seedy Strip where he and his bandmates marauded nearly half a century ago. When lead guitarist Denny Tollesen perished at sea in a tragic Segway Personal Transporter accident, Munsey wasted no time contacting Tolleson’s widow to tell her that she was entitled to a huge cash settlement that made them both obnoxiously rich.

But what of the angry young Nicky Mollash? In an ironic twist to an already moronic story, when Mollash left the world of rock music to write his 1975 self-help book Still Revolting: Channeling Your Inner Spoiled Brat, he admitted to the world that he was actually the son of Walter P. Mollash and stood to inherit the family fortune his Daddy amassed while he was president of Procter and Gamble’s chief rival, Lever Brothers. So much for punk rock.

For this Serene Dominic 24/7 Club BONUS B-SIDE OF DUBIOUS DISTINCTION, we unearthed an abortive session that took place with Nicky Mollash and legendary Britrock producer Mickie Most, notable for his work with The Yardbirds, The Animals, Herman’s Hermits, Donovan and The Jeff Beck Group. Most was here to do what turned out to be an aborted recording session with the Monkees when he corralled Mollash to lay lead vocals on a Yardbirds outtake “You Stole My Love”. Mollash felt insecure and invited about 106 friends into the studio to bolster his confidence. And break things.

Download “Real Revolting”/”You Stole My Love” here!

Click here to subscribe!

When Indian composer Rahala Shimuyanti scored the unsettling music that would eventually become the foundation for “Please Stand By”, he thought he was receiving bad karma for not thanking Vishnu when accepting his Grammy. He set the troublesome recording aside, yet Bollydor A&R rep Sal DeMory, who overheard the hostile session which left at least two musicians hospitalized for unspecified injuries, he grew insistent that Shimuyanti include it on his next album. Recalls DeMory, “I hounded Rahala for weeks asking about that demonic triad song that made me want to punch somebody. He finally just handed me the spool of tape and said he wanted nothing more to do with it. I think it was about three weeks before that scaffolding fell on him and he lost all sensation on his right side.”

DeMory however, was undeterred. He would play the song for delivery men, secretaries, anyone who’d listen and could take a punch.

Eventually, the song reached the ears and throat of voiceover talent Russ Walton (www.jackofallpipes.com) who immediately seized on the music’s tension as the perfect track on which to overlay his soothing baritone. “I wanted to recreate the uneasy childhood feeling of watching TV when the station would experience technical difficulties,” says Walton. “Usually they’d start off with happy music, but as the glitches grew longer, the music tended to get creepier and it looked like you might never see The Flintstones again. If I can make a someone’s day a little upsetting and then give them a little boost, well, I’m doing my profession proud.”

On this split virtual cyber single’s BONUS B-SIDE OF DUBIOUS DISTINCTION Russ Walton introduces you to The Human Torch, a man who sings and burns just for you and who did performed both of those duties at Russ and Julia Walton’s wedding reception on June 11, 2006. There he performed this very medley of Burt Bacharach hits (“Song By Song”) outdoors in the pouring rain under a tent with his mike cord running through a puddle as lightning crashed overhead. Is there no end to what bodily risks the Human Torch will endure for your listening pleasure? No. No there isn’t.

Download “Please Stand By”/”The Human Torch Song By Song” here!

Click here to subscribe!

You could do a lot worse in 1966 and early 1967 than worship at the altar of the Rolling Stones and if anyone ever wondered what the music of Aftermath or Between the Buttons might have sounded like sung with authentic American accents, they could do no better than this Seattle quintet. Stones copyists to a man, The Makeup Sects not only purchased their orange corduroys from the same haberdasher that Brian Jones did, they made sure Jones’ bangs and muttonchops were never longer than those of their rhythm guitarist Derek Linseed’s at any given time. Sometimes that emulation ate through the band’s living funds–purchasing all the exotic instruments the blonde Stone mastered and then discarded with every new Jagger-Richard composition.

“Strength Was Always Your Weakness” is a prime example of The Makeup Sects’ slavish devotion to the bad boys of rock—fuzz bass, ghostly Chuck Berry licks, snarky lyrics about a messed up chick, simple but insistent drumming—had they remained true to these punky R&B roots, the Sects would’ve been in a very good position to usurp the genuine article, soon to abandon those very same earthy sounds for the folly of Their Satanic Majesties Request. But devotees they were to the end, following their heroes up the primrose paisley path with a disastrous psychedelic opus of their own, Demonic Renaissance Minstrels At Your Service, that all but eroded their fan base. Felled by audience disinterest and the the crippling cost of the floral arrangements for the album cover, The Makeup Sects were but a grimy memory by the end of 1968.

Needing a song about a mystical girl that could rival “Ruby Tuesday” for irrationality, The Makeup Sects whipped out their cheap recorder flutes and came up “Drop of a Hat”, a haunting ballad about a girl who thinks the undead are trying to drag her into the cold earth and imprison her as one of their own. It turns up here as a BONUS B-SIDE OF DUBIOUS DISTINCTION since the folks at Fission Records felt there were already too many songs on the pop charts tackling that subject matter already.

Download “Strength Was Always Your Weakness”/”Drop Of A Hat” here!

Click here to subscribe!

This release of 24 Originals Happening Now marks the first-ever appearance of the German prog-rock titans Weather Gnome on a various artists compilation, and odd that it should be one that contains 24 songs. A typical Weather Gnome track clocks in at about the average running time of a sitcom, with suites, segues, overtures and Roman numerals galore to attend to.

The lone aberration in their career was their 1977 bid for Top 40 radio acceptance, the unashamedly commercial Viola! album, which yielded an unheard of six songs on one long playing album. When that failed to sell in the desired numbers necessary in order for it to be deemed a US success, the crafty Krauts ordered their record label (Duetchbagg Ltd.) to destroy all existing copies and several pretend ones.

Not soon after that debacle, they mellowed about song length, thanks to an aggregate of Swedish DJs who called themselves DrugStars at 45. When they released a medley containing snippets of 12 Weather Gnome songs and two Edison Lighthouse songs that clocked in at a miraculous 5:09, even the Germans could see the mass appeal of brevity. Once it became a surprise US dance hit, Weather Gnome decided to chop up their own songs into singles, something they had always regarded before as “inherently wrong to the human ear canal”.

This two-minute distillation of the 22-minute “Eye Throb” was hacked off the trio’s 1979 double-album meisterwork The Legend of Seabeast, which really calls into question what an ocular twitch has to do with a sea serpent looking for spiritual enlightenment and plankton?

“The whole of the Seabeast album was written in one long afternoon in my optometrist’s waiting room”, clarifies singer/bassist Werner Lee Daecher. “He had a 50 gallon fish tank, but not many interesting magazines”.

One of the more stranger assignments that came down the pike for Weather Gnome after the popularity of The Legend of Seabeast album was composing a theme for an animated cartoon series called “Ice Breakers” about a bunch of zany characters who were in many ways, eh hemm, polar opposites. The band immediately went to work and cribbled together a 50 minute theme with sub suites and repeating themes and were more than a little steamed when they were told it was going to be edited down to 58 seconds. No footage survives of the cartoon series but we have obtained some animation cels from the artist, Mr. James Cherry.

Download “Eye Throb”/”Ice Breakers” here!

Click here to subscribe!

Good sir! In trying to represent every conceivable style of music on 24 Originals Happening Now, we were surprised to find through exhaustive and pricey marketing surveys that so many of you, our cherished listeners, wanted us to include something representative of “steampunk” on our collection. We searched high and low, sparing no expense (O.K., we Google’d that) and found there was not a genuine “steampunk” musical movement at all like the steam-less punk of years passed, just a lot of pith helmet, pocket-watch and tarnished brass enthusiasts.

We therefore decided to feed all the neural impulses of a steampunk fashion model into an EEG-based brain-computer interface for virtual cursor movement and attached that to a dedicated electrocardiogram machine filled with blank staff paper in an effort to translate the model’s “steampunk movement” into musical notation. Then we assembled our team of very expensive by-the-hour session players to execute what the computer worked out for us and found it sounded not unlike a drum circle at a senior assisted living facility. After much badgering and intimidation of the elders, it resembled a frightened and hungry Guy Lombardo’s Royal Canadians and later still, after some costly program tweaking, Paul McCartney and Wings on a bender.

So we went with that. Victorian subject matter, marching beat, shiny brass, antique typewriters, yep, it all smacks of Sir Paul after a few too many lagers. Like that morning he woke up under a piano and remembered he’d quit the greatest rock group in the history of mankind to make music with his wife.

Armed with this new insight into steampunk, we located a Paul McCartney impersonator (Bernie Owens) who played left-and-uncalled-for-right handed bass in The Nowhere Men, a touring Beatles cover band that only performed at minimum security prison facilities. Our ersatz Paulie was outfitted with opera glass goggles, antique bird cage helmets, feathers and rotary dials. Rechristening him Watson the Telly, we whisked him into the studio to record a musical retelling of the “Queensbury Rules” of boxing, which was what a highfalutin survey determined was the number one topic you people really wanted to hear a song about (coming in a close second was ‘equity mutual funds’).

After this extremely overpriced recording date, Bernie disappeared with our posh steampunk swag, setting us back tens of thousands of dollars. According to our steeply priced detectives, he was last spotted in a seedy watering hole in Roanoke, rusting our exorbitant armature with sloppy Pabst Blue Ribbon. So if you happen to see Bernie a/k/a Watson the Telly, please give that bounder a right thumpin’ for us.

Unless you’re firing an airship admiral’s sidearm or exhuming some Victorian dueling pistols from their carrying case, this BONUS B-SIDE OF DUBIOUS DISTINCTION will be of no interest to you. But fans of Cher will recognize this at once as “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)”, complete with mariachi brass and actual gun sound effects. The identity of the singer, however, is not the aforementioned Watson the Telly but a trans-gender Cher impersonator named Flossy that the producers took a liking to when they set her in the sites of their steampunk beer goggles.

Download “Queensbury Rules”/”Bang Bang” here!

Click here to subscribe!

World renown hairstylist Mister Catherine had millions of coiffure fanatics around the world, a client book filled with movers and shakers who’d sit still long enough for him to apply his Midas Touch to their hair follicles. But was that any reason to offer him a recording contract?

Embassy Records seemed to think so, feeling that his name recognition alone among hair hags would be enough to rack up millions in sales when it signed him in late 1984..

Such was not the case, much to the chagrin of hit producer Brett Jacuzzi, whose own Midas Touch behind the mixing board couldn’t disguise the awful truth—that Danny Villonovia a/k/a Mister Catherine had a voice like a woman trapped in the last stages of throat cancer.

“I tried triple and quadruple tracking his voice but that only increased the rasp”, Jacuzzi told Hitz Magazine. “In fact, it made him sound like an asthmatic policewoman. So I decided to blend his voice with some people who could actually sing”. Although sworn to secrecy, it is now known that among the accomplished singers used to make that blend were Baby Lewis and one Stephen Oddyssey, then pretty down on his luck with the failure of Analog Cabin and willing to do anything for a buck after losing his house in the stock broker belt of north Surrey.

Also added in the mix for good luck was Daryll Heckenby, the man whom the recording industry knew as “The Hits Whisperer”.

“In those days, if you could get Daryll to whisper on your record, you were assured of a hit”, remared Jacuzzi. “He was uncredited on Band-Aid, but you can clearly see him on the video, whispering behind Bananarama. I’m not sure if Daryll had anything to do with the occult but he was a strange guy and the studio had two locust invasions after he let us know he was unhappy about being so low in the mix”.

Daryll’s lucky streak in the record world ended with this single, which never became a turntable hit in any homes with a working turntable. The universe, now suddenly back on its axis again, continued as it should have, with Mister Catherine returning to his clippers and Daryll Heckenby finding new fortune and fame, whispering to greyhounds at the dog track in White City. Mister Catherine’s last high profile client was President Bill Clinton, who infamously let planes wait on the runway for two hours while Mister Catherine waited for some hair inspiration on Air Force One.

Mister Catherine’s BONUS B-SIDE OF DUBIOUS DISTINCTION demonstrates what happens when too much sweetening takes place in the studio. On “That’s Your Darling For You” Mister Catherine is so low in the mix that he may well have been attending to customers in his salon for all the difference his presence makes. “That was Danny Rivera, a singer from Bolognia who had a really great voice. Much better than Mister Catherine”, recalls producer Brent Jacuzzi who adds that the 2U was affixed to Mr. C’s name in the hopes that dyslexic shoppers would think they were buying a single off The Unforgettable Fire”.

Download “Lie About The World”/”That’s Your Darling For You” here!

Click here to subscribe!

The neo-psychedelic movement in the 80′s may have seen a boost in sitar use and bands swathed in paisley but there was precious little vinyl that was as truly hallucinogenic and skin crawling as early psychedelia had been. “Yellow Shampoo”, a slab of acid battery drippings caked over a bummer of a bad trip, may have proved the exception.

“Yellow Shampoo”, like all of Mendlessohn’s Brain’s material, was written by Diakon Wilson Neugarten, a/k/a Dean Newgarden, the musical prodigy behind this five piece teen freakrock outfit from Elkhart, Indiana. Newgarden’s parents belonged to one of the more conservative sects of Mennonites which generally shun many of the provocative colors and modern conveniences their son enjoyed writing songs about.

Dean kept his rockstar double-life a secret from his elders for as long as he could but when an independently pressed 45 of the song broke out in northwestern Virginia, they could no longer continue to ignore the requests for interviews scotch-taped to the family’s horse and buggy carriage.

Still a minor, young Dean needed his parents’ consent to sign with the proto-punk Scratch Records in Los Angeles. The Neugarten’s slick Mennonite lawyers entered in a clause in the contract which stipulated that their son’s music could only be sold at agricultural fairs and country stores where Mennonite goods are sold. The agreement proved a disastrous one commercially. Even the DIY punk label was not used to accepting record returns with chicken droppings and hayseeds caked on them but in terms of barn airplay in 1986, no one could touch Mendlessohn’s Brain.

“The rumor that ‘Yellow Shampoo’ was not about Fabergé Organic Shampoo but golden showers didn’t exactly endear the band to MTV”, recalls Newgarden today. “We were yanked off 120 Minutes almost immediately but videos with girls dry humping a Corvette got to stay on”.

Our Mendlessohn’s Brain BONUS B-SIDE OF DUBIOUS DISTINCTION continues the tributes to Hall of Fame songwriters Burt Bacharach and Hal David. “We love Love’s version of ‘My Little Red Book’ and learned to play it from that version,” says Newgarden. “I understand it has way different chords from the Bacharach produced Manfred Mann version heard in the movie What’s New Pussycat. We also shaved about 25 seconds off the song’s running time because we learned it off the 24 Original Happening Hits album that way.”

They really had to truncate a lot of songs to fit 24 on an album. There’s a version of “Wooly Bully” there that ends not long after “one-two-three-quartro!’”

Download “Yellow Shampoo”/”Afraid Of The Sun” here!

Click here to subscribe!

No band has been more blatant about their wish to be mistaken as an indie rock band as Brooklyn Beard, a Melbourne chicken-in-a-basket supper club duo who had neither facial hair nor a Park Slope P.O. Box number. Thusly Horbitt and Shanelle Bogan migrated stateside for some much needed indie cred, going as far inserting the “I-word” into this 2005 song title to secure some college radio airplay. Stacking the deck, they heaped on copious helpings of distortion every three bars of what was essentially a bossa nova number. The ruse worked but none of the subsequent soundalike follow-ups, “Independent Survey,” “Independent Means” and the desperate “Up to My Neck In Dependents” failed to sustain their charade any longer, not when actual bearded groups from Ohio, Philadelphia, Illinois and Nevada began invading Brooklyn.

Brooklyn Beard’s BONUS B-SIDE of DUBIOUS DISTINCTION is a song called “You’ll Never Let Me Go” that’s equal portions love and acrophobia. You wouldn’t think someone downunder would have a fear of heights but Horbitt, who also suffers from ifestíophobia, a deep seated fear of molten lava and falling ash, recalls taking Shanelle on a honeymoon that reached its low point on Mount Vesuvius. “I tried being macho about visiting Pompeii, all the while just trembling at every lava coated child. Then Shanelle got very insistent about wanting to see the top of Vesuvius so I capitulated. When we got there, all that was separating us from the caldera and an eight kilometer drop was a flimsy two foot-rope fence.” It took a team of paramedics an hour to remove Horbitt’s white knuckles from Shanelle’s handbag. “You’ll Never Let Me Go” indeed.

Download “Independent Duet”/”You’ll Never Let Me Go Beards” here!

Click here to subscribe!

How many times have you watched VH1’s Where Are they Now or Behind the Music and heard a formerly popular hair farmer band member decry, “Things were going great- till that Nirvana came along and chased us off the radio”? Jack Prisston, lead guitarist of Satyrn, is one such disgruntled curmudgeon. But he didn’t waste time grumbling. He simply stopped using conditioner, traded in his spandex for flannel and formed P@RN, a band whose first order of business was to record this grungy rocker about a guy with a good work ethic who became even thriftier since his high consumption girlfriend left.

In those pre-internet days it was possible to fool some of the kids some of the time. If slackers didn’t pay attention to the pro-work force lyrics, the mere turning up at a P@RN show made it abundantly clear that this geezerfest was not your little brother’s grunge. The phrase “Wait? Aren’t you the guys from Satyrn?” was usually followed by “Hey! This dude’s got hair plugs” and that was followed by a refund-demanding rush at the box office. Prisston maintains that “P@RN was way ahead of its time, at least by a few months. Unfortunately we were also way misunderstood, especially by you guys in the press. And by the way, the band’s name’s pronounced “pat-tern” not “porn,” dipshit!”

Ten years earlier this BONUS B-SIDE OF DUBIOUS DISTINCTION would surely have been an a-side, a fact that hadn’t been lost on Jack Prisston. “We were signed to some ‘phantom indie’ label, you know, pretending not to be in the business of making money and slurring all our words to sound disinterested. Finally, after we’d cut the bulk of the album, I went up to the folks at Maggot and said, you know, when are we going to cut the radio ballad? They looked at me like someone watching color TV for the first time, like they never heard the word before. I mean, how are we going to bang any chicks on the road singing about syringe needles and cold compresses all the time? So they let us cut “I’m Your Creation” which got a lot of play at strip clubs and pizzerias but nothing on MTV. They buried it on a CD single behind every conceivable alternate radio mix of “Tight Wad”. P@RN’s followup album Arm Us Fetus tanked but Prisston refuses to blame its anti abortion message for its failure. “MTV pretty much dropkicked grunge for electronica by then and so we changed our name to Test P@RN for a few months but by then the nostalgia pendulum was swinging back Satyrn’s way so we said fuck this pocket calculator shit and took the hair extensions out of storage.”

Download “Tight Wad”/”I’m Your Creation here!”

Click here to subscribe!