Monthly Archives: January 2021

The Readymades: More Live Than Not – San Francisco 1978

Live and studio recordings of a San Francisco pop-punk legend

At the dawn of punk rock and the new wave, San Francisco’s Readymades sparked both fanship and controversy. Fanship for what New York Rocker described as a blend that leaned “towards the power and simplicity of punk and the accessibility of pop.” Controversy for much the same thing. Readymades lead singer Jonathan Postal had been the short-lived founding bassist of the Avengers, but after realizing his original songs weren’t going to get air time (and seemingly getting ghosted out of rehearsals), he formed a new band with more like-minded mates. As heard here, the Readymades certainly retained the energy of punk rock, but with melody, harmony and often a theatricality that was more rock ‘n’ roll than punk.

The band quickly shot to local fame, gaining a contract for a 3-song EP on Automatic Records after their first show at the Mabuhay Gardens, and quickly lining up opening slots for touring acts that included Patti Smith, Talking Heads, Blondie, Roxy Music, and the Police. They toured the west coast, playing dates as far north as Bellingham and Vancouver, and bringing the San Francisco scene to University of California campuses in Santa Cruz and Davis. They turned down an invitation to record for John Cale on his Spy label, and recorded demos with major label macher Sandy Pearlman. They garnered praise in local, national and international publications, and yet, in the end, failed to release anything on vinyl beyond two EPs and a few compilation tracks.

Why the band failed to gain a major label contract isn’t well documented, though it seems that internal artistic tensions split the group apart after only two years. Postal, who has a BFA in photography from the San Francisco Art Institute, built a career as both a commercial and fine arts photographer, and more recently as a guitar luthier. The band’s co-songwriter, keyboardist, saxophonist and musical director, Morey Goldstein, continued to make music with bands (including Big Bang Beat and the Zasu Pitts Memorial Orchestra), on-stage and for video games, before passing away in 2008. Guitarist Ricky Sludge (nee Eric Lenchner) continued to make music with the Dinos and Ultras, and teaches music through his Professor Sludge Academy.

In 2009 the Rave Up label gathered together many of the band’s recordings for the vinyl LP San Francisco – Mostly Alive, and Liberation Hall (which is reissuing several early titles from the 415 Records catalog) offers a playlist that adds three live cover songs. The collection opens with “415 Music” from the like-titled 1980 label compilation. Surprisingly,  the song and the label took “415” from the California penal code for disturbing the peace, rather than the local San Francisco area code. The song’s amped-up atmosphere disguises a cynical take on punk rock’s “white boys making white noise,” and highlights the in-betweenness of the Readymades highly-charged, but musically fluent music. Similarly, “Heretics” melds punk rock energy and harmony vocals in its tribute to 415 founders Howie Klein and Chris Knab’s late-70s radio show.

At the time, Postal characterized the band’s lyrics as being “things we think about… day to day stuff.” This included wondering about Supergirl’s indestructible hymen (perhaps a tip of the hat to Larry Niven’s science fiction story “Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex”), the impact that technology has on children in the pure pop “Electric Toys,” the pacified escapism of the New York Dolls-styled “Edge City,” and the sterile post-disaster society of “After the Earthquake.” The kiss-off “Hurry Up and Go” trods more familiar lyrical ground, but includes the novel refrain “I’ll remember the good times when you’re gone,” and “Trying to Grow Up” finds itself between childhood and adulthood with the sentiment “I still act like a child, but I look like a man.” There’s Bond-meets-the-Stones reverb and sax in “Spy,” and the influence of Bowie and the Velvet Underground on “Terry is a Space Cadet.”

The three live covers (which, along with the other live tracks were recorded at Miramonte High School in Orinda, California) added to this collection include Del Shannon’s “Runaway” (which briefly gives way to the Ventures’ “Walk Don’t Run”), a committed run through the Animals’ “It’s My Life,” complete with the original’s call-and-response chorus vocals, and a boisterous take on the Rascals’ “Good Lovin’” to close the set. Missing in action are the four tracks from the band’s 1980 post-Postal EP, as well as the studio demo version of “Supergirl” featured on Rave Up’s LP. There are a few tape issues here and there, but everything’s quite listenable and demonstrates just how talented this band was live and in the studio. [©2021 Hyperbolium]

The Readymades’ Facebook Page
Jonathan Postal’s Home Page
Jonathan Postal Guitars’ Home Page

Richard Hell and the Voidoids: Destiny Street Complete

Forty years in the life of an album

After being in the thick of New York’s underground scene with the Neon Boys, Television and the Heartbreakers, Richard Hell founded the Voidoids with guitarists Robert Quine and Ivan Julian, and future Ramones drummer Marc Bell. The quartet’s 1977 debut was headlined by Hell’s anthem “Blank Generation,” and became a touchstone for the nihilistic themes, cynical attitudes and rejection of societal norms that would come to define the scene’s musical, intellectual and sartorial aesthetics. Hell’s disenchantment with touring, the music business, and a deepening drug addiction led to a four year gap before he and the reformed Voidoids (then consisting of guitarists Quine and Juan “Naux” Maciel, and drummer Fred Maher) recorded this second and final album.

By the time of the album’s 1982 release, Richard Hell was thirty-two, punk rock had been supplanted in public spaces by the more commercially digestible new wave, and the underground had morphed into indie and hardcore scenes. The reactionary societal repudiations of the debut had given way to more ruminative views, but Hell had become impaired by addiction, and his sporadic involvement in the sessions led to disappointment in arrangements and production that didn’t match his conception of the songs. Upon regaining rights to the album some years later, Hell removed it from print, with a wish to remix it more to his liking. But with the original multitracks having been lost, his wish was put on hold until he discovered a cassette of the album’s rhythm tracks. This opened the door to re-record the album with new vocals, and new guitar leads by Bill Frissell, Marc Ribot, and original Voidoid Ivan Julian.

The results of these sessions were released in 2009 as Destiny Street Repaired. “Repaired” is a figurative description, since the album’s breakage was in Hell’s artistic soul, and the repair was more of a reimagining. Think of Brian Wilson finishing the Beach Boys’ Smile,  rather than Paul McCartney stripping Phil Spector from the Beatles’ Let It Be. The urge to revise strikes artists of many media, and the twenty-seven year gap between the original album and the remake created interesting artistic resonances. The almost-sixty-year-old Hell revisited works from his thirties with new compadres and a guitarist who’d accompanied him in his twenties. Further twisting the timeline, the title track features a narrator visiting himself ten years earlier, a song that Hell himself was revisiting many years later.

A decade after repairing the album, three of the four original 24-track master reels were found, and together with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Nick Zinner, Hell indulged his original desire to remix the original performances. With only three-fourths of the masters available, tracks from Repaired were used to fill in the holes. This Remixed version provides a halfway house between the Remastered original and Repaired revision. Fans of the original album get (mostly) the original performances they grew to love, while Hell gets closer to the sonics he’d originally envisioned. And if three different versions of the album isn’t enough, this set adds demos, the original Nick Lowe-produced single versions of “The Kid With the Replaceable Head” and “I’m Your Man,” the 1980 single of “Time” b/w “Don’t Die,” and a live recorsing of “Time.” When they say “complete,” then mean “complete.”

So how do they compare? The original album still stands strong, Hell’s dissatisfaction notwithstanding. Quine and Naux took Hell’s absence as an opportunity to cut loose, and despite the songwriter’s reservations, his writing was strong enough to withstand the guitar and sonic assaults. If Hell was impaired by despair and drugs at the time, it seems to have fueled passion in his vocals, both on the original songs and covers of the Kinks’ “I Gotta Move,” Dylan’s “Going Going Gone,” and Them’s (by way of the Little Boy Blues’) “I Can Only Give You Everything.” The Remixed edition widens the original’s near-mono soundstage, and unlike stereo renderings of powerhouse 1960s singles, the expansion offers more instrumental detail without dissipating the punch of the performances.

The Repaired edition offers the biggest changes, with guitar parts that are informed by the originals, timeboxed by the vintage rhythm tracks, and exciting in original ways. Hell’s vocals are born from the original writing and cover selection, but with decades more experience, and vocal chords that weren’t worn out by a lengthy music career. Hell’s singing is strong throughout, and while the original vocals often feel reflexive and instinctual, the new recordings seem to be informed by additional decades of perspective. More ego, less id, and in some ways like alternate takes made after a twenty-seven year smoke break. Perhaps the best test of the Repaired versions is how seamlessly these versions fill the holes in the Remixed edition – sonically, they’re a close match, and attitudinally they still seem to capture the earlier zeitgeist.

Hell’s most covered song, “Time,” provides the album’s most poignant moment, as the then thirty-something songwriter opined, “Only time can write a song that’s really really real / The most a man can do is say the way its playing feels / And know he only knows as much as time to him reveals.” Listening to him sing the lyrics nearly three decades later on Repaired is to hear a writer taking a note from his younger self, a reminder that every age is a way-station, informed by life to that point, but never fully realized. It’s a fascinating example of prophecy colliding head-on with memory.

The bonus tracks include the Nick Lowe-produced B-side “I’m Your Man,” the 1980 single version of “Time” and its flip “Don’t Die,” an unreleased album version of “Don’t Die,” demos of album tracks (“Going Going Gone” and “Ignore That Door”) and songs that didn’t make the album (including a cover of Fats Domino’s “I Lived My Life”), and a teary live take of “Time” performed by Hell and guitarist Ivan Julian at Robert Quine’s 2004 memorial. Altogether, this is a well-deserved accounting of an album that was well reviewed upon release, but overshadowed in public memory by its predecessor. The original retains its primal charm, Remixed refines the sound, Repaired layers the artist’s memories of his vision upon the foundation, the bonus tracks add color, and Hell’s liner notes tie it all together. This a must-have for Richard Hell fans, as well as those just discovering the original gem. [©2021 Hyperbolium]

Richard Hell’s Home Page