SINGLES AGAIN / Chuck Eddy

Chuck Eddy dusts off his old vinyl and scratches his head. We all win.

Greetings, BLURT readers. This column's theme is fairly simple: Basically, I sort alphabetically through my shelves for dusty old 7-inch vinyl indie singles from acts that aren't household names, and try to figure out why I wound up keeping them in the first place. This is the 11^th installment (first two appeared at Idolator.)

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MELTED MEN - Smoke Alarm Limbo (Pink Sock, 2004)

The front of the EP sleeve - revolving around a hideously deformed blue-skinned mermaid princess seated on her throne deep in the coral reef -- looks more or less like some half-awake stoner knocked over a few candles worth of hot wax all over it. And when you get down to it, so does the music, and surprisingly, this is not a completely horrible thing. Back cover also offers a conceptual clue: A middle-aged black couple, possibly with car broken down, occupying the stoop of an apparent gas station in the middle of nowhere, though clearly along Highway 321. Insert shows six subsequent shots of a highway patrolman in short pants detaining a tinfoil-masked transvestite in a hula skirt, not to mention a necklace comprising several primitive woodwinds. Actual vinyl is translucent, a sort of sea-green color. Band is a "collective" (what else?) from Athens, Georgia, and they include the Sun City Girls and To Live And Shave In L.A. among their closest MySpace friends. Songs include "Thumbs Like A Human" (a rapper spits about escargot while splitting the difference between the Residents and Red Hot Chili Peppers over electronic blippery almost managing to sound funky); "After All The Smoke Clears" (sproinging Jew's harp underlies helpful good ol' boy running down the sandwich menu over the phone - hot wings, chicken fingers, deli meat); "Pain Gel" (more blippy electro-funk, this time with twang attached, plus self-consciously annoying babble about being "sick and tired of being sick and tired");  "Sticky Frog" (missing amphibian link betwixt Clarence "Frog Man" Henry and Crazy Frog wherein some backwoods codger growls like Dr. John and/or Captain Beefheart -- but also occasionally Adam Sandler -- about a frog in a hollow log, and the art-funk hops around in an appropriately rubbery and squishy manner);  "Block Of Ice" (beat suggesting soldiers marching in cadence serves as foundation for yet another stoned rebel drawler, this one repeatedly expectorating a borderline quasi-racist "boogie boogie boogie boo/that's what I'm tellin' you" rhyme). During "Pain Gel," I accidentally knocked my phone out of the cradle, and I erroneously assumed that the busy signal - which fit right in - was part of the song.  Neat!

(http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewProfile&friendID=74171248)

MONDO TOPLESS - "Amazon Queen"/"Leave Me Alone"/"Just What I Need" (G.I. Productions, 1997)

More white boys playing fast and loose with dangerous and thankfully long-discarded stereotypes; the drummer even gets credited with "jungle wooops" in the A-side, which wooops sound a lot like the "monkey see, monkey do" chants in "African Man" off Iggy Pop's undervalued 1979 New Values LP. Numerous other racially insensitive rock'n'roll precedents - Warren Smith's "Ubangi Stomp," the Lime Spiders' "Slave Girl," like that - come to mind as well. Though it should be noted that the actual (and pleasantly buxom, though tragically not topless) grass-skirted cartoon Amazon queen on the 45 sleeve is unmistakably Caucasian, not to mention not particularly tall. And speaking of buxom, the band - a couple members of which I should confess here that I partied with on occasion in mid ‘90s Philadelphia, where they're from - took their name from an old Russ Meyer movie, just like Faster Pussycat and Mudhoney and Vixen before them. As umpteenth-generation Nuggets revivalists go, their live sets could be fun to frug to, too, I recall; the bar scene depicted on the rear side of the single sleeve even makes me a wee bit nostalgic. And "Amazon Queen" itself starts off pretty well, with a hardy riff and rolling Tarzan tom-toms and those aforementioned war wooops. But the vocal feels fairly weak and unassertive beyond the chorus, and the "yeah yeah yeah"s sound too rushed to hang loose, and the trash organ more suggests some shag-haired TV approximation of ‘60s garage-punk than the real thing. (Not that ‘60s garage-punk particularly cared about being "real," I don't think, but you get the idea, right?) The guitar leading "Leave Me Alone" has some life to it, too (momentarily reminds me of Mellencamp's "R.O.C.K. In The U.S.A."), and you can feel the band shooting for Seeds/Music Machine/Shadows Of Knight sleaze from some dank back alley. But they seem scared to rock too hard, so it's impossible to shake the feeling that they're just more follow-the-rulebook post-Fleshtones camp followers instead. "Just What I Need" is faster, with a bit of bop to it, but ultimately even more sub-generic. Word is the foursome's still around, though with a couple different guys now.

(http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=4406834)

THE MOONEY SUZUKI - "Oh Sweet Susanna"/"Say Man, What Time Is It?" (Gammon, 2002)

New York, five years later, with garage revival stuff in the form of the Hives and Strokes and White Stripes starting to reap profits that Mondo Topless certainly never imagined, and I WAS THERE, too - never partied per sé with the black-clad sunglasses-at-night schticksters in the Mooney Suzuki, but I did witness them on stage a bunch. They recorded these songs in Detroit, and put a black chick whose Afro harks back to the heyday of Angela Davis and Cleopatra Jones on the hard cardboard cover - so yeah, yet more radical chic and mau-mauing the flak-catchers. But I'm pretty sure "Oh Sweet Susanna" was the Mooney Suzuki's best song regardless, not so much for its bittersweet reminiscence of last summer's crush (which was fine, don't get me wrong) as for its guitar riff, which for all the world sounds stolen outright from Eddie Money's not exactly garage-purist "Two Tickets To Paradise." Boogie-woogie piano at the start resembles "Long Tall Glasses (I Can Dance)" by Leo Sayer to boot, and I have no complaints about the toasty and casually manly vocalization, which pulls off its ‘70s commercial meatball rock in much the way, say, Urge Overkill's "Sister Havana" had a few years earlier. The B-side's MC5 attempt is more along the lines of this band's usual doings, and also isn't really much of a song - just a couple of dorks shouting back and forth: "Say man, what time is it?" "I tell you, it's showtime!" Nothing but a vamp, trying to come off funky, as ineptly at it as anybody from the Spin Doctors to Jon Spencer Blues Explosion (both of whom it brings to mind) might have at the time. As a tossed-off B-side though, taken out of the context of its era and its habitat and it's makers' delusions of souldom, it almost passes muster. When last heard from two years ago, the Suzukis were succumbing to coming hard times in the biz, watching their V2 label fold just in time to keep the world from hearing an album that sounded like they'd experienced a Deadhead conversion.

(http://www.myspace.com/themooneysuzuki)

Chuck Eddy is the former music editor of the Village Voice and the author of several books, including the greatest book on heavy metal ever written, Stairway To Hell. He won't admit it, but he knows more about rock ‘n' roll than the entire accumulated BLURT brain trust.