I'd heard about the Inner Sanctum record store but never got around to Googling it until yesterday. And this image from January 1978 came up:



It's an amazing picture. It looks like a still from a movie -- or you want it to be. (There's another version, taken a couple of seconds later, here.) If you're like me you want to zoom in on the fliers or move the camera to the side to see all the record sleeves. You want to Google the names of the guys - particularly the guy in the Sex Pistols t-shirt, Neil Ruttenberg, who had the cool Jewish punk look down to the nth degree.

The photographer, Ken Hoge, took some other fine shots around that time too....

The accompanying article is the sort of things that hits all my buttons, tying together all my obsessions about the Austin that no longer exists, filling in some of the blanks in my quest to figure out how the predominant music of the city went from Willy Nelson to the Butthole Surfers, from Cosmic Cowboy to Punk. Molly Ivins was editing the Texas Observer in the same building (although she left in '76), for example, and next door all manner of depravity and cheap eats could be found at Les Amis.

PUNCHLINE: You don't need Google or even a sense of irony to guess what occupies that location now.

Ah, it was a golden age. You don't get dialog like that in CSI or Law and Order.

Kid Shirt on that almost (purposely?) forgotten prog-glam-punk crossbreed from '76-'78 that he calls Quirk:

It's all about musicians who can play, but are trying to keep quiet about it, so they camouflage their chops under zany behavior, lurid pastel/checkerboard/black n white costumes and quirky Moderne-isms: sort've Post-Bowie theatricality meets angular, staccato, syncopated, skinny-tie, pogo-on-the-spot, hypercaffeinated rhythms.

(Via Simon Reynolds who goes on a  bit.)

A lot of what gets called "New Wave" (or was called "Power Pop" at the time) falls into this category. The music tended to be clipped, unresolved and tinny, like a willfully constipated version of reggae. The music wasn't so much dumbed down as constricted, each potential solo or virtuoso run clipped at the last second. Image-wise, you can see it in videos of the Police, XTC and (particularly) Elvis Costello and the Attractions, a stern, on-the-edge-of-collapse, robot-out-of-control wackiness. There were certain facial grimaces that seemed obligatory - the unblinking, tilted, puppet-with-cut-strings stare in particular.

Split Endz were a prime example. Also the Doctors of Madness, Punishment of Luxury and Lene Lovich, Spizz in his various forms, John Foxx-era Ultravox and early Simple Minds... bands who sounded like the only music they'd heard was Station to Station and the first side of Low.  You could possibly even argue Siouxsie and the Banshees as the ultimate Quirk band.I'm sure some of you can add your own examples if you're still awake.

(Also Kid Shirt's pieces on Gentle Giant as one of the unsung harbingers of post-punk are worth a look, seeing how they tie in with my own crackpot theories.)

Listening to Deep Purple's Machine Head now and am rather relieved to find I really don't like it. I'd been worried when I recently discovered I loved the first four Black Sabbath albums (excluding a couple of tracks like "Changes" that need not detain us now) that I might feel the same about all the other seventies mainstream rock classics I rejected or ignored as a snooty pre-punk teen. Fortunately Machine Head turns out to be the exact mixture of cod, cock and boogie I'd assumed it was back when I was effetely clutching Rock Bottom, Unrest and The Donut in Granny's Greenhouse to my chest in 1974, trying to pluck up the nerve to put them on the 6th form record player. Given that I had the same reaction to Atomic Rooster's In Hearing Of... recently (aside from the horntastic "Devil's Answer") I think I can safely pass over Free, Humble Pie, Wishbone Ash and all those other hairy-arsed favorites for another few decades....

"Fireball" is still great though. How come they didn't sounded like that all the time?

So I guess I'll be sticking with Sir Lord Baltimore's Kingdom Come if I want uptempo screeching proto-metal.

Krautrock = predominantly excellent.
Italian prog = mostly wonderful.
German prog = uniformly horrid.
Why?

Further points for a working definition of what differentiates Krautrock from German prog. (Give examples.)

Presenting Left Side. Did any Dutch school girls ever have their picture on the bedroom wall?

79 (of the estimated 500!) versions of Gershon Kingsley's banal but evocative electropop classic "Popcorn" at WMFU's Beware of the Blog.

Despite being a Kingsley fan (my mobile's ringtone is "E.T.A." fact fans), I'd only ever heard the Hot Butter cover that hit the charts everywhere back in 1972, although I think I may have owned a cover version of that cover version on one of those MFP "Smash Hits" albums*.

Not all of them are worth listening to, unless you happen to be trapped under a wardrobe for a few hours.

And the best one isn't on the list but in the comments: by the Fairfax High School Marimba Band.

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* Actually, looking at this page I see I'm confusing Music for Pleasure's "Hot Hits" and "Smash Hits" albums with Hallmark/Pickwick's "Top of the Pops" series. I don't think our local supermarket stocked the annual "Smash Hits" collection due to the raunchier sleeves.