Thursday, May 10, 2007

I probably forgot more than you'll ever need.
Objectively I don't know how In Cold Blood stacks up against the 100,000 million Johnny Thunders albums, bootlegs, collections, or bootleg album collections since it's the only Thunders record I've listened to in its entirety (I've also listened to, I think, five minutes of Hurt Me). But I do know that my dub of Nick MacLaren's dub (which only included the first five, in-studio recordings), squeezed onto the end of a 120-minute tape immediately following Black Flag, went missing sometime after being listened to on a chartered bus to Washington, DC in the fall of 1997, sending a small part of me into a severe panic. If there was a way for me to have filed a missing persons report for a tape, I would have. But eventually I realized there was this thing called the internet and I managed to track down a copy of it--released on cd by Dojo Limited in '95, but originally released on LP by New Rose in '83, I think--thus ressurecting another of my high school-era favorites from the high school-era graveyard (props to finding my Wookiee tape a couple weeks ago, as well!), sort of. So yeah, the hazy haze of nostalgia is probably making some non-essential, crappy New York punk/drunk rock outtakes sound much more revolutionary than they really are, but I'm going to stand by these songs (the first five songs, anyway; the live set tacked on the end will have to fend for itself). They're catchy and sleazy and, in the case of "Diary of a Lover", terrible, but they're SINCERELY catchy, sleazy, and terrible, and that goes a long way. Plus the version of "Green Onions" is dirty as hell and kind of sacrilegious, and all the studio tracks were produced dutifully by sometime Stones producer Jimmy Miller.

Johnny Thunders - "In Cold Blood" (from In Cold Blood)
Johnny Thunders - "Green Onions" (from In Cold Blood)
Johnny Thunders - "Diary of a Lover" (from In Cold Blood)

Brighten the Corners song of the day is "Blue Hawaiian", runner-up is "Type Slowly". In On The Kill Taker demos song of the day is "23 Beats Off", but keep it hush-hush. Video of the day is...yikes, Black Oak Arkansas' "Hot & Nasty" (or absolutely anything listed in this WFMU post). Remember when VH1 Classic used to play videos?

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