MOJO JULY 2002

WOW ladies & I do mean gentlemen[s]! MOJO Magazine (the only cool zine 'cause it's from merry olde england) has gifted the eyeball of hell 3 (count 'em) 3 different fucking times in 2002. This from the VINYL JUNKIE column includes such sterling company as the first Stooges album, The Seeds— Raw & Alive, The Dictators—Go Girl Crazy!, The Ramones—End of the Century, our Cle friends, The Pagans—Shit Street & The Cramps—Songs the Lord Taught Us . . . but I ain't getting paid to post their stuff here . . . hey wait, I ain't getting paid to post the eels stuff!!

Teenage Kicks

They guzzled Coca-Cola for breakfast, watched monster movies and crashed their cars. David Keenan picks the best of garage trash.

"CARS, GIRLS, Surfing, Beer, Nothing Else Matters Here!" So went the rallying cry of The Dictators, a group of comic book reading dunderheads whose vision of teenage was pure, Utopian stupidity, one where bad horror movies and the two-chord thump of frat-rock combined with post-pubescent neuroses in a high-energy celebration of all of capitalism's guiltiest pleasures. In their wake, America once more, felt proud to hold their hamburgers high. The Dictators were part of an historical continuum of musicians who had taken rock'n'roll at its word, fallen in love with teenage culture in all of its unlikeliest and most consumable manifestations and in their devotion spawned a fantastically gross exaggeration of all they thought it stood for. The effluvia of this non-movement is often described as teenage trash, but to call it 'trash' is a misnomer. These groups represent some of the purest manifestations of the rock'n'roll urge. It's all that other stuff, everything that betrays the integrity of the initial spark, that should be shunted into the gutter. Groups like The Cramps were vital in fostering this anti-canon and their work in uncovering the no-hit wonders who've kept the flame burning in the squarest of times is a cultural service every bit as vital as Alan Lomax or Harry Smith's. As Lux Interior sang on Garbageman, "You ain't no punk you punk, you wanna talk about the real junk?

THE ELECTRIC EELS The Eyeball Of Hell 2xLP SCAT SCAT62-1 2002 £25 Even more so than The Stooges, The Electric Eels mapped the screwed-up adolescent psyche of the early '70s. Coming out of Cleveland, with close ties to groups like The Styrenes and Mirrors, The Electric Eels were fronted by one Dave E whose audience-baiting routines regularly resulted in a toe up the ass. Their song titles were just as confrontational - You're Full Of Shit, As If I Cared - and their music was a totally de-generated form of garage rock that routinely collapsed into gloriously inept free-for-alls, The Eyeball Of Hell is a retrospective that has everything you need.