Big Money Hustler

Amazon wants me to tell you that I might get paid a tiny stipend if you click on a link and buy something from them

Monday, February 7, 2011

Reunited and it Feels So Good, Reunited to Kick the Jams Born in the Maumee Hood...


































To celebrate all the freshly minted audio excitement, it's only fitting the guys reconvene not only to rescale the sonic summits of their formative years, but ultimately to try and eclipse them. As the sage in-between Maumee rocker (i.e., he's older than H & J, but younger than the Necros) and guitar wunderkind Kelley Cimney once profoundly inquired from high atop his post-party throne of beer-soaked Ramen noodles: "Are you high? Well I wanna' take you higher!" Cimney, who generally chose to voice this query in an aneurysm-inducing falsetto shriek that could shame Rob Halford  into a taking work as a telaflora phone representative, clearly liked to get to the point and stay there.

Likewise, after Henry & June members Jimmy Danger, Dooley Wilson, Ben Swank and Johnny Walker stood up together for the last time, each moved on to various bigger and debatably better things without disowning their collective past:  Danger and Wilson to Boogaloosa Prayer; Swank and Walker to the now-defunct Soledad Brothers. When the band took the stage for a one-off reunion gig in April 2010, someone had either the foresight or folly to hit the REC button and commit the performance to tape, the results of which were apparently impressive enough to warrant an official release. To provide the proper context for the 2010 live recordings, a selection of choice cuts culled from the classic "rehearsal tapes" familiar to close friends of the band make up the remainder of the two-disc set.

Henry and June, 1993







  


  
WHERE AND WHEN: 
THURS. FEBRUARY 10TH-COVINGTON MASONIC BALLROOM COVINGTON, KY 
FRI. FEBRUARY 11TH- MAGIC STICK DETROIT, MI
SAT. FEBRUARY 12TH- OTTAWA TAVERN TOLEDO, OH
FRI. FEBRUARY 18TH-
BAYPORT BBQ BAYPORT, MN
SAT. FEBRUARY 19TH- CACTUS CLUB MILWAUKEE, WI

































DANGER LIMITED

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

01.12.74 New York Dolls, Toledo Sports Arena

UPDATE 01/20/11:
Try as we might, PDGB can't find a single Toledoen who both attended this gig and retains enough unpolluted gray matter to produce an even remotely-lucid recollection. Lucky for us, we found this nearly decade-old interview with Sub Pop Records founder and Toledo Native Jonathan Poneman floating around on the interwebs: 
"The New York Dolls played in the Sports Arena, not in the main arena, but in the little exhibition center right off to the side of it, and there weren't very many people there. It was really funny. I remember everybody sitting down and kind of like... I didn't get it. I was like a Creem magazine reader, and I remember buying the first [New York Dolls'] record and going "Wow!" I was into Todd Rundgren, and Todd produced that record. I was going, "What the fuck's up with this?" There's no (Poneman proceeds to imitate an insanely fast guitar solo). I didn't really get it. This is before The Ramones; it was even before [The Stooges'] Raw Power came out, as far as I can remember. And, so, that's the thing about my earliest experience with punk rock is I thought it sucked, because there weren't enough notes. I was much more [a fan] of like Skynyrd and Allman Brothers and even barfier than that."
You can find the entire interview here:
And if you were there, let us know. A little street cred is a good thing. 

Friday, January 7, 2011

01.07.83 Misfits, Henry Ford Community College, Dearborn Michigan


photo:  Mark Wakabayashi
Doyle, romancing the .016's while sweating out his 20-piece McNugget and McRib sandwich pre-gig appetizer. Wait! Is he wearing Pajama Jeans?!

In the crowd: Foxy Greg Boker, John Gumpf, toke!, and, directly in front of the D-man's strumming hand, Anna, sister of Larissa Strickland(Stolarchuk) of L-Seven and Laughing Hyenas.

Second on the bill were one of toke!'s all time faves, Big Boys from Austin,Texas, with Toledo's own Radical Left in the opening slot. Featuring long-time Glass-City scenesters Joe Testa on nicotine-stained screams and cries of social injustice and all-around good guy Mark Podany bashing the skins, the short-lived and virtually forgotten Rad Left remained unapologetically themselves and did what they needed to do regardless of trends or criticism. And that is about as punk as you can get. Except for maybe a big honkin' semi fully-laden with reproduction punk ephemera destined for Hot Topic mall stores crashing headlong into a Broadway theater auditorium during a command  performance of Green Day's American Idiot. That would really fuck society up.
 
If only Henry1 was around to see his namesake institution of higher learning finally actualize his dreams. But history indicates he was more into the D.K.'s anyhow.