Hey everyone, it’s me, Reggie Queequeg, brand new Blastitude columnist, here, in my first real web-zine job. I think this magazine is some of the best music writing around, which is sort of damning by faint praise I guess, what with shit like Magnet, Chunklet, or Puncture-et around these days. But Larry Dolman don’t play that game. He keeps shit real, kna’mean? Here is some biographical information about myself. I am an Australian living in Minneapolis, I enjoy chain fights, and my stance on Weasel Walter is “he’s a nice guy, except for the bad directions he gave me to a party one time, but I know they weren’t intentional because the Wolf Guys were able to find the party just fine, it was all just because I don’t know Chicago that well, and at least I got to see a shooting that night.” Just so everyone knows where I stand. I originally meant for there to be more music reviews on here, but I find writing about music to be a little bit boring. Shout outs and dedications go to Silcock’s new seed, Fis, Clopez, Elvis DeMorrow, Giggles, Mr. Motherfuckin’, Chauncey, Pastor Peace, Jim “I love Michigan”, Prince, God, and U.

Larry “Fuzz-O” Dolman left, Sir Reggie Queequeg right. A match made in heaven!?

MC Trachiotomy “…w/ love from Tahiti” (Bulb Records)
I got this album without knowing anything about it, cause Pete Larson said it was cool. I didn’t really like it at first, cause Trach, as I like to shorten it to because I am lazy, isn’t really rapping in a tight science sort of way, he’s just kinda talking weird, and you can’t really hear what he’s saying a lot of the time, because the production is all weird-fi. But after a few listenings it all makes sense. He actually does sound like a guy with a Trachiotomy, I saw Sonny Barger, former leader of the Hell’s Angels, on TV the other night. His sloppy style is pretty great too, he’s no ODB as far as turning slurring lyrics into an art form, but there is still a charm to be had from someone freestyling lyrics, and just mumbling when he can’t think of what to say next. Trach has nothing to prove. A true American Originial. Yeah, that’s right, Originial! Fuck you.
       Anyways, the album seemed a little bit long, at an hour and 13 minutes, but the liner notes say “CAUTION: This is ‘THE’ baby makin’ music.”, and I wasn’t making any babies while I was listening. But the notes also say this is for lovas of the 1 hr motel variety, 1 min to check in, 58 minutes of play and 1 min to check out. That’s an extra 13 minutes of music on here, guess some tracks’ll have to be missed while the love session’s on. The lyrics are good for the sweet love though, like “along th’ coast”, which is about race cars. Another one good for getting together with the wife for a night to forget about the kids is “dropping the kids off at the pool”, which has loud loops of a kid laughing loudly, while Trach raps kind of like “wha do tha whe oo owh asabindasohsfaquaraba”. Then the kid stops laughing and it gets kinda dirty funky raunchy. So on a scale of 1 to 10, I’d say this album is pretty awesome.

One of these people is MC Trachiotomy. (Maybe, I am not positive.)
["Dear Editor, MC Trachiotomy is the gent on the left with his arm around the giraffe. If you'd care to add to your ever-so-kind review, his web site is located at: www.mctrachiotomy.com. Thanks a bunch . . ."]

Sun City Girls “live in concert," The Empty Bottle, Chicago; Plastic Crimewave/DJ Kevin Drumm/Wolf Eyes/Black Dice "live in concert," The Abbey Pub, Chicago; November 15, or something like that, weekend 2002
Hooray! Hooray! It was good to see the Sun City Girls, finally. I had heard they were going to play the big De Stijl Fest in Mpls, but then that ended up not happening, but it was still an awesome show, and the best I’ve seen the Wolf Eyes ever. John Olson cut my shoulder with his shoe jumping into the crowd, so I was able to deal with not seeing the Girls kick em on out. But I saw they were playing in Chicago, and danced a little jig. I didn’t know what to expect from them, but they ended up playing the hits. That is, the hits off the Carnival Folklore Resurections albums, but they mostly played songs, there were only a few improv jams. “Helen Waite”, “Opium Den”, “Me and Mrs. Jones”, “My Friend Rain”, were all crowd pleasers, as well as a great cover of “Alone Again Or” by Love, which instrumentally was even better than the version of Love playing with Arthur Lee now! The vocals were better as well, really, because Arthur had laryngitis when I saw him, but he was still really good. Oh, and the SCG also played an instrumental jam based off “Radar Love” as their first encore song! Yeah! Special thanks goes to some members of a certain Chicago based avant boogie spunk frat band for the cigarette that makes you laugh, as the French call it, in French.
       After the show I went to a restaurant in Boy’s Town with some people. Me and my friend Ted were in the trunk of a car, smoking the pipe that makes you laugh! This town is crazy!
       Next day was the big Wolf Eyes/Black Dice show at the Abbey Pub. Plastic Crimewave opened, they were pretty ok. They weren’t horrible, but I wasn’t horribly impressed by them either. But the magazine that the Plastic Crimewave guy does is awesome, it’s called Galactic Zoo Dossier, and Drag City is putting it out now. But musically it was just sort of basic rock and roll, with some synth noodling. DJ Kevin Drumm played between sets, he played good shit, like a techno CD and the Wigmaker CD by To Live and Shave in LA at the same time. It sounded like Tom Smith singing in a techno song, awesome! Then the Wolf Eyes went on, and were great as always, but sounded better than I’ve ever heard them, the sound system was amazing. There was this one song with a great low bass warble thing in it that shook your entire body for about 3 seconds each time it went off. Black Dice were next and destroyed too, and once again myself and members of the aforementioned band and I smoked some of the cigar that makes you laugh. Black Dice are a very hard band to describe, but I guess newer Boredoms is the best reference point, but they are more “sound scapey” maybe, just buy the damn Beaches and Canyons album. Or have your friend tape it for you if you’re super poor, or a cheap asshole.

a photograph of the Sun City Girls playing in Chicago

Jim Goad, The Redneck Manifesto
I was a little bit intimidated by Jim Goad’s reputation from reading many of his previous writings. No, not that he would beat me up or anything like that. It is because he is Extremely Smart, and A Very Talented Writer. Of course, you won’t hear information like this in the mainstream media. You need to go right to the Source for that one. Jim Goad. Or, if you need another source, how bout Maximum Rock And Roll, who called Jim Goad “God”. Now shut up. Anyways, I was thinking, “If I criticize him, what if he writes me an angry letter or e-mail where he just, like, totally shuts me down? He can rip me apart with his Vicious Verbiage!” But then I read the back cover of his new book, Shit Magnet, and I found out that he wrote that he “just may be the nicest guy on earth”. Sweet, he should be able to take some criticism then! And I'll bet he gives hugs too! The nicest people on earth who I have met know that there’s nothing effeminate about giving hugs!
       Anyway, this book really is worth reading, many interesting facts are brought up which I did not know before, like indentured servitude was as bad as slavery. I had previously thought of it more along the lines of being just ‘a little bit better than slavery’. Goad did do his homework on this one; there are plenty of footnotes. I do sort of get tired of his constant strident, defensive tone though. He spends lots of time speaking to the reader as if they were trying to convince him that reparations for slavery should be made by all white people. C’mon Jim, I have never met anyone who has thought this was a feasible or reasonable idea. And I am sure the people who do will never read your book.
       My biggest problem with Jim though, is his hatred of egg salad sandwiches. They are berated twice during the book, once as being the food New Age rich hippies eat, and once as being food that Country Club people eat. Where does this come from? I can’t find the exact quotes at the moment, due to the lack of an index in the book (which really would have been nice, that’s another complaint), but I believe that the country quote club was something along the lines of his mom worked at some country club cleaning up the crusts from egg salad sandwiches that the rich people would toss. Hey, I was poor growing up, and we DID have egg salad sandwiches now and then, eggs are not that expensive. And since then, I’ve been to a few fancy catered events, and they have never had egg salad sandwiches. Therefore, fuck you and your anti-egg salad remarks Jim. Oh, am I upsetting you by calling you on your bigotry? Do I offend you? I make you fucking sick Jim! I am the never-ending flow of blood from your rectum, one of those broken fingers that just won’t heal, an pulsating destructive mind force overload crushing everything you thought you knew about your paltry little universe! Ok, that’s cool; we can agree to disagree, then.

some red-neckeds having fun...RED-NECKED STYLE!

Girls Gone Wild “College Girls Exposed”
It’s been all over the news lately, college girls are going WILD. They are getting TOTALLY NAKED, RAW and UNCENSORED. Yes, these ladies are getting COMPLETELY NUTS at the WILDEST PARTIES in the UNITED STATES. So I was happy to get to finally see Girls Gone Wild. It was pretty surprising, I thought I knew what this program would be like, but there were actually many surprises in store. For one thing, not all the girls yell “Whooo!” when exposing their breasts, only about 10% do. Most of the WET AND WACKY SPRING BREAK REVELERS are very business-like about the whole thing, after flashing their boobs they are just like, “Alright, give me my beads”. They seemed really impressed by the quality of the Girls Gone Wild guy’s beads, which I must admit were cool. They were sort of like tropical necklaces, and some of them had hearts, clovers, or pot leaves on them. It wasn’t just boobs that were flashed though, the GGW crew really wanted to see vag and ass too. “Show me your bush!” they would say, and quite a few PETITE YOUNG TEENS OF ALL SIZES were willing to comply, even if they were shaved, which is apparently a popular fetish these days. I don’t see what’s so great about a woman’s cooch looking like it belongs to a 3 year old, but I guess it keeps the pervs from trying to fuck my prepubescent daughters. Quite a few of these CRAZY COEDS were willing to show their asses, but a couple of them were unwilling to take off their pants at all, citing “I’m on the rag”, and “I’m having feminine problems right now”, but one girl showing her ass had a tampon string visible. You have to admire her for being a real trooper.
       Anyways, I wasn’t all to impressed with Girls Gone Wild, but I still have to be happy that it exists because of the thought of some guy at home jerking it and seeing his daughter or sister as a WILD COLLEGE GIRL GOING APESHIT ON CAMERA!

some COLLEGE COEDS getting CRAZY

The band that played at my parent’s church on a Sunday Morning
This was one of the biggest musical surprises I’ve heard in a while, not what I was expecting at all. Protestant churches generally play either traditional organ and piano music, or worse, they have a ‘praise band’, which usually ends up sounding like a watered down Dave Mathews Band, with heavy emphasis on acoustic rhythm guitar and tambourines. Pretty lame shit. But last time I was at my parents church the high school kids they had playing the music with the singing were really interesting. It was acoustic rhythm guitar, as usual, but then a bass player, a drummer playing in a kind of surf style, a violin player, and a guitar player who did Grateful Dead-style lead guitar lines. It sounded pretty damn good, they were mostly playing along with Christmas songs too. They also did a really cool jam thing during the passing of the offering plates. I think this nameless band is probably the best Christian rock band ever.

Either a praise band, or a Pedro The Lion concert,
I'm not sure which.

T Shirt Reviews
A while ago, I came up with the idea of writing t-shirt reviews, and thought “Alright, a totally original idea!” Later I found out that Bananafish had already done this in an early issue. However, I still have not seen this issue, so my mental slate for this endeavor is still fairly clean. If you think that I am in some way not being original, you should probably stop reading Blastitude altogether, as many people have already written record reviews before.

Hair Police
Yah, the skull! The Angry Skull kicking over a fucking table, and yelling out HAIR POLICE! However, unless you have the excellent Blow Out Your Blood album, you probably won’t be able to read the band name, always a good way to instigate conversations with members of the opposite, or same for that matter, sex. “What’s your shirt say?” “Hair Police” “Oh, one of my friends gets their hair cut there” “No, it’s a band from Kentucky”. SUCCESS! Another aspect I like about the shirt is that you can’t really tell if the skull is kicking or falling back from the table. It is a mystery. I for one, think this skull is a really cool character and would like to see a comic about it. He looks like he would have lots of great adventures.

Black Flag “Police Story”
This is probably one of the coolest shirts I own. And one of my favorite Pettibon drawings. A cop with a gun in his mouth, the assailant shouting “Make me come faggot!” However, I really don’t wear this shirt too much, as it always makes me paranoid, especially given the current status of cops as heroes, because some NY cops died during 9-11. So, I am afraid a cop will get pissed off when he sees me in this shirt, and arrest me, possibly kicking my ass or macing me in the process. (Minneapolis cops are very brutal, and a friend of mine’s graduation party last year was busted, leading to nearly everyone at the party getting arrested for “resisting arrest”, as well as some getting maced or beat up) Also, I occasionally enjoy fumasing of la yerba, as they say down south, and it sort of seems like a Probable Cause shirt. More intelligent than a “Bad Cop No Donut” bumper sticker, but I think the average cop would be even more adverse to this shirt. So I usually wear this one under a button down shirt. But it’s still a great image, and like the Hair Police shirt, somewhat mysterious. What does the guy with the gun look like? Is it a hippie? A punker? Or the skull from the Hair Police shirt. It is questions like this that bolster the current Blastitude theory that Hair Police are the new Black Flag.

25 Suaves
Last year when the Suaves played in Mpls, I was very low on money, and was saddened not to be able to buy this awesome t-shirt. Luckily, they recently played again, and I was able to get it. My favorite band t-shirts are ones that aren’t obviously for a band. And this one is damn stylish too! Unfortunately, the “25” on mine is now missing some buttons. I think some of them might have fallen off during the show, or maybe Pete Larson was trying to rip me off, taking advantage of my drunken state at the time. He WAS kinda snorting when he sold it to me, as if implying I was high on coke, which I wasn’t. That son of a bitch! But I was thrashing forth quite rockingly that night, so I will give him the benefit of the doubt, and try to see if any of my arts and crafts friends have a stud puncher thing, and I can get mine repaired. These t-shirt reviews are some of the best writing I’ve ever done, I think.

Reggie’s Web-Pix (short for ‘picks’, not ‘pictures’)

www.markprindle.com
See, this is why I don’t even bother writing about music most of the time on here, Prindle’s got shit under control. And he is funny as hell. His interactive web site is great for when you know Blue Oyster Cult’s awesome, but don’t know which albums to get, and also enjoy hearing jokes about Chuck Berry watching girls take a shit. It’s a great guide for music by everyone from Bloodrock, to the Monkees, to Michael Nesmith, to Ween, to the Zipcode Rapists, to the BeeGees, who are special celebrity guest reviewed by Gregg Turkington! Actually, he doesn’t have EVERYONE on here, but he updates it often, and seems to keep on new releases that we can’t wait to hear about, like Tori Amos.

www.sugarandspice
Hey, it’s Cupcake’s Super Kewl Webpage! I won’t give away too much about this site, mainly because I’m not sure exactly what the deal is with it, but it seems to be some sort of school art project which developed a life of it’s own. It has a really weird, totally great aesthetic sense. And it has adventures which feature a perverted man dressed up as a dog.

www.nealpollack.com
A blog, which I guess is like a livejournal, of America’s Greatest Writer, writing. Writing about important things, like whether Avril Lavigne is punk or not, and Orwell.

3doctorsmake.itgo.com
The Official Web Site of the 3 Doctors band, a great source of information about one of the Nation’s Top Bands. (the nation being the United States, not the magazine) And they aren’t broken up any more, they have all new members! It’s going to be awesome, like a Doug Yule’s Velvet Underground, or Creedence Clearwater Revisited, only with ONE LESS ORIGINAL MEMBER! And do you like pop-up ads for THE WORLD’S LARGEST CASINO? Cause this website has got ‘em!

putpocketing.freeservers.com
All about putpocketing! The opposite of pickpocketing! What a great concept!

QUEEQUEG CONTINUED!!!
The guy is, how you say, prolific????