22 May 2011

Grasping at straws

Hey, we're still here! The mother of all idiots and madmen is always pregnant. Here's the only Rapture i know...

Just have yout party on tv

Anyway, floating around on the squinternet is a page of a collection of various punk rock records, sub-divided by regions. Well, look what's on the New York page (ya gotta jump down to Jetz...well, hell, now i gave it away!).

I would guess that the single came out May 3, 1980 because of the "catalog number" 5380 (i can't think of any other reason why we would've picked that number), but that can't be right...i would've still been in high school, ergo not in NYC.

Regardless, i do remember that Peter Crowley refused to put that single in Max's jukebox because, thanks to the song Aryan Race, he didn't want anything to do with that Nazi stuff. WHAT?!? We were outraged! April was furious. It was lyrically a piss-take on all that White Power/Nazi bullshit and he interpreted it as promoting that! He probably never even listened to it and just judged it by the title. And me, being young dumb and full of it, it never occured to me for one second that that song could be taken seriously. I remember the first time i'd heard it i fell in love with it! It's a great fucking tune and i still stand by that. I could give a rat's ass about what you think about the lyrics. I know it was a joke. It was just a stupid joke. And as Larry Flynt used to say, if they can't take a joke, I'm fucked.

Some years after my move to the Rome office, upon discovering my chequered past in New York, record collector friends of mine busted my chops about being a Nazi because of that single. But they were just pulling my chain and we all laughed it off.

31 years after the fact, i guess i could see how the title Aryan Race could give some people the wrong idea about us...!

A side note, the single was on our ficticious label Ultramodern Records, a name which i would recycle many more times, but i can't remember if this was the first mention of Ultramodern or not. It's possible that the band we had before i'd left for New York was called The Ultramodern. It certainly was after i'd returned to Detroit. Joey, help me out here!

EDIT 2011-05-23: Joey confirms! According to minutes of awakening hibernated synapses together, Joey says that we had used the name Ultramodern at least as far back as 1980 in a high-school battle of the bands! The rest is for another post.

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