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