First snow of the year, the day after Thanksgiving. Only an inch, but I like how it signals the start of another season.
My coffee mug has served me very well indeed.
My dog enjoys recycling, except he chews the cans up into tiny razor sharp pieces that cover the floor.
It’s been quite a while since I added to my Top Ten All Time category, so here’s another one. Is there really any doubt on this one? I’m positive this is still available from here, http://www.sstsuperstore.com/ for $9 bucks on vinyl, which is a good price by today’s standards. I haven’t figured out why the Tshirts are going for $24 though. I know I’m committing a sin by posting this, since it’s still available, but an angel of the punk rock God came to me in a vision and has sent me on a mission to post this. In case the forces of evil foil my mission from God check here http://digitalmeltd0wn.blogspot.com/2008/09/black-flag-damaged.html (this was a really good read), here http://canyoufeelthisenergyhcandpunk.blogspot.com/2008/09/black-flag-damaged.html , and here http://ya-cant-go-home.blogspot.com/2008/09/trax-01-rise-above-02-spray-paint-03.html , just to name a few of the blogs that have this available for you. One discussion that is common among fans of the band is which singer was the best and picking this album as a top ten does not mean I’m picking Henry as my favorite. I think this album just has the entire band at their best. To be honest with you I like every singer this band has had and each one had their own style to contribute to the mix. Besides my favorite member of the band is the only one I’ve met, Chuck. Very trippy guy but he seemed prettty cool and easy to talk to. I met him at a show in Northridge but I can’t remember what bands were playing. There is so much Black Flag out there for you to check out and as I said you can still get all their stuff from SST, but I did want to single out a couple of posts worth checking out. First off, Erich some time ago posted this rare little gem, http://www.goodbadmusic.com/2006/09/22/black-flag-thirsty-and-miserable-7-aka-licorice-pizza-sst-usa-1981/ . It stood out for me because this was one of the better versions of one of my favorite tunes. Jason recently posted this nice early live set, http://loresviscera.blogspot.com/2008/11/black-flag.html. A good reminder of how good this band was throughout their history. Anyway I played the hell out of this album over the years and was surprised it played all the way through while I was ripping it. My favorite tune was always What I See, but Rise Above comes in a close second. Let me know what yall think.
EDIT: Of course the links are long gone, don’t be that guy, go buy the record.
I dorked out a little bit and decided it would be interesting to see if I could come up with live versions of all the songs off the album. If I was going to do it right, which I didn’t, I would have downloaded a bunch of live sets that are available as torrents and sifted through those to get all the tunes from the album. Being the lazy man that I am, I just went to Youtube, used the Vdownloader and took what I could find there. The sad part of that is that on some tunes, there wasn’t a lot of choices, so I just had to take what I could get to round out the set. The neat thing about it though is that I ended up a good variety as far as the singers were concerned, with the exception of Chavo I think. Like I said I dorked out and the sound quality for the most part sucks, but it was fun.
EDIT: Sad those rips are gone…can’t find the whole record in one vid on fucked tube, but this live version of Rise Above is quite the gem…