Welcome to Rag Mag Issue 4

Hey, issue 4, this thing is really happening. Get in touch if you want to contribute, always looking for events or new ideas. Another week has passed and two new columns have arrived. First up, “Pearls of Wisdom” an ongoing documentation of Saccharine Tryst records head honcho Joe Sutton’s quest for every Power Pearls record, this is going to be a journey and Creature for one is excited. Next up, our pal Velvet Deluxx presents “Stage Dive” a column about our love of performing whether it be in a band onstage, or like this week, synchronized swimming at the Y. Plus Wasteland Chick is back with another review (this week WC’s choice) and, of course, Creature’s Double Feature. Shit is getting pretty wild right now, so look out for your friends and neighbors. We’re all we got and we gotta protect each other. See ya soon punk!

Pearls of Wisdom - An unnecessary run-through of every release on Killed By Death's mop haired sibling. By Joe Sutton

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I first started falling hard for power pop, sometime in the early two thousands. The studs had started going away, the shirts started getting striped - I wore a lot of skinny ties. It was pretty easy to pop into a store and walk away with a Plimsouls single, a Bomp! compilation or every Records, well records, for very few of my hard earned Staples employee dollars.

One day, while flipping through the bins at the long gone (and long lamented) Second Coming Records outside of Harvard Square, I picked up a strange, poorly designed yet appealing compilation called "Power Pearls Volume Nine". I had heard about these, but never seen one in person. In the nascent days of the internet, this version was probably the best stepping stone possible - Bands you knew, mixed with bands you'd heard of (but could never have heard) and a band whose name was in a language I didn't quite understand, and at first blush could not quite figure out.

I wasn't ever consciously trying to collect every record on this series, but a few years ago, I realized I'd had quite a few and it made more sense to keep going than to stop - As it stands, I'm somewhere around half way through and the wonderful editors of Rag Magazine asked if I'd like to write about them. About five minutes before I was asked, I had just got shipping confirmation on the Babij Jar "Ice Age" single and took it as a sign.

For our first installment, we're going to be looking at Any Trouble's "Yesterday's Love".

For every exceedingly rare and expensive single in the series, there are plenty of amazing ones that will only set you back a few dollars, and I've always loved that there are so many of these jumping in points.

Once while waxing poetic about my love for this band, an internet friend who was around 18 at the time of their heyday, living in England and a Stiff Records fan, told me he couldn't get behind this band because their singer looked like a math teacher. I think the complete opposite is true - You expect a cool looking rockstar to start a song with the lyrics "I don't wanna be your lover I just wanna hold you for the rest of the night" but know they probably don't mean it. When it comes from a nerdy fella in big rimmed glasses, you do and that's what makes it so great.

Originally self-released in 1979 (in a true DIY hand stitched cover) it was picked up by Stiff Records the following year and came out as BUY 74 (between Jona Lewie's quirky "You'll Always Find Me In The Kitchen At Parties" and Wreckless Eric, looking very tired for the single cover of "Broken Doll") It hits all the marks - Occasional strained vocals, bass high in the mix, acoustic guitar buried to fill the whole thing out, "Oh oh Oh's" and one of the most important elements in a song like this - a lot of snare drum.

Lauded by Melody Maker and John Peel, compared to early Elvis Costello (they found this unfair, but I think if you dig Declan, you'll dig this) and veterans of The Son of Stiff tour, I absolutely love this band and song.

Fun fact, we'll be seeing singer Clive Gregson again as he produced 23 Jewels perfect "Playing Bogart" which appears on Volume 4, Any Trouble also does their own version on their debut, "Where Are All The Nice Girls?" which should also be grabbed. Lots of people were doing Tom Petty Leers, or at least rehearsing them.

There is a copy of this single on Discogs right now for $4.99 and although I myself am not a math teacher, I think that works out to about $1.66 a minute - That's kind of a hard deal to pass up on, right?

Being on stage is my favorite place to be , nothing is more freeing. But the other place I like to be is in the crowd of an electric performance. Sweaty, screaming cheering seeing someone put on a real fucking show - whats not to love? This month I’m gonna be interviewing my dear friend Cheyenne Harvey who is no stranger to a crowd. When she’s not projecting films at all your favorite art house theatres you can find her swimming at the Y or just crushing karaoke at a local bar. So Rag Hags, let's welcome Cheyenne!

VD: When was your first performance and what was it? How did it make you feel?

CH :I was just a lil 8 y/o when I started doing synchro. When my mom took me and my brother and sister to the beach I would swim underwater and she would lose me and freak out so she put me in synchro so I could learn how to not drown. I remember so vividly my first competition; we were probably at a Y in some suburban town in mass. It was me and all these other little girls in our bathing suits being shuffled around on a pool deck - into the pool and out again, over and over. It was chaos. We were all shivering and excited and nervous, the locker rooms were bedlam: sequence suits, makeup, gelatin (for our hair) and hot water heaters to concoct it, bobby pins, wet hair on every surface; it was gross. But the swimming was SO MUCH FUN. I think we swam that day to music from Joseph and the technicolor dream coat - I didn't know nothin bout Jesus so I was like haha oookaayyy, whatever just let me swim and I'll be happy. And I was - ecstatic.

VD:When I found out you did synchronized swimming I lost my mind because I didn’t think you could get any cooler. How did you get into it?

CH:Haahahahaha, you are so sweet hahaha!! Yeah my mom found out that she could sign me up for a rec synchro team that met at the pool at the highschool in Cambridge, where I grew up. She has always loved swimming as much as she could tell I did, so I think she felt like if I learned she would get a lot of joy out of watching me, and she did! We still swim together, she doesn't do synchro but she floats better than I do - she's got her own laws of physics when it comes to water.

VD:Who gets to pick the music you all perform to?

CH:It seemed like on the other teams we competed against the coaches or parents were choosing the music - it was always like swan lake or like the nutcracker or something like that. But on my team the swimmers largely chose the music that we would swim or it seemed much more collaborative because we swam to the most fun music often. I competed on the Cambridge Synchro team from 8 y/o till 18 and each year I would do a team routine, maybe a duet or a trio routine (or both) and also a solo (lol solo synchro yeaaa hahaha). So I swam to SO MANY different cuts of music. The routines were all like 3-5 minutes long I would say and tended to have 3 different songs cut together in one routine. To name a few of the movies/themes: Drumline, Kill Bill, Baseball/music from A League of Their Own, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (I swam in a blue velour bathing suit for that one), Finding Nemo, the 2001 Spiderman movie, No Doubt, Queen, Horror movie soundtracks - Suspiria/Nightmare/and other music, some songs I still dont quite know what movie they were from -- but I loved that routine music so much :>

VD: You once told me you did a routine to the theme song from Nightmare on Elm Street , can you please tell me more about that?

CH:Absolutely! So, for a couple of years there was a girl on my team named Eleanor and she mostly hung out with another girl but her and I were both the more flexible people on our team so it seemed like maybe we would be good together for a duet, and then she told me she wanted to swim to horror movie soundtracks and I was like YESSS!!! So either she cut the music or our coach did, but either way it came together quick and is still one of my favorite sets of routine music. I thought that I was into horror as a kid, but I realized after doing that routine that there were so many movies I had not yet seen. Now I even feel like I am catching up -- I'll never forget watching the original Suspiria in like 2021 at the Brattle and the moment I heard the opening theme music I was like I KNOW THISSS OHHH MY GOD I SWAM TO THIS!! I hadn't realized that was what the music was from until that moment. And this was after I had literally worked the event at Coolidge in 2019 where Maurizio Guarini performed in movie house 2, I had no idea the connection!

VD: Do you have a favorite performance that stands out in your mind , and why is it special?

CH: I remember doing a Rolling Stone solo when I was maybe 12 or 13 and at competitions it was awesome for the dads hahaha! This was a time before iphones, but after palm pilots and stuff, so the few dads who were in the stands were losing their minds out of boredom (either falling asleep or playing snake on their phones or whatever) and then I walked out to the edge of the deep end and my music began I think with Get Off Of My Cloud and they all woke out of their trances and were like pumped for the routine. It was the closest I think I will ever get in my life to feeling like I'm a pro major league athlete cuz they were like YEEAA thiss rooocks!!

VD: What is a song you are dying to do a routine to?

CH:Hide and Seek by Imogene Heap is the first that comes to mind

VD: If you had to do a routine to a whole movie soundtrack what would it be?

CH:Most recent movies would either be Challengers or Anora ---> Challengers could be tennis themed and would need to be a trio, naturally, and the Anora routine would need to have quotes from the movie cut into the music -- like Diamond saying "Get the fuck out of my private BITCH!" and Ani saying "Fuck ya Boss!"

VD:. Besides synchronized swimming have you done any other types of performance?

CH: Yes! I do love performing, but it's kind of funny; I don't think about how much I love it really at all, I just jump at the opportunity when it comes up. I do karaoke all the time and I did theater in grade school and highschool and college, oh and after college in Boston! I've been thinking a lot lately about this Dada-ist play called the Gas Heart that I acted in which my friend Joe directed in college. The whole things was that it was a movement in reaction to WWI where everything was torn apart and nothing made sense so these artists were like we will make art reflective of that. I played EAR and at one point my line was just "hey" 13 times to no one in particular. It was awesome. It reminds me of experiencing being in the US right now where everything is just strange and bizzare.

VD: Do you have any words of encouragement for our Rag Magazine readers?

CH : Hell ya! Keep reading Rag Mag you goons!!!!

Wasteland Chick

Literally me. Salutations, fellow Wasteland chicks, dudes, and peeps. I just got back from a cool art gallery with my friends, so, despite the looming poxy-clipse, I’m doing good. Let’s get down to today’s review: Sound of da Police by KRS1. Hell freaking yes, this song! This. Song. ROCKS! The melody and general rhythm of this song, for starters, is very good. It’s exciting, flashy, and fun. The “WHOOP”’s under the beat of the music rock too. Anyway, the lyrics are, in short, extremely true! Every line is…just….true! Everything this dude sings is pure truth, and very rhythmic truth at that. I really like the part where the singer compares slave overseer’s to cops, and the part where the singer also says that black cops aren’t helping their fellow black peers by being part of the problem. Just pure gold. In conclusion, Sound of da Police is a very well-written, vibe-able, and very brutally honest song, purely amazing, and something you or I could listen to in any situation, though some good contenders would be drawing in the basement, or vibing in the car. I give this song a 10 out of 10.

Sincerely, Wasteland Chick.

It’s been a busy week for Creature and I know better way to relax than with a pile of records.

First up, Straw Man Army. Earthworks is the third (I think) LP for these new York punks with a heavy, rhythmic peace punk sound and lyrics to match. No cookie cutter crass soundalikes here. Elements of uk diy and post punk bubble through, with clear, understandable vocals delivering a message that we so desperately need to hear right now. From “Mass Production of Loneliness” - “We made our bed, we’re lying in it! Slowly strangled by the peace we’re finding in it. Our lives are mass produced To break the link from me to you”.

Decay is your friend / even empires end…

For the back half of this double feature, a brand new (old) recording from one of Creature’s favorites Les Rallizes Denudes - YaneUra Sept. ‘80. It's no secret to anyone that knows me, that I perhaps have an unhealthy obsession with Japanese psychedelic noise rock legends Les Rallizes Denudes. Another legitimate reissue by temporal drift records (is it really run by one of the guys from LA metal punks zig zag? - band rips). This may not be the best introduction to this band, but the version of flames of ice in this recording is on fire and the guitar playing is making me think this could be my favorite version of the song. Featuring guitarist Fujio Yanaguchi of hard rock/glam outfit Murahachibu (if anyone has a copy of their album available cheap, yr’ ol’ pal creature wants to give it another listen). The mastering here is a clear live recording and Fujio's guitar has an unusual sound for Les Rallizes Denudes, pushing harder and more proto punk, making this one of the heaviest version of Flames of Ice I've ever heard. Playing all around is excellent and Creature is just going to keep jamming this one.

Normally this is where Records of the day would go, but since I’ve already talked your ear off about ‘em, here’s two more:

The Ward - The New Dykes. Hot new release from ugly pop records of a couple songs from a mid 2000s Toronto band I sure wish recorded more songs back then. This falls on the melodic side of punk, luckily staying on the gruff Leatherface/blotto side with great vocals and unabashedly queer lyrics. Double a side banger.

Nubs - Dog. I know this is the b-side and the a-side is probably a better song, but this is my column. Classic kbd punk. Luckily last laugh reissued it, so still cheap and easy to find. Love the commitment to the lyrics/gimmick. So dumb, so catchy, so punk.

Last up is Creature’s soul song of the day. Sometimes you love a song because you misheard a lyric and really loved it, only to realize that you’re just a dummy. Which brings us to What Now by Gene Chandler. The first few times I heard this song, my brain heard “holding in my beer and fighting off my tears” instead of “holding in my fears”. Still kinda like my misheard version better but song rules.

That’s it for Rag Mag this week punks. Check out some events below and keep sending them in.