Cassette Culture Part II

Ok so I’ve loaded up my genuine, original K-Tel Cassette Selector for the easy flick thru, high rotation twenty cassette pick of redneck lounging goodness, all scientific of course - some I play all the time anyway, some cos they just look right and feel right as I flick thru lookin’ for that heart starter pick em up that will get my head cleared, my day started and the neighbour’s dogs howling…

RADIO BIRDMAN – RADIOS APPEAR. Yeah Hup, that’s right… original cassette copy bought back in the day when I was like 15 and discovered this band and a whole new world opened up. Me and my mate Ganders would play this on my pissy little tape deck as we trekked out of town to the caves up in the pines. We had a little cubby hole with posters on the wall, dirty mags to read and this tape echoing off the cave walls and thru the pines. It still holds up pretty damn good in the shed too.

MANITOBA’S WILD KINGDOM – AND YOU? Handsome Dick, Andy Shernoff, Ross the Boss… it’s the Dictators in all but name! Attitude, balls and rock’n’roll. Just a dumb shit party album that gets yr heart raising and yr pecker rising. What more could ya want?

fEEDTIME – SHOVEL. The greatest band Australia ever produced? I can’t think of anyone else who comes near them, except maybe early Tatts and X. Solid blues grunt, gospel beast funneled thru this thumping rhythm section that takes no prisoners. Cant say I lounge to it cos it always makes me get up and howl.

CREEDENCE CLEARWATER REVIVAL – 20 GOLDEN GREATS. Sure, we’re all sick of Proud Mary and Grapevine but shit this stuff still sounds great and I can listen to em anytime. One of the first rock bands (per se) that I discovered as a kid via my old’s record collection. I think I’ve still got the Proud Mary single in its picky sleeve rolling around in a box somewhere.

ROLLING STONES – STICKY FINGERS. Cost me a buck secondhand and worth it jut for “Cant You Hear Me Knocking” . I read somewhere that Gram Parsons and Keefy were very chummy around this period and it shows. Some real country pickin’ style filtered thru the stones art skool/ rich kid slummin’ it blues.

VARIOUS – DYNAMITE I had to have at least one genuine K-Tel release in the damn thing. This ‘un is as obscure as they come though and I found it at one of them bootslaes somewhere. Wizzard, Suzi Q, Nazareth, Mud – early glam, rock and Pommy one hit wonders. Clifford T. Ward? Who the hell is he?

T.REX – THE SLIDER Bolan was one of my first rock heroes. He still is. An original all the way even when he was a coked up fat prick. I still remember the day I bought this album, paid for with my own pocket money. It’s still arguably his best work and I play it all the damn time.

SLADE – WHATEVER HAPPENED TO? The album no one remembers. Heavier than previous efforts, the band had just come back from Amerikka, soaked up the vibe, came home and found that no one cared anymore. Pity, cos this is a lost straight out knees up rock and roll classic.

VARIOUS – LITTLE IMP An NME giveaway back in the 80s? that I found at a record fair so I didn’t even have to buy the shitty mag. 22 trax of solid R&B (the real shit not the kiddie porn they produce today and dare to call R&B), blues and early rock from the likes of Fats Domino, Louis Jordan, Amos Milburn, Patti Anne… not a dud amongst em and plenty of beer drinking songs strangely enough.

ALICE COOPER/BOB SEGER Picked this up for 20c at the scout hall junk sale. Someone’s home recording job with Welcome To My Nightmare on one side and mid era Seger on t’other. Cheap shitty brand o’ tape but its hanging in there even if Bob don’t get that much of a play.

CHARLIE DANIELS/ VARIOUS Same sale, same price. Best of Charlie, with all the good shit plus a pile of fifties rock like Hey Little Cobra and The Crusher. Decent brand of tape too. Love them sales.

HELIX – AIN’T NO REST FOR THE WICKED 80’s canuck heavy metal band who knew how to knock out a coupla sub ac/dc riffs, add some fine hooks and then fade back into obscurity. (‘cept at the redneck lounge where they’re a staple diet. I even got this on vinyl)

NEIL YOUNG – WELD This was a double but I taped this myself off a mate’s rekkid. It’s the Hey Hey sides up to Cortez The Killer. Didn’t think much of the other sides. I just can’t listen to Powderfinger knowing what it inspired

MOTLEY CRUE – DOCTOR FEELGOOD The band might have been straight when they recorded this but I rarely am when I listen to it!

MOLLY HATCHET – FLIRTING WITH DISASTER. Molly gets (unfairly) blamed for killing Southern Rock but hell I still like this album. A stew of boogie, metal and southern boy roots. It’s just dumb enough to be fun. And it gets plenty of play in the lounge, plenty of play.

GLEN CAMPBELL – GLEN CAMPBELL COUNTRY Galveston, Phoenix, Where’s The Playground… all that’s missing is Wichita Lineman. I make no apologies for likin’ old shiny face’s great takes on Jim Webb’s classic songs. I’ll put up with his shiny happy people schtick any day to listen to Jimmy’s songs. And most of you do too, its just I’m the only one with the balls to admit it.

CHARLES MANSON – WHITE RASTA Prison blues from an old hippy who shoulda known better. At least he don’t play no beatles on this! There’s an ambience about this tape, it’s dubbed down so many times now and you can hear the prisoners going about there business as chuckles strums his geetar and tries to spread some kind of message. Last I heard they took away his rights to have a guitar cos it’s not good for him or it’s a weapon or some shit like that.

NAZARETH – HAIR OF THE DOG 1975 release that still kicks rock and roll arse. AC/DC and Motorhead are rightly revered for their rock and roll stance but what about Nazareth? No bleached hair shit, no fancy boy Jet retro bullshit, no metal dweebs who don’t even scare their mothers – this is straight ahead sweaty beerhalls and years of touring type rock and fucking whiskey drinking roll!! Took me years to find a decent copy of this cos they’ve all been flogged to death and then I found the tape and the record in the same week! Now that’s rock and roll karma.

VARIOUS – KINGS OF CAJUN VOL II Suds suckin’ dance hall, toe tappin’ party music. Boozoo Chavis, Rockin’ Dopsie, Clifton Chenier… When I’m in the lounge pissed and can barely stand they’re ain’t nothin’ I like better than two steppin’ to Boozoo.

METALLICA – MASTER OF PUPPETS The last good album these fuckers ever did! Bought this back in the late 80s and it’s still hangin’ on despite the years of constant play. I can’t listen to these songs without throwing that waver in when the tape tightens up and then lets go again. Bow to the Leper Messiah!

Cassette Culture

So we took beezlebubby down home to the country for a week so nanna could spoil her rotten and I could relax a bit. After the tree pruning, taking down the goddamn xmas lights and spider proofing the place. Which is still better than last time when I had to get up on the roof and clean five years worth o’ shit out of the gutters. (I thought that’s what the grandson was for – hell he’s eighteen now he’s gotta be good for something besides feeding)

The first day we hit town though, the goodwife, beezlebubby and I went out to my mate Gander’s property for a bbq. Ganders and his goodwife have got a coupla acres of rock and dirt, a house, a big shed, a calf and an old ram in the paddock out back of the homestead, chooks, possums, crows and a coupla teenage kids of their own and Ganders and I have been best mates since the first day of primary school and that was a long, long, long time ago now. First thing they had to do was show us the new John Deere. No not a tractor, a ride on mower. He was proud of that baby, showed us all the bits, talked us thru the purchasing process, haven’t seen him this proud since he was a kid and came round to tell me he had colour tv, the first in town in fact. I used to go over there to watch The Goodies cos all we had was a shitty old b&w that couldn’t even get the abc and the other channel rolled anyway.

Anyway after we cooked up some dead animal and sawdust (sausages) and ate of the salads that they’d prepared cos we were totally unprepared, Ganders wanted to show us what else he’d been buying. Seems his boy has left home, moved to the big town some 50k’s up the road for work reasons, though he was still home every weekend to fill up on food anyway, and Ganders well he’s been out at the garage sales looking for furniture and cutlery and what not for the boy. Though he seems to be really just buying more shit to put in his bigass shed. Knives and bowls and shit he don’t even know what it is (like the world’s smallest juicer?) but he did pick up an old Phillips radio for me cos I collect shit like that and it can sit in my tiny shitty ass shed (size does count when it comes to sheds!) and then he pulled out the piece d’resistance!

A genuine, original K-Tel Cassette Selector.!! You ‘member them don’t ya? They used to advertise them back in the 70s on the back of all the K-Tel compilations. The Record Selector and The Cassette Selector – finds your favourite music in seconds! I had a record selector but it was a piece of shit really, it didn’t hold gatefold sleeves properly and you had to get the weight just right for the damn thing to work or it wouldn’t flick forward properly but the cassette selector it looks the goods. After all, cassettes all pretty much weight the same right? Of course it doesn’t hold double cassettes but when did you last see a decent one of them? It’s always Pink Floyd or Frampton Comes Alive or some hokey 80s thing with a bonus remix tape. The last decent double cassette I owned was Osibisa - Black Magic Night and that has long since disappeared into some other bastard’s pocket. So now, I gotta select twenty tapes and get this baby set up in the music half of the shed on top of the family radiogram which sits in the corner waiting for me to fix it up, next to the stereo with the block under the back corner to keep the $20 record player balanced. Between the two stereos in the place there’s four tape players plus my old double deck unit that plays two tapes at once cos I left the damn thing in the tiny ass shed for about three years and the cockroaches chewed through something but hell that can be fun too but anyway there’s plenty of places to play the old cassettes and since the scout hall across the road has these regular like shitty ass garage sales where Ganders would think he’d died and gone to heaven, full of mismatched china and three legged tables and lots of clothes no one, not even the poor, would wear but most importantly cassettes, boxes of shitty tapes and dubbed stuff and religious rubbish and all for twenty/ twenty five cents each, well I got lots of tapes floating around. Some I grab to play some I grab cos at twenty cents that’s cheaper than new for a blank tape and some well… I just feel sorry for em sitting there looking like they need a new home. But anyway, I’m gonna sort through them tapes and slap 20 of em in the K-Tel cassette selector and then when I’m sitting out in music half of the shed I can just grab one and play it instead of looking through the three drawers of crap or under the stereo or behind the radiogram or wherever else I keep dropping, stashing, throwing the fuckers when I’ve got a sixpack and a coupla shots of Nelson County under my belt and the feet think they can dance even though the rest of me knows they can’t. and when I do you can be sure there’ll be a list here of what’s made the cut.