Best bands/Albums on SST

Mojack isn't even half-way yet. This week it's SST #174. Surprise! It's yet another Zoog Rift album (Son of Puke). I skip over the episodes that don't have interviews, but some of the folks they've been talking to are incredible.

never seen film of these boys before:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjV0HtVsQWU

moments like that they sound like sst's answer to the clean or something

the answer to the question is Zen Arcade

angst is great — i love lite life!

best sst band was slovenly, hands down.

Oh? How so? You've got me intrigued.

How does it fit into what they do? I've never heard them.

i <3 Slovenly so much :)

Dow, they kind of sound like pere ubu or the magic band circa ice cream for crow but also they feel like they're related to british post-punk stuff like the fall or wire without really sounding anything like either (they did cover the blue orchids though). Anyhow check out the albums 'thinking of empire' and 'riposte' - the way the band meshes together on those records is a thing of joy and beauty for me, especially the drums and the way the guitars weave round them

here you go:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCQJvZJfFKE

the bands they remind me of most are the wolfhounds, the blue aeroplanes, life without buildings

I particularly liked Overpass (post–Slovenly band, most of the same guys)

(oh they weren’t on SST tho)

new alliance though right?

Their first LP, yeah. The second one was on Smells Like

oh i never heard that!

From the bunch of SST-related threads on here, I think this one is the most appropriate: has anyone else here picked up Jim Ruland’s Corporate Rock Sucks yet? My copy arrived today and I’m looking forward to getting stuck into it later.

I got my corporate rock still sucks SST book today - will probably somewhat enjoy reading it - but still not sitting well with the past Greg Ginn news …

Robert Christgau gave Boyb Dylan str8 Apluses for his Cover Art. The most I goyt for Black Flayg was a D for Do Better. A-hole n a half.

— Raymond Pettibon (@RaymondPettibon) April 13, 2022

Spot's in really bad shape, recovering from a stroke and a blood clot in his lungs while waiting for a lung transplant due to pulmonary fibrosis.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZCxFwrVSlQ

Shit that’s terrible about spot I didn’t know

rest in peace Spot:(

this is from Carducci's Facebook so it's real

SPOT - "Glen M. Lockett" (1951-2023)
I hate to type out the words but... SPOT passed away after 10am today/Saturday (Mar. 4, 2023) at Morningside Healthcare in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. His nurse told me he woke up alright but later showed no pulse and several attempts to revive him failed. He had cancelled a planned photography exhibit in late 2021 when he found his fibrosis began to impair lung function. Since then he'd been on oxygen and was hoping for a lung transplant, but a stroke about three months ago put him in the hospital. I was hoping he was recovering speech but realistically he was not likely at his age and condition to become a candidate for a lung transplant, though that would have solved his health problems. SPOT didn't dwell alot on his personal history but I believe he was born in Los Angeles, grew up in the Crenshaw neighborhood, moved to Hermosa Beach in the mid-70s, moved to his favorite Black Flag tour stop, Austin Texas, in the mid-80s and then to Sheboygan to be near his favorite Celtic music scenes in Milwaukee and Chicago. His father was Claybourne Lockett who was a Tuskegee Airman who flew British Spitfires and Spot told me once his mother was Native American and from New Orleans. His older sister has advanced dementia. SPOT was a musician and writer and photographer who spelled his name in all caps with a dot in the middle of the O. His principal sideline was as a record producer-engineer and an architect of the natural approach to recording a band in the punk era. He started in Hermosa Beach playing and recording jazz and he took the primacy of live jazz playing into recording bands against prevailing attempts to soften or industrialize a back-to-basics arts movement in sound. When approaching the mixing board SPOT would assume an Elvis-like stance and then gesturing toward all the knobs he would say in a Louis Armstrong-like voice, "This is going to be gelatinous!" His recorded work as player and producer is listed at discogs.com. I'll be going through his writing with an eye toward publishing a collection including his writings on jazz for the Hermosa Beach free weekly. He spent recent years writing the novel, Decline and Fall of Alternative Civilization, and producing a radio-like dramatization of it which is online. Last year he posted new SPOT music at his bandcamp page. In recent weeks I read off lists of the names of his well-wishers to him and SPOT nodded at the mentions of his friends from around the country and the world.

RIP

Rest in peace SPOT, no doom record ever sounded as great as the first Saint Vitus album.

That eulogy is from carducci?

It is.

Mike Watt also posted a tribute on his FB page an hour ago.

https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=749059163257339&set=a.261113598718567

"good people, we just lost my old buddy spotski, a terrible blow. he recorded the minutemen's first stuff, I go way back w/this man. brother matt took this shot six years ago when spotski came to visit our pedro town... man, this is a terrible blow. I love you spotski forever."

Aww man :(

via FB

(person 1)
I had heard from a friend recently that he wasn't doing too well. This friend was temporarily storing a bunch of Spot's equipment that had been cleared out of his place in WI. Supposedly there were lots of tapes of unreleased stuff.

(person 2)
whoa

Gern Blandsten
i can confirm this. SPOT reached out to me about releasing some of that stuff right before he moved up there. The tangled web of getting permissions was not a mine field I could traverse. Needless to say, the comp CD he sent me of the out takes of some of the records he produced was jaw dropping. He said he never stopped the tape and still had almost every version of the songs the bands played in the studio. sometimes 8-10 hours of stuff for one record. Insane to think about.

That sounds exaggerated to me, it would be way too expensive to even run a simple 1/4-inch snoop tape constantly in session. Cassettes yes, but for anything else, I doubt he would have had the budget to do that.

fair enough, but he clearly had a shit-ton of outtakes regardless

Gern Blandsten was a legit label fwiw

hearing from that same thread that Henry Rollins is getting the tapes, which seems good

https://www.instagram.com/p/CpajZ33pxc3/

As he was closing his accounts and getting his affairs in order, SPOT got in touch with us last summer. Long story short, we received a large box in the mail, containing a stack of two-inch tape. They stunk to high heaven of mold and appeared to have spent the last several years in a garage, far too damaged to be playable. Still, it’s nice to have the original multi-track tapes of “Meat Puppets II” back in the family.

oh man

This was posted elsewhere a while ago:

"Someone I know got a look at where the SST masters were stored about 15 years ago -- in bulging/splitting cardboard boxes in a non-temperature controlled closet in TX."

I was hoping that wasn't true.

Ugh, but for some reason I am not surprised.

That is hurting my heart

Never did get Spot’s 2014 “Sounds of Two Eyes Opening “ photo book w/Hermosa Beach and Cali skateboard and punk rock photos.

RIP

Thinking about Spot and those moldy 2-inch tape boxes.

Today, for fun, I ran 'New Day Rising' through some stem software and remixed it as best I could (there are always issues in the high-end with these things) but I tried to beef it up a little, which wasn't easy.

Here, if anyone is curious - https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/zfn9k3e5jwxhpc0s7imz9/h?dl=0&rlkey=nmsdaig356hozouccvmya465p

What stem software did you use?

RipX

Thanks, will check it out...

always felt bad for Spot's "reputation" - like everybody else involved in the scene, from vocalists to musicians to artists to label bosses gets away with being DIY, amateur and doing their best with the tools they have, but its only Spot that gets shit on for somehow not making Husker Du sound like The Unforgettable Fire? anyway...

FWIW, with Hüsker Dü, I've found that it helps to run their SST albums through a parametric equalizer. Something like -2 db at 10k and -1 at 6k to bring some warmth into that otherwise cold and glassy top end, then add like 1 db at 100 and 2 db at 50 to put some body into the bottom end and to restore the bass cloud without overdoing it.

(To be clear, this is for the CD's and I guess all digital masterings since there's only one.)

1 vote for the MaresNest remaster project

RipX broke it into 4 stems for me and I loaded those into ProTools and used mostly EQ and various Preamp plugs to bring out what was there. I might try something from My War.

do the 1982 demo version instead ;)

RIP SPOT

Husker Dü Announce New Live Album Tonite Longhorn
The set captures the trio across four performances in Minneapolis in 1979 and 1980

https://pitchfork.com/news/husker-du-announce-new-live-album-tonite-longhorn/

SST show on WFMU including an interview w/ Jim Ruland

I’m still disappointed the book wasn’t interested in diving into the non “punk” directions the label took from the late ’80s. Like, I don’t remember if it even mentions Ginn’s affinity for Tim Harding of the Richmond scene; I just got a mint copy of the Office Ladies LP on New Alliance from 1989, unopened until I sliced the shrink rap to put it on my turntable 20 minutes ago, and it’s great! But it’s like, Black Flag breaks up, the partners sell to Ginn, Ray Farrell and Mugger leave, and Ruland’s immediately uninterested in the story. Like, I dunno man, stuff like Issues Records and why it existed is interesting to me, but the book doesn’t even acknowledge it existed!

instead of like spending $44 billion dollars to ruin an app, i wish some billionaire with too much money would buy everything associated with SST and hand it over to the folks at Numero Group to give it the treatment it all deserves

agreed, altho Ginn has probably ruined the masters already through poor storage etc

i know i know, i just want someone to save what can be saved at this point

totally