Best bands/Albums on SST

(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.

Nice job on the rematering! Although I have to admit that I prefer the way that the original sounds like it's been buried in both marshmallow and cotton wool, especially the vocals. I guess this is what they call 'nostalgia'.

Funny to me that the default, esp with the Husker records is that the sound of them is a defect and not that it was done on purpose

otm, I like them just fine

Kinda weird how the major label Husker Du albums sound horrendous too - almost worse. Had to have something to do with the band and not just Spot. "Let's make the drums sound as shitty as possible". DONE.

speed is a helluva drug

Listen to the first Man-Sized Action lp that Mould produced, people should be praising Spot for getting as much low-end on those records as he did

Funny to me that the default, esp with the Husker records is that the sound of them is a defect and not that it was done on purpose

Yeah, this has always been a mystery to me. Like, what do you want music like this to sound like? Do you want huge Phil Collins drums? Do you want dub bass? Do you want more isolation between instruments? That is not what this music is about. It's a wall of sound with Bob Mould roaring at you from the middle of it all. I don't even like Hüsker Dü, and I can accept that they had a sound in mind and they achieved it.

on the early stuff it sound tite af but I think it does obscure the songwriting a bit when things get “deeper” idk

I feel like Zen Arcade sounds right. Metal Circus works for the material. Earlier shit sounds like shit but doesn't matter. New Day Rising and onward it just gets worse and worse. Put on track one on Warehouse and it's like "okay these guitars sound awful but I can get into it, it works for Bob stuff", then the bass comes in and it's so dinky it's like "what's wrong with the bass?" and then the drums are like "holy shit how is it possible to sound this bad?" You could buy a radio shack mic and put in the hall outside the room the drums are in, with the door open, and press record on a cassette four track and it would sound better. I did that in high school and it sounds better.

It's like they eliminate every frequency below 500Hz and above 10kHz and did a 5db bump at 1kHz or 2k or whatever sounded the harshest ice pick to the brain.

Good grief those cymbals. I guess those are hi-hats? Hard to even tell. It sounds like white noise.

This was my favorite band in 9th grade. I'm probably going deaf now because of Bob's mixing preferences. Class action suit time.*

Copper Blue sounds like a "Bob Mould and his shit sounds" record but actually kinda good. Maybe the labels made him put the full frequency spectrum back in.

*Back sort of to the SST topic - how come when you go to a zip line park or whatever you have to sign an injury waiver but when you go to a Dinosaur Jr show you don't? I saw those freaks about a year ago and it was upsetting how many middle-aged adults were in the crowd without ear plugs. I mean that shit is one-show-and-it's-permanent damage territory. Feels really irresponsible by the venue and band. What's the point of that? I like loud shit but there's a point where you know scientifically it is causing permanent damage. I go to punk and rock shows all the time and often "forget" to bring my plugs even though Bob already permanently damaged me from those shit Husker Du records when I was a kid. I'm not some old dude complaining about loudness. I love loud. Dinosaur Jr is like four steps beyond loud.

That earplug rant is OTM.
We just had no idea as kids. We'd come out of shows and laugh about how we still couldn't hear anything for hours afterwards. And now i'm one of those middle aged dudes complaining about how loud the bar is because i can't hear the conversation happening at my table.

With a tuner app, I have verified that my tinnitus is consistently a high F# tone, generally ignorable but always there. I wonder what the dominant overtones of New Day Rising are?