Bouncing Along Over to Sounds

The sun is taking a long time to come up.  I’d better head to bed.

Much later now.  A friend texted me something in which he referred to the Misfits.  I haven’t heard them in years.  I searched Spotify and threw on “Where Eagles Dare” and remembered the funny chorus.  I played it again during my pushup routine.  This got me on to figuring out how to make a hardcore punk mix on this new service. 

Interestingly most of the underground U.S. hardcore I searched for was there.  A bunch of UK hardcore was there as well.  I started thinking of all the songs I really hadn’t heard in years.  Many gems regularly appear on mixes I have on my phone.  But there are a few songs that remain as faint echoes from the early eighties, that I haven't heard since then. 

Searching in that vein, a distinct memory of being in St. Mark’s place in 1982, bouncing along over to Sounds after having been in Bleeker Bob’s.  It had seemed like a hardcore punk revolution was upon us, as every week there were more and more new bands playing this uncompromised, underground music.  An album by a band from Finland was put in front of me.  The lyrics at one and the same time angry, legitimate and ridiculous.   (I can still hear a chorus that sounded something like "sue-er hagen, nogen flocken" or some such thing.)  And walking along that day a bunch of hardcore kids in front of me had a song playing out of a box, that I was immediately struck by.  What is that sound?  Who is that?   I must have asked them because not long after I had the Rudimentary Peni EP with that song on it. 

If you’d asked me the name of the song, any time in the last thirty-four years since then, I’d have been at a loss to name it. Though I remember the sound, and the tenor of the singers voice, and the opening line: "Let's find someone we can blame it all on."  Making my hardcore punk playlist this morning, I tried to find some Rudimentary Peni on Spotify.   There was nothing.  And, indeed, there was nothing there by Crass either, the well-known anarcho-pacifist band whom RP were associated with.  If Crass and the early Rough Trade ilk have resisted licensing to Spotify, it warms my heart, I suppose.  Youtube, however, the meta vacuum cleaner of any and all digital audio, video, without regards to the niceties of licensing; Youtube had it. 

The song I’d heard that day, was “Subdued Violence.”   It was on an EP called “Farce” that is likely still in my mom’s basement.  They were a particularly outspoken vegetarian band, outraged at the slaughter of animals.  My older daughter is a veg and I just played her the song.  We got through about half of its fifty-seven seconds.  I don’t think she’s going to start the Rudimentary Peni resurgence at her school, anytime soon.  I however am going to listen to it, again. 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2BWUpXO57k