No, not the “first lady of Def Jam”, rap femme fatale… I guess Nikki D’s was a bar in some crevice of Columbia, South Carolina. Who cares…enjoy the footage…it’s pretty great (i.e. clear and reasonably audible) for being (semi-)close to 2 decades old. Shouts to all of my NYHC heads, these selections are for you crazy kids…
Rorschach. Nothing above.
Los Crudos. Latin Kings.
Drop Dead. Crustified Violence. Peep the drunk red neck antics.
Assuck. Mightiest Grind.
What’s that? You don’t understand what’s going on? You hear only noise? It’s Brutal Tuesday at PTP, dammit! You either do or you don’t…so go check _____________ if you wanna be spoonfed some sweet shit.
Courtesy, once again, of KillThatCat (on Youtube). Dude has so much footy…some super-rare shit. I spent a good hour too many raiding his video crates last night. Some favorites:
West Coast:
Despise You – 3/22/08 – 924 Gilman Street, Berkeley, CA
Spazz – 7/05/97 – Albany, NY
Enewetak – 7/20/96 – Goleta HC Fest, Goleta, CA
East Coast:
Cattlepress – 10/05/97 – Coney Island High, NYC
Born Against – 11/15/91 – Philadelphia, PA
Rorschach – 7/16/93 – 924 Gilman Street, Berkeley, CA
I re-stumbled upon this rad-as-fuck blog, Blogged And Quartered, late last Friday night in search of a few old hardcore demos…boy oh boy, did I G off.
Not only does this cat, Vin, have a TREASURE TROVE of mostly NYHC rarities (definitely not limited to that, the recent Infest pack he put together is currently the apple of my ears…along with the following…read on), but he also seems to have earned the backing of many well-respected characters of the late-80′s/early-90′s era. Freddy “Wardance” Alva, Daryl Kahan and Patrick Winters of CXA, Javier “Against” Villegas, Dave K, Rich Trash, and so on, have all contributed to this blog’s character development through not only insightful commentary on his posts, but also by sending the lucky guy copies of unreleased material for him to share with the rest of the online community. A lot of ABC No Rio love on there, including the following long-forgotten, never-released, compilation directly from Freddy Alva’s vault.
Fuck Rock (this is a link to the Blogged And Quartered post, including an intro by Mr. Alva, with fully breathing download link)
This compilation was/is a monster. It features most of the bands that put ABC No Rio on the map…and did I mention that these are all alternate recordings of songs.
Flash forward to now; I’ve had the master tape of the comp and tons of photos/flyers languishing in an old shoebox throughout the years & with the recent advent of putting up an old project of mine online (New Breed), I was motivated to revisit this comp and listening to these tracks, it made me realize how much they have stood the test of time, shit still rocks.
Okay. Fucking intense, tight, and thoroughly entertaining performance. Typical German punk/hardcore scene hijinx with the paper mache snowball wars and energy (at least from what live footage I’ve seen of other bands playing in that region).
…not to mention a quick Nirvana rendition…yes, THAT Nirvana.
Come September 25th, I will be tearing my vocal chords out at the NYC reunion…then I’m skating off to the Organized Konfusion/P.R.T. show (followed by the C.R. reunion/finale out in Shaolin the next day). I will have no face.
This was found under the “related videos” section of the following (probably infamous) clip of Rorschach playing their cover of Black Flag’s “My War”. As I was one of the unlucky few who missed them in the early 90′s, the “My War” performance was the first live clip that I had the pleasure of finding. I was seriously floored. In this, I saw a band who looked and performed as they sounded on record…fucking crazy.
The fact that, in the video, they are all reduced to silhouettes thrashing around on stage, due to the venue’s choice of “mood lighting”, made this even more psychologically appealing. To me, it heartily reinforced the band’s bold, and sometimes unsettling, visual aesthetic (as well as that of the music). Let’s also not overlook the coincidence of the whole “cloaked identity”/Watchmen comic book character (from whom their name was adopted)…and the element of ambiguity that which the inkblot test was centered around (from which Alan Moore derived the name for his character).
