Various Artists
Sub Pop 100 LP
Sub Pop, 1986

So what's the opposite of tan, rested and ready (as in "Why not Tricky Dick, he's tan, rested and ready") -- izzit pale, tired and haggard? That's where I am - one of those weeks where your off-line activities meet your work life and end up in 6AM to 12 midnight days where you gotta be on.

So, howdja like my last posting? Isn't it kinda like when people bring out pictures from their vacations? Isn't it the ultimate vanity trip to post your own songs on what has to be the ultimate vanity blog, going through your LP and cassette stack - and will this take the rest of my life or what? Your deafening silence is well deafening. Thanks for not saying anything bad, at least.

So, Sub-Pop. Short for Subterranean Popular Music, I guess. First a xerox fanzine and then the founders decided to get serious about life and build a multi-media empire in the Great Northwest and just happened to come into existence when the whole Seattle sound becomes hot and have like half of those hot bands signed within the year. This album kicked it all off. 5000 supposedly printed -- I've seen folks selling mint copies of this for 100 bucks. Also heard rumors that a CD came out -- who knows if it was authorized. Rumor was that early in Sub Pop history, they had problems paying the record pressing companies who retaliated by releasing special versions of their more popular records.

While Sub Pop 100, the album, doesn't showcase many of the ultimate blankscowls known collectively as the Grunge scene (and, I'm tripping perhaps but is Pearl Jam really, really grunge? Are the Screaming Trees? Are the U-Men, even), it does put together a bunch of dangerous and noteworthy types to kick off the label: Sonic Youth's great Kill Christgau song, the supposedly first known recording from Naked Raygun (personally, I think that's a goof, since the song is just so blatantly awful), Skinny Puppy's somewhat retarded industro-tape "Church in Hell", Lupe Diaz (who?), the whacky samplings of Steve Fisk, the afore-mentioned U-Men and Austin's own grunge entry Scratch Acid with a song off one of their disks. Um, well, who else? Only the greatest band in the Northwest -- the Wipers doing a live version of "Nothing to Prove" and Thalia Zadek's first (?) band Dangerous Birds. Oh, and the slightly under-rated Savage Republic and the slightly over-rated (at the time) Shonen Knife, doing two songs that probably shouldn't be on the same record, the primitivecore "Real Men" and the cymbal-hooked "One Day Of the Factory," respectively. So what to share, what to share? Well, I do have some other Wipers material which I'll get to someday. I have some Shonen Knife elsewhere as well as Skinny Puppy, Scratch Acid, Naked Raygun, S. Youth. But, oh screw it, the best song on this album has to be the chin rocking Ramones meets the 'Mats Wipers song. Oh and here's Lupe Diaz because for some reason I think Loki and SVC might like and I've been digging their pages lately.

"Itsbeena" - Lupe Diaz
"Nothing to Prove (live)" - The Wipers

Notes: I'll add some notes and fix my typos later. Off to the Trachtenberg show.... also, I've been meaning to ask, how do my recordings sound these days. I'm using variable bit format and I think I'm doing a better job at reducing surface noise.

The Wipers official website - I love the history of the Wipers...
Damned if I can find any information about Lupe Diaz. The liner notes say they are from Mexico City.
Sub Pop memorabilia - visit their main site for a plethora of music, bands, videos and MP3s.

Update: The Trachtenberg Slide Show canc-ex, as they say in the military (cancelled exercise, get it?)! Their van broke down south of Phillie. Would that be Delaware?!? When I was 9 or 10 years old, we used to love to drive through Delaware because it sounded like underwear and for some reason only known to kids, it's cool to say underwear over and over and over again. Is the drummer from the Trachtenbergs too sophisticated for that I wonder? Isn't there a Trachtenberg song in here?