Go Metric

Are You Receiving Me? Post-Ergs Recovery Act Pt. I & II

Night Birds
4-song demo (CD-R)
Self-released

Psyched to Die
Sterile Walls 7” EP
Grave Mistake/Firestarter

Questions Frequently Asked About the Post-Ergs Recovery Act Parts I and II

1. How best to deal with the demise of the Ergs?

It's been nearly a year since the news of the late Jersey trio's demise and many of us are still grappling with what to do, recognizing the need to move on yet uncertain of the proper steps. We suggest focusing on the quantitative, the numbers. Convince yourself that a post-Ergs world has the potential for more Ergs-related records (given that all three members are in new bands). It's kind of like when Husker Du split up and there were records from Bob and Grant. Big windows to let in the sun. Again, focus on the quantitative.

2. Do either of the bands featured in the first two parts of the Post-Ergs Recovery Act sound like the Ergs?

No, but the Night Birds and Psyched to Die do sound similar to each other.

3. Are either of the bands any good?

Yes. Quite good. Let's start with the Night Birds, a.k.a. Joe Erg's new band. Their 4-song demo draws a lot on 80s punk like the first Dead Kennedys album or Agent Orange. There is also a hint, just a hint I say, of '60s garage rock (especially the "I'm ready to go go go" chorus on "Send Me Home" and the "ahh ahh" backing vocals on "Can't Get Clean"). It's like the middle ground between the Monkees and Minor Threat versions of "Steppin' Stone," only the guitar leads sound surfy now and again so throw Dick Dale in the mix. Knowing, of course, that the Night Birds are mostly punk—fast, intense, earnest, catchy but not poppy. Next: Psyched to Die, a.k.a. Mikey Erg’s new band.He’s still singing (some of the leads, not all) and he’s on guitar rather than drums.Gone are songs about girls.Now it’s songs about dying, swift and imminent.And tongue in cheek. Sonically Psyched to Die draw heavily on Minor Threat (and like minded 80s hardcore bands)—the fast tempos, the hoarse vocals, the Jeff Nelson fills across the toms.The songs are catchy and witty (“New Hampshire Man’s Quandry” is a great title if you’re in the “songs about dying” racket) and pretty similar until the last song, “Sterile Walls,” which breaks in a different direction and suggests that Psyched to Die are going to rise about the trappings of concept band status.

Night Birds: myspace.com/NGHTBRDS, joey_erg@hotmail.com

Pigshit: THE MAN WHO INVENTED THE SIXTIES

by Gary Pig Gold

HE MAN WHO INVENTED THE SIXTIES

If veteran rabble-rousing, uber-networking, visionary (“Blacklisted”) journalist Al Aronowitz’s lifetime of achievements should be remembered for but one solitary event, may I posit it be for what he managed to pull off in the immediate hours following The Beatles’ concert debut at Forest Hills Tennis Stadium, New York, one dreamy midsummer 1964’s night.

For it was within mere minutes after the final shrieks of and around “Long Tall Sally” wafted skyward that our story begins, with the Fab Four safely ensconced back upon the sixth floor of Manhattan’s Hotel Delmonico. Somehow, into that inner sanctum high atop the Beatle-manic corner of Park and 59th, was snuck none other than Bob Dylan, a bottle of cheap wine, and a fateful envelope’s worth of herbal libation.

Ladies and gentlemen, life as we knew it was about to abruptly cut from stark black and white to rich, fully-dimensional stereophonic day-glo from that momentous moment hence.

It seems Bob, misreading a certain “I Want To Hold Your Hand” refrain as “I get high” as opposed to “I can’t hide,” had been convinced to confront those four lyrical Liverpudlians he’d previously dismissed with that cruelest of epithets: “Bubblegum!” In the process, to break the trans-oceanic ice as it were, he decided to introduce his fabulous new pals to the hitherto non-rockin’ accoutrement known as, yep, marijuana.

Suffice to say it wasn’t just the Beatles’ consciousness which was forever altered that night, but the very course of rock and roll, the music business as a whole soon enough after, and as a result just maybe Western Civilization Itself. And it is in my wisened opinion that the singular man we all have to thank for that, for Rubber Soul, for “folk-rock” in the process and, really, for loading Dylan into his station wagon and dragging him towards the Delmonico to set all of these historic balls into motion in the first place, is none other than a dear, sweet man I had the pleasure to have known named Al Aronowitz.

FACT: With all apologies due Ralph J. Gleason, Al Aronowitz was the first widely-published man to ever take what we now regrettably take for granted as rock and roll “seriously.” His “Pop Scene” columns four decades ago in the New York Post, not to mention a litany of legendary Village Voice and Saturday Evening Post features, brought to widespread attention such figures as the fledgling Brill Building songsmiths, teen tycoon Phil Spector, and of course Bob and those Beatles to boot. Even prior to that above-mentioned hot August night at the Delmonico though, Al was busy forging crucial artistic bridges between hitherto insurmountable cliques and cultural divides. To cite but one cataclysmic example, it is SO plain to see how Al’s introducing Allen Ginsberg to a fresh-from-Minnesota Dylan eventually helped Beat meet Beatles, as it were, and in all the most ingeniously genre-busting of ways.

Al eventually compiled his Greatest Hits, so to speak, across the 615 history-packed pages of Bob Dylan and The Beatles: Volume One of The Best of the Blacklisted Journalist. The result is, without a solitary doubt, Required Reading for anyone and everyone who considers themselves fans, followers, students, or those just plain curious of the Golden Age of Popular Music, and how the players – Dylan and the Fabs especially – met, influenced, and eventually actually interacted with one another during those halcyon-indeed daze. Thanks in no small part whatsoever to the Herculean efforts of the man who, in his very own only slightly jocular words, would try to pass it all off by claiming “I was just a proud and happy shadchen, a Jewish matchmaker, dancing at the princely wedding I arranged.”

“I recognized Dylan and The Beatles as immortals, and I wanted to cop some immortality for myse lf,” Al told me. “I knew that bringing Dylan and The Beatles together would have exactly the result that it had. The result is that contemporary popular music changed for the better. Otherwise, every generation creates its own heroes.”

“Whether subsequent heroes will enjoy the same immortality that Bob and The Beatles attained, I am unqualified to predict. All I know is that Bob Dylan and The Beatles are hard acts to follow.”

As is Al Aronowitz, who passed away four years ago August First in Elizabeth, New Jersey. He was 77 years old.

His good, good work lives on, however, at www.blacklistedjournalist.com.

www.GaryPigGold.com.

Bob Meets The Beatles - The Meth Minute 39