Mars - Helen Fordsdale
When we first heard the Sex Pistols, we were not exactly disappointed, but we were surprised. It wasn't that they weren't as ferocious as the sound we'd built up in our head after reading and hearing about them for a long time before actually listening to them, but they weren't as anarchic—they were singing about something rather than embodying it. When we first heard Mars, we realized that they were what we'd been expecting. This song starts making sense pretty quickly.
Jesus Lizard - Boilermaker
We don't think we've ever heard a better guitar tone in our lives. Led Zeppelin never recorded anything a tenth as pulverizing. It sounds like standing in the middle of a highway.
Crime - Gangster Funk
This tune was ginned up by a crew of late '70s San Franciscans who dressed up in full on police regalia and sang lyrics like "James Brown, Iggy Pop/Jesus Christ and Redd Foxx," meaning them more seriously than they let on. Anticipates the punk/R&B fusion a million douchebags would later ride to millions, and kicks harder than anything any of them came up with. Legitimates the group's claim to be "San Francisco's only rock band."
Big Black - The Model
Steve Albini and Co. imbue the Kraftwerk classic with the warmth and humanity its creators denied it. It sounds like getting hit while in the middle of a highway.
Talking Heads - Psycho Killer (B-side version, with strings and additional pretentious lyrics)
What's interesting is that as the well known album version is essentially a perfect song, one would expect an alternate version to be like a malformed, crippled twin best left in the attic. Hardly so.
The Only Ones - Another Girl, Another Planet
The best Buzzcocks song the Buzzcocks didn't write, this is as famous as any of The Cars' singles in some slightly alternate universe.
X - Soul Kitchen
Jim Morrison deserves everything anyone's ever said of him, but Doors songs provided pretexts for impossibly great Al Green and X performances, so who really cares about the drunk frat boy and his cock-snake?
Minutemen - Bob Dylan Wrote Propaganda Songs
We knew we wanted a Minutemen song on this mix and we weren't sure which, so we picked one at random. Mike Watt would approve, we think. This is one of the few bands that really gets better as you get older; they had as plausible a take on the relationship of punk to black music as Gang of Four or Crime, they were as humane a band as we've ever heard, and they understood Bob Dylan better than anyone other than Tom Waits.
The Raincoats - Lola
A droll take on the unimprovable. An obvious joke well told.
Avengers - We Are The One
A great, ungrammatical anthem that really should have been in the background of some seedy made-for-TV movie about the punk scene. They seem to have meant this song very seriously.
Adverts - Gary Gilmore's Eyes
As we understand it, to recapture the shock effect this had at the time, this song would have to be cut by someone like Lil Wayne, and the equivalent lyrics would have to go something like "looking through al-Zarqawi's eyes" these days.
Flipper - Sex Bomb
The single greatest rock and roll song ever recorded. If you don't think so, drink some whiskey and then play it as loud as you can, preferably with people dancing nearby.
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