C.M. Ruiz of CMRTZ asks, and Facebook delivers:

IOOF Hall, Graceland, Off Ramp, Metropolis, The Weathered Wall, The Kilowatt, Sit N Spin, Velvet Elvis, Moe's, Rckcndy, Graven Image, Wrex, The Golden Crown, Ok Hotel, Norway Center, I-Spy, The Rainbow Tavern, Dragon Palace, Danceland, Zak's 5th Ave, Colourbox, The Bird, Seattle Boxing Club, Scoundrels Lair, The Aquarius Tavern, Motorsports Intl Garage, Green Lake Aquatic Theater, Flophaus, 2nd Ave. Pizza, SS Marie Antoinette, The Hideaway, The Vogue, The Breakroom, DV8, Arospace/Noiselab, Area 51, Ballard Firehouse, Ditto Tavern, Bugsy's, The Farside Tavern, Here Today, The Gorilla Room, Natasha's, Hollywood Underground, Polish Hall, The Carpenter's Hall, Bahamas Underground, Hall of Fame, Lakeridge Restaurant, Viaggio, Paradox Theatre, Lake Union Pub, Storeroom Tavern, Hamburger Mary's and The Palms, 700 Club, Uncle Rocky's, Gibson's, Sub Zero, The Catwalk, Black Cat Cafe, Rock Theatre, The Funhole, Eagles Auditorium, Moe, The Grey Door, Roscoe Louie, G.G.S.C.C.O., Gorilla Garden's Omni Room, Mcleod Residence, Fen's Party Palace!

But surely there are more...

British DJ Greg Wilson, who did an interview with John Robb in 2007 to commemorate the legendary Manchester club The Haçienda on the occasion of it opening 25 years ago, has reprinted that exchange on his blog to celebrate FAC51's 30th birthday. As most anglophiles know, The Haçienda (owned by Factory Records boss Tony Wilson and New Order, and a major part of the movie 24 Hour Party People) served as one of the most important incubators of acid house, baggy, and rave music throughout the '80s and '90s, before folding in 1997. Wilson provides an engaging reminiscence of The Haçienda and his role as a DJ in the club's history.

Here's a key passage:

One of Manchester’s major attributes in the early 80’s was that it was a very cosmopolitan city, certainly in relation to other parts of the UK. There was a crossover between the black community and the student population, especially in Hulme, so there was an open-mindedness with regards to music, which, by the end of the 80’s, had given Manchester its unique flavour, illustrated by the fact that Indie bands like the Happy Mondays and Stone Roses were inspired by dance music, pushing at the boundaries in the process and pioneering a new mutant genre, Indie-Dance.

The Haçienda provided the focal point for this cultural pow wow, initially taking its lead from the underground black scene in the city, before House became the music of choice with the white audience (many of whom had previously been Indie kids with little affinity to dance culture) and the whole thing exploded on a mainstream level.

People will always look back on that late 80’s period, especially what happened in Manchester, with special affection. Its place in the history popular culture is assured, with The Haçienda pivotal to this. However, to view The Haçienda on its own obscures the foundations it was built on – a proud tradition of black music clubs in the city going back to the Twisted Wheel in the 60’s, and on through the 70’s and 80’s with venues like Rafters, Rufus, Legend, Berlin, The Gallery and The Playpen. These are the rocks on which The Haçienda was built.

Read the whole interview here.

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The Black Dog & Regis, nearly a year and a half later, return to the post-punk Sheffield sound.

MNML SSGS writes:

One of our most loved ssg mixes has been High-Rise Living '78-'86, compiled by The Black Dog & Regis. It was tantalizingly subtitled as 'Part One', with the implication being that there would be a second act. We have often been asked would we ever see Part Two. Well, here is your answer.

'There was nothing for us, so we did it ourselves'. - Richard H. Kirk

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While doing some research to find out when this Violent Femmes show at Gorilla Gardens happened, I stumbled upon the YouTube channel of somebody called KlingKlang13. And oh wow, is it chock full o' Seattle history.

• Pamela Laner Petersen

I guessed that the Violent Femmes show was from 1985, Kerri Harrop remarked that she remembers Gorilla Gardens was closed by 1985. A lot of reports seem to say that the Circle Jerks played Gorilla Gardens in January of 1986 (after the location had moved to Fremont from the International "China Town" District). Apparently in the middle of the Circle Jerks show, the fuzz appeared and stopped the music. KlingKlang13 has footage of the news story about the riot:

Several police cars were damaged after the punkers threw beer bottles and snowballs. Three kids on a couch are featured in the footage, recalling the skirmish with police. Where is Tim Ebeling today? Ed Mitts? The guy in the middle who doesn't say anything? Ed's mother Judy Foster also has a few things to say about the cops manhandling her kid!

MORE EXCELLENT VIDEOS AFTER THE JUMP.

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My good friend Joel Schalit has a nice post on Souciant.com about Brixton's past and present.

No London neighborhood is as synonymous with reggae as Brixton. Immortalized in countless songs (“Guns of Brixton“, “Electric Avenue“) for outsiders, the borough’s musical identity is inseparable from popular music of the late 1970s and early eighties. Residents of San Francisco will find it comparable to the Haight Ashbury area’s identification with 1960s bands like The Grateful Dead, and the Jefferson Airplane.

Though the original hippies are long since gone from the Haight, the Caribbean community synonymous with Brixton remains.

This is the present...

This is the past...

It's TRUE!! On May 11th, 1969, the New Yardbirds Led Zeppelin played on Greenlake, like, on the lake...ON THE FUCKING WATER, no less. It was on a stage called the The Green Lake Aqua Theatre. It was an amphitheater of sorts constructed for the "swimusical," the Aqua Follies, 'round abouts in 1950. Anyway, the New Yardbirds Led Zeppelin were opening for Three Dog Night! Seems weird to think, but for all their soon-to-be-godheads status, it was still 1969 and the Zeppelins had not quite achieved notoriety. In fact, when frontman Robert Plant said they were going to play "Communication Breakdown," they were met with "a light smattering of boos and requests for "Good Times, Bad Times"" as that was the single being played on local radio! NICE.

Now, dig the pix of a very young looking the New Yardbirds Led Zeppelin and a few more details on Greenlake blog as well as the slightly gossipy, and recommended for more show anecdotes, History Link post.

The Grateful Dead also played on Greenlake, August 21, 1969. It was to be the Aquatheater's last show as the city deemed the structure unsafe.

I came across this passage near the end of Robert Wright's The Moral Animal, one of the leading and cementing texts of evolutionary psychology:

Psychologists found several decades ago that artificially lowering self-esteem (by giving false reports about scores on a personality test) made people more likely to cheat in a subsequent game of cards. A more recent study finds that people with lower serotonin levels are more likely to commit impulsive crimes. Maybe both of these findings, translated into evolutionary terms, are saying the same thing: that “cheating” is an adaptive response, triggered when people are shunted to the bottom of the heap and thus find it hard to get resources legitimately. Maybe there’s some truth to that ostensibly simplistic refrain about inner-city crime—that it grows out of “low self-esteem,” as poor children are reminded, via TV and movies, that they’re nowhere near the top of the roost.

My point: I have always wondered why boasting played such a central role in the origins and consolidation of hiphop. True, these days, it's weird, crass, even outright inappropriate for Jay-Z or some like rapper to boast about being rich when they are indeed stinking rich. But back in the day, rappers exclusively boasted about things they didn't have: "Hear me talkin' bout checkbooks, credit cards, more money than a sucker could ever spend..." Did this boasting have something to do with boosting self-esteem, increasing the levels of serotonin? Was this the root of the pleasure that the hiphop critic Tricia Rose theorized back in the early 90s?

Worked out on the rusting urban core as a playground. hip hop transforms stray technological parts intended for cultural and industrial trash heaps into sources of pleasure and power. These transformations have become a basis for digital imagination all over the world. Its earliest practitioners came of age at the tail end of the Great Society. In the twilight of America’s short-lived federal commitment to black civil rights, and during the predawn of the Reagan-Bush era. ln hip hop, these abandoned parts, people and social institutions were welded and then spliced together, not only as sources of survival, but
as sources of pleasure.

Tons of words have been written about Miles Davis’ ’70s electric phase, and, as a fanatic for that era, I’m determined to read them all. But not so many analyses have been penned about his work in the ’80s and ’90s. Music journalist Phil Freeman wrote a paper titled “From the Corner to Carnegie Hall and Beyond: The Urbanization of Miles Davis 1972-1991,” which he delivered at the recent EMP Pop Conference in New York about that oft-overlooked era of Miles. As someone who’s never given Miles’ post-Agharta/Pangaea releases much of a chance, I found the piece to be illuminating.

Here’s a key passage about Miles’ ’80s/’90s activity:

These records are not jazz records. Period. And the jazz business needs Miles Davis to be its standard bearer. So do jazz critics, many of whom were deeply wounded by his change of direction because it flew in the face of the idea they hold most dear, which is that jazz is somehow innately superior to all other forms of music, especially those that outsell it by a factor of ten. So we get the sellout myth. It’s a shame that an entire decade of vital, creative work can be shoved aside just because it presents an inconvenient narrative, and doesn’t help sell the latest repackaging of Kind of Blue.

Read the whole thing here.

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Even before I knew the driving force behind it, namely the Beatles, I was aware of Apple Records (1968-1975), because my parents owned a few of their releases. Mom had James Taylor's self-titled debut and Badfinger's No Dice and Dad had John Lennon and Yoko Ono's Two Virgins (separate households, separate collections).

I don't recall Dad ever playing the latter, but at least he didn't hide it from my underage eyes—then again, he was a regular consumer of Playboy and Hustler. Oddly enough, my parents didn't own any Beatles records that I can remember, but I was as familiar with the foursome as any child of the 1970s.

Watching Strange Fruit: the Beatles' Apple Records got me thinking about the label all over again. My friend, Alan, describes Sexy Intellectual, the company that released the documentary, as "demi-hemi-semi-legit," which sounds about right. They previously issued From Straight to Bizarre: Zappa, Beefheart, Alice Cooper and L.A.’s Lunatic Fringe, so Apple makes sense as a follow-up.

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