In the aftermath of their former lives as big label artists, the remaining band members teamed up with Spoon producer Mike McCarthy to work on their second - and reportedly last - LP, Don't Let Your Baby Have All The Fun, which was officially released as a free download on November 10th via Rockproper.com. Free is great; but this is one record we'd gladly pay for, so if a vinyl edition comes out (please!), we'll let you know.
Over the course of only the near 18 minutes that make up its excellent debut EP, "Love & Death," the Columbus-based four piece manage to out- Vine the Vines with opener "Fell So Hard," pay homage to the great mid-'60s American garage rock compilation "Nuggets" with "Carry It All," then recall the beauty of Paul Westerberg at his acoustic best with set closer "Eyelids Apart."
"We're scatterbrained," admitted Sun singer and guitarist Chris Burney. "And scatterbrained in a good way. We can't keep our minds in one place for longer than 25 minutes. I don't mind it."
“I’d like to think even though we’re thirty years old, we’re not over the hill. Fifty is the new over the hill, right?” asks Greg Hall, who has been the owner of local vinyl shop Used Kids Records since he took it over in 2014.
Hall’s involvement with the store actually started in 1979 at School Kids Records. Used Kids Records was introduced in 1986 as the used records supplement to School Kids.
Over the next 30 years, there would be plenty of changes for the store, willingly and forcibly. Various trials have threatened to close the store multiple times, but those changes are precisely what Hall attributed its success to.
“The big thing about the music business is, things change, and you’ve got to be ready and willing to change,” Hall said. “That’s the only way that you’ll survive. Any business person will tell you that.”
A great deal of the decorating was done on several spastic afternoons by Jack Taylor (birth name Richard Violet), who was fired and rehired by Dan Dow. Jack, like the décor of Used Kids was a living example of a life half finished, this is not just for the fact that Ritchie (as I first knew him as) died young in an unremarkable fashion. While giving up the lures of the city, Richie moved home to lonesome Urbana, Ohio and got a job at a local United Dairy Farmers convenient store. A long drop from the coolness of playing CBGB’s and getting name checked on an Unsane record. It was there in the vast flatness of western Ohio that Richie took a shot of dope too deep for his veins and died behind the UDF store, proving that heroin can be found everywhere. Richie, was a cross between Bluto from “Animal House” and a tarnished flannel shirt, he could be devastatingly charming and brilliant on one hand and on the other he could stab you with an insult that could bring the worst of high school back in a flutter of embarrassed red cheeks. He was the first member of Monster Truck 005 to die.
W: This was the late ’70s early ’80s, did people harass you for being punk? Did you have to fight people?
MRoc: We got close.
MRav: When we went down south we got in a lot of tiffs because hearing us on a record they’d book as a punk band, but then being southerners they’d be surprised when a black guy would walk in. They’d say, “Nah, nah, nah we can’t let you play here.” We’d say, “Why” and they’d be blunt and say, “You’ve got an n-word in the band”
MRoc: What was that one club in Marietta?
MRav: Marion. Even in Marion, OH they wouldn’t let us play.
MRoc: Yeah, yeah we had all kinds of problems. That was before I was wearing the flag.
“Coming into [the group] we were already steeped in trouble,” said singer Johnny Weills, who will join bandmates Joe Maple (bass) and Jeffery Alan Dutton (guitar), along with drummer Zach Shriner stepping in for the late Johnny Bernardo, for a one-off reunion show at Ace of Cups on Friday, Oct. 23. “All of us drank heavily and imbibed other substances heavily. And aside from the whole intoxication element of it, we were always the guys that would go out and start trouble. A lot of it was intended to be good-hearted mischief, but it didn’t always end up that way. There were a lot of people in town who were like, ‘Man those guys are fucking scary.’”
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(Dallas) We’re a little bit more mature. We pay a little more taxes. We’re probably not in as many bar fights as we used to be. Not as many. The one thing I heard after that show, the next day there was this silence. Everybody was like, did that really happen? Yeah, it did. And we actually took pictures this time. Everybody was like, I’m so glad there’s more to come because how depressing would it be if that was it?
(DeLeon) I’m sure there were people who thought this was going to be a traipsing through the past and they were going to go through the motions. But every band that went up there went for the throat. It was totally for the jugular. Every band that went up there just punched everybody in the teeth. And it was succulent and you were showered in it. It was really electric and everybody went bananas for it.
