I was looking for an LP to play this morning while I was trying to work out what I can fit in the next issue of Sideburn. I dug out one I haven't listened to for well over 10 years, maybe 20 years. A record collection is weird like that. I've moved it all over the country, it weighs more than a car, it sits in the corner and I don't spend much time with it, but every now and then it delights and surprises me. Like your mum.
The record is Hit It or Quit It by Girl Trouble, from 1988 (when I was 17). I knew nothing about the band when I bought the record, but that was the benefit of being a regular at a record shop, things you might like got brought to your attention. As far as I know this band never toured England, or if they did, not as far north as Leeds where I was living. They came from Tacoma, Washington. I had to look it up on a map. I didn't know where the Pacific Northwest is. Now Sideburn/ Dirt Quake takes me there once or twice a year.
It's very lo-fi, amateur, punky garage rock, the stuff I've been lapping up since I was 15 and one of my older brother's gave me some LPs when he emigrated to the Netherlands. The stand-out song on the LP is She No Rattle My Cage, it was a staple of my mix tapes of the time. Is all this making me sound like a relic? I don't care. Anyway, I thought I'd have a little look on YouTube to see if there was anything on them, instead of carrying on with what I was supposed to be doing. I found that someone has made a documentary on the band. and it looks fantastic. So good, in fact, that I had to break off looking at the YouTube, that I broke off planning issue 29 to look at, to write this blog post.
Hit It or Quit It is on in the background and I've just remembered they wrote a song about Wild Angels, a favourite bike B-Movie of mine. They even sample the film, a tiny snippet of Diane Ladd asking Peter Fonda's Blues about her fella, The Loser. The Loser was played by Bruce Dern. Ladd and Dern married and made Laura Dern, who was mesmerising in Wild At Heart. Hmmm, I'm not sure I'm going to get much work done today...