As we reported back in October, our friends at Music Video Distributors worked out a deal with the legendary punk club CBGB to release
performances from the club’s audio vault. A lot of incredible performers
appeared on the CBGB stage over the club’s 33-year lifespan, and thanks to MVD
Audio we’ll get to hear some of this music as part of the CBGB OMFUG Masters Series
(The Bowery Collection). First on the slate, with a March 18 street date, are
performance CDs from NYC garage rockers the Mooney Suzuki, ska legends the
Toasters and hardcore punk cult band Terror.
The Mooney Suzuki disc offers up a June 2001 performance
from the club, the band captured on tape at the peak of its power and creativity.
The ten-song, 35-minute CD offers material from the band’s 2000 Estrus label
debut, songs like “Singin’ A Song About Today” and “Everything’s Gone Wrong”
along with tunes from the critically-acclaimed 2002 album Electric Sweat, including
“In A Young Man’s Mind” and “A Little Bit Of Love.”
The Toasters are familiar to any ska fan as America’s
longest-running band in the genre, and they had nearly two-decades under their
collective two-tone belts by the time that this June 2002 performance took
place at CBGB. This 60-minute disc includes 11 rockin’ tunes, including such
Toasters fan favorites as “Run Rudy Run,” “2 Tone Army,” “Modern World America”
and “Ploughshares Into Guns.” Thousands of nights on the road have made the
Toasters into one of the best live bands you’ll ever see, and this CBGB
OMFUG Master Series release should have listeners ranking full-stop!
(The Toasters are still alive-and-kicking, too, as evidenced by this review of
their latest CD.)
Terror may not be as well known as the other two bands here,
but the West Coast band with East Coast roots kicks out a jackhammer blend of
hardcore punk and grindcore-styled metal that is relentless in its aural
assault. Vocalist Scott Vogel was a veteran of Buffalo,
NY bands Slugfest and Buried Alive and before heading west
to L.A. to find
like-minded brain-crushers to form Terror with. This eleven-song, 32-minute
disc captures the Terror frenzy from a June 2004 performance at CBGB, and
includes the band’s debut, Lowest Of The Low, almost in its entirety, songs
like “Life And Death,” “Keep Your Mouth Shut” and “Better Off Without You.”
All of the shows are taken from well-preserved soundboard
tapes and should sound great, and the series’ covers look really cool, knocking
off Universal’s “Millennium Series” CD covers. Other future titles in the
series will include shows from the Queers and H2O. The discs include liner
notes from Handsome Dick Manitoba of NYC legends the Dictators and a portion of
the sales of all of the CBGB OMFUG Master Series CDs will be
donated to the Hilly Kristal Foundation for Musicians and Artists. Kristal, who
opened CBGB in 1973 and ran it for 33 years until its closing in 2006, died in
August ’07 after a long battle with lung cancer.
(Click on any CD cover to buy these CBGB OMFUG Master Series titles from Amazon.com)
