I was just expressing my appreciation for the Jesus and Mary Chain and how refreshing I found their albums, coming in the dark days of radio hair metal during the mid to late 80’s. I recently heard some of those songs for the first time in a while and was struck all over again how good they are. Much like the Sonic Youth of the same time period, they made noise accessible and enjoyable. Via WREK I heard a lot of the unadulterated stuff back then and mostly couldn’t take it. When it was married up with just enough pop sensibility ala “Just Like Honey” I was all over it. I only saw them one time in the 90’s with Mazzy Star opening up and it was a good enough show but those albums are really where they were at.
I have a highly uncommercial band concept – a Jesus and Mary Chain tribute band. Maybe you could get a Skinny Puppy tribute band to open at your sparsely attended gigs in deranged venues.
I dunno – BRMC’s early offerings are about as close
to a JAMC tribute band as you can get. Certainly turned
me off enough to say “When I want to go se JAMC, I’ll go
see them instead of this bunch of wankers, thank you very much”.
I think that was (yet another) short-sighted, non-linear
outburst from me, but I stand by the thinking behind it.
I would have to say that Psychocandy (tho you really can’t go wrong with Darklands) is right up there on my all time list as well, and recently re-discovered to boot.
I would love to see a Skinny Puppy tribute band comprised of the Reid brothers… now THAT would be something! Fade in long distorted guitar feed back loop… cue droning downbeat vocals: “God’s… gift… maggot…” Brilliant! Completely nonviable commercially, of course.
I’d imagine that there may be a medium-small market to take all the alternative bands (before “alternative” was trademarked as a genre of music) from back in the day, find the ones that are floundering around with nothing to do, and have them do songs from each other’s repertoire in their own idiomatic style. I’d pay to see it.
It’s so weird that I read this, because just the other day I was thinking to myself.. I want to start a Jesus and Mary Chain cover band! They are, no doubt, one of my fav bands ever! I’ve got them in constant rotation on my iPod (Psychocandy, Darklands, Automatic).