Miss Piggy Lunchbox

You’ll wanna see the band playing bish bash bosh tonight
- “Tonight”

Supergrass is one in a long line of over-hyped bands from England that pretty much flopped in the United States.  Stone Roses, Oasis, Arctic Monkeys…help me out…there’s so many.  “Flopped” might be too strong a word, especially in the case of Oasis, but these bands never live up to their hype: they’re always supposed to be “the next Beatles,” and not only do they not live up to that impossible standard; their eventual impact hardly ever makes them next Rick Astley.

In It For The Money, the band’s second album (so they’d already been vetted and discarded in the States by this point), starts off with a real good groove on the title track and I begin to think the Yanks may have had this one wrong.  But they immediately ruin the whole thing by going with the chorus too many times at the end and then screw up, I can only guess intentionally since making it awesome should have required next to no effort, the transition to the next song, “Richard III,” one of the best on the record.

And that’s kind of how it goes through the whole album: unrealized promise.  The first three tracks kick it hard, then there’s a couple of mediocre tracks, then another great one, then the worst song on the album (“Going Out”), and so on.  There’s enough quality on this that it’s hard for me to grant it three lunchboxes, my lowest rating for a CD I like, but given that it never seems to achieve greatness for more than a couple minutes at a time, the inanity of the non-keepers, and the lack of easy enjoyability (it’s just hard to sink into), three lunchboxes is what it deserves.

Listen, I’m not saying Brits have bad musical taste.  They probably do, but that’s not what I’m saying right now.  What I am saying is that two places separated by an ocean, no matter how similar their cultures or how easy technology has made media distribution, will develop different tastes.  Furthermore, those tastes will diverge as younger generations grow up hearing different songs in their youth, creating different and divergent aesthetic sensibilities.  And so STOP FUCKING TELLING ME I’M GOING TO LIKE WHATEVER SHIT ALL THE WANKERS IN ENGLAND THINK IS THEIR NEXT FUCKING GIFT TO AMERICAN RADIO AND THEN WRITING CONDESCENDING ARTICLES ABOUT HOW AMERICANS DON’T LIKE WHAT SOUNDS SO OBVIOUSLY FUCKING FANTASTIC TO YOU!

I’ve been holding that in for over a decade.  F**kin’ music critics.

Rating:

Mixers: “You Can See Me,” “Sometimes I Make You Sad”
Non-keepers: “Late In The Day,” “Going Out,” “Hollow Little Reign”
Filed Between: Sunny Day Real Estate (The Rising Tide [Japanese Import]) and Matthew Sweet (100% Fun)

Wikipedia says this album sold half as many copies as its predecessor, Blood Sugar Sex Magik. That’s what the band gets for moving towards good, a big smackdown by their fans. Because while this album just barely peeks in on the Land of Good, that glance makes it the best collection of their songs I’ve ever heard, containing a handful of good songs and strewn from start to finish with several almost-good-if-it-just-didn’t-contain-that-one-annoying-part songs.

Those songs break my heart. They’re tragic, really. These sonic butterfaces are endowed with either a fantastic chorus, verse, or bridge, only to be marred by a stomach-churning minute, sometimes less. Almost all of them go on too long. If you took the bridge from “Aeroplane,” put it with the verse of “Falling Into Grace” and add in the chorus of “Shallow Be Thy Game,” you’d have a mix CD candidate for sure. Separated, though, “Shallow Be The Game” barely gets kept and “One Big Mob” is another one I can shag after putting a bag over its face (i.e., the slow part).

This was the album where the band’s guitarist was Jane’s Addiction guitarist Dave Navarro. Wikipedia says more of these songs were written as fully conceived pieces instead of via the band’s usual collaborative jam process. Navarro was replaced by his predecessor, John Frusciante, for the band’s next album. I don’t know if they went back to their old ways or not, and I don’t plan on ever finding out, but this album is either an anomaly or progress away from their prior decade-plus of sucking. For their sake, I hope they didn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater when they fired Navarro and his drug habit.

Rating:

Mixers: none
Keepers: “Warped,” “Coffee Shop,” “One Big Mob,” “Tearjerker,” “Shallow Be Thy Game” Update: “One Hot Minute”
Filed Between: Red Hot Chili Peppers’ What Hits!? and Redd Kross (a peek into Show World promotional sampler cassette)

R.E.M. released Monster in 1994 and my one-liner about the band for several years that followed was something like, “What I wanna know about R.E.M. is…when did they hold the meeting where they decided to suck?” I’d never really followed R.E.M. that closely, but I respected their early work, loved the singles off of Automatic For The People, and hated the singles off of Monster (with the exception of “What’s The Frequency, Kenneth?”). Therefore, I thought this line summed up what was seemingly an intentional plunge off a cliff for such a successful band.

It turns out, there was such a meeting. According to Wikipedia, it was…

Early in 1993, the members of R.E.M. convened a four-day meeting in Acapulco, Mexico, to devise a plan for the next two years. The group settled on a plan for 1994 through the end of 1996, which included recording a new album and touring behind it. Drummer Bill Berry was particularly eager to tour (which the band had not done since 1989), and was insistent that the album “rock”.

Apparently Berry was misunderstood and everybody else in the band heard “suck.”

Actually, if I may, I have to say that given a more considered listen, these 12 tracks don’t all suck, and some of them are quite good. And the album does “rock” in the sense that most of the songs are upbeat rockers with distorted guitar (though they tend to have a same-key, same-tempo problem). Of course, the biggest violator of this trend is “Strange Currencies,” which I still can’t differentiate from Automatic’s “Everybody Hurts” until it gets to the chorus, and only then if I’m paying attention to the lyrics.

The band seems to have enabled the rocking by discovering the wonders of a delay pedal. It’s used heavily on “Crush With Eyeliner,” “Bang And Blame,” “I Took Your Name,” and “You,” and by allowing the repeat delay to re-strike each chord several times, they’re able to pick up the pace of their songs without actually having to move their hands any faster. Except for the drummer, of course, who, as mentioned above, was dead set on this “rocking” thing.

Even though I may have been too hard attaching the “suck” tag to this album, there is plenty of mediocrity (and some suck, too) to go around. The most obvious suck symptom is they do that thing that huge bands past their prime do, where they stop writing great songs but instead focus exclusively on their sound fidelity and timbres, because they can pay for that kind of work, then go and talk to the press about how it’s an “intentional stylistic shift,” how it’s “their favorite album of theirs,” and how now they’re really doing the kinds of things they want to do, when it really amounts to putting lipstick on a pig. “I Took Your Name,” an otherwise mediocre song, is a good example of this, where cool sounding bells enter from crisply-defined space around your speakers mid-song.

But I love “Let Me In” and “What’s The Frequency, Kenneth?” and the first five tracks can be listened to straight through without a single bad thought about the band or album entering your head. After the first track (“Frequency”), you might not notice that anything’s playing if you’re not paying attention, but at least you won’t be annoyed. And even if my assessment back in the day was too harsh, I can’t even tell you how excited I am to have got the meeting part right.

Rating:

Mixers: none “Let Me In”
Non-keepers: “Crush With Eyliner,” “King Of Comedy,” “I Took Your Name,” “You”
Filed Between: Automatic For The People and Radiohead (Pablo Honey)

This is the Ozzy Osbourne record where he really broke away from the metal genre and asserted himself as a star with some crossover appeal who could age well. Not physically, of course. No, I saw him on this tour (because it was going to be his last…ha ha ha), and he was already unable to stand erect, weighed down by his man boobs. No, by “age well” I mean that he established himself as a star who had put the drugs behind him and was able to act like a professional and write music and perform concerts in a workmanlike manner. While that professionalism enabled him to turn his notoriety into a fiscal empire, it doesn’t sound all that rawk. Maybe that’s why two of these 11 songs are meta-rockers about how awesome and crazy (Ozzy’s fave word) it is to rock like he has and is and how he just can’t stop, whoa yeah.

This album’s core strengths are in the guitar and bass performances of Zakk Wylde and Bob Daisley, respectively. Osbourne deserves credit for surrounding himself with these guys, of course, but they really are carrying the load.

This was Wylde’s second studio album with Osbourne, and he picks up where he left off on No Rest For The Wicked, putting his signature melodicism everywhere. Wylde’s technique is phenomenal, as is that of all the guitar deities of the era, but what sets him apart from the crowd is his ability to affect every aspect of a song. Along with rock-horn-inducing solos, he always sets just the right mood at the beginning of a song and fills in the space between vocal phrases so well you can’t help but sing along with those parts as well, Beavis and Butthead style.

There aren’t any great songs on here (though all four keepers come close), but there’s really only one awful song (“Zombie Stomp”). When grunge came along to banish metal to the butts of jokes for several years in the early 90’s, this was one of the albums that managed to rise above it, despite not really being considered a masterpiece. Along with Osbourne’s die-hard fans, this gained enough crossover radio airplay to keep it chugging along, in that unspectacular workmanlike manner that I mentioned above.

The singles from this disc cover me like an old, comfortable blanket, transporting me back to high school. There’s a lot to like here beyond just nostalgia, too. However, when I listen with my critical ear, with its lack of sentiment, it picks up a lot of terrible lyrics, and a lot of lazy melody writing. Add in the clunky moments that pepper “I Don’t Want To Change The World” and “A.V.H,” to name a couple, and you’ve got a mediocre album. Still, almost every song has a bridge, which keeps the disc on the listenable side of the spectrum, and if I ignored the comfortable, nostalgic blanket aspect of things, I’d be betraying my soul, so this barely gets its third full lunchbox.

Rating:

Mixers: none
Keepers: “Mama, I’m Coming Home,” “No More Tears,” “S.I.N.,” “Road To Nowhere”
Filed Between: Joan Osborne (Relish) and Ozzy’s “No More Tears” Collector’s Edition cassette single

Guapo is an instrumental trio that finds its way from London to my CD player via Ipecac recordings, who really should just have money taken out of my paycheck. According to Wikipedia, Black Oni is their sixth of eight albums. Also according to Wikipedia, “Guapo’s music explores the outer-most regions of psychedelic composition.” Um, no. At least not on this album.

I like this album, but its primary characteristic is that it spends minute after minute, about 60-70% of them interesting and enjoyable, chugging along to build up to a climax that never arrives. If I listen for five minutes, I think it’s awesome. Ten minutes, and I’m starting to get bored. Fifteen minutes and I realize they never delivered on the promise of that first five minutes, but at least now they’re sweet talking me with another long, slow build (that won’t arrive).

According to the band themselves, though, they’re the second coming. Here’s how the bio on their website starts out:

“Blaze the Light of Ten Thousand Suns!”

So cries Elizabeth Clare Prophet, spirit channel and avatar of the Church Universal and Triumphant….

Ho boy, well that explains a lot. Somebody put instruments in the hands of Tolkien fans and now they’re trying to turn legends of elvish rings into abstract sounds. And, really, an excellent mood-setting that causes your attention to drift and never delivers on its promise is basically how I would describe the Lord of the Rings trilogy, so well done, boys.

The last sentence of that bio begins:

How long is a climax? “How long have you got?”, replies Guapo

Unfortunately, you apparently need longer than 43 minutes, which is the length of this CD, because this never really reaches a climax.

So it goes nowhere, but for the most part it sounds great in the meantime, so I unhesitatingly give it three lunchboxes. If you need to escape to a land of warlocks and trolls, light up, put this disc on, and let your mind go. You could do a lot worse.

Rating:

Mixers: none
Non-keepers: “II,” “IV”
Filed Between: Great Phone Calls featuring Neil Hamburger and The Gumdrops (Tight Pants)

With the experimental feel and emphasis on sounds, as opposed to traditional pop song structure, this album of remixes from The Downward Spiral does indeed sound like you’re further down said spiral, as if the descent into madness is taking control, moving past the point of no return, and making what surrounds you more confusing, more disconcerting, and less concrete. This collection sounds better than The Downward Spiral and, because it has less vocals and isn’t trying to appeal to a broader audience, has less of those roll-your-eyes moments Trent Reznor is so good at giving us. On the other hand, The Downward Spiral mixes things up better and still has better cohesion. This CD rarely strays from one of two moods, both fairly acerbic, and, as a collaborative effort, feels a bit pasted together.

In remix circles, I believe this qualifies as star-studded. J.G. Thrilwell contributes a couple of remixes and Aphex Twin delivers a pair of originals. The first of these, “At The Heart Of It All,” may be the highlight of the entire album, as its meditative atmosphere is fantastic background and sleepy-time music in the best sense of those terms. Similarly, “The Downward Spiral (The Bottom),” is another one of my favorites where not much happens, but at least it’s interesting while it happens, like an entire movie of interesting exposition and character development: no plot, but riveting.

This set of remixes probably rates slightly higher than the album that spawned it, though they are coming at things completely differently. If I want more of a rock album listen, I’ll go for the original, but if I’m looking for groan-free interesting sound, I’ll pull this one out. That’s a refreshing conclusion to come to given how horrible the last Nine Inch Nails set of remixes I listened to was. Plus I kept versions of two tracks from the original that didn’t get kept there: “Piggy” and “Eraser.”

Rating:

Mixers: none
Non-keepers: “The Art Of Self Destruction, Part One,” “Self Destruction, Part Two,” “Hurt (Quiet),” “Eraser (Denial; Realization),” “Erased, Over, Out”
Filed Between: A Thousand Pleasures and Nirvana (Bleach)

General Patton Vs. The X-ecutioners, a project between Mike Patton and The X-ecutioners, a group of three turntablists, is kind of a cross between the two Mike Patton releases on Ipecac that would follow it. As a predominantly hip-hip album, it serves as a bit of a forerunner to 2006’s Peeping Tom, though this isn’t nearly as accessible and the cohesion I raved about in that album’s review isn’t present here. Still, you can hear Patton experimenting with some of the things he would employ expertly the following year.

Unfortunately, early 2005 seemed to be a time when Patton had run out of ideas as well as the ability to concentrate for more than one minute, as this disc bears a lot in common with the Fantômas album that would be released six weeks later, Suspended Animation. Back then I wrote:

The fragments are too short and the intermittent samples are too long. Just when a groove starts to take hold, they cut it short in disorienting fashion. The album doesn’t flow and I don’t feel compelled to keep listening for what’s around the corner.

I could hardly describe this album better. It has its moments, great ones in fact, but those moments seem to be randomly scattered throughout bland, repetitive melodies, a constant shifting from one riff or noise to another, and the same vocal tricks by Patton that were brilliantly original from 1995 to 1999 but are just treading water now. “Chuck-a-loo, chuck-a-loo,” Patton percussively sings, and I drift back to the Clinton administration, when he was breaking new ground with how the voice was used as an instrument. Then, to really drive home that parts of this disc were just mailed in, we get the “This…is a journey…into sound” sample. I mean, really? Really? This sample was on just about every hip-hop album in the 90’s and you…I mean…what the…what on Earth made you think this was some effective way of demonstrating your sonic prowess in 2005? I don’t know, maybe if you were in a coma in the 90’s and wanted to hear Patton’s take on hip-hop, then maybe this would be a great listen.

As it is, it’s merely a good listen, as some of the great moments bring it up just high enough to clear that bar. “Battle Hymn Of The Technics Republic” is a Star Wars laser gunfight on Planet Hip-Hop and manages to out-do all but the first two movies on its own. About midway through, “¡Kamikaze! 0500 Hrs. (‘Take A Piece Of Me’)” is probably the highlight of the album, with its hard-hitting beats and big, encompassing sound…if the whole album could have been that good…well, if wishes was fishes, I guess. Instead it just makes me that much more appreciative that Patton came out of his 2005 funk to make Peeping Tom, which I think I’m going to go listen to now.

Rating:

Mixers: “¡Vaqueros Y Indios! (Joint Special Operations Task Force),” “Battle Hymn Of The Technics Republic,” “¡Fire In The Hole! 0400 Hrs. (Joint Special Operations Task Force),” “¡Kamikaze! 0500 Hrs. (‘Take A Piece Of Me’)”
Non-keepers: “Improvised Explosive Device 0300 Hrs.,” “Precision Guided Needle-Dropping And Larynx Munitions (PGNDLM),” “Convulsive Antidote For Nerve Agent Autoinjector (CANAA),” “Surprise Swing Insurgency/Tabla And Tongue Twist Counterattack/(‘Dragon Seeks Path’),” “Eastside Multichannel Tactical Scratch Communications (EMTSC),” “Warcry/Infrared R’n’B Hallucination/Jungle Operations Exfiltration System,” “L.O.L.—¡Loser On Line! (Hate The Player, Hate The Game)”
Filed Between: Gene (“Sleep Well Tonight”) and Gershwin (Complete Piano Works (perf. Dag Achatz))

I get the impression that when the music press talks about how huge British bands just don’t go over with “American audiences” that they, and “British audiences,” are looking down on us and our high-fructose saturated musical tastes. On the contrary, I wonder what it is about British and journalist listeners that think that standard-template bands with a whiny accent are worth juicing up the loins for. Do they think they’ve got the market cornered on straight-forward, mildly melodic, heavily distorted, guitar-driven, rhythmically dull rock? I mean, Oasis’ big competition at the time of Definitely Maybe was motherf**king Blur? Are you kidding me? Give a skinny guy in tight jeans a drug problem, teach him to sneer and use a distortion pedal, and he will soon own the British Isles.

Whatever. This is a fine CD (just four out of 11 don’t get kept, two of them singles, oddly enough) and I’m eager to entertain, and even create, hypotheses about how early musical and other sonic input, as well as the sound of your native language and whatever other cultural influences you can come up with, influences what music you like in your taste-making years, but my point is just that: American audiences aren’t some retarded puppy you need to feel sorry for. We can hear the same damn music you can, it just doesn’t mean the same thing to us. I don’t know…maybe I’m projecting.

Anyway….

I can even sometimes get my groove on to these songs if I get in my listen control center and do some manual calibration or if they happen to catch me at just the right moment, but it’s far from an easy, uninhibited, joyful enjoyment. Songs that were “the best song on the disc” yesterday are “meh” today and split the difference as a keeper. (I’m looking at you “Digsy’s Diner.”) The far-and-away best song on the album, “Slide Away,” goes on a full 90 seconds (at least) too long before mercifully fading out. It’s like this disc is just begging to be exactly three lunchboxes.

The overriding vibe I come away with, though, is: Does he need to whine all the time? And does every song need to have the same distorted jangle? And really, what’s the bigger mystery? That Oasis was bandied about as the greatest British band of their time? Or that motherf**king Blur was the counterclaim?

Rating:

Mixers: “Slide Away”
Non-keepers: “Shakermaker,” “Up In The Sky,” “Supersonic,” “Cigarettes & Alcohol”
Filed Between: O.A.R. (“The Stranger”) and The Offspring (Smash)

There’s an episode of The Simpsons where Homer catches on with the Jim Rose Circus and the Lollapalooza tour because he can take cannonballs in the gut. At some point in that episode, Bart and Lisa are watching some band, I think Smashing Pumpkins, from the crowd and Lisa makes some comment about how, although the music is dark, it certainly was affecting the kids. Bart shrugs and says something like, “Eh, making teenagers depressed is like shooting fish in a barrel.”

That sentiment basically sums up my opinion of Smashing Pumpkins and Nine Inch Nails. The lyrics are eye-rollingly bad. I swear I wrote some of these exact same lines a few years prior to this album’s release when I was 17. KEN-penned lyrics include the shouted “I wanna fuck everyone in the world” and “Don’t you tell me how I feel” from “I Do Not Want This” and, from “Hurt,” the whispered:

I hurt myself today
To see if I still feel
focus on the pain
The only thing that’s real

God, no matter how many times I go over that I can’t help but groan. And the histrionics don’t end there. This is the breakthrough NIN album, the one that capitalized on the buzz from Pretty Hate Machine, in part because of its “outrageous” and “controversial” lyrics like “God is dead/And no one cares” from “Heresy” and “I want to fuck you like an animal” from “Closer.” Really, people, are we going to make it this easy? “Fuck you like an animal” is going to be the phrase that causes your outrage that induces the publicity that builds Trent Reznor’s mansions? Good lord. I guarantee you your teenage son wanted to fuck one of his classmates like an animal long before hearing this song.

If you can get through the melodrama, though, and the handful of throwaway tracks here, this is actually pretty good. “March Of The Pigs” uses an odd meter played at speeds that are difficult for most musicians to play in four. “Big Man With A Gun,” despite its sophomoric and juvenile phallic lyics (and you know I always like good lyrics about cock) is a 96-second visceral rampage conveying a violent, unsatisfying orgasm. The last five tracks, as well as “The Becoming,” demonstrate that even when the songwriting doesn’t come together for Reznor, his attention to sonic detail, which creates a three-dimensional, hyper-realistic, cinematic sonic environment that I swear you can see, is enough to keep you listening to repetitive, simplistic compositions.

Reznor is amazingly talented in two areas: combining cool sounds and marketing himself as some kind of anti-authoritarian revolutionary. There are some musicians whose abilities in the either of these categories exceed Reznor’s, but nobody has a higher combined score in the two. Unfortunately, many of his songs suck. There are a number of musicians who make sounds as cool as Reznor and who write great songs. Unfortunately, they’re not as apt to pepper their songs with meaningless melodrama, so they go undiscovered. Nine Inch Nails is fine, but they’re still overrated.

Rating:

Mixers: “The Becoming”
Non-keepers: “Mr. Self Destruct,” “Piggy,” “Heresy,” “I Do Not Want This,” “Eraser”
Filed Between: NIN’s “Head Like A Hole” and Nirvana (Bleach)

10 nights over the course of five-and-a-half years. 13 sets. 2 audio CDs and one MP3 disc. 127 tracks. 10 hours, 12 minutes, and 32 seconds of audio. 7.5 pages of notes. There were times I considered just throwing up my hands and walking away from my collection. I must be masochistic, given my willingness to jump into this after Pearl Jam’s 2003 tour.

I came away from this much happier with Melvins than I came away from that tour with Pearl Jam. There are a number of reasons I’ll attribute this to. First of all, I just had a higher level of affection for Melvins going in. Second, 13 sets over 10 nights is not even close to 73 sets over 72 nights, nor do the length of any Melvins sets approach the length of the single shortest Pearl Jam concert. Finally, this represents five-and-a-half years of changing set lists, not five-and-a-half months of the same. Plus it’s Melvins vs. Minneapolis, for crying out loud. How can you go wrong with that combination? Boner-ness commence!

I’ll be honest with you, though. This sounds like ass. I’d love to tell you these were lovingly recorded, mastered, and compiled concerts—and they very may well have been done out of love: the non-Walker shows, which is also exactly the set of Grumpy’s shows, were “recorded from the audience by Jeff Sebastianelli” and sometimes with Geoffrey Nicholson and the box set is dedicated to Sebastianelli’s memory—but no amount of love is going to burnish a non-soundboard recording in a tiny bar.

Still, I enjoyed this immensely. As opposed to the Pearl Jam debacle, which emphasized how much I hate several songs of theirs and how even the ones I like can’t quite stand up to that amount of heavy rotation, this experience reinforced to me just how much I love the Melvins catalog. Be assured, this is for fans only. Newcomers who don’t already have a robust Melvins collection will be confounded and perturbed. But if you love Melvins, you’ll love the passionate performances and live energy that cut through the terrible sound quality.

Even I got something new out of it. They hearken back to their very early Pacific Northwest days by covering Malfunkshun’s “With Yo’ Heart (Not Yo’ Hands)” from the legendary Deep Six compilation, which also featured four Melvins songs, and then they go right from that song into “Leeech,” a song that was given to them by or stolen from Green River, depending on who you ask. (This brings us all the way around because those were the two bands that merged to form Mother Love Bone, the predecessor of Temple Of The Dog and Pearl Jam.) Their covers of Alice Cooper’s “Halo Of Flies” are amazing; Melvins meets 1970’s glam-prog-rock? That’s such a fantastic combination I can’t believe it’s not a Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. In fact, the performance of that track on 9/18/2000 might be the highlight of the collection if it’s not the Walker sessions where they do “Hung Bunny” and “Roman Dog Bird,” the first two songs on Lysol.

Still, my god, I’m not sure what’s better: Having this collection and listening to it intently several times, or finally allowing myself to move on through the rest of my unlistened-to collection.

Rating:

Mixers: None
Keepers: 3/20/04, Grumpy’s Minneapolis: “Night Goat,” “With Teeth,” “Black Stooges/It’s Shoved”; 3/24/06, Soo Visual Arts Center: “Intro by David Scott Stone”; 2/8/03, The Walker: “Hung Bunny/Roman Dog Bird”; 9/18/00, Grumpy’s Minneapolis (Set 1): “Missing,” “Tipping The Lion,” “With Yo’ Heart (Not Yo’ Hands)/Leeech,” “Halo Of Flies”; 9/18/00, Grumpy’s Minneapolis (Set 2): “Revolve,” “AMAZON,” “Cherub,” “Youth Of America”; 9/19/00, Grumpy’s Minneapolis (Set 2): “Youth Of America”; 10/15/01, Grumpy’s Minneapolis: “The Ballad Of Dwight Fry/Halo Of Flies,” “At The Stake”‘; 10/16/06, Grumpy’s Minneapolis: “Intro/Oven,” “It’s Shoved”; 2/9/03, Grumpy’s Minneapolis: “Black Stooges (first half),” “Black Stooges (second half)”; 3/25/06, Grumpy’s Minneapolis: “Pigs Of The Roman Empire,” “Hooch,” “Happy Birthday/Black Stooges”
Filed Between: Melvins’ Nude With Boots and Melvins+Lustmord (Pigs Of The Roman Empire)