Saturday, January 20, 2007
Plate Of Shrimp - Rollins
So I'm reading through one of the books I got for Xmas - Fanatic by Henry Rollins. It's a book full of annotations related to the songs he played on the first run of his radio show Harmony In My Head on Indie 103.1 back in 2004. I love listening to/reading Henry's thoughts on music. When it comes down to it, he's just a fan-boy music-dork like the rest of us. He can get just as passionate about Dionne Warwick as he gets about Bad Brains. OK...That's a slight exaggeration, but not as much as you'd think.One of the bands that comes up over and over again in the book is UK Subs - an old punk band from the UK (duh) that was already legendary by the early 80s. After the umpteenth mention of them in Henry's book, I decided it was time to pull out my only UK Subs lp and give it a listen.
I bought this record when I saw them playing at The Complex - a short-lived venue on 9th St. in DC, sometime in the mid-80s ('86, I think). As I pulled the record out of the sleeve a postcard fell out. As I looked at the postcard, a few more memories came back. My friends and I actually got to hang out with the band for a while that night. At least one of them was interested in our friend "B". They seemed to think if they kept feeding us free beer, they might have a chance with her. Little did they know they had no chance in hell, but we weren't about to tell them that. Not as long as the beer was flowing anyway.**
Anyway - I ended up getting a couple of autographs on this postcard. I forgot all about that until today. The odd thing about this is that one of the autographs reads "To Jim - Henry Rollins Rules".
Whoa! That's like weird and shit. The only explanation for this that I can come up with is that I was probably wearing my Black Flag shirt that night.
** They unintentionally got me back for drinking the free beer. The record they sold me had a chunk taken off the edge, so the first track on both sides is unplayable. That explains why I never really got into this record. Never trust a punk.
(Plate of Shrimp explanation)
