Minutemen The Punch Line/What Makes A Man Start Fires?/Double Nickels On The Dime vs Black Flag Damaged/Slip It In/My War

This is going to be so one-sided (in favor of the Minutemen).

its a 3 run album poll though not a Double Nickels poll

but you're probably right

I was going to do the 1st 3 Sonic Youth albums but I figured Black Flag would give it more of a contest.

the hill on which I would be proudest to die is "black flag was never good," so, the Minutemen it is

i think land speed record/everything falls apart/zen arcade would have been more of a contest.

It’s hard to think of the minutemen’s discography in terms of albums, as a lot of their work was released as EPs. Like Buzz or Howl Under the Influence of Heat, it’s technically an EP even though it’s actually longer than The Punch Line—not to mention MANY times better than The Punch Line

That said, outside of The First Four Years, I’m with JCLC on Black Flag, so Minutemen it is

weirdly, the black flag album i played the most in the 80s was Loose Nut. i dug the riffs. i always thought a really heavy/metal band should cover that album. i just really don't like rollins at all as a singer. i have the first four years on cd and everything went black on vinyl. and i'm good with those. though i would keep a copy of loose nut if one came through the store. i saw them on that last tour and they were fun. 1986.

Double Nickels > Damaged > Fires >> Slip > Punch Line >> My War

this would be much harder for me if it was 1st Four Years, Damaged, and the 1982 Demos for BF

this thread takes me back to 15 getting ready for school

any excuse to post The Minutemen playing in some dude's driveway -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4W5jP_Gmrg

Too bad the Pop Group never made it to a third album in their original run. I'd stack Y and For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder? against The Punch Line and What Makes A Man Start Fires?

We Are Time was released at the time. Is more odds & sods from various early points but I'm sure you could get away with it at a push.

I thought Black Flag with Kira Roesler and Bill Stephenson were fantastic. Missed seeing the band with Dukowski.
But mainly only had Damaged, My War and Everything Went Black. Thought they were all great but didn't pick up anything later. Did listen to the Marquee 84 live recording more than any other live recording after getting it a few years later.

Didn't pick up on Minutemen until later despite having the tracks on Blasting Concept. Do wish they could get a decent cd mastering campaign like the Rykodisc Meat Puppets. You can get combinations of various eps and lps as Post Mersh volumes but could do with an upgrade on mastering.

Last year, as an experiment, I had a go at trying to remaster 'The Punch Line' and 'Nothing Left Inside' with this stem-splitting software I use for work, just to beef them up a little.

The Flag track needed more done to it, and the horrible static at the start seems to be on every single iteration of the song I could find.

https://we.tl/t-CjeSO2LFx8 - if anyone's interested.

JCLC otm, I will join you on that hill

Metal Circus/ New Day Rising / Zen Arcade. < This could have been another challenger.

Easy vote for the minuet men but i'm just waiting for the SWA vs DC3 vs Zoogz Rift vs Gone mega-poll

(just made myself relisten to some SWA and tbh I'd forgotten just how much Sylvia Juncosa rules)

Loose Nut is the best Black Flag album. I just discovered this a couple of months ago.

Easy vote for the minuet men but i'm just waiting for the SWA vs DC3 vs Zoogz Rift vs Gone mega-poll

haha I know a certain Irish poster who would be up for that.

i used to put "bastard in love" on my mixtapes in the 80s. loved it. the whole album is solid though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpfSkdXRX3s

Metal Circus/ New Day Rising / Zen Arcade. < This could have been another challenger.

― The Artist formerly known as Earlnash, Monday, September 9, 2024 7:47 AM (fifty-three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

This makes more sense as a vs to the Minutemen

Loose Nut is great, I celebrate their whole catalog

the hill on which I would be proudest to die is "black flag was never good,"

no!!!!!!!!!!

anyway i will be voting for black flag

i love the minutemen tho it kind of pains me to make the choice

damaged > my war > slip it in > loose nut > process of weeding out > in my head, all great and the last one is my favorite

when i was in college i listened to the black flag discography when i was really sick with the horrible flu variant that came out that year (h1n1 i think?) and it kinda changed my life. that's when i resolved to get a black flag tattoo, probably the corniest tattoo i have but it's true to what i value about music, a group that never stopped mutating into something other than what it was. roessler/stevenson a peerless rhythm section when practically every other lineup variation also had a peerless rhythm section. anything greg ginn did after this is better left unacknowledged

i seem to have left out family man in that list of records but i really adore that stupid fucking record too

the only minutemen record i ever owned was project: mersh. i liked the song "king of the hill". i don't think i've ever listened to an entire minutemen album. i did like their van halen cover. i used to put that on tapes. i do like "rise above" though so i will vote for black flag. the bakery across the street from my store is named Rise Above. its a good bakery.

Almost all of the SST/Our Band Could Be Your Life stuff was MASSIVELY influential to me growing up and I went through a pretty extended punk/hardcore phase as well but Black Flag was the one major band of either ilk that I never really got into, felt like punk for jocks or meatheads or something but it never clicked with or appealed to me...so by default the Minutemen would get my vote here but I probably shouldn't participate given I never gave most Black Flag stuff a fair shake.

ivy.'s so otm

If this was polling early SST records then its Damaged for sure but those other groups made much, much better records and tried different things whereas Black Flag just stayed in a similar-ish way but I am giving it another listen again.

I dont revisit SST stuff often but I went through a lot of it after reading that SST book from last year, and it really cemented for me the notion of how quickly the other major SST bands figured out Black Flag's equation and moved beyond it, while Black Flag kept running in circles. Its true in some sense that they were always evolving, but only within the severely limited constraints they set for themselves.

If this was polling early SST records then its Damaged for sure but those other groups made much, much better records and tried different things whereas Black Flag just stayed in a similar-ish way but I am giving it another listen again.

eh? they stopped playing fast and slowed right down to a sludgy sound. Then there was the process of weeding out EP and the spoken word stuff.

Yeah they just lengthened out the early stuff, and there are some good results. Like half of "Slip it in" is amazing (just been relistening to "Bars") but I just lost patience.

I will listen to 'Loose Nut'/ and 'In My Head' tonight.

Somebody should start a thread for 3v3 proposals.

I hope its not a ten year waiting list like ballot poll threads

Damaged is all the macho Rollins posturing I need nowadays. Not all Minutemen songs succeed in what they're aiming for, but you can be sure there'll be another one along in about 45 seconds.

Voted: Minutemen. Sorry Greg.

Major label-era Hüskers vs Replacements fite proposal, more of a 2.5v4 I guess

i also think that black flag had the shittiest sounding records of any famous band that i can think of. from 1978 until they died. and its not a case of "hey man this was punk it was raw and blah blah" almost EVERY california punk record that i love sounds AWESOME. from the avengers to dickies to weirdos and on and on into the hardcore 80s. as much as i like loose nut its just kinda laughably bad sounding. especially when you think of what cali crossover and metal sounded like at the time. bad SST sound not limited to Black Flag of course.

no way, Damaged sounds amazing to me... the rest, sure, although "Fix Me" has a real punch that almost nothing else had in early 1978, it's more of a stab than a roar though

i like the nervous breakdown ep. its like budget stooges punk. that middle class EP was crazier sounding though. for 1978. i mean i do like the early BF its just that everything around them sounded way better to me. even damaged i don't love. sounds muddy or something.

Write-in vote for Minuteflag

Not really

IMHO Black Flag with Dez on vox is theeee apotheosis of LA punk.... but My First Bells cassette only comp is god-tier.

So basically:
Everything Goes Black LP2 vs. My First Bells*

*https://www.discogs.com/release/1043613-Minutemen-My-First-Bells-1980-83

eek, everything WENT black

'In my Head' is p good ('Drive nkibg and Driving especially). Gets me thinking of a Billy Idol-Swans hybrid.

They shouldn't have split, just carried on for another 30 years at a quarter of the speed of Damaged. Probably would've stumbled on a big hit.

OK, Double Nickels has aged the best out of this bunch, but I spent more hours listening to those Black Flag albums and I can’t just sweep them under the carpet. I also agree that Flag seemed to be on the verge of “something” when they split. They even got a glowing write up in the Sunday NY Times in ‘86 (I realize that’s outside of the time frame of the poll options).

Minutemen, of course. “The Punch Line” is my favourite album, full stop. It’s coming with me to the desert island with Up on the Sun and I don’t know what else, I only know those for sure.

I appreciate Black Flag, but they peaked when Dez was the singer. Those cuts on Everything Went Black are the best they ever sounded on record.

pre-Rollins Black Flag vs. Minor Threat

yeah sorry I meant the garbage SST re-pressings to be clear, the OGs are fine and I am firmly in the "Spot did what the bands wanted" camp

I know the production is so bad thing will never go away but the music is so fkn good despite this. We just can't stop talking about the miracles from this label

Now that CD storage capacity has increased to the 82-minute mark (and possibly beyond) it should be possible to reissue this on CD with all the tracks from the vinyl edition. Never gonna happen, but it could...

It's really fucking sad that the original SST CD for nearly all of that label's music is possibly the best extant master we have for those recordings, thanks to Ginn's non-existant archiving practices.

Having said that, since Double Nickels was never issued in its entirety on CD, what would be the new vinyl edition's source for the missing material? If it's a needle-drop of the shitty old SST pressing, that would especially suck.

(correction, per sleeve the SST re-pressings are crap, the OG's are fine...but who knows if they'd use good copies of the OG's if they had to use vinyl as a source.)

Well, the Insta video that Golden Mastering shared a couple of years ago showed what looked like tape boxes. Who knows what generation they were, if there were even tapes in them? Anyway, the re-pressings I have sound fine to my ears; my biggest quibble is the absence of the locked-groove tracks and some of the car jams.

the absence of the locked-groove tracks and some of the car jams.

wait what?!?

Don’t hold me to this for the exact details, but LP1 doesn’t have the car jam on side two, and it’s missing the locked grooves. LP2 is missing the car jams on both sides but at least has the “Three Car Dance” locked groove.

(That would be “Love Dance” into “Three Car Jam”. Thanks, brain.)

Every time this thread is bumped I hope it’s black flag discussion. Don’t the minutemen have their own thread ?

ILM doesn't seem to *do* Black Flag

Why is that

I don't know.

But here's another poll to fight over

Hüsker Dü - Land Speed Record/Everything Falls Apart/Zen Arcade vs Descendents - Milo Goes To College/I Don't Want To Grow Up/Enjoy

slsk users, there are folks out there with lossless copies of Double Nickels taken from pristine vinyl copies of the original SST release. They are complete and to my (admittedly older) ears they sound better than any of the subsequent CD reissues.

as someone who owns one of those vinyl copies, I agree

Regarding the car jams; I picked up the most recent pressing of Double Nickels just last month. Side 1 starts with a car jam, no car jams on side 2, side 3 starts with a car jam and ends on a car jam with locked groove, side 4 starts with a car jam and ends on the three car jam and runs into the dead wax where my auto lift kicks in.
As far as I can tell this is the same as the OG pressing. It's the same as the clear green vinyl my friend had in early 90s and same as any lossless OG rips I've heard from slsk.

Poll Results

it's a crime that it says this and not "ballot result" at the top of the thread.

What’s being polled next?
Could do early Big Black vs early Sonic Youth
Or Half Japanese vs. Daniel Johnston

Bongwater vs. Negativland

Gone vs Nig-Heist

Zoogz Rift vs Leaving Trains

Lawndale vs Tar Babies

Actually, EVOL / Sister vs You're Living All Over Me / Bug might be good.

I've been trying to think of someone to run against early sonic youth that wasnt in the previous polls.

Im open to suggestions. Doesn't have to be on SST because I've tried thinking of every combo in that regard

Das Damen?

Swans and Sonic Youth were considered of a piece up to Children of God and Sister, avant noise downtown 81'ers making their way in the rock world.

Ditto Live Skull but I wonder who'd win a poll between them and Sonic Youth?

Melvins?

xp I bought Bringing Home The Bait last year and the shop owner had written "Better than anything Sonic Youth ever did" on the price sticker, so probably depends on if he's on ilx

Live Skull vs DUSTdevils vs. Ut vs Band Of Susans?

These Immortal Souls vs. Divine Horsemen for later SST?

Non-Flag Ginn poll: Gone vs October Faction vs Mojack vs solo vs Hor vs Confront James vs El Bad vs Jambang vs Good For You

haha, how to even chose?

haha, how to even chose?

As with Billy Joel songs, whichever one you're not being forced to listen to at that moment is the best.

early Melvins is a good one. Was thinking doing them vs early Soundgarden. Though I could just do Soundgarden vs AIC or even Pearl Jam. But I think that keeping it to non mega selling is more fun.

But I want to do Sonic Youth first and I'm just gonna run them vs Swans I think.

Sonic Youth - Sonic Youth/Confusion Is Sex/ Sonic-Death Sonic-Youth Live vs Swans - Filth/Cop/Greed

Non-Flag Ginn poll: Gone vs October Faction vs Mojack vs solo vs Hor vs Confront James vs El Bad vs Jambang vs Good For You

the first October Faction album's ok so them I guess. don't like Gone and never heard any of the rest and have no pressing intention to change that

October Faction vs Always August

Angst vs Fear

steve fisk vs elliott sharp vs henry kaiser vs whatever other sst art rock weird dudes i'm forgetting right now

i think Glenn Phillips Band – Elevator was the first album i bought blind purely on the strength of the SST logo on the back and boy oh boy was i confused

i mean...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIrd3xebcgo

xxp No Man, Universal Congress Of

ah that no man record was great! strange but great!

i think this one is beautiful if you like wistful eno-esque moodscapes, solo at the end is very st elmos fire:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybKpKaFD-t4

When the latest run of polls is over I may run a "No Age - A Compilation of SST Instrumental Music" one, just try and stop me. A week's delay gives everyone a chance to get to know the material!

A week's delay gives everyone a chance to get to know the material!

...and run far away!

[steve fisk vs elliott sharp vs henry kaiser vs whatever other sst art rock weird dudes i’m forgetting right now]

That weird Henry Kaiser/Zoogz Rift nexus gave us Scott Colby’s Slide of Hand, which is a real gem.

(Eh, did the italics tags wrong there, I’m not quite awake yet.)

Bazooka was really great live, saw them open for fIREHOSE. The trio came back up to play ‘red and the Black’ to close the show.