UNREST reunion -- holy moly!

Tickets for the event will go on sale this Friday, November 12, 2004.
Available through ticketmaster.com [800-551-7328] or at the Black Cat box-office
[202-667-7960, no service charge] between 8:00pm and midnight [cash only].
The first 100 attendees each night will receive a complimentary copy of the
Teenbeat 20th commemorative audio compact disc.

TEENBEAT 20th
February 24 and 25, 2005
all-ages
$12/per night

Black Cat Nightclub,
1811 14th St. NW (between 'S' and 'T' Sts.),
Washington, D.C.
www.blackcatdc.com

February 24, 2005 (Thursday)
UNREST (reunion performance)
EGGS (reunion)
+/- (PLUS/MINUS)
TRUE LOVE ALWAYS
THE FONTAINE TOUPS
JONNY COHEN
8pm sharp

February 25, 2005 (Friday)
TUSCADERO (reunion)
VERSUS (reunion)
FLIN FLON
ADEN
HOT PURSUIT
hollAnd
9pm sharp

im just really excited about this unrest reunion!

i'd love to see a reunited unrest. is it the 'classic' robinson/cross/krauth lineup then?

i thought bridget was still serving times in a correctional facility...?

(ps why was bridget in jail?)

All this talk about reunions reminded me that there was a benefit concert for Bridget to help pay her legal costs a while back - apparently, Velocity Girl did a reunion show!

Any word on the TeenBeat Library (supposedly an upcoming 10 CD collection)?

imperial ffrr could probably use a remaster.

On the other hand, YES!!! Soon it is going to rain...high speed jangly guitar strumming!

But: There's absolutely no way I can see it. Baby due within a week or two of that weekend. Other coast.

Deep breath.

[i kid.]

By god, what a horrible decade that was. Almost as bad as this one is.

and, hey, sometimes i do think of imperial as the Greatest Album Ever Made (for me to listen to). why not?

I'm across the country, so it's a moot point for me, though.

They're wusses, sure...but at least they MOVE. Limp-wristedness is actually necessary to strum that quickly.

It's like 70-something in New Orleans right now.

*strum* "You..." *strum* "were..." *strum* "the very first one..."

- baby blue cardigan
- white striped shirt
- jeans
- silver shoes with a buckle

i look like this:
http://photos4.flickr.com/5016824_dd66d4842b.jpg

Great show last night though the appeal of Eggs continues to elude me. I'll post a both-nights thing tomorrow morning (like anyone cares) but I will say that it "Make Out Club" got the club pretty crunk for DC (ie a couple people moving from side to side or nodding their heads) and that Phil Krauth is fucking amazing.

also, oh my god. that show was so awesome. i dont know, adam - eggs was pretty excellent, IMO. i wish unrest had played for 10 more minutes, but whatever. great show. phil krauth indeed pwns, but no more than mark and bridget. they are all fantastic players with excellent distinctive styles, and the songwriting is some of the best pop-rock songwriting i can think of. definitely one of my favorite bands, and one of my better concerts.

Bridget's vocals sounded great but were mixed kind of low--but you're right, they played fantastically, especially considering the first-show-in-a-million-years thing. I was a little surprised at how short their set was but I figure they just played like 10 of the best songs ever written fucking beautifully, what more can I ask for?

+/- seem to have gotten a lot better since their first record.

True Love Always are my girlfriend's favorite band and it was her first time seeing them so it was a blast.

I'm a big Versus fan so I liked the Fontaine Toups, bought their record etc. Sounds like Versus with Fontaine singing all time, yay!

Johnny Cohen is Johnny Cohen. I don't get it.

Peter--did you get the Imperial reissue? I just listened to the first couple tracks and it sounds really good. "Imperial" especially. Also, you gonna be there tonight?

im not going tonight - not too much interest in any of the bands. itd be cool to see flon flon, but mostly, eggs and unrest were the thing for me.

setlist?

Suki
Imperial
...Blushing
The "back when I was 20" song that Bridget sings the name of which I can't remember
Make Out Club
June
Cath Carroll
So Sick

... and a couple others. It was the end of a very long and hazy night.

i know im missing one or maybe two, but "so sick" is not one of them. that was the one i was most upset about them not playing...

what an incredible show. one night is not enough.

Some light pogoing no less.

I'm very glad that I caught this show, and that I met Alex and his lady companion. However, I still dislike True Love Always, even if they weren't as annoying as they were three years ago.

a couple other photographs can be found here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/theoreticalgirl/tags/unrest/

i didnt take many because a) i wanted to watch the band and b) there were eight billion other people with cameras in my way. but im happy with the scant images i took.

They were all very modest, playing the show like it wasn't a big event, and not even mentioning the reunion aspect of it. Mark even said, toward the end, something like "We're Unrest. You can buy CDs and t-shirts at the back" very matter-of-factly. Needless to say, it was an amazing (and yes - too short!) show.

But nobody has mentioned the other utterly mind-blowing set of the anniversary, and that was VERSUS playing the entirety of The Stars Are Insane in order. MY GOD. They fucking tore the place apart. Seriously - that good.

Flin Flon were in good form, although you could tell when Mark or Nattles would make a little mistake because they'd make some insanely goofy facial expression. I could've watched Flin Flon play another hour or so, too. Mark said that a new FF album should be coming out this year. I would've gone nuts if they had played "Jumpers" or "Chicoutimi" (no such luck) but the whole set was solid - highlights were "Black Bear," "Swift Current," "Upper Ferry"...

I dug the Eggs set, and it ended with "A Pit with Spikes" complete with the mid-song funk-out section. Tuscadero were fun - the crowd really got into 'em - and I admit that I have a soft spot for "Nancy Drew" and "Leather Idol." Their next-to-last song was a cover of "Centerfold" (J. Geils Band), and they finished with "Angel in a Half Shirt." I watched True Love Always from afar, but they played a good set, with "Mediterranean," "September" (Earth, Wind, and Fire cover) and "Sunshine" with Evelyn duetting on vocals.

Before or after Versus, Butch Willis stepped onstage to sing, unaccompanied, while shaking in a really creepy manner (nervous tic? D.T.s?). The between-band banter from the emcees was pretty groan-worthy. (Example joke: "Ten years ago, 'tsunami relief' meant when Jenny Toomey broke a guitar string"). And, inexplicably, Allison from Bratmobile stepped onstage to gripe about never being invited to a TeenBeat banquet.

So, do we need to wait another 10 years for another Unrest show?

i missed "june" which im a bit sad about but, oh well.

By Richard Harrington
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, February 18, 2005; Page WE05

MARK ROBINSON is checking in from Boston, where he's lived the past five years, designing book covers for Houghton Mifflin. But next week, Robinson will be back in the town he helped put on the indie-rock map as his Teenbeat Records celebrates its 20th anniversary over the course of three nights: Wednesday at Arlington's Galaxy Hut (2711 Wilson Blvd.; 703-525-8646), and Thursday and Feb. 25 at the Black Cat (1811 14th St. NW; 202-667-7960). The shows will feature acts from Teenbeat's current roster as well as reunions of several of its best-known bands.

The Galaxy Hut show will occur literally to the day Robinson and four like-minded mates at Arlington's Wakefield High School released a compilation cassette, "Extremism in the Defense of Liberty Is No Vice." The title was lifted from a famous Barry Goldwater speech, but the contents consisted of offerings from Unrest (Robinson, Phil Krauth and Tim Moran), Thinking Boys (Ian Zack and Moran), Jungle George & the Plague (featuring Andrew Beaujon), Fred and Ginger (Robinson and Beaujon) and England's Section 25 (a couple of tracks bootlegged from a 9:30 club performance).

The cassette that those Wakefield boys sold to their peers during lunch period launched a label whose catalogue now includes more than 300 cassettes, vinyl records and CDs, many sporting covers and designs by Robinson. In fact, that's how he ended up at Houghton Mifflin, despite never having taken any graphic arts classes, or even having finished college.

"College was cramping my style because I would get all these offers to do shows, so I left for an education in rock 'n' roll," says Robinson, referring to Unrest's glory days in the late '80s and early '90s, when Spin magazine insisted "a band this creative, talented and bold cannot be ignored for much longer," a statement that the mainstream disproved even as Unrest became as much of an indie icon as its label.

The Teenbeat celebration kicks off with a free show at Galaxy Hut featuring Tracy Shedd, Bossanova, Alice Despard, Triple M Threat, Pavlov Gregoravich, Larry Crane (formerly of Vomit Launch, the label's first non-local release in 1989) and Robinson, with members of Unrest spinning old favorites between sets. The action then moves to the Black Cat for reunions by Unrest, the Beaujon-fronted Eggs, Tuscadero and Versus, along with performances by Aden, Jonny Cohen, the Fontaine Toups, hollAnd,Hot Pursuit, +/-, True Love Always and Robinson's current band, Flin Flon. The first 100 attendees each night at the Black Cat will get a free copy of the Teenbeat 20th anniversary commemorative CD.

They'll be shipped from Chicago's Carrot Top Distribution, where most of Teenbeat's stock sits these days. Before, it occupied much of the space in an unassuming green bungalow in Arlington that for much of the '90s served as world headquarters for Teenbeat.

A lifelong obsession with records and music -- Robinson started playing guitar at age 13 -- could have taken a wrong turn at Wakefield, where the first band he played in aped Van Halen and Rush.

"I wasn't really into either of those bands, I was more of a Queen/Kiss kinda guy, not to mention the punk stuff I was into," Robinson says. "Then we needed a drummer and there was a guy in my English class who was in the marching band, and that turned out to be Phil. And it kind of morphed from there into Unrest, which in its early incarnation was really influenced by the D.C. hardcore stuff. But we were also really into [prog rockers] King Crimson and Henry Cow [the band took its name from the title of a Henry Cow album.] We didn't really have songs: We would show up at practice and just improv for three hours in somebody's basement. It was punk art rock."

At local hardcore shows in the early '80s, the budding musicians noticed that bands were dubbing their own cassettes and selling them. "So we would tape our practices and come up with a record sleeve for it, and there would be one copy and someone would take it home and borrow it for a few days, like a library. At some point we decided we were going to dub more than one copy, and we sold them at school for a dollar. We just took any money we got from that and kept going."

The "Extremism" cassette was followed by the first "Unrest!" cassette and 500 copies of the band's first seven-inch vinyl release, as well as cassettes from other Arlington bands such as Clarence, Jungle George, and William and Vivian. According to Robinson, "at first it was just kids from Wakefield. A few years later we were putting out stuff by bands from California and New York, and then five years after that, we were primarily putting out records from the D.C. area."

And graduating to vinyl albums, with a unique approach: Unrest's 1987 vinyl debut was pressed in an edition of 1,000, each with a cover hand-decorated by friends, each with its own title. It's listed in the Teenbeat discography as "Tink of S.E." (a 1993 reissue on Matador carries a much more interesting title that, for tastes reasons, we cannot share).

"There was a distributor who fell in love with it and kept ordering more and more, and it was like, 'Wow, we have kind of a hit record on our hands!' It sold only 1,000 copies, but for us that was pretty big and got us some sort of national attention."

Teenbeat was clearly inspired by Washington's Dischord label, which had started five years earlier but was at the time primarily punk-focused. Teenbeat would provide an outlet for a wider range of eclectic, indie-pop bands, modeling itself along the lines of England's Factory and 4AD labels, and also emulating those labels' penchant for artful, often lavish releases. Smart packaging and marketing would turn Teenbeat into one of the highest-profile independent labels of the past two decades, generating critical acclaim for releases by local acts such as Unrest, Eggs, Tuscadero and Versus and such national acts as Gastr del Sol and Luna. It has such a strong brand identity that in 2002, a tribute album featured 23 acts paying low-fi homage to their favorite Teenbeat songs. Robinson himself covered a Phil Krauth song and welcomed the CD into the Teenbeat catalogue (Teenbeat 344). A second tribute album is in the works.

At its peak in the mid-'90s, Teenbeat had 20 bands on its roster (it now has about a dozen). The best known would be Unrest, which Robinson, Krauth and Moran formed as Wakefield freshmen in 1982. A decade later, former Velocity Girl Bridget Cross joined the band just as they released "Imperial f.f.r.r.," which Spin called one of the best albums of 1992. Unrest's final album was 1993's "Perfect Teeth," and they broke up a year later that same year, with Krauth embarking on a solo career and Robinson and Cross continuing in the short-lived Air Miami. Robinson also played in Grenadine, a collaboration with Tsunami's Jenny Toomey (whose Simple Machines label would become another Washington institution) and recorded several solo albums.

To coincide with the anniversary events, Teenbeat will release a deluxe reissue of "Imperial f.f.r.r." ( for "full frequency range recording"), adding nine demos, remixes and alternate versions to the album's original 11 tracks. Robinson says that "Imperial" is probably the label's best seller and most famous release, and that a reissue has "been in the works a long time." It was released jointly with 4AD in Europe, and with the Number 6 label through Caroline here. "From what I gather it sold a lot, but we didn't get any royalties from it."

As for the reunion -- this will be Unrest's first show in 11 years -- Robinson jokes that "we're going to have grueling rehearsals. Actually the Unrest style is we never had rehearsals. When we did one of our last albums, I don't think we played the songs more than twice before going into the studio and recording it. This time I think we're going to have to practice a little more."

Robinson says he's particularly excited about the reunions of Eggs (who last played together a decade ago) and Tuscadero, who haven't played since 1999. Teenbeat's newest acts include hollAnd (audio artist Trevor Kampmann, who has recorded many of the label's acts); the Fontaine Toups, who will appear with Toups's old group Versus, two of whose former members, guitarist James Baluyut and drummer Patrick Ramos, are now +/-, mixing indie-rock and laptop pop; and the Sisterhood of Convoluted Thinkers, "which is Rob Christiansen from Eggs. It really is incestuous," Robinson admits.

Sometimes, it's something more: Another band playing is Hot Pursuit, which includes Evelyn Hurley, Mrs. Robinson and the mother of their two sons, and former lead singer of Teenbeat group Blast Off Country Style; also in the band is Margaret McCartney from Tuscadero and drummer/art curator Ginger Crockett.

Next week's events mark Teenbeat's 20th anniversary, but date back to 1990 at D.C. Space, a label showcase that grew out of what might be called the Teenies. That's the annual ongoing banquet at Arlington's Oriental Restaurant where Robinson hands out framed gold records -- well, they're spray-painted gold -- to bands that have had successful releases that year. Success being relative, say 500 copies sold vs. the RIAA's gold standard of 500,000 copies sold for a genuine gold record.

As Robinson explains, "we'd started the annual banquet dinner, and some of our bands had come down from New York and we wanted to have a show for them. After that it became an annual event." In true Teenbeat spirit, most of the proceeds from the $12 tickets to the Black Cat shows will fund airfare for faraway musicians to reunite with their old bands.

Monday, February 28, 2005; Page C10

Mark Robinson is hardly a teenager anymore, but he's still the curator of Teenbeat, the indie-rock label he founded as an Arlington high schooler in 1985. Robinson lives in Boston these days, yet Washington is where he and numerous other Teenbeat veterans assembled for a series of gigs marking the label's 20th anniversary. The band that started it all, Robinson's Unrest, reunited to headline the first of two shows at the Black Cat. Although the trio split a decade ago, it (and five other Teenbeat acts) managed to sell out the club Thursday night.

The version of Unrest that performed was its final incarnation, with Bridget Cross on bass, and the band emphasized material from that period. In its early days, Unrest was chaotically eclectic, but it settled into a style that mixed '80s British indie-pop with the modal locomotion of the Velvet Underground and various Krautrock outfits. That's the formula it followed at the Black Cat, ranging from the hushed "Imperial" to the churning "Cath Carroll." The music wasn't complex, but it required both precision and vigor, which Robinson, Cross and drummer Phil Krauth supplied with no apparent strain. From the far side of adolescence, Unrest still sounded passionate about rhythm, noise and -- in Robinson's case -- girls.

Most other Teenbeat acts have tended to sound something like Unrest, and that was certainly the case with the two that preceded the headliner Thursday evening. Eggs, which also reunited for the occasion, had a wider range of timbres, with congas, keyboards and trombone jostling the scratchy guitars. If their collage of styles was unpredictable from moment to moment, in its entirety it was not unfamiliar. Eggs were preceded by Plus/Minus, whose blend of loungy rhythms and noisy guitar neatly exemplified the grown-up Teenbeat sound.

-- Mark Jenkins

Monday, February 28, 2005; Page C10

Arlington-born Teenbeat Records is still a going concern, but its best-known acts are all defunct. So each of the Black Cat concerts marking the label's 20th anniversary was headlined by two bands that reunited especially for the occasion. On Friday, the second of the Cat shows, the top attractions were D.C.'s Tuscadero, in its time probably Teenbeat's most-loved band, and New York's Versus.

Inevitably, Tuscadero played such early favorites as "Mount Pleasant" and "Dime a Dozen," bouncy pop-punk ditties with appealingly bratty attitude.

Yet the quartet favored the heavier, less playful sound of its later work, which sometimes overpowered the material's bubblegum appeal. As Melissa Ferris noted of "Nancy Drew," such tunes were written when she and fellow singer-guitarist Margaret McCartney were in their early twenties. Retaining their barely post-teen worldview more than a decade later is a tricky proposition, one that Tuscadero didn't quite manage in a set that, while tight and energetic, lacked something of the old spark.

Versus's style, derived from the likes of Television and Mission of Burma, was less distinctive, but has held up well. Playing one of the Teenbeat self-tribute's most rock-oriented sets, the quartet showed a command of drama, noise and dynamics. Versus pitted lyrical passages against emphatic crescendos, mirroring the contrast between guitarist Richard Baluyut's tenor and bassist Fontaine Toups's soprano.

Also on the bill were Flin Flon, Teenbeat founder Mark Robinson's current band, and Aden, a lounge-rock quartet with a bit of a twang. Flin Flon's short set offered the same sort of vamps that Robinson has purveyed for years, albeit with more emphasis on the bass. Aden boasted some of the evening's most accomplished songwriting, but its performance sounded tentative.

-- Mark Jenkins

This is from a Slate online chat about a series on selective enforcement of laws:

Washington: Several years ago the boyfriend of a friend of mine stabbed someone. She fled the scene and was arrested and charged with literally seven crimes. After she agreed to be a witness and paid for a high-powered lawyer, all but one charge was dropped and she was convicted with a suspended sentence because of time served in lockup. I found her story profoundly disturbing because the charges weren't real and wouldn't have stood up in court, but they were levied against her as a negotiating tool for her to put her boyfriend away. I mean, the guy was guilty so she needed to testify, but it wasn't a murder mystery novel where the character let introspection guide her to justice—she was jailed, couldn't work, and her name was splashed across the newspapers.

I'm sure this sort of thing has happened to more than a few people, but the location on that one was a little ... "OMG your friend is Bridget Cross and claim my $5."

hearing reunion rumblings

Maybe Its Reno album was already a kinda/sorta reunion (and was great!)