Minor Threat covering a song by the Monkeys:
turn it up at the start: The song starts with the guitar player learning the song (!), then saying “got it.”
You can hear one of ’em sniffiling, someone had a cold.
These guys were like 16 and 17 when they did this. Literally a “Minor” threat. lol.
At the end they say “Skip, we love you!” (Skip was their friend who paid for the studio time).
Have you heard the recording my old band Baby Opaque did of the Johnny Cash song “Long Black Veil”?
Ian MacKaye (singer from Minor Threat / Fugazi) sings backup on it.
Recorded in the same cramped studio as all the Minor Threat stuff. (Inner Ear Studio, in the basement in a residential house in a sleepy residential neighborhood in Arlington, VA.)
There are a couple interesting firsts in this song:
Was the first time Ian sang backup on a song from a band he wasn’t in. Also, when I interviewed Henry Rollins at his office for my book $30 Music School, I told him about this song.
Rollins was surprised, he’s good friends with Ian going back to high school, is an Ian MacKaye completest (as a record collector).
But he didn’t have this song. So I helped him download it on his computer. He said “That’s the first time I’ve ever downloaded a song.”
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I played in another band in Charlottesivve too, The Beef People. Listen here. First beef people song starts with an outtake. lol.
That was also recorded at Inner Ear Studio.
That studio cost 30 bucks an hour, before home recording was feasible, and most studios were 200 bucks an hour or more.
A lot of great punk rock was recorded there.
Beef People recorded and mixed a whole album in one day. I think the studio cost was 200 bucks, including tape.
Couldn’t just release to the Web then, it didn’t exist. My fiend John Beers pressed the vinyl for that album.