Great Rock From Ocean City, MD

Hey, I pledge to post more! — and isn’t DJ Suiciety supposed to be writing? — DJ, Where are you?? Anyway, I was listening to Ocean 98 (98.1FM, Ocean City, MD) yesterday while cleaning my house because I couldn’t find my iPod (iPlopper — that’s his name) and I heard a really good song by a band called The Lower Class Citizens – Then I heard that they play in OC all the time.. and I think, “No way is this band local.” So I head over to the google and find out that they are indeed from Ocean City, MD and that they are unsigned.. which is a really big bummer for me, because these guys rock hard. Are any good bands getting signed lately?? Well, check them out on their myspace http://www.myspace.com/lowerclasscitizensmusic, if you’re into quasi 70’s hard rock, the songs I’ve heard have awesome production, and these guys are just too good.. and for that I hate them!! — Just kidding, but, I will admit to a little jealousy, these guys are the real deal. Check them out.

J

Young Fresh Fellows, Scott McCoughey, R.E.M. “Accelerate” B-Sides, Giving away free CDs to Peter Buck, and Why is my “This One’s For the Ladies” CD actually “Totally Lost?” and The History of the Universe.

Okay this might sound crazy… but, I was on Amazon.com today buying things (not that part) — The new Tom Petty project Mudclutch and a CD by the Young Fresh Fellows and a romance novel for my girlfriend.. guess I’m not romantic enough.. and I was looking through my Young Fresh FellowsCDs that I’ve ripped into my i-Tunes and it said that I had one called “Totally Lost” — I thought.. “I don’t remember buying that CD.” So I go and look through my Young Fresh Fellows CDs and notice that I do not own “Totally Lost” — I own all the Minus 5 stuff, but only “Electric Bird Digest”, “Because We Hate You”, “It’s Low Beat Time” and “This One’s For The Ladies”.

So I pop in my “This One’s For The Ladies” CD and notice that i-Tunes reads it as “Totally Lost” — and so I check out the songs compared to the snippets in the i-Tunes store and, guess what, the CD pressed on my “This One’s For The Ladies” CD is actually their 1988 CD “Totally Lost” — It’s the packaging, CD Art, and cover art for “This One’s For The Ladies” but the actual songs are from “Totally Lost” — so I thought.. “What the hell?” — I guess it got pressed wrong.. I decided to blog about it cause I didn’t see anyone else writing about it.. actually I only did a quick search on the google and on wikipedia.. my source for all knowledge in this universe.. well, that and John Hodgeman’s book”The Areas of My Expertise “

The Cover Art For “Totally Lost” — A CD I didn’t buy..

The cover art for “This One’s For The Ladies” — a CD I thought I bought but, apparently did not.

So, now I’m faced with a dilema.. Do I buy the “This One’s For the Ladies” CD again and hope that it’s the correct songs.. or am I going to get “Totally Lost” again? — and do I buy “Totally Lost” just for the cover art? Heck.. maybe it’ll have the songs from the missing “..Ladies” CD… or, I suppose I could just buy the songs for “…Ladies” on iTunes and then I’ll have the correct songs, but just not the correct CDs..

This is so stupid.. so is my mispressed CD a collector’s item? is there some super Scott McCoughey fan out there that would buy it? I met Scott briefly after a Minus 5 show in Philadelphia.. just a fan waiting in the throngs (is that a word?) — I wish I would’ve known about it then.. I would have asked him. I actually met Peter Buck from R.E.M. for a second as well… I gave him a CD of my band at the time… for some reason he looked really pissed at me when I did that.. I didn’t want anything off him, like “hey get me signed to WB, Buck… come on” — It was sorta a bummer though, because Peter was my first all-time guitar hero… (isn’t that some new fangled video game? I wonder if he’s in it?) Actually, he seemed sorta drunk.. but, I’m not really sure. I might be saying that just so I don’t feel bad about him not paying attention to me.

in related news.. I picked up the latest Q magazine with R.E.M. on the cover because it came with a free CD the “R.E.M. Jukebox” with 15 “Essential tracks hand-picked by Micheal Stipe, Peter Buck and Mike Mills” — I always buy those magazines with those free CDs, I love them.. I think I wrote a blog about the Neil Young one a while back. Compared to the unCut R.E.M. hand-picked “Strange Currencies” V/A cd from a while back, this one kills that one.. The best and most humorous thing about “Jukebox” is that most of the songs that Peter picked are one’s that he was involved in. The Young Fresh Fellows, Steve Wynn, The Minus 5, The Venus 3 and Tuatara. Well, since this is a post about Scott McCaughey, the coolest thing is that it includes an unreleased song from the forthcoming YFF album called “Let The Good Times Crawl.” — I totally didn’t expect that when I picked up the magazine.. so it was a rare treat.. and in the magazine, Peter says something to the effect that “Scott McCaughey is the greatest songwriter in the history of the universe” — and I tend to agree.. as far as lyrics go, Scott is absolutely one of my all time favorite lyricists, and you can’t deny the inherent catchyness to all his songs and overall awesomeness. I discovered my love for McCaughey’s music a little late in his career, with the Minus 5 EP on Hello Recording Club back in like 1994. But, he’s a fantastic talent and has really inspired my own songwriting, especially when I get to serious with myself. He and Warren Zevon are two of the greatest lyricists in rock history. (and songwriters actually, for what it’s worth.)

Lastly, in my Scott McCaughey news, I was really pleased to see that Scott is credited as a co-songwriter on the new R.E.M. b-side “Airliner” which appears on the UK single of “Supernatural Superserious” (a Superseriously great song) and the DVD portion of the deluxe edition of the new R.E.M. CD in nice little mp3 files in a folder on the disc, and as a bonus track on the iTunes version of “Accelerate” — which, if i’m not mistaken, is maybe the first time someone has been given coauthorship of an R.E.M. track. I don’t know if that still stands as truth, but, I seem to remember there being some FLAC with Peter Holsapple (the dBs) where he left R.E.M. as the back up guy around 1991 (sometime after Out of Time and that first R.E.M. unplugged where Michael wore that fishing hat — and then I went out and bought one and wore it all through High School — thanks, Michael, you made me look like a creep from 1991-1995..) where Holsapple left because they wouldn’t allow him to contribute as a songwrite.. and I remember a quote something to the effect that “R.E.M. would always be Berry, Buck, Mills and Stipe as the primary songwriters” (ref: http://orangefox.svs.com/rem/crawled.html) — so the only reason I rehash this, is because it’s great to see Scott given credit as a songwriter and being allowed to contribute on of my favorite songwriters with one of, if not my total, favorite bands in the history of the universe. I just wish it wasn’t just an instrumental! but, it’s still a great song.