Greetings on this fine Election Day here in our fair city of Pittsburgh. My polling place is two doors from my house, so hopefully I’ll be able to make it to my parents’ house in WV quickly for dinner after I pull my levers, but enough about that. It’s the beginning of a new month here at bigoleschleep.com and I think we all know what that means.

On October 10th, I posted a second entry that asked if you could be in one of your favorite bands, making no decisions but coasting along for the ride through all said band’s trials and tribulations, who would you choose?

1) VELVET UNDERGROUND

Since you’ve moved up from popping speed in a filthy New York City park to shooting speed in the Factory with a bunch of whacked-out “superstars” and fixtures someone spray-painted silver for no reason, it’s time to go for the gold and get that big name producer for your record that is so new and so cool and so hip and going to change the world. Oh wait, it’s Andy Warhol and he doesn’t do anything. He foists an Austrian junkie dickpig on you to draw some attention to the group and after she’s done fucking everybody in the band and Bob Dylan and singing a couple good tunes, you wise up and ditch the wimp and the chanteuse and get a real producer to make White Light/White Heat. Now you’re destroying the world with electric screaming noise and hard fucking and screeching amps and torrid vignettes that the hippies can’t handle. However, Lou Reed is in your band and his colossal jerk-off attitude saps most of the fun out of things, culminating with John Cale leaving before your third LP comes out. While he goes on to produce the first Stooges album, you’re purged by your label because you liked doing drugs, Lou Reed bolts during the making of Loaded, and recently acquired Doug Yule somehow has to hold it all together. Soon you’re busted and dropped and Lou makes Metal Machine Music and the Raven and proclaims “I AM NEW YORK CITY, I AM ROCK N’ ROLL”, but you know that he actually just asks people to shit in his mouth at parties after he’s spiked a vein or two in the restroom. You reunite in 1993, but soon Sterling Morrison’s dead and Moe Tucker is busy being a mom. You influenced some of the best bands of all-time with your records: Spacemen 3, Cheater Slicks, etc.; however, you also helped bands like Interpol become enormous and have made it a priority for everyone in New York City to dress like you even though they moved there from San Jose two years ago to be a “conceptual artist”. So thanks a lot, asshole.

2) CRIME

Releasing the first West Coast punk 7″ in 1976 set the stage for how awesome your band was going to become. You have the best gimmick in punk’s history, great artwork, fliers, a sneer that would match the statue of Ozymandias, tunes to back it up, and distorted, fuzzed-out recordings that were honed in a run-down pool hall in San Francisco. You immediately tell everyone to fuck off and the hippie punks freak out, then you refuse to open for the fucking Sex Pistols at Winterland and keep Seymour Stein waiting for hours to see you play, which results in you never really doing much of anything. Since you’ve only put out two real EP’s so far, naturally you have to have multiple lineup changes since almost everyone is so scagged out that they can barely stand. You make waves by playing at San Quentin, but pretty soon everyone (including your drummer/manager, who eventually bails) is pissed and you put out the Maserati/Gangster Funk 7″ and it fucking sucks. Since it’s time to hang it up, you go dormant till you get booted a few times, then Swami drops a sweet reissue that reignites some interest from the uninitiated. The only problem is you’re about 55 years old and bald and no longer look that cool in the cop threads. You play live a few times in the 2000’s with two original members and hit a few festivals, then put out another (?) record. Blather, rinse, repeat.

3) THE STOOGES

You’re the precursor to Black Flag for Cro-Magnon Midwestern American morons in the 60’s and early 70’s: a grinding, seething ball of fury and sexual repression that blasted a copious amount of spunk all over the face of the recording industry. But no one really seems to notice. Your manager Danny Fields is introducing you to all the “cool people”, as Johnny Ramone put it (he did the same for the Ramones a few years later and that got them nowhere as well), but no one is going to help you since you’re gangly longhairs pounding booze, buying guns, huffing up huge rocks of heroin, and not paying any taxes. Ron Asheton is wearing swastikas before it was cool, and you move out to LA where all your records flop and you can’t tour because everyone except Ron is junked out, so you break up. Now, you’re broke, dropped, and ugly. Since David Bowie and Iggy ended up sucking each other’s cocks at some point, the band was back with money behind it, but now Iggy is given top of the marquee, everyone moves to England, and ol’ Ron has to move to the bass (a travesty in itself) because Dave Alexander was fired for being too drunk to play properly before he dies in ‘75. Now James Williamson adds a huge dose of wankery to Raw Power, the Bowie/Iggy mix is flat, no one buys THIS record either, and you flounder until someone records bikers almost killing you at your last show and it sells 100,000 copies. Iggy realizes that after recording with shitstains like Sum 41 that his career has been a joke without you and you reunite to play Fun House over and over at festivals and make fucking BANK. Your new album in the 21st century sucks and everyone is embarrassed for you, but at least Mike Watt’s in the band and it’s so easy to let the rest of the OG’s turn up and play those riffs loud and still be cool, so a band that looks like a bunch of drunken uncles (and I am including Mike Watt) are still one of the best live bands in the world, probably. No one knows why you play “Now I Wanna Be Your Dog” twice.

4) ANGRY SAMOANS

Considering your previous band was fucking VOM with Richard Meltzer which was unbelievable in itself, it’s no small wonder that you ended up putting out two of the best 12″ punk records of any year/subgenre/location ever with Inside My Brain and Back From Samoa. Since your band is politically incorrect but actually intelligent, you’re pissed that you’re misunderstood because all you’re doing is joking. However, when it comes to yutzes like LA punk DJ Rodney Bingenheimer, it’s no joke. You call him out and get blackballed in the 80’s and pretty soon you can’t play anywhere. Your records get weirder and people stop caring. You were the only band on this list today not doing insanely hard drugs, so everyone makes it out alive and relatively successful, meaning that they can either fall back on one of their numerous degrees (…) or you can at least be able to con an A&R job that pays the bills. However, almost all the founding members hate Metal Mike the singer for being a complete wack-job, so he takes the show out on the road singing the old hits and rambling about Britney Spears. Gregg Turner is doing Calc II equations somewhere and not interested. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to either go on the road in California and be a joke or get a life and leave a band that was actually doing something twenty years ago. Tough call.

5) CRAZY HORSE

After Neil Young cherrypicks you and yours out of a borderline pariah/caveman outfit called the Rockets, you’re in the pink. You get to help Neil Young play real rock n’ roll the way he does best and are the backbone of his live show and some of his greatest records. Everyone thinks he’s crazy since you guys are always baked on California green and blitzed on tequila all day long, but you’re the band he sounds best with. However, things aren’t all sunshine and arena tours. Neil’s wildly unpredictable and withdrawn at times, and he can leave the band at the drop of a hat and play with Nashville guys or Rick James or go tour with bloated coke whales like CSNY for what amounts to millions of dollars in our money today. And when he does that, you’re left holding the bag and no one cares about you on your own. Add to this the fact that your extremely soulful and sensitive lead guitar player Danny Whitten bought the farm in 1972 due to his heroin OD triggered by his depression over being fired by NY. Things pick up whenever Neil rolls back into town, and you grab a new guitarist named Poncho who shows up with enough drugs for everyone to get stoked and tries to make things run as smoothly as possible. Your band ceases to record on its own and no one really notices, but everyone learns that they need a sidegig so they don’t get bored. You do have to hang with Pearl Jam when grunge picks up what you were doing in 1975, but it could be worse. You could be Danny Whitten.

Have we learned anything so far? For starters: DON’T DO HEROIN. I still fully endorse telling DJ’s they’re pieces of shit, though.

And the winner for this month:

THE MUMMIES!

Obviously, you’re the coolest and punkest band of all time. Punk’s as stagnant as can be in 1988, and everyone’s too serious for their own good, so why not start a band where no one gives a fuck and rule number one is FUN. You start mining the 45 racks and playing Back From the Grave HITS, and no one can handle the fact that 80% of your songs are basically Sonics covers with originals that no other band can touch. Not only do you take the best band photos of all time, but you actually work murdering metalheads into your photo collages. Crashing parades while cruising in an old ambulance with your name painted on the side and loudspeakers mounted to it solidifies your position as madmen who deserve mad props for NOT GIVIN’ A FUCK. You tell Sub Pop to fuck off after they start sniffing around looking for a single. You hate everyone and let them know it. Everyone bootlegs you including Crypt, Sympathy, and you could care less because you weren’t making any money anyways, but you’re plied with free booze and you start eating legs of lamb the size of a tree trunk in public for no reason. At least two of your singles have naked women on them. You champion Supercharger on the back of your debut LP, despite the fact you can secretly play circles around most anybody. 60’s recording techniques make your records sound like garbage to squares and a guaranteed boozed-up fuck party for people who get it. Your singles collection LP on Estrus is just you playing your own 45’s on your stereo and taping it. You tour America and Europe, blow everyone’s mind, help kickstart the 90’s garage-punk revival, break up, then go on tour in Europe again and live the dream for a free vacation. And to top it all off, barely anyone knows you were in a surf band the whole time and still think Greg Lowery had something to do with it. Let’s hear it for the Mummies FUCKIN’ KILLIN’ IT.