<![CDATA[Sounds Rad

<![CDATA[Sounds Rad - Rants]]>Thu, 02 Jul 2026 17:43:27 -0700Weebly<![CDATA[The Economics of a Record Label (Or: Why I Might Be Insane)]]>Thu, 02 Jul 2026 21:15:58 GMThttps://www.soundsradical.com/rants/the-economics-of-a-record-label-or-why-i-might-be-insanePeople hear "record label" and picture something glamorous. Leather jackets. Tour buses. Someone snorting something off something. Let us correct that image immediately: it's us, at 11pm, reconciling a distributor spreadsheet, trying to figure out why a 53-year-old pop-punk drummer with two teenage kids and a mortgage is owed $11.40 for a repress of a record he made when Clinton was president.

That's the business. Let's talk numbers.

Quick housekeeping before we dive in: I run the label. The bands are my partners, not my employees, not my content, not line items — partners, in the actual sense of the word. So when this reads as "we," that's not corporate royal-we nonsense. That's me and the bands, in it together, on the same 60/40 math, hoping the same twelve people show up.

First, Some Context: Nobody Involved Is Famous
This is not the Mötley Crüe economy. Nobody on this label is buying a yacht, crashing a yacht, or recording a Netflix docuseries about the yacht. These are bands who were active thirty years ago, in some cases genuinely great, occasionally influential, and now — like everyone else who was 22 in 1994 — they have families. Careers. Orthodontist appointments for their kids. One of them is, statistically, someone's soccer coach right now.

And we're not just guessing at this — we track the data. Order after order, statement after statement, the demographic comes back the same: our fanbase skews 35 to 65. This isn't a label selling to teenagers discovering a genre for the first time. It's a label selling to people who discovered it the first time around and never fully let go.

The fanbase has aged right alongside them, which means the addressable market for any given reissue is measured not in thousands, but in a number you could seat in a diner. A generous count on some of these releases nets you an audience in the dozens — and being honest with ourselves, a meaningful percentage of the original fans are no longer in a position to purchase anything, vinyl or otherwise, on account of being dead. This is a genre where "core demographic" and "actuarial table" are starting to overlap.

So no, we are not doing this for the money. We are doing this because someone has to, and also because we apparently enjoy financial self-harm.

The Royalty Model Isn't What You Think
I pay bands 60% of net profit — not gross, not "off the top," actual net, after every pressing cost, mechanical royalty, and design fee is recouped. And it's a hard, fast 60/40 for everyone. No sliding scale, no "well for you we'll do 65," no special treatment because your band was on a compilation once. Sixty to the band, forty to the label, across the board. If the record hasn't paid for itself, the band doesn't owe me anything; the shortfall just carries forward like a bar tab nobody's rushing to collect on. And dammit, one day I might actually see that 40% myself — between the cash lag and the recouping and the twelve-person addressable market, the label's cut is often more theoretical than actual. Given that we're often talking about pressing runs whose total lifetime audience could fit in a Honda Odyssey, "recouping" can take a while.

The Real Villain: Cash Lag
Nobody warns you about this part. You don't get paid when the record sells. You get paid months later, when the distributor finally settles up, in a statement that distinguishes between units "shipped" and units "paid" — two numbers that are not the same thing and are absolutely not additive. We learned this the hard way by adding them together like fools and briefly believing a 30-year-old pop-punk record was suddenly having a moment. It was not having a moment. It was an accounting error.

Meanwhile you've already paid for the pressing, the mechanicals, the packaging, all up front, for an audience that peaks at "everyone who still has a working turntable and a functioning cardiovascular system."

Credit where it's due, though: our distributor, ILD, pays out monthly like clockwork. We lLD so much. In an industry built on feels, delays, and the honor system, that's basically a miracle. I know because I've lived the alternative. A previous label I ran had a distributor who took four fucking years to pay us a single dime, and when I finally made enough noise about it, they gave me a thank you check and a kick in the dick. I then went to another distributor, Lumberjack, on the recommendation of a friend, only to have them go bankrupt and sell off all the product I'd given them. That's the industry standard, apparently: labels operate on trust with companies that have none. ILD just... sends the statement, sends the check, every month, no drama. It's the one part of this business that behaves like a normal business, and I genuinely don't know what I'd do without it.

Pressing Runs Are a Bet on Velocity, Not Volume
We modeled a reissue at 500 units financed at 9% interest, hoping the math would tell us something encouraging. It did not. It told us that interest alone would eat roughly 9% of the total pressing cost just for the crime of the inventory sitting around waiting for 50-somethings to remember it exists. Cut the sell-through time in half, the drag shrinks with it. Velocity and financing cost are the same lever, which is a fancy way of saying: press small, sell fast, don't let 400 copies of anything gather dust in a room you're also paying rent on.

So now the strategy is deliberately tiny. Press lean, generate a little FOMO, and let the remaining sliver of people who still care buy in before they, too, age out of the market in the most permanent way possible.

Consistency Is the Whole Point
Every release runs the same math: 60/40, net profit, no exceptions, no favorites. It would honestly be easier to negotiate case by case — offer a lower cut here, a sweetener there, depending on who's asking and how loud they are about it. We don't. Multiply a single flat rate across a back catalog spanning a decade and at least the accounting stays simple, even when the outcomes don't. Every release is still its own tiny, barely-profitable universe — it just runs on the same rules as all the others.

And for the record, on the rare occasion a run actually clears its costs and turns a profit, we're talking a label margin somewhere around 17.5%. Not 40%. Not the "40%" from the split, which is a share of net profit, not a margin on revenue — two very different numbers that get confused constantly. 17.5% is what's left after the pressing, the mechanicals, the packaging, and the freight all take their cut, on a good run, with a target we don't always hit. That's the actual economics of this business when everything goes right: single digits away from "barely worth doing," on a genre whose fans might not all make it to the next pressing.

Sometimes the Tape Itself Hates You
Not every reissue is just "press more of the same file." Some of these masters are thirty years old, recorded on a four-track in someone's basement by a guy who is now, statistically, an insurance adjuster. Tape degrades. Formats die. Sometimes what we get back from the vault is less "master recording" and more "here's what's left of it, good luck." Restoration, remastering, tracking down a usable copy when the original tape has physically started to flake apart — that work is real, it's specialized, and it is not cheap.

Every so often the amount of work required is so staggering that I nearly spit out my malt liquor reading the bill. You budget for a pressing. You do not budget for "baking a decaying analog tape in a food dehydrator just to get one clean pass through the heads before it crumbles, so we can finally transfer it to something that won't disintegrate in a decade." And yet, here we are, paying it, because the alternative is letting a genuinely good record just disappear because nobody could be bothered thirty years ago to store the tape somewhere that wasn't a garage.

So Why Do This?
We do hold out a little hope that some of these fans are cool parents now, quietly slipping their kids a copy of something we pressed and hoping it takes. Realistically, it's a coin flip at best. If my parents had been the ones curating my music taste via pop punk and power pop, I probably would have rebelled hard in the opposite direction and become a devoted fan of Tibetan throat singing out of pure spite. Teenagers can smell "your dad's cool record" from a mile away, and nothing kills a genre's edge faster than a parent's enthusiastic endorsement.

Because somebody has to keep this stuff in print for the twelve people who still want it, and because there's something genuinely funny about running discounted cash flow models on a genre whose target demographic is aging out in real time. The numbers don't say "hopeless." They say "niche, thin-margin, and shrinking by attrition" — which, if you squint, is just a more honest version of every record label that ever existed.

Press lean. Watch the cash lag. Don't count on Q4 sales from anyone who might not make it to Q4.
And I'd do all of this again in a heartbeat. None of the above is a sob story — it's just reality, the actual mechanics of what this business looks like when you're honest about it instead of dressing it up. I do this because I love making records, I love the bands, and I love the people who still show up for them. Full stop. Everything else is just the spreadsheet.]]><![CDATA[A Long Overdue Sounds Rad Update]]>Fri, 26 Jun 2026 15:00:51 GMThttps://www.soundsradical.com/rants/a-long-overdue-sounds-rad-updateIt has been a while since I’ve written anything here, or even used this feature on the website, so I wanted to give everyone a real update about what has been going on with Sounds Rad, what we have coming up, and what we are hoping to do next.
First, we have some really exciting releases on the way — the kind that take a ridiculous amount of time, work, emails, waiting, more emails, and a little bit of stubbornness to finally make happen.

The first is Sweet Baby’s It’s a Girl, which we are especially excited about because it represents the culmination of about four years of work. That meant tracking down the original masters, working with Dallas and Matt from Sweet Baby, reworking the artwork with our illustrator-at-large Dominic Arce, and going back and forth with Warner Bros. / Ruby over the rights to the Slash and Ruby recordings.

It has been a long road, but it really has been a labor of love. This is one of those records that deserves to be back out in the world, and I’m really proud that Sounds Rad gets to be part of making that happen.

We are also finishing up the third of the three Pansy Division reissues we agreed to do: Pansy Division’s Pile Up. It is a fantastic compilation of rarities, and we are very excited to finally get it cut onto vinyl. Both It’s a Girl and Pile Up are slated for October release, and preorders are up now, including some really good bundle deals.
That brings me to what comes next.

Now that this round of records is finally moving across the finish line, we are getting ready to move on to additional reissues. People keep asking about more Mr. T Experience records, and yes — we are excited to get those going. They have just taken an inordinate amount of work. Some of the upcoming reissues require more than just remastering. They will require remixing, rebuilding artwork, sorting out concepts, and making sure everything is done the right way. The requirements are extensive, but I’m excited to keep working with Dr. Frank and to move those forward.

That said, Sounds Rad is, in reality, a company of one. With extensive support from the bands and buds like Domo, Chris @ Hit Points Media, Justin @ Mystery Room Mastering ... and Rachel E at Burg Bookkeeping. There is no giant staff behind the curtain. It is mostly me doing the best I can to keep things moving, answer emails, pack orders, work with bands, coordinate artwork, deal with manufacturing, manage delays, fix mistakes, and keep the website from falling apart.

Speaking of the website: over the summer, I’m going to be rebuilding it. The goal is simple: make it easier to use and, frankly, less crappy. I’ve done my best to keep the current site updated, but over time it has gotten messy. The ordering and inventory system has also been frustrating. There have been times when people ordered something that appeared to be in stock, only for the inventory not to match what the site showed. That is not good enough, and I know how disappointing that can be.

So we are moving to a new platform where the website, store, inventory, and point-of-sale system are integrated properly. The hope is that everything will be cleaner, easier, more accurate, and less likely to leave anyone disappointed.
I also want to say something directly: sometimes I get things wrong. Sometimes shipping is slower than I want it to be. Sometimes the website creates problems. Sometimes I get overwhelmed. And when that happens, it genuinely bums me out.

Sounds Rad really is a labor of love. I care about these records, I care about the bands, and I care about the people who support what we do. If something goes wrong with your order, please email me. I will do my best to make it right. I’ll fix it, discount it, replace it, sort it out — whatever I can reasonably do. I try to treat our customers like friends, because that is honestly how I think about this whole thing.

I know not everyone who orders from us knows me personally, but hey reach out! I love chewing the fat. If you came through Maryland and hit me up, I’d be happy to sit down, have a beer, and talk about punk rock, power pop, pop punk, Lookout-era records, and all the music that made us care about this stuff in the first place.

Part of the reason things sometimes move slowly is that I also have a whole life outside of Sounds Rad. I’m finishing a PhD, managing work, family, and all the normal human things that sometimes pile up. I’m a scholar, a punk rocker, a dad, a teacher, and a record nerd trying to keep all the plates spinning. Sometimes I pull it off. Sometimes I don’t. But I’m always trying.

Looking ahead, we also want to expand the distro side of Sounds Rad. The goal is to carry more records from bands and labels around the world and make the site a one-stop shop for music I love and want to share. Our markups are not huge, and we try to keep prices fair — especially when people bundle records together with flat shipping. Ideally, buying from us should be cheaper than most record stores, and that is something I want to keep committing to.

So that is the update. New records are coming. More reissues are in the works. The website is getting rebuilt. The distro side will grow. And I’m going to keep trying to make Sounds Rad better, more reliable, and more useful for the people who care about this music.

Thank you for sticking with us, supporting the releases, sending kind notes, asking about future projects, and being patient when things take longer than expected.

Here’s to a great coming year — and probably more diatribes soon.
— Chris/ Sounds Rad]]><![CDATA[RAD-005-7: The Punkemon Story]]>Fri, 13 Oct 2017 16:34:43 GMThttps://www.soundsradical.com/rants/rad-005-7-the-punkemon-story

By Dr. Frank
I’m not sure exactly what Chris Appelgren had in mind back in 1999 when he approached me with the idea of participating in the creation of a Pokemon themed pseudo-band, but in the fantasy world in which I lived at the time he was playing Kasenetz and Katz to my Joey Levine. We would, in our own unassuming and likely unappreciated way, produce some pre-fabricated bubblegum punk pop for the new millennium. This was the moment I had been waiting for.

The assignment was, write a song on the subject of Pokemon. Well, I knew nothing at all about Pokemon, though I had heard that it was a kind of Japanese craze, but I didn’t let that deter me. I identified a suitable character and wrote a little theme song for him. “Lickitung” was born and I believed in it to the degree that I’m capable of believing in anything.
I home-recorded what was at that point the most ambitious demo I’d ever done, on a four track Tascam cassette machine and this giant Yahama organ (a YC45D) that I’d acquired on tour in Saskatoon, purchased mainly just to see if it would fit in the van. (It did, though it barely fit in my apartment when I got it all set up.)

I submitted the tape and awaited the next assignment, daydreaming of other pop culture ripoffs I’d be tasked with, for what I imagined would be a string of glorious throwaways that would finally make my name as a pop music architect of the absurd, the Mike Batt of my generation.

We could hire actors to portray a band on TV, I thought, getting a bit carried away, miming to the song in fuzzy costumes. Like Wombles, you see?

Meanwhile, Mel Bergman of the Phantom Surfers had also answered the call, with the arguably less abstruse “Pocket Monsters.” Chris Imlay of the Hi-Fives etc. was enlisted to play bass.

Chris Appelgren himself was the drummer.

We all convened with Kevin Army at Foxhound Sound in Oakland. (Foxhound was essentially Bob Coover’s laundry room and garage in Oakland, so named to commemorate his dog. The MTX Road to Ruin was recorded there, as well as many of the Alcatraz overdubs and — I think — “I Don’t Need You Now.”)

By the end of the day we’d done all the tracking, replete with Imlay’s unforgettable Charles Nelson Reilly-esque take on Mel’s “Pocket Monsters” lyrics. Then Mel and the two Chrisses left me and Kevin to fret and haggle over the “Lickitung” synth, vocals, and mix. By the end of the night it was done. A true instant recording. And to everyone’s surprise, it was actually good.

And I mean that emphatically. Though I can’t put my finger on exactly why, “Lickitung” remains my favorite recording I’ve ever done. Now I can die happy, I thought. It was only going to be a seven inch, but from tiny acorns mighty oaks do grow. We were looking at the humble start of something big.
Except we weren’t, and it wasn’t. For some reason, the proposed seven inch, Punkemon the band, and all my carefully honed Wombles delusions simply disintegrated and vanished. A thin-sounding mp3 version of an unedited dump of an unmastered “Lickitung” rough mix was put up on e-Music as a free promotional download for a stretch. That version is still floating around in the dank corners of the internet. But it was a sad, ignominious end to a putative crowning achievement. One of many, of course. That’s the way this stuff works.

Anyhow, fast forward to last year. Though the idea of digitally releasing the “Lickitung” song just for the sake of completeness had come up from time to time in my discussions with Chris A., it wasn’t a very high priority and never wound up happening.

When the Pokemon Go craze hit, though, it seemed as though, you know, if there were ever a time to release these songs, this was it. Maybe Lickitung’s time had come at last. It was at least worth, maybe, looking for the tapes to see if it was even possible. Neither Chris nor I could find the master (though I suspect the multitrack is probably on the end of one of the Road to Ruin reels… I do have those, but nothing to play them on to check.) At that point all we had was a second generation rip (from YouTube) of an upload of that old e-Music mp3 and it sounded, ooh not so fresh, certainly not good enough for a release, and no one had Mel’s song in any form. Once again, Punkemon lay dead at our feet.

To my amazement though, in the end, Mel managed to come up with a DAT. Yes, we had missed yet another craze, but at least we had the tape now. And then along comes Sounds Radical, who basically said, “we’ll put it out however you want.” Given carte blanche, if c.b. means what I think it does, rather than simply uploading “Lickitung” to the digital distributor as a Dr. Frank oddity, we decided to create the Punkemon single exactly as it might have been had it been released in 1999. I sent the DAT to my buddy Pete Mattern, saying “see what you can do with this, mastering-wise.” He restored it just beautiful, Dave at Lucky Lacquers cut it great, and it sounds terrific now, far far better, probably, than it has any right to be.

And now it’s coming out in November 2017. I’m not sure if anyone else will care about it, but it feels to me like a wrong righted, a valiant rescue of a child, er… a recording rather, stuck in a deep dark well for eighteen years. I still consider it my favorite recording. And I still don’t quite know why.

So there you have it. Punkemon emerged at the end of the last century, from the fevered brain of Lookout Records president Chris Appelgren, inspired by Kasenetz and Katz to fabricate a ‘mon-sploitation band dispensing Bubblegum for the new era. In-house Lookout stars contributed songs and sounds, but they flew too low, too late. Release was an abandoned dream. Their destiny was the vault. They could have been bigger than the Beagles. These two songs are all that remain.

]]><![CDATA[Good Things Come in Awesome Packages]]>Tue, 22 Nov 2016 01:00:42 GMThttps://www.soundsradical.com/rants/good-things-come-in-awesome-packages

By Chris, Owner of Sounds Rad!

Those of you that have ordered from us before know that Sounds Rad! doesn't screw around with its packaging or the quality of our items. Yeah, you pay a little more for a limited run apparel, but you get your money's worth. Our apparel is the kind of apparel WE want to wear: durable, comfortable, and custom. We could try to save you a few bucks and give you standard item (increasing our profit), or we could try to give you the best product possible (increasing your satisfaction). We choose the latter.

We also try to tie our apparel to the bands that we work with by making it the physical accompaniment to digital music (LP, EP, or single).

This is what we are doing with MTX--combining physical apparel with digital music. We are tying everything together in the hope that we can take what has become soulless and disembodied media and turn it into an experience again--buying music should always be an experience.

Our goal is to give you an experience through the mail. Imagine this: You order a custom shirt, hoodie, etc., and receive an instant download of the album that it represents. In a short time (depending on production) you get a custom box filled to the brim with killer apparel and swag.

Every item we sell is packed and shipped in a custom box. We take pride in our packaging.

BEHOLD THE BOX! And try to imagine your delight at getting something amazing in the mail. This month we think we kind of outdid ourselves. We created a special holiday box for our orders shipping after Dec 4th. Not only does it look AWESOME but we think it's a pretty rad vessel to tell the world that the holidays don't necessarily have to suck.

]]><![CDATA[MTX's Shard's Volume 1 Explained: Song By Song]]>Thu, 03 Nov 2016 17:32:27 GMThttps://www.soundsradical.com/rants/november-03rd-2016

Mr. T Experience - Shards Vol. 1

$10.00

Add to Cart

By Dr. Frank

1. King Dork
Long before it was a book, it was a song. The basic tracks for this one were recorded during the Revenge Is Sweet... sessions but the song was never quite completed at the time. One of the rough "in progress" mixes done during the sessions appeared as an out-take on the Lookout compilation Forward 'til Death in 1999 as well as on a split 7" with the German band Gigantor. This more fully realized mix was included on the 2001 ...and the Women Who Love Them "Special Addition" CD re-issue comp. Al Jardine was dozing on the couch in the closet-like other room during the belated mixing session. I wanted to wake him up to ask him to do vox, but chickened out. I think Kevin Army might have casually mic'd the closet door though.

2. How I Made a Million in a Punk Rock Band
One of Jon von's most charming Sky Saxonisms, vocally, and among my favorite tracks from these sessions for some reason, this was an out-take from the second wave of Making Things with Light sessions at Sound and Vision. I feel like I should apologize for the naked Frehley-isms on the guitar, but I'm not gonna. This appeared on the Big Black Bugs CD comp.

3. Sackcloth and Ashes
Just me, a good song, a double tracked Les Paul Jr., and the tremolo knob on a Sears Silvertone amp. I wanted to record a whole album like this. Still do.

4. Whistle Bait
This Collins Kids cover is one of two songs we recorded with Jim Tierney at Fishtraks in Portsmouth, NH for the Joe King-produced compilation More Bounce to the Ounce. (It was later included on the ...and the Women Who Love Them CD comp.) Not much more to say about it, except: those were good times, and that p-90 sounds great.

5. Itching Powder in the Sleeping Bags (Live)
I'm a little fuzzy on the precise source of this track, but it was recorded live on the radio, probably on KFJC, and probably around 1994 (Joel/Jim line-up.) It appeared as "Bonus Mystery Live Track" on the CD single version of the MTX / Goober Patrol split from 1995.

6. Boredom Zone
The song itself dates back to my high school days. This version was recorded in 1988 by Greg Freeman at Lowdown Studios in San Francisco as part of a lengthy demo tape, and it first appeared on the Lookout Records compilation The Thing that Ate Floyd. It was later included as a bonus track on the Lookout CD re-issue of the Night Shift album. Not, perhaps, my finest hour as a songwriter, but I still like the drone/jangle guitar.

7. Fill in the Blank
Not A-list material by any means, but still kind of a fun track. Recorded at Sound and Vision in San Francisco during the second wave of Making Things with Light sessions, this song originally appeared on the 1991 Flipside compilation The Big One, and was included on the Big Black Bugs CD re-issue comp in 1997.

8. Unpack Your Adjectives
This cover of the Schoolhouse Rock tune was one of five songs we recorded at Sound and Vision in '94 or '95, the first recording session to feature Joel Reader on bass and backup vox, and the last thing we ever did at Sound and Vision. The other songs were "Alternative Is Here to Stay", "New Girlfriend," "You Today," and "Semi-OK." My original plan was to do them all as a self-released e.p., but Larry Livermore talked me into doing a single with Lookout instead. The die was cast. We stayed on Lookout. (This song, under the title "Adjective," appeared on the 1995 Lookout Records comp. A Slice of Lemon.)

9. Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah
This surf-y song with nonsense lyrics somewhat inexplicably appeared on a 1997 compilation somewhat inexplicably called "Generations I - a Punk Look at Human Rights." Somewhat inexplicably, its title was listed as "Ya, Ya, Ya, Ya." It was later included on the ...and the Women Who Love Them CD comp. I believe this was recorded at Roof Brothers studio in Oakland, at the same session where we did the Duran Duran and Primitives covers. (We used to try to combine the covers comp recording sessions and throw in one of our own songs if there was time for it -- this track was unfunded, meant to benefit... something or other.) I can't remember much more about it, but I do remember the carpet. It was gray and kind of damp. Smelled like cats.

10. Semi-OK
This original version of this song was on a Lookout flexi sampler that came with the September 1995 issue of Punk Planet as well as on the Goober Patrol / MTX split 7"/CD that came out in the same year.

11. Flying Jelly Attack
This was recorded at Dancing Dog Studios in Emeryville ca. 1989 for a Shonen Knife covers compilation called Every Band Has a Shonen Knife Who Loves Them; later on, it appeared as a bonus track on the Making Things with Light CD and subsequently the Big Black Bugs CD compilation. Many of the covers we recorded were done solely because the people putting them out gave us a small amount of money for studio time, but in this case it was a band I really loved and was one of my favorite songs by them. Our version is... well quite weird sonically, but sort of charming I guess. The guitar stuff was perhaps a harbinger of things to come in a way: this is what happens when you give a boy an SG and a Mesa Boogie. A guy from Jon von's work transliterated the Japanese lyrics for me and I sang them not very convincingly, but that didn't stop it being used as evidence for the still extant folk legend that I am half Japanese. (I'm not.) When we played with Shonen Knife a few years later Naoko Yamano told me my Japanese was "very well." Success.

12. As Life Goes On, You Get More and More Out of It
A home recorded never-before-released song that first appeared on the ...and the Women Who Love Them CD. comp. All it's got going for it is the double-entendred title really, but it's a pretty good one.

13. Kenny Smokes Cloves
One of the earliest MTX songs, recorded in that Greg Freeman/Lowdown 8 track demo tape session. Kenny Kaos needed to be immortalized in song, somehow, and while I'm sure I didn't quite do him justice, I did the best I could. This first appeared as a bonus track on the Night Shift album CD re-issue.

14. Can't Get There from Here
Recorded for a 1992 REM covers compilation called Surprise Your Pig (because they gave us $200) and included on the Big Black Bugs CD comp. Figuring out absurd sound-alike lyrics for the incomprehensible Michael Stipe lyrics was the fun part and the main memorable feature here, a rare instance, perhaps, of nonsense parody lyrics making more sense than the original. "Donna Reed is not my mom" will forever live in infamy. Years later our old associate Robert Shimp was engineering an REM record in San Francisco and played the track for Peter Buck, who reportedly said "at least they got the chords right." As with so much else in our repertoire, it was the very least we could do.

15. God Bless America
This much loved/maligned song originally came out on the Blame and Burn 7" comp on Flush Records in 1992. Later it was added as a bonus track to the Our Bodies Our Selves CD issue with no indication that it was "bonus" leaving many/most fans with the impression that it was the final track of that album. In fact, the song pre-dates the album by many years and was originally meant to be solo/acoustic, and generally played during broken string breaks and such at shows. (Ironically, on the other hand, "Even Hitler Had a Girlfriend" had been intended as a full band song that became acoustic by exigency.) This recording was meant as the first iteration of what was to be a generic backing track with new lyrics/vox to be added and submitted every time we had a compilation offer with no budget. (cf. "Vive la France" and "God Bless Lawrence Livermore".) It was also included on the Big Black Bugs CD comp. A different mix appears on the MTX/Goober Patrol split.

16. I Was Losing You All Along
As originally conceived, this song was intended to be the grand finale track of Revenge Is Sweet and so Are You -- the album title appears as a lyric in the bridge, in fact. In the event it never quite "gelled" in the studio and we didn't have the time (nor, arguably, the talent) to do it justice so it was abandoned unfinished. Kevin Army and I did what we could with it several years later to make it presentable for the ...and the Women Who Love Them CD compilation. It was during this session at Shark Bite studios in Oakland that Al Jardine poked his head in to say: "that bass sounds a little picky... not to be, you know, picky" lending a Beach Boy's support the tone side in our ongoing argument over how trebly and stringy the bass should be. While the recording isn't perfect, this is still one of my favorites among my songs, and I'd love the chance to re-do it properly one day, or to hear someone good do a cover of it. The reprise of the guitar line from Milk Milk Lemonade's "See It Now" was intended to link those two albums together on the basis of some no doubt pretentious rationale I've since forgotten.

]]><![CDATA[Dr. Frank Discusses MTX Shards Vol. 1 ]]>Mon, 31 Oct 2016 14:44:58 GMThttps://www.soundsradical.com/rants/dr-frank-discusses-mtx-shards-vol-1

By Dr. Frank
So the tl;dr of this is: we just put up a new, MTX digital album on iTunes/Amazon/etc. It is volume one of what will be a two volume set containing all the extra songs that have appeared on various CDs as bonus tracks but haven't been available in the official online catalog till now. 16 tracks on each, 32 songs total. It's called Shards (Vol. 1). (Volume 2 is coming soon.)

Sounds Radical is offering a package deal where you can pre-order a limited edition re-issue of the classic MTX Starship T-shirt (with a pin, sticker, and poster) along with an immediate download of the album. While supplies last! Order on Oct. 31st to get the album download a day early! If you want in on that go here. It will also, of course, be available on all the usual services like iTunes, Amazon, spotify, etc.

More: when we first started putting out records in 1986, the vinyl LP, ep, or 7" was obviously the main release, the "real" one. When CDs came along, this didn't change. The albums were still side A and side B of the LP. (For some of us, regardless of format, they still are, two halves, 20 minutes each or so.)

The CDs were seen as an adjunct to the vinyl version, and, like a lot of bands, we used to pile on any available extra tracks in a more or less archival spirit without much (or any) thought given to aesthetic cohesion. The idea was, why would anyone want to pay more money for a CD of this when you could get a perfectly good LP -- better give 'em something extra to justify the extra expense. (Though in some cases it's not at all clear that these extra tracks added value rather than subtracted it.)

Anyhow, the result was, in the end, a mess, and a blurring of the line between the albums per se and the morass of extras. (e.g., the crazy track listing of the Our Bodies Our Selves CD, where the obvious ending song "Game Over" is succeeded by three cool but random extra tracks (one of them inexplicably moved from the main album to the end) with "Swallow Everything" shoehorned in between "More Than Toast" and "Not Guilty" -- because they were recorded in the same session? And then there's a hidden track at the end of a big space of silence after "God Bless America"... Clearly, the product of a madman, if not several madmen. Yet I know that many people think of this nutty CD as the actual "real" album. And maybe it should have been, in that some of the crammed-in songs are many people's favorites. But, it wasn't.)
So when, in the wake of Lookout's exit, we re-organized the digital back catalog, we decided to restore the original vinyl track listing and sequences of the albums, eps, and singles. While many of the CD extras had been b-sides that had been included on their respective singles in the re-organization, this left out a great many previously released songs (thirty-two, to be exact.) Some of these were quite "important" ones too, like "King Dork", "We Are the Future People of Tomorrow", "Unpack Your Adjectives," as well as a lot of fun covers and such. The plan was always to compile these into an Odds 'n' Sods / Relics type album, but what with one thing and another, that plan hasn't happened till now.

I've tried to arrange the tracks as albums that can be listened to as such, eight songs to a "side" in the traditional manner, rather than chronological archives. They are from various sources, (covers comps, out-takes, demos, one live on the radio song) spanning 1987 thru 1999. The criterion for inclusion when it comes to the out-takes and demos is simply whether they have already appeared (and subsequently disappeared from) somewhere. I have however left off the terrible sounding live cassette recordings that were on the Making Things with Light CD; they were just messing everything up like they always have. (They're easy to find if you must have them, and in fact, I can even sell you a CD if you want one of those: drop me a line at themagnificentdrfrank@gmail.com) As for the demos and out-takes, maybe one day I'll find the machinery and the gumption to re-examine those tapes and see if there's anything else interesting on them, but that's for another time if it ever comes. For now, this is what there is. You can get the whole thing at once, or song by song as needed. Or not, as the case may be. Just putting it out there, as it were.

Finally, big, heartfelt thanks go to our good friend Pete Mattern at Planet X Recording Studio for mastering the comp. You'll probably be surprised how good it sounds, especially considering the sources.

]]><![CDATA[We're Music Fans Not Machines: Making an Experience Out of an Impersonal Medium ]]>Fri, 28 Oct 2016 16:50:22 GMThttps://www.soundsradical.com/rants/7235142By Frank Portman and Chris Thacker
The devastation that the digital music revolution brought to the music industry and its reciprocally sustaining culture and subcultures has been exhaustively discussed and analyzed. The results of it are plain for all who walk in its ruins: music has been devalued to almost nothing in the commercial market, almost everyone went out of business, and the role of struggling musician became even more of a struggle.

Less discussed has been the effect of this devaluation of music from the perspective of fans and music lovers, which has been paradoxical. While there is easy, cheap access to an effectively unlimited aggregate of material, being swamped in undifferentiated “content” has not proven to be the paradise it was cracked up to be. And in a world where releasing a record typically involves little more than pressing “send”, and where consuming the music encoded therein involves little more than clicking “add”, or even just doing nothing at all and passively allowing yourself to be fed from a cloud, the resulting experience, for all its convenience, has become highly impersonal at best.

What can be done to restore the immediacy and personal quality that made bands and their “content" so compelling in the first place? No one has figured out how to do this very well. Most of just press “send" and click “add” and hope for the best. That’s just not good enough, and we decided to do something about it by--

Curating the best possible music from amazing artists
Focusing the best physical product to support the music
Creating a shared experience for fans

A record label is nothing more than a curator of music. If people trust the curator's taste(s) they will buy the music. That's why it is critical to focus on working with amazing artists. When the idea of Sounds Rad was being kicked around, the first person to immediately buy into the idea of personalizing the experience of buying music was Dr. Frank of the Mr. T Experience. If Sounds Rad’s first principle is to curate the best possible music, then damn it, MTX has to be a part of it. And from there it became clear that to goal is to find as many existing MTX fans and create a community by knocking them on their ass with releases that they would love to hear; merch that they would love to wear; and a shared experience that makes that them feel if they are members of a secret MTX cult replete with ritual handshakes, code names, and songs about girls.

Everything that "we" (the royal we--Sounds Rad and MTX) are trying to do is based on quality: records, apparel, and the experience. Imagine this: You place an order on the Sounds Rad website. A few days later you come home to a custom designed box at your door. You run inside and carefully open the box to find a new signed limited MTX album, a t-shirt that you actually want to wear all of the time, and the knowledge that you got amazing value. That's what we want to do. Everything item sold is coming from the band to the fan: a shared experience.

This shared experience is exciting. We want you to get excited! That’s why we will do everything and everything we can to get you to listen to our music, wear our march and come out to our shows. You are not just customer, you are part of our cult, cabal, faction, clique, coterie, and possibly a junta. So froth at the mouth, sing-a-long, and be rad!

]]><![CDATA[Guest Blog - King Dork Approximately, The Cover That Might Have Been ]]>Tue, 18 Oct 2016 01:13:24 GMThttps://www.soundsradical.com/rants/guest-blog-king-dork-approximately-the-cover-that-might-have-been

By Frank Portman
Frank Kozik is one of the greatest poster artists in the history of rock and roll. His work revolutionized the "rock concert" poster in a fundamental way, and whether you realize it or not, if you've been a rock and roll person over the past twenty-five years, you've seen his stuff, especially perhaps in San Francisco, where he moved (from Austin) in the early '90s. Even if you didn't know anything about the man himself, one of "those" posters meant the show it advertised was real and significant; these images were an integral part of the show-going experience (and are often the thing I remember most about shows I've been to when I think back) Of course, my dumb little band never did the kind of show that would have warranted that sort of treatment or attention: our poster style was, find a picture from a magazine, photocopy it with added text, and tape it to a pole.

But in the pretend rock star parallel fantasy world that lived in my mind alongside the actual one, every show had a Kozik poster, because of course it did.

So I was indescribably excited, overcome with emotion in fact, when I learned that Krista, my editor at Random House, and Angela, the book designer, had arranged for Frank Kozik to do the cover of my new book King Dork Approximately. I wanted to kiss them. It was such a perfect idea. It was amazing that he agreed to do it. Also, it was the realization of a lifelong dream.

Plus it was just great art. He'd read the manuscript and come up with a terrific King Dork-ization of the Judas Priest Screaming for Vengeance eagle (which plays a big role in the book.) The original sketch looked like this:

"Well, Doctor," I said to the face in the mirror, "they can't take this away from you." Except, they could.

It's a long, complicated story, but publishing a book is never a simple matter. There are many considerations, and hundreds of people involved in considering them. Folks who hadn't been through the same rock and roll wringer that I'd been through, for whom this artwork was nice but not, perhaps, the realization of a life-long dream, wondered whether people would "get it." We looked at other options, as you do. And in the end, due to circumstances beyond our control, the cover was scrapped, new approaches investigated, release dates delayed, tears cried, teeth gnashed -- the standard procedure in every human endeavor. The hardcover book was published with the yellow cover you know, and life went on.

Well, in publishing, a paperback release is like a second chance. And as you may have been able to tell, I've put a whole lot of energy into making this particular second chance as special and second chance-y as possible, with new cover art, a new album, singles, videos, shows, T shirts, lunchboxes, cookies, etc. etc. So when Chris of Sounds Rad and I started to discuss ways to make our rock and roll KDA specialty packages as cool as possible (and remotely signable) we decided to reproduce the original cover, book sized, as an insert for me to sign instead of the usual bookplate. Pretty cool. Welcome back, lifelong dream.

]]><![CDATA[Guest Blog - I Wrote Rock and Roll about a Book about Rock and Roll]]>Sat, 01 Oct 2016 01:09:00 GMThttps://www.soundsradical.com/rants/guest-blog-i-wrote-rock-and-roll-about-a-book-about-rock-and-roll

By Frank Portman
The release date for King Dork Approximately the Paperback and King Dork Approximately the Album is October 4th, less than a week away. It’s kind of hard to believe. It’s been such a long time coming, yet it still has managed to sneak up on me, as it were. The music part is the first MTX album in twelve years. Pulling that together just on its own took some doing, I can tell you.
But it’s also the realization of a plan that goes all the way back to 2005, when the band had ceased to function along with the entire under- and over-ground music industry, and I started writing what would become the unexpectedly successful novel, King Dork. When Tom Henderson, the book’s narrator, began to write songs in the narrative, it was perhaps inevitable that I’d try to write some of them for real alongside their fictional counterparts in the book. And that’s exactly what happened. I half-finished the novel with a handful of half-written songs.

From there I developed a kind of fantasy vision of my future as a novelist, not unlike the fantasy careers of Tom’s imaginary notebook rock bands. (Just call me Tennis with Guitars.) In this fantasy vision, the book I was typing at Cato’s Ale House would become a smash success, and I would use this success and my new position as a Literary Big Name to organize the recording and release of a parallel album of songs from the book, bringing my band back from the dead. The two things would function as complementary iterations or… “faces”, maybe, of the same grand project, the same story. Fans of the songs could learn more about them by exploring the novel that gave rise to them, while my legions of readers could deepen the literary experience by hearing the fictional songs “made flesh.” (And maybe dancing around the room in their underwear, because they’re nerds and they probably need to get out more. i.e., Literature, the way it was obviously meant to be.) I imagined a massive rock and roll book tour, sixty cities plus, with library and bookstore visits in the day, rock and roll shows in the evenings, readings on the stage at the Fillmore, surprise punk rock pop up shows at the Millbrae Library or Powell’s. Hollywood, New York, Stockholm, the whole deal. Media and merch tie-ins as far as the eye could see: basically, James Joyce meets Gene Simmons, meets Don Kirshner, meets Ron Popeil.

In my fantasy I had re-invented the novel as a trans-media “experience”, the Great American Young Adult Novel with Guitar; and I had reinvented the rock album as a virtual LP with a whole novel inside the imaginary gatefold cover instead of mere liner notes by some guy from Rolling Stone. Books, records, and shows would never be the same. I was really something. Soon everyone would be doing it, I was sure.

You guys all do that kind of thing, too, the semi-ironic grand fantasy that only sets you up for a more profound anti-climax when actual events play out. I mean, don’t you?

But the craziest part is that a bit of it did in actual fact come true, sort of. I mean, King Dork was an undeniable critical, media, and commercial success. It made a genuine impact on popular culture, the real popular culture, not just the imaginary one in my head. The other half of the fantasy, though, proved much more difficult to pull together, so difficult that I all but gave up on even the fantasy, let alone actually trying to do it. Though bits of the unfinished songs did trickle out in various forms, such as half-assed acoustic versions of some of them as bonus tracks on the audiobook, and performances in empty Barnes & Nobleses across the country, the full album never materialized. Nor did the radical reconstitution of the music and publishing industries, and of Art itself. Boy, did that ever not materialize.

Well, how could it? Who would pay for it? Who would buy it? Who would care about it all? Surprisingly, having a successful novel doesn’t mean you automatically have a whole bunch of guys in suits banging on your door saying “here’s some money to record an album to go along with your book, plus a detailed plan on how to make that happen.” Plus, rousing the beast and getting it moving at all was always a pretty big, unlikely undertaking in itself. And by beast, I mean the Mr. T Experience.

But somehow, ten years later, a version of it has materialized. It may be just a bit smaller than the grandiose fantasy outlined above, but that it happened at all is pretty amazing. I’m lucky to have had so much help making it happen, from my bandmates most of all, but from dozens of others as well. It turns out you don’t need the guys in the suits. Help and goodwill from the community of people who have liked your songs and books for years and years can help you do it on your own, or a version of it anyway. And if it doesn’t quite turn the whole world inside out as it did in the fantasy, at minimum we all get a new MTX album out of the deal, something I was also pretty sure would never happen.

So, I thank you.

Now, because there’s still confusion (always with the confusion, people) here’s how it’s going to work.
The release date for the paperback edition of King Dork Approximately the Novel is October 4th, 2016. It costs $9.99. When you get your hands on the book (preferably by buying it) you’ll find the url of a download page and a code to enter. Enter it, and a zip file of King Dork Approximately the Album will download to your hard drive. If you buy the book from the Sounds Radical website, you can download the album instantly, just as you might if you bought it from iTunes or the like, and listen to it while you wait for the physical book to arrive in the mail. There are two singles that we are releasing to the “services,” “Cinthya (with a Y)” and “High School Is the Penalty for Transgressions Yet to Be Specified.” You can buy these on iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, etc. Up till January, though, the only way to get the rest of the album is through the book download procedure outlined above. This record is really, really tied to the book and I’m not gonna let you forget it if I can help it, at least not while we’re on tour and have a merch table.

In January, there will be a general digital release, meaning the whole album will be up on iTunes, spotify, etc. For those who feel it is worth waiting a few few months for the opportunity to pay the same price for the sound files without the book, January is your moment.

In April, the vinyl version of the album will be released by Sounds Rad, augmented with extra tracks and other cool peripheral stuff.

My hope is that by April this will have laid the groundwork for a subsequent (non book) MTX album as well as subsequent King Dork books. (The grand fantasy there is: six more books, with guitar, ending with King Dork Superstar, in which Tom is 42 years old. I’ve still got that fantasizing streak, you see.) But that’s a discussion for another time. Help make this work, and maybe the subsequent stuff can have a chance of working, too. And the way to help is, buy, read, and listen. Thanks, and cheers to you all.

]]><![CDATA[Review - Breaklights - Instructed to Fail]]>Sat, 27 Aug 2016 03:49:37 GMThttps://www.soundsradical.com/rants/review-breaklights-instructed-to-fail

Breaklights, "Instructed to Fail" EP is terrific debut from Charlie Whittle, formerly of Joe Jitsu. Thematically, Instructed to Fail covers very familiar territory--love songs from a group of angst-ridden and maladjusted dudes who can't seem to catch a break (love songs are the bread and butter of just about every great pop band). True that this sort of theme has been done ad nauseam, but who the hell cares? The songs are wonderfully catchy mid-tempo power-pop tunes that I replayed over-and-over. And first two tracks are real gems--I found myself humming the melody throughout the day.

Breaklights sound can best be described as a bit of a continuation of Joe Jitsu (and this an excellent thing). Charlie Whittle writes some excellent songs; his songs are not overly complicated or overloaded with guitar solos. Instead, the band uses simple riffs with an occasional sliding octave cord as a lead.

This style produces a sound that is similar to SoCo skate rock bands; but the difference is that Breaklights stick to mid-tempo, which gives their songs more a power-pop feel.

Charlie's vocals remind me a lot Matt Hart from Squirtgun--nasally (but not high pitched). His voice doesn't seem forced, and he sings in his natural range. However, his vocal tone at times gets a bit drowned out—this left me wondering if they could double up the vocals throughout (my only criticism). That being said, the tracks do contain enough backing vocals and occasional harmonies by Tron, the band’s drummer, to add enough support to Charlie’s vocals, and it really does work well.

The album was produced by Stephen Egerton (Descendents) at 3CG Studios in Tulsa, OK. The production of the EP is fantastic—in particular, the mix. The guitars are even and crisp, vocals are right up front (though I think Charlie's natural tone could use more support), and the drums are very present without drowning everything out.

Verdict: Buy. Breaklights, "Instructed to Fail" is a great four song debut that will leave you wanting more; the band shows a ton of promise, and I hope they can put together a full-length sometime soon. Check them out on their Bandcamp page: www.breaklights.bandcamp.com

]]>