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Yesterday I posted about the ditched liner notes I was commissioned to whip up for the great Strum & Thrum compilation of lost mid-80s jangle rock bands, but forgot to add in this pic of one of my favorite jangle bands, the Windbreakers. Also, I should’ve added a track in there too, so here’s one of my faves from the comp, below.

Check the post and my liner notes HERE!

Primitons - “All My Friends” - 1986

#windbreakers #primitons #jangle rock #indie jangle #80s Pop #captured tracks #strumandthrum #mitch easter #album liner notes

My Liner Notes for Strum & Thrum compilation, 2020

So long about two and a half years ago, an excited and probably slightly tipsy Mike Sniper came up to me at a Brooklyn bar and told me I was the perfect choice to write liner notes for a compilation he was putting together for his record label, Captured Tracks. This was to be the first archival type comp his venerated indie rock imprint had ever done, and in fact the first of what’s to be a series called Excavations.

Mike surmised that perhaps the last underground rock music scene to never be fully recognized yet was that brief span -- between hardcore’s early ‘80s rise and late ‘80s proto-alternative rock -- where loads of young, small town bands picked up (mostly) Rickenbacker guitars and a cardigan sweater, and searched for a new punk energy-inspired sound that was a little more melodic and looked back to jangly ‘60s antecedents like the Byrds, instead of forward into hardcore’s macho dystopian nightmares.

There was a musically concurrent scene in the UK and New Zealand around that time that got some ink and college radio play over here, and has since become collector market-defined. Mike thought these American bands that had somehow slipped through music history’s hands were just as good; and in fact some came before the British and Kiwi bands, and exuded an often more ragged, anxious, and yes American edge to the sound. He also noticed that the mid-80s being the mid-80s, the whole DIY underground touring network wasn’t completely solidified yet, and so these ostensibly “lighter” bands often shared Sunday afternoon all ages hardcore bills because where the hell else were they gonna play.

I grew up in an Ohio scene that housed a number of these types of initially hard-to-slot jangle bands, I was a fan of said music (often umbrella-tagged “college rock” back then), and I ended up fronting a fast punk band (New Bomb Turks). So Mike thought my personal understanding and involvement could convey the premise of his comp idea to modern day garage punks and indie rockers -- the two types that should likely find interest in this stuff.

The Reactions, from Cleveland, 1985

By January, 2019, we got to work on writing the liner notes and riding an editorial email thread train through the end of winter. He also asked me to edit email Q&As with the bands that he and his nice assistant, Gabrielle Redmond, had accumulated over a few months of prepping the comp -- there’d be an Oral History in the liner notes too. Admittedly, I’d only heard of about 1/3 of the bands on this comp, but that’s Mike for ya -- there are few current record collector / label heads around who have as much knowledge and sheer vinyl mass as Mike Sniper. He did a similar deep dive with lost late-70s power pop back in the mid-2000s with his Radio Heartbeat reissue label, helping turn that forgotten sub-genre into the Next Big Collector Thing.

It was a lot of work, and everything seemed to be going fine. But as happens with these large projects, staff came and went, ideas shifted, and there was that little Covid-19 thing. By the time the compilation came out last September, the liner notes idea morphed, and they ended up mainly being Mike’s thoughts, which makes complete sense. Looking at my liner notes now, they are pretty fucking long. I always offered to chop them further, but I was assured at the time they were fine. Most of the Oral History I clipped up is in the comp’s excellent pix-stuffed booklet, and hey, I got paid, so I’m not complaining. Got a couple copies too, which is cool because apparently the thing is already sold out! (I believe a repress is in the works...)

I was pretty proud of the liner notes I did though, so I thought I would post them here on my blog. Mike’s idea was great, and I understood it before it all came out of his mouth that night at the bar. There really were tons of these kind of bands, they (say it with me) just didn’t sell. If you went to bar shows or off-campus parties at all from 1983-87, you no doubt saw some and maybe had a couple in your town, so it is a scene well worth revisionist attention.

Not to mention, Strum & Thrum: The American Jangle Underground - 1983-1987 is excellent, a wonderful listen, best suited to cloudy Saturday afternoons in the cold months, and packaged in a nice sleeve with that big thick booklet. Get it while you can. Aside from capturing Sniper’s vision, it’s really one of the best compilations of the last few years. So thanks Captured Tracks!

So, dig into my original liner notes below...