Youthful Indiscretions

My brain, what's left of it, won't quite let the words escape to this digital page. Spend over a month watching schlock and b-grade nonsense, that'll happen. The last day of the Thursday Night Massacre triple feature I've been hosting every Thursday pops off tonight, sending us off into a real turkey of a month in proper fashion with Trick R Treat, The Thing, and, of course, Halloween. It's been nice having a bunch of drooling idiots cram in my living room for the past month and I'm already planning more tightly themed line-ups for next year's installments. A little more info on TNM, it's "presented" by Night of the Living Heinoids, which keen observers may remember from a checklist included on the back of Not Normal Quarterly #2. Keep those peepers peeled for forthcoming zine by that name, covering just these sort of topics. Death To The Heinoids! Long Live The Heinoids!

Beyond that, everything's quiet. Things are moving, but nothing loudly quite yet. Expect some new releases next month along with some sneak-peeks, but don't get your hopes up, ya mugs! The road we've tread is lousy with broken promised. Just one addition to the distro this week, a spicy little live tape from the punk-addled brain of Abi Ooze!

And now, a little more excavation:

NNT#002 Raw Nerve - Self Titled CS

Contrary to what I said a coupla weeks back, life yields no shortage of youthful indiscretions you absolutely deserve to be both ashamed of and shamed for. That’s how you learn, for instance, to not leave evidence of a “clean up” just lying around where a parent could find it, or, as in another hypothetical, how to avoid falling in dog shit at the tender age of four lest ye be dubbed Dookie Boy, an appellation which will follow you well into your adult life.

It’s interesting to revisit the origins of Raw Nerve, a group we started as relative children, especially after we retconned the ending as grown adults at the last EINOK. Lyrically, half of our self-titled demo dwells amongst my least favorite of anything I’ve ever contributed to, but there are a couple high points: Born Under A Bad Sign, my best and probably last opinion I’ll ever voice on the topic of that perennial punk menace religion, and Gun/Mouth, unhealthy though it may have been, putting those thoughts to paper is probably the only thing that kept me from going through with the subject matter during those darker days. Musically, it’s slow, falling far short of the wall of noise, sonic assault we strove for on the superior LP and Midnight EP, but it was spastic and immediate in a way that waned as time went on. Overall, a serviceable foundation.

But the truth is, a great deal of our existence was just so fucking hokey. Not the stuff you’d expect: the ski masks or the suspicions we planted in distant cities eager to solve the riddle of which members of which band’s side project we really were. But the slow revelation that we were McLarened to some degree, the stolen artwork, the aesthetic and creative decisions taking place beyond our control contrived between a well-coifed sociopath and an opportunistic businessman, the endgame interviews where I had to clarify “no we’re not voyeurs, no we were not glorifying that at all,” we were all left feeling like Dookie Boys, ya dig? The inevitable break-up has been documented in various capacities, but the details are comparable to most groups partially comprised of emotionally stunted, uncommunicative men in their early twenties: we plowed forward until absolutely nothing positive was left to be wrung from the project and obliterated a great deal of our social connections in the aftermath.

But that came later; before the $30 special editions, before the proprietor of Dude Fest cried about broken duct work or a similarly moronic Indy native demanded a birth certificate to prove I was actually born in this century, before, as with most marginally talented men, “our” every whim was catered to instead of being ridiculed unanimously (which is possibly the most ahistoric statement thus far, we got dragged, baby!), and, sure, before I told everyone in Chicago I was quitting the band without informing a single member, there were five brats with a real Kooky Idea, some masks, and some big plans who had our first practice in my grandma’s living room.

Trivialities: Two separate runs of 100. First 100 on black, second 100 on translucent yellow. Double-sided j-card/insert with lyrics. All of the standard j-cards had the cover infuriatingly inverted, but our guitarist was an art major so how can you argue with that? 24 copies of the second run had an alternate cover with a “crazy electric chair guy,” whipped up for a weekend jaunt to St Louis and Kansas City.

NNT#003 Guinea Kid - Self Titled EP

My earliest memory of Mat Williams is a simple, one line question, “Will Pygmy Death play my house in Crown Point?”. To hear Mat tell it, our first interaction was a year earlier, when I threatened him and his band mates with violence over some sketchy lyrics, a not altogether unreasonable conjecture given my frame of mind at the time (and always). Whatever it was, be it the belligerence of dirtstachioed peace punkers or the intriguing offer from an unknown punker, the answer was yes and a few weeks later we played his garage.

I’m unable to reconcile that the mythology of NWI as this supreme punk rock incubator and the mythos’ corresponding pantheon took root so many years later, because for me, it began in that garage, just twenty or so 13-19 year olds flailing and somersaulting along to Mainstream Mind Control, the gaggle of barely teenaged miscreants that would become Guinea Kids before chopping off the “S” and becoming that singular manifestation of Midwest Mutancy, Guinea Kid. I had a reckoning that day: Pygmy Death had been doing our vile mixture of Municipal Waste party thrash and Ceremony-esque pseudo power violence, Stubborn Attitude had their valiant but failed emulation of Negative Approach, and there was the tired-even-for-the-time GG-worshippin’ shock punk baloney of Religious Sex, but Mainstream Mind Control had already written Boneless.  It was time to pack it in.

I’ve seen this group through all the name and line-up changes, all the way up to what I consider the essential line-up, responsible for the Self-Titled EP, (consisting of Gwen Lopez, Brandon Stringer, Mat Williams, and Mark Winter), and that first time astonishment, that utter thrill of catching them play never subsided. I knew from the jump they had to be a part of NNT. Two releases deep, flush with that sweet, sweet Raw Nerve Cash, and after no small amount of hounding, we made it happen. 

It’s rare, I think, for any recorded medium to capture the same feeling and energy that the live setting allows for, but they got about as close as possible with this one. Divine Breed was a little meaner than the two previous times it appeared on CD. Boneless, a track which I was known to mosh for before they’d even start playing, got streamlined, but lost none of its bite and still expertly evoked a feeling of a suburban dog day, skating a parking lot, and getting harassed by cops and jocks. Annoying Dumb White Teenage Girl was as stupid as ever. These hits got joined by the comparably epic Night Time Here and Ghost, and the song that eventually became the Cherry Pie to GK’s Warrant, With A Nail. The track was a slammer, but I don’t think you have that in mind when you’re ostensibly writing about suicide. The guitars were nasty and spastic, Mat’s lyrics were relatable and quietly brilliant (a fact that has never changed, all the way up to his current project, Liquids), and the recordings caught his vocals at that perfect point between squeaky adolescence and gruff adulthood. To this day, I still consider this both NWI and NNT’s crowning achievements.

There were, of course, some behind the scenes issues that I wasn’t privy to until much later. Ryan, enlisted to help with the layout, unsurprisingly changed a lot of their ideas to better cohere to his Marketing Guy vision for the band, actions I would have never condoned.  There was also something about how the tapes were being sold, that they couldn’t move their copies because I was selling mine at the same shows, but even in the early days of the label I knew that you didn’t pull that shit! I think what really happened is that I was hustling hard in those days, bringing my little cardboard box to every single gig to be immediately defaced and sell tapes out of AKA doing my dang job, baby.

Trivialities: We did two runs of this tape, for a total of 300 copies. It’s been 9 fucking years, so cut me some slack, but I strongly believe the first run went something like this: 100 copies on Rhodamine red (objectively the best cassette color option), professionally imprinted with black ink. Second run: 200 copies on yellow, professionally imprinted with green ink. Single sided j-card remained consistent throughout runs.  First run of double sided inserts printed on a really cool, dull yellow paper, second run printed on standard white. Oh!, and Mat was right, I definitely threatened to fight him and his friends.

Necessary Diversions

It's been a long week, True Believers, but I welcome ya back all the same. It'll be short and quick ones until November comes, as I spend the remainder of October on some necessary diversions, namely being a big Halloweenie. I attended 18 out of the 24 hours of horror madness that comprises the Music Box of Horrors, seeing such choice cuts as Bloody Muscle Body Builder In Hell, Event Horizon, Tetsuo: the Iron Man, and the OG Buffy from '92. In the last 48 hours, I finished the 3rd book of Alan Moore's Saga of the Swamp Thing, Bulgakov's The Fatal Eggs, and the short, but potent, The Lamb Will Slaughter The Lion by Margaret Killjoy. The latter is a little silly at times with its constant reminders of how punk it is, but a fun ride nonetheless. Beyond that, I'm continuing my second run-through of the Buffy television series, and reached the hospital in the first Silent Hill. Most of you freaks are probably into similar shit, so comment below with some recommendations or just how you enjoy spending your Halloween!

In actual NNT news, we're pleased to announce that recording for the new Tums CS, a nasty little number that goes by the name of Old Perverts & Horse Fuckers, is just about wrapping up. 10 or so tracks serving as a proper punctuation mark for this sick outfit. Expect it some next month, presumably alongside bughouse ii (mk. II) and the long delayed HJD demo. The CB Radio Gorgeous EP is past the post-production stage and will be hitting the press at Cleveland's Gotta Groove Records in December. I'm excited to work with our favorite person/label/one-woman powerhouse Grace Ambrose again and it's nice to swing back around to GG for this one, as they handled production on our first two records way back in 2012. And finally, Mister began tracking their EP, Espejismo, this past weekend and it's sure to be a hot one!

We have to thank our good friends over at the Chicago Reader's Gossip Wolf for once again covering the nation's premier purveyors of Hardcore Punk slop. You can read it here or just stare in awe at this incredible picture of yours truly with nary a click.

Those close to us know that co-founder Raven's involvement in the label has long taken a backseat to her teaching career, and her past week has been spent protesting as part of the CTU/SEIU strike, fighting for the rights of Chicago's teachers, support staff, and, most importantly, the children and teens affected by Chicago's history of understaffing and underfunding its schools. Solidarity to all of our friends and family in the streets doing the damn thing.

In distro news, we added the essential demo from OKC straight edge heavyweights End On End, released jointly by Dog Years and NMZ. It's a killer cut of Hard-Hitting Hardcore and we've been blasting it at NNHQ for a while, so follow the link up top and get it while it's hot. We'll be back in seven with the latest from the almighty Advanced Perspective label and two more cuts from the crypt: the vile Raw Nerve and the original Region Rockers, Guinea Kid.

The First Days

Alright alright alright, thanks for returning for the second Not Normal Thursday. If you think hogging a whole day for ourselves on a weekly basis is a bold move, consider that we once claimed a whole year belonged to us. That’s 365 days, not the paltry 52 counting us down to the last one very last one, so I dunno, be thankful there’s not more of us to ignore.

You know the boy can talk, but after last week, I’m spent. I’ll save the greater ruminations and expressions of gratitude for subsequent entries, so I’ll just say that the inpouring of well wishes and support is noted and appreciated. If the label couldn’t run without the True Believers, it certainly couldn’t end without you either, so thank you.

I have a few goals that I’d like to accomplish before next October and I believe enumerating them on the World Wide Web will hold me accountable towards their completion. There are a few things I’m keeping close to my chest for once, holding off until their completion is within reach, but Number 1 is uploading each release to our YouTube channel and to that end I’ve updated it with two new entries: the Mike Jones x Spoken Thought collab and the Accela demo from early last year. Number two the completion of a project that has fully stalled in recent months: uploading full scans of the artwork and accoutrements for all the digital TB’s out there. Finally, I’ll be starting at, well, the starting point for my tertiary objective, which is to reflect on each release, so here’s me chewing cud on some real NWI crud: the Cold Shoulder demo collection.

NNT#001 Cold Shoulder - Same Fucking Excuses CS

It wouldn’t do to get all poetic or prosaic or bop around non-linear like for these here purposes, we’ll start at the beginning and meander over to the now as it may come. But the big First Ish sprang forth from everyone’s Mama, necessity; after a whopping three or four people asked over a period of months why Cold Shoulder’s demos were sold out and whether they would ever see reissue, we got to compiling and came up with Same Fucking Excuses just in time for our first and only show outside of the Midwest.

When a project wraps up, there’s something intrinsic to punk(s), that first comes the moving on and then comes the implicit embarrassment, a 1-2 step we’ll witness next week. You see this frequently in groups of thirty year old men who suddenly begin “exploring their creative side” through rote experimentations with post punk or dry-humping guitar pedals or what-the-fuck-ever other kind of chickenshit overcompensations for a receding hairline they need to fill their personalities with, or in the way post-grads pepper litanies of clarification into speech with co-workers. “Oh, I enjoyed United Mutation, but have you experienced this obscure Italian psych raga from ‘63? It’s transcendent.”

Look, I kinda blacked out through that, but I was on my way to a somewhat salient and positive declaration: Cold Shoulder was a necessary and important starting point in many ways, not just for the label, but for the entirety of my output as a musician and artist. It was blunt and dumb, because we were blunt and dumb. It was beholden to no prevailing trend in hardcore, because we were yokels from NWI with zero conception for what was what. You took two hardcore kids, two metalcore dorks, and a folk punk and Cold Shoulder’s what you got. We played my high school while our future bassist got chased by my chemistry teacher for moshing, we played Florida and covered Poison Idea to an unimpressed audience of 12, we released a seven inch before most of us left our teens, and recorded the two demos and handful of b-sides compiled here before we inevitably imploded, capping off our illustrious year and a half as a four piece with a fill-in drummer. Those are the sounds and emotions and experiences captured on this tape and I think that’s all something to be proud of and the reason, True Believer, I think you’ll find a sliver of relevancy within that diatribe is that you may have already or may hope to tread a similar trajectory within a similar timeframe, and when you do, you should be fucking proud regardless what some fucking know it all jagging off to Death In June thinks.
 

Trivialities: 100 copies on white cassette with taped on paper labels. A side: Cold Shoulder, B side: Same Fucking Excuses, in a Discharge font (or typeface, if you must) downloaded off the fucking internet. Double-sided, two panel insert with lyrics, original release info, and personnel listing of all the different Mikes in the band.

That’s it for this week! Check the webstore for some real shit. We’ve got the new Pleather single, the cyco loco nastiness of DC’s Corvo, plus much much more.

Til next time!

One Eye Goes Back; The Other, Forward.

Hello hello hello,

I dug out our old "blogspot" in order to, hopefully, more efficiently communicate over the next year. We've got two points of discussion to get through today, one "small" and one BIG.

Let’s get the "small" one out of the way first, though this speaks more to the quantity of info, not the quality. The modern masterpiece Blackie by Roy Kinsey is and has been available on vinyl for some time. It was an honor to work on this with Roy and Mike and, after a very long sabbatical on our part, have the chance to get it into your hands. It’s joining the webstore accompanied by some other “recent” acquisitions, as well as almost everything in our inventory at the lowest price possible (a sale that will largely last until those products have been cleared out). Please follow the link above to one of our storefronts and scoop it up.

What comes next is long, it's BIG, if ya dig, so if you stick around, take the time, and follow us through it, I thank you for being what you are: a True Believer.

I borrowed this term, from the Man, the late Stan Lee, father (grand-father? Great grand-father?) of modern comic books, the head of the House of Ideas. He used it as I use it, to describe a group of fanatics who just can’t seem to get enough of what most would write off as kid shit, those in pursuit of alternative modes of expression, those who fumble and falter through one bad idea after another until, finally, it clicks!, and you find the good one. I like to think that is the legacy of Not Normal Tapes. That the dead space and silence, what little of it there was between each release was a series of fumbles ‘til we face-planted into that out of the way sort of genius I believe constitutes an NNT release.

Since the last broadcast of Not Normal Quarterly, I did what I always do: overloaded myself. I swore I would take it easy and then just couldn’t do it, proceeded to drop a slew of releases, which I regard as highly as those first steps taken over ten years ago: the Floor Above, true outsider hardcore punk from Nashville; CB Radio Gorgeous, the best punk band this city has produced since the turn of the century; the Lipschitz, the hardest working, hardest rocking duo since Fred and Toody and/or Lux and Ivy; two releases from Roy Kinsey, the most focused, brilliant, and thought-provoking artist I’ve had the fortune to work with; Deodorant, who could not possibly cater more directly to my musical tastes if they tried; Dagger, THE fucking band that reminded what was special about my home and, I believe, rekindled the fire in the region; CT-85, a necessary explosion; all followed by the “big” reboot, the extension into infinity that brought us Bughouse II (mk. 1, for those counting); Jocko, a monumental expression of, well, Expression; and, finally the collaboration between Mike Jones and Spoken Thought, two of the big brains that helped bring Roy’s vision to fruition just a short time prior.

This last year has seen a tremendous amount of support for what we do from some wonderful people and I’d like to take time to acknowledge that. We held three anniversary shows in honor of our 10th year, held at places as varied as Bric-A-Brac Records, Paul Henry’s Art Gallery, and Slippery Slope, all attended to capacity. I thank Jen & Nick, Kenny, and Liz, respectively, for making sure said events went down, for allowing me a place to celebrate a plateau not many other DIY Hardcore Punk labels have been fortunate enough to reach (though not for lack of trying.) I was also interviewed twice, once by NWI’s own Musically Meditated Podcast and again by Golnar Nikpour for MRR, which appeared in that hallowed punk rag’s penultimate issue. To be allowed to opine on such a grand scale by someone I so fully admire, who so fully embodies the punk ethos as I understand it is something I will be thankful for until my dying day.

So we’re here now, in infinity, pondering these auspicious happenings. It was a fucking goddamned year like most of our fucking goddamned years. Exhausting, but remarkable. But then, I again ponder that penultimate issue of MRR, and the final issue as well, and how well they no doubt sold, and how things possibly would have been different for the most important running document the underground has, or had, but you get it, if that sort of full throated support had been consistent. And I’m also pondering the recent article in Rolling Stones magazine informing whoever still reads that hackfest that vinyl is poised to outsell CDs for the first time in a couple decades, a high tide that was never gonna raise all boats. The mainstream confirmation of CDs as a soulless format is a truth the underground has known for decades, and all this means functionally is that major labels found a way to offset this discovery by clogging the arteries of vinyl production with Beatles reissues, repackaged as collectible knick-knacks for the check out line at Forever 21. So yeah, I guess it’s notable that those honkeys in Imagine Dragons moved some vinyls through Target or some dad scooped up a killer NOFX scratch and sniff picture disc RSD exclusive, but that doesn’t move an American Hate LP out of my fucking house. And all that makes me ponder, not necessarily the function of all DIY labels at this point in space-time, but definitely the function of mine.

There’s two of me writing the forthcoming revelation: Ralph Rivera, the co-founder and business owner of Not Normal; and Ralph Rivera, the True Believer. I’ve run this label at about 20% the former and 80% the latter for the entirety of its existence, a percentage I think is about consistent across the board for any DIY label worth mentioning. None of us got into this to live the good life, ya dig?, but you can only run on just this side of financial ruin, spend a few grand on a record you know to be perfect just to watch it sit on the shelves and collect dust, or have a release coincide with the dissolution of the band so many times before the mental toll beats out even the most superhuman of constitutions, something I’ve never been accused of possessing in the first place. And those conditions? Things just change, and I’m chief among them. It’s harder to take risks on the creative endeavors of others when to take them means perpetually delaying your own.

I won’t flatter myself by thinking anyone was waiting around for this, but, for my own sake, it was something I needed to get out of my head and onto paper, digital or otherwise. I’m thankful for the opportunities I’ve been given and the love and support I’ve received. I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished and have no regrets, except five, give or take, but that’ll come later. I’m just at a distinct juncture and I’ve grown enough behind the scenes to know it for what it is. Over the past six months, I’ve ran over every conceivable scenario, to the point that I informed a member of CBRG I would no longer be able to release their record, that I was packing it in. I thought I could just call it now and be content, but that’s a choice I’m too high diva to fucking make. No, no, everything’s gotta be a fucking production with this one, so although I don’t see many years left of this label, I can see exactly one. One year to tie up the loose ends of this big multi-issue arc we’ve been working on.

Behold, True Believers, the final era of Not Normal. The finite infinity that stretches before us, that fate dictates exactly like this:

NNI#004 Tums - Old Perverts & Horse Fuckers CS

NNI#005 Bughouse II mk. II CS

NNT#047 HJD - Demo ‘84 CS

NNI#006 CB Radio Gorgeous EP

NNI#007 Mister - Espejismo EP

NNI#008 Absolute Bughouse II CS & Zine

Not Normal 0

I’ll be back with more words (though considerably less than this), weekly, every Thursday, until the last day, 10/10/20. I hope you follow along with us until that point.

Thank you, True Believers,

Ralph/NNT