We Give You...
Spacemen 3 - Little Doll ( 1986 / Psych)
Hello internet pals of music. Today the sun is out, and the cheeseburger birds are back so we’re listening to a Stooges cover better than the original via Rugby’s favorite fucked-up children*.
HB started out as a frequent customer.
It was at a video store, when those were cool, and he was a guy like me. With music and films, I just wanted to see something new, as did he. So we talked excitedly about things a lot of people found exasperating to listen to: Hong Kong action movies, Godzilla and strange music. Most of those people were waiting behind him in line, so I get it. Our customer service was good for the right people, terrible for anyone else.
At some unimaginable point he moved into our house for several months because we were scrambling to fill a room left barren when my roommates kicked out a high school friend of mine. He worked at a bar and was a terrible drunk. His girlfriend was a worse one, so they had to go. They also kicked out HB, although in both cases, I had to do the dirty work since I’d brought these rubes into the whole dumb desperate agreement. I was the house assassin.
A year before all this tragedy of youth, I had moved up with these two brothers; we found this house that was being used as a bootleg tattoo shop, and there was a giant stencil painting of Alfred E. Neuman’s face on one of the bedroom walls. That was enough for me, and I claimed my room (another house I moved in later had been previously occupied by a dominatrix and I chose the room that had the weird little hooks in the floor and ceiling). On move-in, I was completely disappointed to find out they’d nixed my request, and painted over the giant grinning face. To round out the rent, one of the brothers asked a small, wily, goateed co-worker to move in. It quickly became a burnout party house. We also lived across the street from a deputy of some sort who never felt compelled to bust us and I swear his wife gave us homemade cookies once, and catty corner to a woman who was some sort of punk scene ghost legend; someone invisible who you’d never guess knew everyone you could think of, and they all knew her. She was a trip. No word a lie, I sat with her, my roommate, and Top Jimmy (as in the Van Halen song) at her kitchen table, maybe having black coffee. Surreal to recall.
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So while I don’t thank HB for being a not very good roommate who never paid rent on time, I do thank him for playing his part in the house: another person with a great, but different record collection. Which is one of the reasons he never had rent on time. We saw it all coming within weeks when we discovered he didn’t have a dedicated job, but in typical slacker fashion it took us several months to move through the stages of passive aggression and actually do something about it. He was the first real record collector I’d met—he had doubles of several albums and I’d never seen that before; he even had a few triples. We probably could’ve kept his records, sold them and paid off his back rent if we were assholes (we were assholes), but we didn’t. The guy was well meaning and sweet though. I always felt like a rat for being the one who said both welcome and shortly after dude, I’m gonna need your key back now. I bumped into him a lifetime later and it felt warm to see him; he had a partner and he seemed happy and settled.
He introduced me to Spacemen 3.
Spacemen 3 were as legendary for kicking off a resurgence of deranged UK psych rock as they were for their blatant, unsavory appreciation of recreational drugs. One thing that’s always struck me is their acceptance of the bleak drudgery they brought on themselves—walking that line between the romance of addiction and pleas for salvation from the end. It was never a put on, they lived the life they sang about…Junkie gospel music.
They’re also the one band I can think of whose cover versions almost universally rival the originals. This Stooges cover is a prime example.
*refers to a famous bootleg and t-shirt, For All the Fucked Up Children of this World, We Give You Spacemen 3
Oh, and it’s the 15th. Enjoy another ten song mix of things I’m stuck on right now:
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Musik Klub: “Everythang’s Workin”