Razorcake | DIY Punk Music | Punk Bands | Punk Rock Bands

I was unemployed for most of the summer of 1987, and, to give myself some illusion of productivity, i started off every morning (okay, afternoon) by sending an anonymous post card signed with the obvious pseudonym “Jesus Chrysler” (note: this affectation preceded both the band of that name and the song “Jesus Chrysler Drives a Dodge” by the Screaming Blue Messiahs) to my friend Donny who was stationed in Japan. The only actual message i still remember from any of the cards i sent him (which were, as often as not, just weird scrawls and chicken scratching) was something to the effect of “HeY dONnY i bEt yOu DOn’t KNow tHaT NAz nOmaD & tHe NiGhtMaReS aRe reAllY tHe DAmNeD!”, which amused, puzzled, and bewildered him even after he got out of the Navy™. In retrospect, how ANYBODY could have listened to this record back then and NOT immediately pegged it as the Damned by the time “Action Woman” rolled around is beyond me, but, nope, most joes were well and truly of the opinion that Naz Nomad and Sphinx Svenson were real people (who weren’t other real people with funny names most of the time), that this really was the soundtrack to a movie called Give Daddy the Knife Cindy that no one had ever heard of before or since, and that American Screen Destiny pictures would one day surely grace us with this sure-fire box office smash in full Psychedelic Color, as advertised (starring Eddy Taylor and Shelley DuMaurier, don’tcha know). Oh well, people are weird that way. In any event, this album was always real cool to have at parties—if half the people wanted to hear something at least vaguely tied to punk rock (“vaguely tied to punk rock” about as generous a label as one’d slap on the Damned ca. this album’s original release in 1984) and the other half wanted to hear some sort of ‘60s punk-psych-garage thing, you could flip this on and be hailed as The Great Uniter; plus, back when it came out, i wasn’t all that familiar/saturated with songs like “Action Woman” and “She Lied” and “I Can’t Stand This Love, Goodbye,” so it came in handy as a de factoNuggets/Pebbles type thing as well. From a Damned standpoint, this record is certainly WAY the fuck better than their “real” sixth album (i maintain that every album up through Strawberries, their fifth, is worth owning), and, compared to Acid Eaters, the Ramones’ lame attempt at doing the same sort of record years later, Give Daddy the Knife Cindy is King of the Jelly Jungle times ten. From a standpoint of how essential a record featuring a ‘77 punk band (’76, whatever) doing cover songs from 1967 in 1984 is in 2005, if you can cope with a little of that thin, overcompressed ‘80s sound, and the whole bouncing around thing from the ‘70s to the ‘80s to the ‘60s to the ‘00s doesn’t swat you as sure to produce some horribly ersatz result, i say tune in, turn on, and blow your tweeter, dude. BEST SONG: I’ll say the one original, “(Do You Know) I Know.” BEST SONG TITLE: “I Can’t Stand This Love, Goodbye” FANTASTIC AMAZING TRIVIA FACT: I obtained my vinyl copy of this in the ‘90s when Timbo from Mutant Pop™ decided he could no longer stand this record, goodbye, and gave it to me. Sweet. –Rev. Norb (Dionysus)


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