Playlist Of The Day 4/10/2016: Big Stick

How the hell I missed Big Stick when they could have had the most immediate benefit to my adulthood is a very sad mystery. If I'd ever come across them, I must have lumped them in with certain Cro-Mag hedonists of the time -- My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult sprang to mind, maybe the Electric Hell Fire -- that I didn't dislike so much as I mistrusted. I was terribly wrong to even blindly associate Big Stick with them, or anybody else. So much trouble could have been avoided if I'd taken them up when they were around. Our repentance is not so much regret for the ill we have done as fear of the ill that may happen to us in consequence. Damn straight, Frankie.

Big Stick, very much still around, started in Astoria in Queens in 1986 with an EP called Drag Racing. It was fairly straightforward and economical. Yanna Trance repeated a line about wearing tube tops and going to the drag races with Eddie as John Gill poked away at guitar while moments of inexactitude showered all around them. John Peel put it in his Record Box as one of the singles he'd save if his house ever caught on fire. They wore heavily disguising wigs in performance and in whatever fleeting moments they allowed themselves to be interviewed. The tracks kept coming from what I assume was their shared apartment: mantras written down in a grease fire storm, Gill's guitar coughing and lunging, Trance's drums clattering, the two of them mocking advances in recording technology as enthusiastically as they used them. If I didn't have such a big stick up my kisser at the time these things came out I'm sure I could have made several advancements in the realms of self-confidence and zen. I'll do better in the next life. Here are a platter of Big Stick moments to hum along with your sweetheart.