The last post has featured a "noise band" from New York. Now here's for Madison, Wisconsin. Killdozer, the band credited for being pre-grunge, proto-grunge or real grunge before grunge ever happened, are best known for cover-versions of songs everybody likes to sing along with. They reduce these songs to their skeleton (bass, drum, guitar) - done by the Hobson bro's, slow them down, make em heavy and the singer (whose name is Michael Gerald) tries to sound like a drunken hooligan. This way, some of these songs become simply ridiculous, some of them capable of being listened to by a human being in his sober mind. Here is a song that is not a cover version (as far as I know), although it bears some reminiscences to Scott McKenzie's mainstream hippie-hymn "San Francisco". Maybe the most cynical comment on Hippiedom ever: Free Love in Amsterdam from Killdozer's "Twelve Point Buck".
The most famous among the Killdozer covers (their album "For Ladies Only" was made up of those entirely) is their rendering of Don McLean's "American Pie". Instead of that one, I include two other tracks from "For Ladies Only": Steve Miller's "Take the Money and Run" (I have the idea that they really like that song) and Joe South's "Hush" (most widely known for the Deep Purple cover of it). ENJOY!
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