Swinging Singles Club MN

 Yeah, I'm just sipping whisky and listening to the Sex Clark Five. For you I just have this. Jive-Ass Nightmare (1996) Supermodel. From Saint Paul. I got nothing here. Nothing to be found. One member ended up in Exercise. A bit all over the map as far as the music goes as I remember and something you're absolutely unlikely to ever come across again. It's on SMA Records which suggests that they would have existed in the initial orbit of bands that centered around the Turf Club which had become the hippest place to play starting around then.   (I always liked playing there except that the stage is about four feet off the floor and I have a terrible tendency to really like extra heavy amplifiers.)

 So yeah, I have diddly to say.  It's winter. There's fuck all to do except sleep, cook and play video games. Still buying more music than I have time to listen to, but I get some satisfaction in just looking at the wall of music, so it's a bit of a push, I guess. At least I'm picking stuff up cheaply as imaginable since for the most part I'm buying singles and compact discs and everybody else is still fetishizing vinyl.  But hey, if spending more money than necessary because the format makes your nipples hard I say have at it. You'll listen to the download and the record will mostly sit on a shelf collecting dust. Good for you. Present General Conditions (1996) So Dwindle . It's the indie rock/pop from the end of the 20th Century Minnesota style. The link gives the background on this release.    Days Away (1999) Their sophomore effort. These two things have been kind of languishing in the "to post" file for a couple of years now on the thought tha...

  Seriously, I wish there was more. II (2016) Apparently released simultaneously with the 6 song compact disc was this vinyl only release. This is the final piece of the Chuck Miller story as it stands now. But given the previous timeline, I can't really rule out that something else might appear mysteriously and suddenly without warning and that somehow I'll miss out on the opportunity to see it happen live. Such is the story of life. But get your own physical copy. You're not going to see it otherwise. Buffalo Sleeper Bandcamp has them cheap and worthwhile.

  I usually try not to post things less than a decade old. Give things time to fade into whatever obscurity awaits them before shining a light into the darkness. I also want things to be out of print.  It seems only fair to the makers of things that way. I'll also link to the bands when I can and encourage people to spend some hard earned for their own copies. Which leads us to this post. It's been six years and I never see these in the wild. So here we go. Buffalo Sleeper (2016) So another six years had passed. I was doing internet stuff and I for some reason was looking to see what was out there that I might have missed. There's a seven inch of bands live at the Turf Club with a Ten Ton Bridge track on it, but the only copy I've ever seen listed was asking a thoroughly ridiculous price for it. (Which some idiot actually paid, it seems.) While I was doing my google shit I came across Buffalo Sleeper. Yet another Chuck Miller joint with other local music veterans. Yeah,...

  Time passed.    Landfall (2010) And so it came to pass that nothing was heard of the adventures of Chuck Miller for lo, many years until one weird and magical day this album dropped from the blue sky and Ten Ton Bridge was alive again. Once again, of course, fate had it in for me. They played a few gigs, but I'd started back to school so that I could make a living rather than scrape by paycheck to paycheck. But there stood one final monument to Ten Ton Bridge to be reckoned with. I'll also admit that I haven't spent as much time with this one as the others. But no discography is complete without it. Let me know what your standout tracks are. I'm still listening to Milhaus while I type.

 Making a queue. I still haven't decided what to do for original flavor SSC. Going to plug away here with these Chuck Miller posts. It's too good to stop now. Fit (2003) A couple of decades back we had a band. We were still pretty fresh as a band, but we had some stuff that needed to be recorded and documented and maybe put onto an Ep that we could use to see if we could get gigs with and trade with other bands. We ended up going to local maestro Mike Wisti's Albatross Studio in the basement of his house. Before we actually booked we talked dates and made arrangements with Mike and he gave me a copy of his yearly "best of" of recordings he'd done the previous year. (I'll post that at some point. There's some really interesting things on there that never got a proper release) For me the standout track was "Misunderstanding" by Milhaus. That was my personal introduction to the world of Chuck Miller. It was the only thing on there that I immedia...

  Weird stuff happens.  Loaded (2000) The sophomore effort by Ten Ton Bridge. It's more of the same. Stripped down pop rock. The kind where there's only like an overdrive on the pedalboard and maybe a judiciously used chorus. A bit bolder and brasher, perhaps. (I mean, they used the same name as a Velvet Underground classic lp. That takes some balls.) I'm also listening to these as I type just to remind myself about them and because I genuinely really enjoy these albums. While I was doing this I found out that what I'd originally had in the file folder as this album was actually the first one all over again and tagged wrong and has been for over two years. So if nothing else, that's fixed and I get to be reintroduced to this one.

 I don't know anymore. I'm tired. I've been baking bread lately. It's easy as fuck and only needs five ingredients (flour, yeast, salt, water and a little sugar to get the yeast started). It also tastes great and having the oven on warms the apartment while making for a really pleasant aroma. Tonight I took some of the ends and a stale half a loaf and made bread pudding. I've also been digitizing another host of Lps this week. I started diving back into the Recent Arrivals for seven inches tonight too. Needless to say that as long as no one narcs on me and Google shuts me down I've got a whole fucking shitload of stuff that is on the docket for both blogs. It also seems like every time I leave the house and hit up a local record store I find something else local that I wasn't aware of on top of the huge list of things I'm still trying to track down. Eager to Please (1997) So it's the first post of the year. It's the kind of thing where for whatev...