Standing Over By The Record Machine: The Adverts and Cheater Slicks

Two crucial archival dives from the fine-boned aesthetes at In The Red Records.

I know, I know. Last week you only got one post out of me, a pair of record reviews for The Sleeveens and a Patsy Cline reissue. Then silence.

Because I was building a monster: 5,000 words on Flaco Jiménez! 5,000 words that somehow all of you actually read. I don’t know if you’re saints, masochists, or just really love Tex-Mex accordion players, but I appreciate the hell out of it. It damn near killed me, that piece. Took forever to research, forever to write. In between frying an egg, choking down a pot of coffee, and stealing three hours of sleep before the next shift at a day job that mostly hasn’t existed since November, yet somehow came roaring back to life in a big way and even offered me a promotion? I was neck-deep in Flaco.

And then the damn thing ballooned from a simple appreciation into a book chapter I didn’t mean to write. 5,000 words later, I shoved it out the door, and somehow you all followed me all the way through.

Thank you.

But that meant the rest of the week was a wash. No time for another story, no quick hits, no 1500-word blasts. Just me staggering from work to sleep and back again, while the Substack sat quiet. And here we are again—Friday’s at the door, another week’s gone, and it’s the same damn movie on repeat. Only this time, no Flaco piece waiting in the wings. Just me, once more running behind, running on fumes, typing at the edges of a life that’s equal parts shift work, exhaustion, and rock ’n’ roll obsession.

Which brings me to this week’s column, and a couple slabs of vinyl that needed to be written about. I mean, one of ‘em came out LAST YEAR, ferchrissakes! But y’know? I was kinda writin’ a book. Much like I accidentally did last week….

THE ADVERTS – Rehearsal Tape (In The Red Records/2.13.61) 12-inch 45 RPM EP

The Adverts were the sound of a small-town dream colliding head-on with the London punk explosion. T.V. Smith came at it with songs that were smarter, sharper, and more personal than most of his contemporaries, even if his band could barely keep up with him. That was part of the charm—“One Chord Wonders” wasn’t just a single, it was a mission statement, punk’s trial by fire wrapped in Smith’s sardonic wit. And then there was Gaye Advert: the bass lines might have been rudimentary, but her presence—dark-eyed, striking, defiantly female in a boys’ club—made her one of the first true icons of the scene. Even when the press tried to box her in as a sex symbol, she answered with scorn and low-end rumble.

For a brief, furious stretch, The Adverts embodied punk’s contradictions: brilliant songs in the hands of self-professed “terrible musicians,” media exploitation versus genuine outsider spirit, the glitz of the spotlight clashing with small-town awkwardness. “Gary Gilmore’s Eyes” turned tabloid horror into a charting single, while Crossing The Red Sea with The Adverts proved that even a band held together by duct tape and adrenaline could make a classic. They burned fast, they burned out, but the evidence is still on wax: the sound of a band out of its depth, and all the more powerful for it.

Now we get the sound of The Adverts coming undone. Or maybe it’s the sound of them becoming done?!

Sometime in 1977, The Adverts ventured around the corner from their normal rehearsal room on Lillie Road in Fulham to the rehearsal basement beneath the Beggar’s Banquet record shop, where The Lurkers rehearsed. The goal was simple:

“We went there once and did tape some songs onto cassette," shrugs Smith in Dave Thompson’s inner sleeve liner notes. “I don’t recall why….”

Whether it was intended as a demo, or just some way for the band to have a vague idea of what they sounded like to those frothing pogo’ers down at The Roxy, a cassette nevertheless ended up at the offices of Chiswick Records. They had the good taste to sign Motörhead, The Damned, The Count Bishops and Johnny Moped, but apparently thought Whirlwind would make a better investment. Shrugs

“The cassette sat at the label headquarters until October 2022, until it was auctioned on eBay,” wrote the winning bidder Henry Rollins, in liners riding this record’s back cover. He goes on to explain hearing subterranean fidelity bootlegs of these tracks over the years, involving lifelong pal Ian MacKaye in the digital transfer, then releasing them through the kind auspices of Larry Hardy’s more-than-crucial In The Red Records. For which, we should genuflect towards Henry, Larry, and various other golden idols.

The thing is, these digital transfers are a step above those sludge-fi boots Rollins describes. But it does not matter. It’s murk, but it’s LOUD murk! The Adverts’ energy, bombsite attack, and Smith’s too-good-for-punk songwriting come blasting through the layers of filth. It all works. As Austin-by-way-of-DC guitar genius Evan Johns once told me of a live album he once recorded on a Walkman at the Hole In The Wall: “You can hear the cymbals and shit.”

These versions of these familiar favorites—“One Chord Wonders,” “New Boys,” “Quick Step,”
“We Who Wait,” and “Bored Teenagers”—blast with all the authority they would ever have. The band’s as tight as they’ll ever be, and the only real difference between these takes and what you would hear on their singles and Crossing The Red Sea is a matter of production. For musicians who really weren’t any great shakes in the chops department, Gaye, guitarist Howard Pickup and drummer Laurie Driver knew how to get the best out of their limited abilities and give Smith’s songs exactly what they needed. Nothing more, nothing less.

What you get with Rehearsal Tape is The Great Lost Adverts EP: An alternate universe debut where they pre-empted Red Sea with five of their best songs, recorded minimally with maximum energy and aggression. Not better or worse than what was “legitimately” released, but an equally fine representation of the band. It won’t replace the originals…or maybe it will?

Rehearsal Tape is like finding a cracked cassette at the bottom of some kid’s rucksack in ’77, still reeking of cigarettes and stale beer, but when you press play it’s the sound of punk being born all over again—raw, imperfect, unstoppable.

CHEATER SLICKS – Don’t Like You (In The Red Records) 2xLP

I can remember when this album came out 30 years ago. Boston’s Cheater Slicks had released an album some years before, when G.G. Allin’s brother Merle played bass, that sounded like The Replacements in a bad mood—not bad, but not terribly distinguished either. “Crude, sludgy, and unrelenting garage punk,” as their current bio would have it, like one of Tim Warren’s Back From The Grave comps shakin’ off a particularly nasty heroin-and-tequila hangover. Which sounds good on paper, I know. But you didn’t reach for it first off the record shelves, either.

Don’t Like You was a whole ‘nother critter altogether.

Tom, half of the singin’/guitar-slingin’ Shannon brothers at Cheater Slicks’ core (alongside Dave), says if they didn’t fit in on your records shelves, they “just did not click” in their native Boston.

“We were surrounded by neo-metal bands lamely aping early White Zombie or Metallica,” Tom writes in the liner notes to this, the 30th anniversary repress of Don’t Like You on fluorescent pink and green vinyl, with a second disc of the demos that went into this LP’s birthing pains.

“Grunge was just developing but we didn’t fit that either, although we were heavy,” he continues. “We did not have metal influences. We came in at the end of ‘80s Boston garage rock (DMZ, Lyres, Real Kids etc.), but our vision of garage was different—cruder, noisier and more anti-social. It did not rely on or glorify mod haircuts, Beatle boots or any of that stuff. We loved ‘60s punk for its wild off-the-hook spontaneity. Rockabilly was a big influence too, but only because it was crude and insane, not because of the fashion. We eschewed most of the cultural aspects of our influences.”

Apparently, losing bass guitar just served to make Cheater Slicks even more unchained and bloody-minded. So did losing dayjobs at Rounder Records, and living on top of one another in a shared bandhouse in Allston. It all came spilling out in two bursts of songwriting/demo sessions—one on eight-track, the other on 16—broken up by caveman drummer Dana Hatch’s angry defection, during which another unnamed drummer ushered in more composing.

Songs were falling out of the sky back then. One riff, a snarl, and they’d have another one done. Tom Shannon remembers them being hallucinations of sorts: “A chord progression and then BOOM a song.”

When they had 11 blistering angst bombs ready to track for real, they decamped to Jerry Teel’s Funhouse Studio on New York’s Lower East Side, Jon Spencer at the board.

Funhouse was chaos. No place to stay in NYC, so they crashed in the studio or passed out in the van, then woke up and hit it again — live takes, vocals shoved through a P.A., everything raw as hell.

“Certainly not ideal,” recalls Shannon. “Jon had a vision for us, but it pushed us to the edge and added a further insane, almost inept quality to the recordings.”

So, with a repertoire full of songs about bad livin’, energized by sessions fueled by worse livin’, how could they lose?

No lie—Spencer kinda made them sound a bit like The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion—a purposefully ramshackle garage-punk outfit without a bass guitarist, as influenced by Hound Dog Taylor and The HouseRockers as by The Stooges. His disc, the original release, is heavy, dense and noisy, full of audio collage elements and more fuzz-per-square-inch than my belly button. Yet all the mania somehow does not obscure that there’s a level of craftsmanship to the songs. These are catchy tunes! Something like “Spanish Rose” is actually hookier than a fishing lure shop! And Dana Hatch beats the shit outta two and four the whole way like one pissed-off troglodyte.

Then you take the fluorescent pink disc in this two record set off, and put on the fluorescent green one with the demos—including songs that did not make it past these official sessions—and it’s almost a different album.

The production is more open, more bare-bones. More clangy, in a way. I almost prefer it, as the overall audio picture is less claustrophobic, more open. These songs can now breathe. And it’s wonderful, refreshing.

And while I say I almost prefer the green disc, the pink disc remains great. No LP has so directly reflected its cover photo—the two Shannons flanking Hatch, looking hungover and wary and ready to start throwing fists, while the drummer looks malnourished and higher than Dumbo’s crows, front and center—better than the original Spencer recordings. But the green disc sounds like the Shannons had some aspirin, Pepto Bismol and a cup of coffee, and Hatch at least ate some White Castle. Two sides of the same whatsis, just before and after, if you will.

Three decades on, Don’t Like You still sounds like the best bad decision you ever made in a record store—feral, funny, and flat-out unbeatable. Cheater Slicks weren’t trying to fit in then, and they sure as hell don’t now. That’s why this album holds up: it’s noise, it’s hooks, it’s survival, and it’s still one mean motherfucker of a record.

🔥 Punk doesn’t get archived by accident. 🔥

It takes obsessives, insomniacs, and writers dumb enough to turn “a couple reviews” into 5,000 words at the drop of a needle. That’s what you come here for—the deep dives, the lost tapes, the garage noise reborn in full Technicolor.

If you’ve read this far, you know it’s worth more than a casual scroll. Paid subscriptions keep this fire lit. No ads. No algorithms. No clickbait. Just the music that matters, written like it matters.

Right now, I’m offering 20% off for new paid subs…for life! That’s less than what you drop on a greasy burger and a soda, and it keeps these stories alive.

If you value punk history told without compromise, hit that button. This offer ends on the 31st. Let’s keep dragging these ghosts back onto your turntable, together.

Coming Soon: The Kinks, The Mekons, more James Baker, more David Joahnsen, and more Jimmy Ashhurst!

#TheTimNapalmStegallSubstack #TimNapalmStegall #StandingOverByTheRecordMachine #RecordReviews #TheAdverts #TVSmith #GayeAdvert #GaryGilmoresEyes #CrossingTheRedSea #PunkIcons #UKPunkHistory #ChiswickRecords #HenryRollins #IanMacKaye #InTheRedRecords #LarryHardy #CheaterSlicks #DontLikeYou #GaragePunk #BostonPunk #JonSpencer #FunhouseStudio #DanaHatch #NoiseAndHooks #PunkJournalism #IndependentVoices #SupportIndependentMedia #GoPaidItGetsLouder #KeepTheSignalHumming #SubscribeNow #TwentyPercentOffForLife