Subscriber Update: Yes, I left a paragraph outta today’s post!

Damn, I gotta stop editing at midnight….

Napalm Nation, you have had to endure my mea culpas before. No, I’m not always my own best editor, one of the weaknesses of self-publishing on Substack. I get impatient: “Goddammit! I wanna get this post up already!!” I need a kind sensei telling me, “Patience, Grasshopper. You must do this right.” Or at least my former editor at The Austin Chronicle, Raoul Hernandez, ringing me up after I submit my piece to yell about how he can’t understand what I wrote.

I have two corrections to today’s post about Cherry Red’s US/Canada punk and garage box sets. First is a simple sentence construction, four paragraphs in. It should read like this:

Because they got beat to everything by Richard Hell, the guy who provides Cherry Red with the title/opening track for its comprehensive box set Blank Generation: A Story Of US/Canadian Punk and its Aftershocks 1975-1981.

Sure, a subtle matter of moving the subject, Mr. Hell. His name was initially placed after the box set’s title. An awkward construction, but one that some may not have noticed. But it looked clumsy to me, in the cold light of day. It probably looked thusly to Mr. Hell, as well. Many apologies, good sir.

Secondly…HOW IN HELL DID AN ENTIRE PARAGRAPH GET LOST DURING FINAL EDITING?!!

It was a necessary one, as well!

It was supposed to be the piece’s sixth paragraph. Here’s the expurgated graf:

But the meat of Blank Generation is the American stuff. All the heavy hitters besides Hell are present and accounted for: Obviously the Ramones’ blitzkrieg surfisms (“Rockaway Beach”), Television's jagged perfection (“Friction”), Patti Smith's poetic fury (“Pissing in a River”) and the Dead Boys’ young/loud/snotty power-rocker “Sonic Reducer” and The Heartbreakers’ Dee Dee Ramone & Richard Hell-penned ode to smack addiction “Chinese Rocks.”  Still, the beauty of the set is its lack of concentration strictly on the big names, spreading the focus across the US. So you get more regional acts such as the Stoogetastic DMZ (“Bad Attitude”), the similar Los Angeles-by-way-of-Detroit band The DoGs (“John Rock,” their salute to MC5 manager John Sinclair), The Avengers’ we’re-taking-over anthem “We Are The One,” the American Generation X-isms of SHOCK (“This Generation’s On Vacation”), and OG afropunks Pure Hell (“Noise Addiction”), among a thousand million more worthy three chord wonders. 

Those corrections were made and updated at the version of the review at the Substack site. This extra is strictly for the benefit of those of you on the mailing list. Thank you all for putting up with me and my caffeine-fueled ADHD-style editing. See you soon.