The Way Out

The world unexpectedly lost Bob Casale (a.k.a. "Bob 2") this past Monday, at the age of 61. Casale was Devo's guitarist and keyboardist, and a founding member of the punk/post-punk legends alongside his brother Jerry and the brothers Mark and Bob "Bob 1" Mothersbaugh. Casale's death comes less than a year after the loss of longtime Devo drummer Alan Myers, who died last summer at just 58 years old. These are both terribly sad losses for the underground music world, and so it seemed a fitting time to stop and pay tribute to Devo.

For this special hour of The Way Out, we combined a few favorite Devo tracks along with some Devo side projects (Mark Mothersbaugh's film and TV scores, Jihad Jerry, Devo 2.0, and Devo aliases The Wipeouters and The Smart Patrol) and various artists who either influenced the spudboys or were closely associated with them over the years.

Here's the playlist for our Thursday, February 20, 2014, show:

Devo - "Jocko Homo (Booji Boy version)"
The Wipeouters - "Shut Up Little Man"
The Smart Patrol - "That's What He Said"
Jihad Jerry & The Evildoers - "Beehive"
Devo 2.0 - "Boy U Want"
Mark Mothersbaugh - "Hardest Geometry Problem in the World"
Cyndi Lauper - "Pee-Wee's Playhouse Theme"
Devo - "Uncontrollable Urge"
Pere Ubu - "Life Stinks"
The Dead Boys - "Ain't Nothin' to Do"
15 60 75 (The Numbers Band) - "Animal Speaks"
Tin Huey - "I'm a Believer"
Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band - "Dropout Boogie"
The Residents - "Laughing Song"
[Kraftwerk - "The Model"]
[Suicide - "Rocket USA"]
Brian Eno - "King's Lead Hat"
Neil Young & Devo - "Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)"
[Devo - "Gates of Steel"]

Archived streaming audio of this show can be heard here now (playable in Chrome, Firefox, Explorer, Opera, and Safari browsers):



Note: The bracketed songs in the playlist had to be cut from the live broadcast due to time constraints, but we've inserted them into the archived streaming audio file posted here. Consider this the "deluxe edition" of the show! We've also included the full 10-minutes of "Hey Hey, My My" from the film Human Highway (1982) - it was faded out after about 2-minutes in the live broadcast. As a result, though, be aware that the song references in the last voice break don't match perfectly to the playlist order you'll hear in this streaming audio file.

A couple weeks ago we presented a shoegaze-themed broadcast to celebrate Slowdive's reunion announcement. The response to that show was overwhelmingly positive, and so we thought we'd revisit shoegaze music again and provide a sequel of sorts. But we also didn't want to repeat ourselves, and therefore this time we choose to explore some of the various influences on the shoegazing bands, in a show we titled Roots of Shoegaze. (A prequel, perhaps....)

We wanted to highlight an array of artists from the 1960s through the 1980s who influenced shoegazing in significant ways: from the lush psychedelia of The Byrds and Love, to the hypnotic drone of The Velvet Underground, to the atmospheric, ethereal new wave of Cocteau Twins and The Cure, to the mopey, jangling pop of The Smiths, to the distorted noise-pop of The Jesus & Mary Chain and Sonic Youth, and ultimately the narcotic dissonance of My Bloody Valentine. As is the case with most themed shows like this one, fitting in everything that deserved attention was impossible in only an hour-long program (bands like Bauhaus, Echo and The Bunnymen, The La's, Ultra Vivid Scene, Dinosaur Jr., and Husker Du had to get cut, just to name a few). But to the best of our abilities, this is the pre-history of shoegaze in 15 songs.

Here's the playlist for our Thursday, February 13, 2014, show:

The Beatles - "Rain"
The Velvet Underground - "Sunday Morning"
The Byrds - "I See You"
Love - "She Comes in Colors"
Syd Barrett - "Dark Globe"
Cocteau Twins - "Lorelei"
The Cure - "M"
The Chameleons - "Thursday's Child"
The Smiths - "That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore"
The House of Love - "Love in a Car"
The Jesus and Mary Chain - "Just Like Honey"
Spacemen 3 - "So Hot (Wash Away All of My Tears)"
Galaxie 500 - "Blue Thunder"
Sonic Youth - "Tom Violence"
My Bloody Valentine - "Sueisfine"

Archived streaming audio of this show can be heard here now (playable in Chrome, Firefox, Explorer, Opera, and Safari browsers):



Note: The archived recording inexplicably cut off after The Chameleons song. We've dubbed in audio of the songs from The Smiths onward, but unfortunately the voice breaks in the second half of the show have been lost (and hot damn were they good voice breaks - Andrew was really on a rock critic history lesson trip that night!).

This week's show featured a jumble of 1970s and 1980s music that we dubbed An Arty Punky Sort of Pop (ok, a couple of these tracks were released in the very early 1990s too, if we're going to get picky about it). These are all artists and songs that might typically get classified as proto-punk, punk, post-punk, indie rock, new wave, or art rock. But each in its own way defies such easy classification. The lineup here is incredibly diverse, however each of these artists shares a certain style or approach: they're all somehow unconventional, challenging the norms and conventions of popular music while also clearly still working within them. Some of these artists play eclectic pop with punk or avant-rock tendencies, while others play proto-punk/punk/post-punk with experimental but nevertheless overt pop sensibilities. We can't quite put a finger on what it is they're doing and yet it seems to make a certain amount of sense - hence the vague specificity of the phrase An Arty Punky Sort of Pop.

Here's the playlist from our Thursday, February 6, 2014, broadcast:

The Modern Lovers - "Someone I Care About"
Beat Happening - "Midnight a Go-Go"
Half Japanese - "Eye of the Hurricane"
The Soft Boys - "Sandra's Having Her Brain Out"
John Cale - "Fear is a Man's Best Friend"
Magazine - "Because You're Frightened"
Jonathan Richman - "They're Not Tryin' On the Dance Floor"
The dB's - "Dynamite"
The Embarrassment - "Patio Set"
The Feelies - "The Boy With the Perpetual Nervousness"
Violent Femmes - "Gimme the Car"
Television Personalities - "Salvador Dali's Garden Party"
Swell Maps - "Let's Buy a Bridge"
Pere Ubu - "Navvy"
Can - "Vitamin C"

Note: Be aware that the audio drops out unexpectedly at a few spots in the archived recording. Also, near the top of the show we mentioned that we were going to play Brian Eno. Indeed, the original intention was to play Eno's "King's Lead Hat" and also Talking Heads' "Don't Worry About the Government," but we ran long and those two songs unfortunately had to get cut.

Archived streaming audio of this show can be heard here now (playable in Chrome, Firefox, Explorer, Opera, and Safari browsers):

Earlier this week, the very welcome news arrived that 1990s U.K. shoegaze legends Slowdive will be reuniting later this year after an almost 20 year absence. So far, only a pair of concert dates have been announced, in England and Spain respectively, but it seems highly likely that more will soon follow. And the band's even talking about writing and recording new material together already.

This is stop-the-presses type news here at The Way Out, as we're massive fans of Slowdive. And indeed, when the reunion news broke on Tuesday night, we quickly scrapped our planned continuation of last week's early U.S. punk and hardcore show (don't worry, we'll return to it soon) and threw together a set of classic late 1980s and early 1990s shoegaze music in Slowdive's honor.

In choosing a shoegazing playlist, we decided to focus on only the initial crop of mostly U.K. acts who were first grouped together under the "shoegaze" banner (though we also included a couple of their U.S. contemporaries, namely Swirlies and Lilys). Shoegaze is quite a nebulous concept - at best a "sound" or "style" rather than a specific genre, scene, or "movement" - and as a descriptor it gets thrown around very loosely today. To put it more bluntly, the term shoegaze gets grossly misapplied. In our minds, the term belongs to a specific style of indie/alternative rock music that existed for just a handful of years in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and that was performed by a relatively small cadre of bands. But that's perhaps a debate best left for another time and place. Suffice it to say, the bands we chose to feature represent the style's "first wave," if you will, and some of its most prominent purveyors.

Here's the playlist from our Thursday, January 30, 2014, broadcast:

LoOp - "Arc-Lite (Sonar)"
Slowdive - "When the Sun Hits"
The Telescopes - "Flying"
Chapterhouse - "Pearl"
Pale Saints - "Sight of You"
Swirlies - "Sarah Sitting"
My Bloody Valentine - "Come in Alone"
Lush - "De-Luxe"
Ride - "Nowhere"
Slowdive - "Catch the Breeze"
Swervedriver - "Sci-Flyer"
Lilys - "The Hermit Crab"

Listen to archived streaming audio of this show here now (playable in Chrome, Firefox, Explorer, Opera, and Safari browsers):



You can also stream audio of the show via SoundCloud by following this link: January 30, 2014

While late 1970s and early 1980s punk and hardcore music is regularly featured on The Way Out, we recently realized it's been a little while since we dug deep into these genres on the show, especially with a focus solely on the U.S. scene. For instance, last semester we did a whole series of shows dedicated to U.K. post-punk and indie-pop. We also did another run of shows focused on the "classic" indie/college rock era of the late 1980s and 1990s that emerged out of the first couple waves of punk and hardcore (Sonic Youth, Husker Du, Beat Happening, et al).

So, we decided to kick off this Spring semester with a few shows dedicated to late 1970s and early 1980s U.S. punk and hardcore. And we've chosen to focus on some of the more obscure artists from this movement, by which we mean no Black Flag, no Minor Threat, no Bad Brains, no Dead Kennedys, no Germs, no X, and so on. We love those bands but we play their music fairly regularly, as do a few other DJs on WSUM. Thus, we thought we'd give some other bands their due. (And certainly, if you know this period of music well, many of these artists below are hardly "obscure." But we think it's safe to argue that they definitely don't receive the attention of Black Flag and the other handful of groups named above.)

We're dubbing this series of shows Destroy All Music - a nod to terrific The Weirdos song, which indeed kicked off the whole series. Part 1 was broadcast on Thursday, January 23, 2014, and at least a couple more sets will follow in the weeks to come. Here's the playlist for Part 1:

The Weirdos - "Destroy All Music"
Black Randy and the Metrosquad - "Idi Amin"
Articles of Faith - "Bad Attitude"
The Zero Boys - "Civilization's Dying"
Flipper - "Living For the Depression"
The Fix - "Vengeance"
Deep Wound - "I Saw It"
The Fiends - "Asian White"
Redd Kross - "Pseudo-Intellectual"
The Embarrassment - "Celebrity Art Party"
White Flag - "Face Down"
False Prophets - "Scorched Earth"
The Pagans - "Not Now No Way"
Void - "War Hero"
Ignition - "Anger Means"
Alice Donut - "Burlesque"
Wipers - "Alien Boy"
No Trend - "Without Me"
The Avengers - "The American in Me"
Big Boys - "Fun Fun Fun"
The Dils - "You're Not Blank"
Really Red - "I Was a Teenage Fuck Up"
Nihilistics - "You're to Blame"

[No archived audio available.]

Back in December, during the week before Christmas, we decided to be a little cheeky and counterprogram the usual slate of cheerful holiday music that you hear all over the radio with a set of dark and gloomy tunes we dubbed Sad, Dark, and Depressing (And So, So Good). After all, the holidays may be cheerful for some people, but not all. And as the "and so, so good" addendum suggests, we here at The Way Out quite enjoy the gloomier side of rock and pop music anyway. So, this theme gave us an opportunity to play a bunch of musical styles that don't often make it into our playlists on a regular basis: goth, darkwave, horror punk, psychobilly, deathrock, doom, melancholic folk and country, and a bunch of other sullen, brooding, sinister and/or mournful tunes.

We came up with quite an extensive playlist and ended up splitting the show into a pair of 2-hour long sets. The first set was broadcast on Friday, December 20, 2013. It focused a bit more heavily on goth and post-punk. Here's the playlist for Part 1:

Depeche Mode - "Black Celebration"
The Damned - "The Shadow of Love"
Bauhaus - "Stigmata Martyr"
The Jesus and Mary Chain - "Nine Million Rainy Days"
The Gun Club - "The Fire of Love"
Pleasure Forever - "Curtain Call for a Whispering Ghost"
Johnny Cash - "Hurt"
The Black Heart Procession - "It's a Crime I Never Told You About the Diamonds in Your Eyes"
The Rock*A*Teens - "All That Death Jazz"
The Cramps - "Sunglasses After Dark"
Xiu Xiu - "I Luv the Valley OH!"
Death in June - "Torture By Roses"
Crime and the City Solution - "Six Bells Chime"
Killing Joke - "The Wait"
Harvey Milk - "The End"
Swans - "Big Strong Boss"
Christian Death - "Romeo's Distress"
The Cure - "Doubt"
The Smiths - "Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want"
The Birthday Party - "Nick the Stripper"
Misfits - "Last Caress"
Joy Division - "Isolation"
The Faint - "The Conductor"
Siouxsie and the Banshees - "Sin In My Heart"
These Immortal Souls - "Marry Me (Lie! Lie!)"
The Sisters of Mercy - "Lucretia My Reflection"
The Mission (UK) - "Serpents Kiss"
Big Star - "Holocaust"

It took us a few weeks to get back around to it, but the second set was broadcast last night, Thursday, January 16, 2014. This time the focus shifted more to roots rock and downbeat indie rock. Here's the playlist for Part 2:

Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds - "Song of Joy"
Lou Reed - "Oh Jim"
Arab Strap - "Soaps"
The Dream Syndicate - "Weathered and Torn"
The Twilight Singers - "Martin Eden"
Sparklehorse - "Sad and Beautiful World"
Nick Drake - "Harvest Breed"
Elliott Smith - "Pitseleh"
Tom Waits - "I Hope That I Don't Fall in Love With You"
Dirty Three - "Hope"
Sigur Ros - "Sigur 1 (Untitled)"
Black Tape for a Blue Girl - "Memory, Uncaring Friend"
Vic Chestnutt - "Flirted With You All My Life"
Hefner - "Goethe's Letter to Vic Chestnutt"
Calexico - "Trigger"
The Twilight Sad - "That Summer, At Home I Had Become the Invisible Boy"
I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness - "When You Got Out"
Cold Cave - "Hello Rats"
A Place to Bury Strangers - "The Falling Sun"
Arbouretum - "Ghosts of Here and There"
Pinetop Seven - "At His Kitchen Table"
Shearwater - "(I've Got a) Right to Cry"
Shipping News - "Bad Eve"
Steve Earle - "I Still Carry You Around"
Hallelujah the Hills - "The Might Come Back Club"
Retsin - "Dog and a Butterfly"
Songs: Ohia - "Hold On Magnolia"

[No archived audio available.]

This week we wrapped up our two-part, four-hour long 2013: Year in Review - a rather scattershot rundown of some of the more interesting and exciting new sounds to come out during the past year. Here's the playlist for Part 2, which was broadcast on Thursday, January 9, 2014:

These New Puritans - "Fragment Two"
Bill Callahan - "The Sing"
Bed Rugs - "Yawn"
Disappears - "Power"
Crocodiles - "Heavy Metal Clouds"
Lee Noble - "Covers"
Cough Cool - "Keeping Perfect Time"
Psychic Ills - "Might Take a While"
Black Hearted Brother - "(I Don't Mean To) Wonder"
No Age - "C'Mon, Stimmung"
Bill Orcutt - "Zip A Dee Doo Dah"
Fuzz - "Raise"
Purling Hiss - "Mercury Retrograde"
Teardrop Factory - "Vanity Unfair"
The Sufis - "Most Peculiar Happening Cat"
Jail Weddings - "It's Not Fair"
Milk Music - "I've Got a Wild Feeling"
Implodes - "Scattered in the Wind"
Tim Hecker - "Virginal II"
Akron/Family - "Sand Talk"
Omar Souleyman - "Ya Yumma"
Bass Drum of Death - "Way Out"
Unknown Mortal Orchestra - "Swim and Sleep (Like a Shark)"
Forest Swords - "The Weight of Gold"
Superchunk - "Staying Home"
Polvo - "Light, Raking"
Girls Against Boys - "It's a Diamond Life"
Wire - "Eels Sang"

[No archived audio available.]