M(H)AOL (photo: Pete Olshansky) Yeah, I’ve been missing in action all year, at least writing-wise. I’ve been pouring most of my energies into the radio show. I’m not making an excuse or making it up when I say that I’ve been suffering from writers block for a few years. It’s getting harder to write reviews because there’s not a lot I hear that’s not worthy of hyperbole and I really don’t want to over-praise releases that don’t deserve it. There are albums that have one or two worthwhile tracks but the rest is meh. I’ll play the good songs from those on the radio show but it’s not worth the e ..read more

As we approach the 50th anniversary of the release of Iggy & The Stooges “Raw Power” album (the actual release date was 2/7/73), it provides another opportunity to tell the story of how I discovered this life-changing album. I published this years ago on a MySpace blog (remember MySpace?) and I’ve made a few revisions. It was the summer of 1976 and I was in the middle of a somewhat lonely adolescence. I spent a lot of time in my room listening to records and devouring music magazines and books like Circus and Creem. I had a paperback book called “Rock Revolution,” about different gen ..read more

  SAVAGEHEADS Hey, it's your long-lost punk rock scribe. Yeah, it's been a long, up and town, tumultuous year and it's caused me to neglect this blog. Things are more or less on the upswing. I've been to a number of great shows in the last few months and seem to have partially snapped out of my chronic writer's block. I'm doing the top ten thing a bit differently this year. I'm putting them in alphabetical order. There really wasn't one stand-out album for me. It depends on the day but the ten selections probably got played more than anything else. I also know they're all 12"s. I do ..read more

COVER OF SUBURBAN PUNK #7, BY CHRIS CORKUM "IT SWALLOWED A GOAT ONCE..." After an abysmal 2021, 2022 isn't off to that great a start either. Things have opened up a bit again and I'm looking forward to seeing more shows in the coming months. It's been a little slow for new music coming my way but there have been a handful of releases that have been worth more than one play.  Still, it's been several months of personal loss. In my Best of 2021 post, I mentioned my friend Pat Lynch's passing. Two other friends (well, one was more of an acquaintance) passed away in January. I met the latt ..read more

ANTI-MACHINE (photo: Rachael Shorr) Yes, I know it's been the better part of a year since I posted/published anything. But I finally pulled it together for a Best of 2021 list. Hope you find something you hadn't heard before.  I don't have to tell everyone how much this year sucked, yet again. I made it to a grand total of three shows, so having a "best live" listing doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but much appreciation to Kyle for keeping the Banshee Den open and everyone else making an effort to keep DIY punk alive.  As I said, this year sucked. My friend Pat Lynch passed a ..read more

READ YELLOW Time for another reprint of a Maximum Rocknroll column, this one from MRR #394 (March 2016), with a few modifications…  UNDER THE RADAR—the 2000s  I’m an obsessive maker of playlists for my iPod—either putting together sequences from my old mix-tapes or having various “best of” collections spanning different years and decades. I’ve been listening a lot to my best of the 2000s mixes, lately—the oughts or zeros or whatever you call them, and there are quite a few songs/bands that might have been lost in the shuffle (not a pun about the iPod shuffle, honest). So this col ..read more

CATCHING UP ON SOME BOOK AND ZINE REVIEWS LONG GONE ILLEGAL PUNK VENUES IN BOSTON by Chris Strunk (Free The Future Press, half-size zine, 40 pg.) Pretty self-explanatory--a history of "illegal" DIY spaces in Boston and environs for the first decade and a half of the 21st century. Author Chris Strunk--who played in such bands as Conversions, Vile Bodies and Crisis Actors, as well as booking the occasional show--offers a tour of various basements, warehouses, lofts and college/community/art spaces that hosted unlicensed punk shows. It was a constant game of whack-a-mole, as the police got ..read more

I'm really going to try to publish more blogs this year... some will include reviews, maybe I'll do an interview or two and some will come from the archives, my Maximum Rocknroll columns, in particular. In case you missed it, I retired from MRR last year. I really don't feel like retelling or rehash why and, in the end, I might have burned a few bridges but it was ultimately on my terms and I have no regrets. It was time. 36 years of contributing, the last 15 as a columnist is a good run.  This piece (with a few modifications) is from my November 2016 column (MRR #402). It was ..read more

COLD MEAT  I won't be the only person lamenting how absolutely fucking awful this year was... and I'm done apologizing for my habitual lateness in uploading these things. I got to a grand total of five shows this year, so it makes little sense to post a best live list, although I enjoyed sets from Touch Heads (RIP), PCP and the Knives, Gel (from NJ) and Urin (from Sweden). Two shows at the Banshee Den, two at Last House and one at the Hong Kong. I just hope all of those spaces are able to survive a hiatus that is likely going to last well into 2021.  Anyway, one positive is Sonic ..read more

SNIFFANY AND THE NITS Yeah, that's right... 38 years this month. Suburban Voice started as Suburban Punk in early September of 1982 as a four page, xeroxed zine with record and live reviews. And here I am, still hammering away on a keyboard, only it's connected to a computer and I'm sending this off into cyberspace, instead of the copy shop... but I digress... In case you missed it, I've retired from Maximum Rocknroll. I posted my final print column for them last year. I hung in there for awhile, doing on-line columns but it definitely wasn't the same. And then I hit a ..read more