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Current mood:doin' the dog....
Category: Music
 Before there was punk rock, there was punk rock. And before that, there was punk rock. And I'd venture to guess if you'd dig even further back, you'd find punk rock.
Point being, there's many buried chapters in the punk rock story, ripe for exploring. Earlier this year, a whole lotta frenzy was whipped up by the discovery of demos from lost '70s Detroit monsters Death. Who knows how these scorched and healing ears will react once they get a load of The Imperial Dogs?
In short, LA's punk scene did not commence once Brendan Mullen opened the Masque and Slash began publication. It honestly began much earlier, when four graduates of North Torrance High School drove into Hollywood to see Iggy And The Stooges and New York Dolls at the Whiskey on separate occasions, and decided blooze-based rock was not the way to go. Black leather and chains and louder amps and sinister vibes and decadence all took hold, and they changed their name to The Imperial Dogs. For their trouble, they left behind four gigs and change, some shitty live cassettes and a rehearsal tape clear enough to yield a posthumous 45 and retrospective LP, and a song title ("This Ain't The Summer Of Love") and line in a chorus strong enough for Blue Oyster Cult to pay 'em a little money to refashion into a new song BOC would ride into glory. The singer (Don Waller) would become a rock critic of strong repute who would literally write the book on Motown, among other things. The others would do their things. And that should be that, right?
Wrong. A primitive live video surfaced, from a time when it was rare for young garage bands to create such documents. And it shows them doing what they did best: Creating a noise that could be an American Radio Birdman, wedding the snotty Stones rock of the New York Dolls and '60s garage bashing with the intellectual metal of BOC, in front of a collegiate audience looking positively poleaxed. And now it's out on DVD, available directly from the band themselves.
A website has been set up just for this, featuring a pair of video highlights to sample. You can click here to dig in full, as I recommend you should. And for their story in full (written by yours' truly, natch), the forthcoming issue of Ugly Things garagezine will present just that. Meantime, I offer you a little taste of The Imperial Dogs before you go to the band's website: Their anthem "Midnight Dog," which The Stooges likely would have killed to have written. Enjoy!
9:08 PM
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