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LP
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FTR 158LP
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"When Don Fleming was doing the initial transfers of the tapes we'd gotten retrieved from Randy Cohen's barn, every evening seemed to bring a new surprise. But nothing was a bigger jawdropper than the material which makes up the second LP of our Jack Ruby archival series. The central core of the album is the 16 & a 1/2 minute track, "Destroy/Lost," recorded at the band's rehearsal space in January '74. Robin Hall vocalizes and Boris plays electric viola, but the bulk of the piece is screaming analog synth weirdness from Randy Cohen's Serge synthesizer. According to Robin, the track was recorded in hopes that it might be pared down to a single. Hard to imagine how the hell it might've been done (or in what universe), but it is a masterpiece of long-format insanity -- with Boris and Robin providing a context for the massive gallumping of the Serge. Additional players appear on some of the shorter tracks -- new music/free jazz saxophonist, Pete van Riper, on "Lithium Serenade"; Boris's electric viola on "Hydrogen Lullaby"; Chris Gray's guitar on "Mandible Mambo"; Rich Gold's Serge joins Boris' strings on "Ghost Note." The rest is the product of Randy's whacked-out compositional notions and his mastery of the Serge's patch-cords. Some of the material was recorded pre-Jack Ruby at Cal Arts (where Randy and Boris first met). The rest was from a performance in New York in early '74. Heard as a whole, it is a bizarrely shaped piece of the pre-punk/free-form puzzle that was Jack Ruby. Buckle up. It's going to be a bumpy ride." --Byron Coley; Includes download card. Edition of 600.
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LP
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FTR 105LP
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2021 restock. "Back when Thurston and I were working on our book about the New York No Wave scene, a key mystery we hoped to unravel was the one surrounding the band Jack Ruby. I knew George Scott had been in the band, along with Chris Gray, but we were never able to nail down any hard info. Lydia Lunch and Rudolph Grey both had blazing memories of their weirdness, originality and power, but no one could turn up anything solid. Time passed, the book came out and -- chuffed by the fact we'd name-checked the band in the book -- some of the participants began to emerge. Weasel Walter got his hands on a great tape of material which he released on CD (most of which is reprised here), and bits and pieces of the band's story continued to roll out. They'd actually formed in 1973 with Boris Policeband on electric viola and Randy Cohen on Serge synthesizer. The two pretty much constant members were guitarist Gray and singer Robin Hall. They'd done a demo for Epic. The original band never played live, etc., kind of crazy. Then a batch of old tapes was found in Pennsylvania. We sent them to Don Fleming who transferred and catalogued them for us, and we were totally blown away by what he was uncovering. 'Hit and Run' and 'Mayonnaise' are the original line-up recorded in a small Times Square Studio. Boris left after that and they recorded the Epic session as a trio. That's 'Bored Stiff,' 'Bad Teeth,' and 'Sleep Cure.' The other songs were recorded by the later, performing version of the band with Chris and George and another (all but anonymous) person or two. They played five live shows, featuring crawling dolls, buzzing dildos and the cracked Rocket From The Tombs sort of sound they'd evolved. The last one was in November '77 at Max's with Vivienne Dick's then-boyfriend, Stephen Barth on vocals. And the shit may be lo-fi at times, but it is genuinely fucked and a real pleasure to hear nonetheless." --Byron Coley; Includes download code with purchase.
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2CD
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CEC 002CD
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New lower pricing on this 2014 release featuring tracks performed in the HBO series Vinyl. The collected recordings of legendary lost 1970s New York City band, Jack Ruby. Seen and heard by just a precious few, Jack Ruby made only five studio recordings and played an equal number of gigs between 1973 and 1977. None of their music was ever released and, until now, they have existed solely as a word-of-mouth legend among peers. Yet their legacy and influence can clearly be heard in bands that followed in their wake like Sonic Youth and Teenage Jesus And The Jerks. They have been variously described as "The Velvet Underground in a car crash" and the "art-punk Steely Dan." Formed in 1973 by vocalist Robin Hall, guitarist Chris Gray, multi-instrumentalist Randy Cohen, classically-trained viola player Boris (also known as Boris Policeband), and later joined by bassist George Scott (James Chance And The Contortions/8-Eyed Spy/John Cale) and new vocalist Stephen Barth, the first incarnation of Jack Ruby demoed two tracks in a Times Square recording studio in 1974; their signature tune, the nihilistic proto-punk "Hit and Run" -- sounding like some unholy blend of Raw Power-era Stooges, Velvet Underground and J.G. Ballard's Crash -- and a bizarre number entitled "Mayonnaise," based around Boris' amplified viola and primitive electronic "beats" sequenced on Cohen's Serge synthesizer. These two cuts were used to hustle additional studio time from Epic Records through Sly Stone's A&R, Stephen Paley. Three more maniacal songs of arch art-punk with killer pop hooks -- "Bored Stiff," "Bad Teeth," and "Sleep Cure" -- were all recorded in one five to six hour session at Columbia Studios in May 1974. With Cohen patching musique concrète sounds through the Serge, set against Gray's banshee guitar-playing and Hall's snotty vocals, the Jack Ruby sound was formed. But a record deal evaded them. Cohen left and started a new career as a writer for Late Night With David Letterman and, later, as The Ethicist, a columnist for The New York Times solving readers' ethical problems. In 1976, Hall and Gray reactivated Jack Ruby as a live-performing unit with George Scott on bass. They played harder, faster and louder than any other band in New York at that time. Their rehearsals at Matrix studios, and dusk-to-dawn parties at the Bowery apartment behind CBGB's shared by Gray and Scott, became a cult draw for other NYC punk and no wave musicians. Hall quit the band unexpectedly in 1977, days before their first scheduled gig. Jack Ruby continued on as a power trio with Gray, by now the only original member, taking over vocal duties for a couple of shows alongside Teenage Jesus And The Jerks and the Fleshtones, before disbanding for good after one last riotous show with new vocalist Stephen Barth at Max's Kansas City, formerly stalking ground of the band's idols, The Velvet Underground. Hit and Run is a two-disc set of everything Jack Ruby recorded between 1973 and 1977 (across four incarnations of the band) that should see them acknowledged as one of the most radical and brilliantly original groups to emerge from the 1970s New York City music scene. Remastered from recently-discovered master tapes, the first disc collects all five of the band's studio recordings, which although 40 years-old still sound thrillingly urgent and modern, alongside a 1977 cassette of a band rehearsal, and a 2013 remix by producer Don Fleming. Disc two contains another side to Jack Ruby; a series of largely-electronic, avant-garde pieces from 1972 and 1974 -- nine short tracks that play like a library record, book-ended by two longer ones -- some of the earliest extant recordings made on a Serge synthesizer. What Jack Ruby left is a remarkable legacy of recorded music -- hidden for decades, now-revealed -- constituting a previously-unheard secret history of the New York City music scene of the early 1970s.
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