What exactly is the thrust of this project?
It’s a sort of… correction, I guess? In the 2010s, I found an early Aughts Baltimore Sun piece featuring Roman Kuebler (frontman for Oranges Band and Roads to Space Travel), who noted the short musical memory of Charm City’s punk scene. As a non-native/outsider who has played in a number of local bands myself, this struck me as profoundly true. Though I had a scattered sense of Bmore music from playing around town – e.g. I heard folks mutter about Jason Willett, Linda Smith, Tonie Joy, the Anomoanon, various dead venues, etc. – it was hard to get a clear sense of how the pieces fit together and what they meant in a larger local context. I began developing plans to build a few representative mixes, but didn’t start constructing anything until I discovered MixCloud (and suddenly had ample free time) during the 2020-2022 pandemic.
The Sun‘s Kuebler quote seemed to focus on the Baltimore punk scene. Would you consider that to be the “scope” of these mixes?
Yes and no. Because the city didn’t have a thriving indie/punk/new wave underground before the 80s, my 50s-70s mixes offer a grab bag of jazz, funk, doo-wop, garage rock, soul/R&B, hard rock, disco, prog… basically, whatever struck me as valuable or interesting. However, the mixes do begin to center on “alternative” music from the 1980s onward. Though Baltimore had a massive hard rock scene during the Me Decade – from hair metal like Child’s Play, Kix, and Mannekin to thrash/dirge fare like Have Mercy, Revelation, and Rancid Decay – it’s not really my thing, and I haven’t felt like investing time and money into music that only abstractly interested me. Ditto pristine R&B and MOR acts like Tony Sciuto, Bootcamp, the Ravyns, and Shor Patrol: they’re all fine, but a limited budget and aversion to mission creep ultimately pushed them outside my particular ambit.
You mentioned Kix, who are from Hagerstown. What exactly does “Baltimore” mean in the context of these mixes?
Reasonable question! My rule was basically this: a band/musician had to either a) live and exist in Baltimore proper, b) hail from an immediate suburb like Towson or Glen Arm, and/or c) have a local link so strong it somewhat obviated its connection with another town. A glaring example of this latter is Crack the Sky, who started in West Virginia but found a rabid audience in Mobtown; Baltimore was the band’s only major radio market, and the city loved CTS so much that lead singer John Palumbo eventually moved there. Annapolis’s Moss Icon also fits the bill, as frontman Tonie Joy became one of Baltimore’s key indie ambassadors – he performed in a number of touring local bands (Breathing Walker, Ink, Lava, Universal Order of Armageddon, the Convocation Of…, etc.) and ran a popular label here (Vermin Scum) for years. Similar examples include Uniontown’s Half Japanese, transmetro acts like Slack and Cinnamon Toast, and D.C.-based soul singer Leon Gibson, who recorded for Baltimore’s Ru-Jac label in the 1960s. As of November 2023, I’m still deciding if Annapolis chart-grazers Jimmie’s Chicken Shack fit the bill – though the band enjoyed plenty of Bmore fame (and its Fowl Records released platters by locals Mary Prankster and All Mighty Senators), I’m under the impression they never moved here.
If I’m being honest, I’ve given Annapolis the project’s most porous borders, particularly in the 80s and 90s mixes. Many of its bands played Bmore with townie regularity, so it would be hard to deny them their place in the scene’s history. That said: despite the occasional exception, I did try to be ruthless re: keeping things distinctly local. Because Annapolis and College Park (to say nothing of D.C.) have their own things going, I have made a point of skipping regional-but-locally-beloved bands like Judie’s Fixation and the Original Fetish.
How about musicians that spent large parts of their lives in Baltimore? Were they fair game?
Again, it all goes back to my rulebook. Did they make music there? Were they part of (to borrow from Beck) the total scene? Young local phenom Myra Ellin – later Tori – Amos produced a 7” of breezy cheese as a Bmore teen, so I can imagine plugging her juvenilia into a third 70s mix if I find enough other material. Itinerant folkies Will Oldham and Cass McCombs also lived and created in town, so they’re up for grabs. But Tupac Shakur? Alicia Keyes? David Byrne? Counting Crows’ Adam Duritz? Robbie Basho? Go-Go’s drummer Gina Schock? Billie Holiday? All were long gone before they recorded anything, so they don’t really fit the spirit of these mixes. I did make an exception for John Waters muses Edith Massey and Divine: the latter is an obvious local celeb and, while the former recorded her deathless novelty hit “Punks, Get Off the Grass” after moving to L.A., the record was essentially a hi-fi version of music she’d played for years with local punk band Edie and the Eggs.
How many mixes will there be? Is there a clear endpoint for this project?
At this point, the plan is to produce the following:
- One 50s mix
- One 60s mix
- Two 70s mixes
- Three 80s mixes
- Three 90s mixes
- Three 00s mixes
- Three 10s mixes
That said, I have an absurd (and growing) amount of material, so there’s room to expand things. While others have done a lovely job of documenting Baltimore’s rap and club music histories, I wouldn’t mind tracking each scene’s growth over the decades. I can also imagine making a second 60s mix, as I keep finding new stuff from that era, and/or a mix consisting of folks whose careers really started after they left the city. Really, it just depends on will power, sustained interest, and finances. I’m doing this project for my own edification, not to create a completist, Baltimore Sounds-esque aural catalogue of every band Baltimore ever produced; this isn’t my life’s work, and I would prefer to keep it firmly in “hobby” territory. I have considered making a Patreon-supported zine to explore topics that a mix can’t cover – histories of local record labels, venues, connections to other cities, etc. – as well as defray the cost of acquiring all these old, obscure local LPs. If that happens, I’ll hop onto social media and gauge folks’ interest.
Wait… I was in a semi-popular local indie/punk/etc. band, but we’re not represented in any of these mixes. What the hell?
Can’t showcase everyone, but I do hear you. Many of my omissions are simply a matter of access: if your music is wildly out of print, difficult to find, expensive on the used market, and/or only available as grainy 128k MP3s, I’m not likely to feature it. E-mail me and send along some nicely ripped WAVs or FLACs! If your music fits the scope of the project, I’ll happily consider including it on a mix.
Outside of your mixes, can you suggest any resources for exploring Baltimore’s musical history?
Sure! Ground zero for this sort of thing is Joe Vaccarino’s Baltimore Sounds, a monomaniacal database of every musician to drunkenly tread Charm City’s potholed streets. After that, I’d consider digging into former Atomic TV host/Thee Katatonix drummer Tom Wilson’s blogs, Accelerated Decrepitude and Media Maxi-Pad, as well as Baltimore or Less (co-produced by Scott Huffines). On a more consistent tip, local alt-blog Splice Today posts pieces about past and present local music with some regularity. A little precision Googling could also lead you to the now-defunct City Paper’s annual Best of Baltimore issues, which offer a treasure trove of Charm City culture through the ages.
In terms of kickstarting these mixes, I found the following compilations useful:
- Baltimore’s Teen Beat a Go Go (Get Hip Recordings, 1997)
- Psychedelic States: Maryland in the 60s (Gear Fab Records, 2014)
- The Ru-Jac Records Story, Vols. 1-4 (Omnivore Recordings, 2018)
- The 98 Rock Album, Volume 1 (98 Rock Baltimore, 1978)
- Something Special Under the Sun: WKTK 105 FM Presents Baltimore’s Best Rock (Key Broadcasting, 1978)
- The Best of Baltimore’s Buried (Balto Weird Records, 1979)
- Bloodstains Across Maryland (Big One Records, 2015)
- 8 Essential Attitudes (Frantic Records, 1985)
- Essential Attitudes, Pt. 2 (Frantic Records, 1987)
- Merkin Records’ Seedy Sampler (Merkin Records, 1989)
- Baltimore – February 15, 1992 (Hat Factory Records, 1992)
- Baltimore: The City That Breeds (Reptilian/Kwality Record Co., 1993)
- Baltimore Volume II (Kwality Record Co., 1994)
- Walking By A Building: A Collection of 22 Songs From Baltimore (Hat Factory Records, 1995)
- Adventures in Mobtown (Kwality Record Co., 1997)
- Splice Today Presents: Baltimore Does Baltimore (Splice Today, 2009)
- Towson-Glen Arm Freakouts 1 & 2 (Nuns Like to Fence, 2013)
- Morphius XX (Morphius Records, 2014)
(Note: if anyone has a copy of 1997’s Listener Supported comp on You Say When, let me know!)
Eventually, each mix will also feature a running commentary, complete with web presences (sites, Facebook, Bandcamp, Soundcloud, etc.) and some biographical sketches/scraps. I will likely link to each band’s Discogs profile, as well.