13. Misfits
This was when I first got into punk music, pre-internet, when I was in middle school, so it was hard to find a lot of punk music, you had to get it dubbed from somebody’s older brother or sister. I think the first stuff I heard was probably the Walk Among Us stuff, and Earth A.D.. A little while later, we heard ‘Cough/Cool’ that sounded like it had been dubbed 10 times, and we would get live tapes that also sounded like they’d been dubbed 10 times and recorded on a tape recorder held next to a speaker – everything’s overblown, but we could still follow the songs. I don’t think I realised until later, but that’s how my love for tape hiss came about, I was hearing these Misfits bootlegs. I remember when the remasters came out in the early 90s, and finally hearing like, ‘Cough/Cool’ or ‘Rat Fink’ at its proper fidelity. So much was missing for me – there were so many sounds in these dubbed versions I had that were just gone. I mean, I probably would have liked the proper versions if I had heard them first, but these poorly dubbed ones were the ones I listened to over and over and over, that’s how it sounded right to me.
What you fell in love with was the whole sound world and all the unwanted stuff as well as that actual song?
When I heard Harry Pussy for the first time, they were a punk band that I thought, this is like a Misfits bootleg – I can tell there’s a song there, but it’s so blown out and it’s so buried in low fidelity that I really fell in love with that band. It was like the Butthole Surfers or Couch again – this is what punk has always been in my head. I think it really made me want to explore those sounds in that tape hiss, dubbing tapes over and over to see what happens. I didn’t until recently put two and two together, that this all probably came from me listening to these Misfits tapes.
