10. DustHard Attack
Dust is the other New York band like Sir Lord Baltimore. Another power trio. "Power trios are big! British rock is big. Let’s try it and call ourselves… uh… Dust." The drummer in that band is actually Marc Bell! Marky Ramone! I think he was like 16 when he did that record. The guitar player is this guy named Richie Wise who later went on to produce the first KISS album. Then one of the greatest bass players ever, Kenny Aaronson, on bass. They really had their own thing going! I’ve been trying to figure out for years where they got their sounds from. Now obviously it came from England, because that’s where hard rock comes from, but there are really no direct swipes that I can see. It’s not like with Lord Baltimore where you can tell where they’re swiping Led Zeppelin or Black Sabbath. I couldn’t tell with Dust. They were very original from what I could tell. They had a different sound that wasn’t so doomy, heavy. It was brighter. The guy played a Rickenbacker bass. The stuff they sang about was the typical sword and sorcery rock band, let’s-make-heavy sort of thing, interspersed with couple of blues songs or like a boy-meets-girl song. My favourite song on that record, well there are two of them, ‘Learning To Die’ is fucking unbelievable, high-energy rock music, American rock music. It has one of the best riffs ever, which I stole. In fact, I flat-out stole a lot of things from these records. Thank you!
‘Suicide’ is the one. Here is a song about committing suicide. It’s really long and Kenny Aaronson has this bass solo which is just ripping, just ripping all by himself. The song stops in the middle and the guy just starts shredding. You’ve gotta hear it, it’s amazing. Then by the end of it… you want to commit suicide! It’s great!
