Lost Crusaders "It Don't Worry Me" Mike Chandler doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page… Mike Chandler, the one from Outta Place and Raunch Hands… one of those guys who had garage punk transplanted right next to his heart…
And then the Reverend… fifth and final episode… with this differently splendid record…
There are bands that play rock 'n' roll. Others that, much more simply, ARE rock 'n' roll. It’s a matter of ESSENCE or of smell, if you prefer. Yes, smell. Because the Raunch Hands have that typical funky stench that every rock 'n' roll band should carry with them. As Mike Edison explains in his How Punk Rock Ruined My Life, rock 'n' roll is a drug and once you get hooked, you're screwed. A theory that Feel It!, the album that reopens the Raunch Hands’ brothel fifteen years after the last studio orgy, fully embodies, with an explosive erotic charge that Edison, Chandler, and Mariconda know all too well. Temporarily setting aside their projects, here they are again with 11 bombs of idiotic and debauched frat rock, peaking in absolute delirium on The Sophisticated Screw, The Skies Above, You Don’t Care, and the perverse gospel of Kick Me One Down. Since then, nothing more has been heard from them, even though that same year, in 2008, the album of that new band I mentioned at the beginning came out.
And no one seems to notice.
But how the hell is this possible, I wonder.
In here we have Mike Chandler, Heavy Trash, Keith Streng and Steve Greenfield of the Fleshtones, Laura Cantrell, Brian McBride of the Electric Shadows, Hans Chew, Buffi Agüero of Tiger! Tiger!, Johnny Vignault of the Woggles, and no one is talking about it?
Miracles of musical journalism in this little Italy now reduced to pure propaganda for whoever the distributor is, in exchange for a few pages of advertising and a handful of promo.
That’s how the world works. By the way, have you heard about the world?
If you haven’t heard enough, it’s time to repent. Because Michael Chandler has become Reverend and will lead you to the light with his gospel tainted by garage and rock 'n' roll. They are neither the Raunch Hands anymore nor are they the Mercy Seat but they are perfectly in between. A one-way ticket to paradise, aboard a Roush Cobra speeding from Madrid (where Mike has since moved, NdLYS) to New Jersey, driven by the organ of Jerome Jackson, organist of the Kelly Temple Church Of God In Christ in Harlem.
The twelve sermons of Have You Heard About the World? are the alternative to so much rock that smells like dead bodies and is terrifying the world.
Forget about the xx and jump for real joy.
As for you, Chandler, may you be impervious to illness as you have been to everything that doesn’t smell like rock 'n' roll.
The world, this one and the next, owes it to you.
P.S: Billy Miller died on November 13, 2016. Mike left this world on April 22, 2018, at 4 in a morning that will never come.
