Lost Crusaders "Whose Name Will I Call?" 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 so the Reverend… in three episodes with this beautifully differently splendid record…
MIKE CHANDLER – NYC Real R ‘n’ R Motherfucker
Published on April 17, 2022 by reverendolys
2016: Mike Chandler has cancer. And only a few know it.
Like Billy Miller, another monument of New York rock ‘n’ roll, he is slowly wilting away but with great dignity.
He even has a new band, but no one knows.
After all, few remember the ones he had before: a band of degenerates called Outta Place who enjoyed dragging old carcasses out of the muck of rock ‘n’ roll, putting a rag on them and displaying them like scarecrows in the garage circuit that mattered. They were the best in the game.
Rude and without any hope of appealing to anyone, except for me: by the time the second mini-LP was released, they no longer existed.
But in 1983, while Rudi Protrudi struggles to find a label to release the first album by the Fuzztones, they are already recording their first record. They are Mike Chandler, Orin Portnoy, Jordan Tarlow, Shari Mirojnik, and Andrea Kusten, and they share (and will share) many things with the Fuzztones: Orin is the brother of their guitarist Elan Portnoy (with whom he already recorded under the name Twisted and with whom he would later found two extraordinary bands like Headless Horsemen and Bohemian Bedrocks) and plays drums in 2000; Shari will end up in bed with Elan and Rudi, while Mike, besides flirting with Deb O’Nair, will write (something that perhaps few know or easily forget even today, NdLYS) some of the finest songs of the Fuzztones: Bad News Travels Fast, She’s Wicked, Highway 69, It Came in the Mail, Me Tarzan You Jane, What You Don’t Know, Brand New Man, Heathen Set.
But back then, Outta Place were “just” three guys and two girls who took it upon themselves to print the first garage-punk record of the New York area.
They reached the court of Midnight Records thanks to a self-produced demo that boss J.D. Martignon took it upon himself to publish almost entirely on record. The result was printed on a twelve-inch spinning at 45 RPM and was the second record in the Midnight catalog, which in a few months would also publish the debuts of the other two garage bands in the city: the Fuzztones and the Vipers (produced, among other things, by Jordan Tarlow himself). But We’re Outta Place, in terms of beat/punk violence, had already said it all, shouting it with the loud, relentless, and provocative tone of Mike Chandler. Those six covers were the baptism certificate of the garage scene of the Big Apple. And the instrumental leftovers (with Chandler's screams recorded in his apartment and added in the subsequent mastering) that would be released three years later after the band had already disbanded, were its certif…
