Lost Crusaders "Have You Heard About The World?." Mike Chandler doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page... Mike Chandler, the one from Outta Place and Raunch Hands... one of those who had garage punk transplanted right next to his heart...
So then the Reverend... in three, no let’s make it four episodes with this wonderfully splendid, yet differently splendid record...
Long before them, there had been something else: a band where Chandler poorly played the bass and Tim Warren just as poorly played the organ. It would leave no trace, but it would mark the beginning of a great friendship, even artistically: Mike would lend financial support to his friend Tim to press a record that would signal the start of a label that would become the emblem of an entire philosophy of life, the same one from which Outta Place would draw.
The label was Crypt Records, and the album was the first volume of Back from the Grave.
The stories of Tim and Mike would intertwine again, as we will see.
The next step was the Raunch Hands.
At the time, no one understood them.
Afterward, neither did anyone.
Except Tim, of course, who not only welcomed them into his home and his van to take them on tour wherever possible but also suggested a whole series of obscure things he was digging up around America to fill his volumes of improbable music. Furthermore, bending the rules, he even included them in the third volume of his Back from the Grave, alongside beasts like Murphy and The Mob, Montells, and Little Willie and The Adolescents, opening for the second time (in the first pressing of the first volume of the series, he actually allowed his friend Monoman to close the lineup with a version of The Witch that would be removed in subsequent pressings, NdLYS) the secrets of his crypt to a contemporary band.
But before ending up in Warren’s crypt, the guys signed with Relativity, a metal label set up by Barry Kobrin but that also worked with Robyn Hitchcock and Cocteau Twins, among others. They had money to invest, and they poured it in like this.
All the material recorded for Relativity (El Rauncho Grande in 1985 and Learn to Whap-a-Dang the following year) would be reissued digitally in 1990 by a label from Tokyo, 1+2 Records by Barn Homes, and it's from here that the story of low-fidelity rock 'n' roll in the Nineties begins. That of bands like Bassholes, ’68 Comeback, Gibson Bros., and Gories, to be clear. They not only recorded poorly, in fact, terribly, but they played with the same clumsy, insolent, and brazen way, recovering from the leftovers that the history of rock had dismissed and put among the scraps. Country, hillbilly, and broken blues, tied up with string and stuck together with carpenter’s glue. A bit out of place everywhere at the time.
Rejected by the diehard devotees of the Outta Place garage punk, mocked by the faithful to the roots sound, accused of being a puppet band that mocks tradition. And yet... if the Long Ryder
