True Crime Magazine was founded by Cleveland's answer to Charles Lieurance, Mark Tidrick, and Austin's answer to Mark Tidrick, Charles Lieurance, over a drunken wee-hour phone call on June One, 2006. We're dedicated to musical Maoism, as long as it doesn't interfere with anything we really want to do. In the words of Aldo Moro: "Is this thing on?"
When Rock and Roll blows it's nose where does all the bloody mucus go? Here, dear friends. You are feasting your eyes upon the trash can filled to the greasy brim with all the grandest junk that Rock spit out of it's maggot-filled orifices. It's the stink from under the floor boards, the stuff that drives one to drink, the stuff that pokes holes in the very soul...this is IT.
It's the final good bar left at the end of that block where Best Buy set up a shop on your grandma's grave. It's the last theatre that still shows silent films and Marx Brothers comedies. It's a wheezing record store where record collectors (the ones with the price guides and the stained shirts) are told to get the fuck out.
It's on-line magazine filled with all the ephemera that should take the existential hum out of your life...or add a little more.
There's enough couches here for everyone to pass out on.
Hang with us for a while.
As Usual,
Mark
True Crime is dedicated to Extreme Musics, from the condensed, sugar-rush shamelessness of 1910 Fruitgum Company, Ohio Express, The Royal Guardsmen, Collins Kids, The Monkees, Sweet, Tommy Roe, Lobo & Andy Kim, to the epic shamelessness of Hawkwind, Pink Fairies & early Vanilla Fudge.
...Phil Spector, Shadow Morton, Billy Sherrill, Joe Meek, Billy Strange, Graeme Hall, Jack Nitzsche...
True Crime is dedicated to the blues, but not the blues as FAC dance fodder for stenographers, effete college professors, tattooed love boys & their Bettie Page-costumed arm candy. True Crime thinks the blues is driving music, and if it doesn't match the barren-road-at-midnight hoodoo of a heavy-lidded drive down an aphotic country road, then that particular 8-track tape goes right out the fucking window (the kind you roll down). True Crime loves the blues before it became outright dance music (Charley Patton, Skip James, Geeshie Wiley, Reverend Gary Davis, Blind Willie Johnson) & when it was coopted by savages from the wilds of Australia (The Birthday Party, Scientists, King Snake Roost, The Moodists) & again, when coopted & distorted by disheveled white cannibals like Soledad Brothers, The Kills, Immortal Lee County Killers, Black Keys, Bantam Rooster & Mr. Airplane Man.
...Chili Cold Blood, Pearlene, Slim Harpo, Sonny Boy Williamson, Screamin' Jay Hawkins, Howlin' Wolf, Knoxville Girl, Jack'O'Fire, Pretty Things, Speedball Baby, R. L. Burnside, The Hunches, Them, 68 Comeback, Yardbirds, Chrome Cranks, Pussy Galore, Juke Boy Bonner, Tav Falco, Jandek, Bassholes, Gun Club, Jackknife...
True Crime is committed to the goo-goo muck -- the freaks born or re-born at the crossroads of B-horror flicks, hot rods & echoey, fuzz. Year by precarious year this sacred nexus seems more endangered & rare. In fact, at this point, Europe seems more intent on keeping this idealized American form alive than we are. To True Crime it's tantamount to jazz.
...The Cramps, Mad Daddys, Satan's Cheerleaders, Big Daddy Roth, Ghoulardi, Count Five, Sickidz, Fuzztones, Chris D. & The Divine Horsemen, Subsonics, The Oblivians, Lime Spiders, Alice Cooper, Redd Max, Honeymoon Killers, The Standells, Pandoras, Hellcats, Panther Burns, Raymen, Mummies, Trashwomen, Gories...
True Crime champions the unreconstructed hillbilly, hunching up from the hollers every now & again to wail & stomp; modern day lyncathropes with their greasy howls, the skulls of Kali as guitar straps & bone shards for picks, driving down the property values, scaring the villagers & marinating roadkill possum three days in coca-cola.
...Hasil Adkins, The Legendary Stardust Cowboy, Charlie Feathers, Warren Smith, Jimmy Martin, Doc Watson, Merle Travis, Big Al Downing, Wade Curtiss, Jack Starr, Stud Cole...
True Crime is for those longhairs at the back of the room in old footage from '77 "punk" rock shows around the country, those baggy-faced weirdos in axle grease-stained Question Mark & The Mysterians & Seeds T-shirts & worn-in leather jackets, who never got a mohawk or strategically placed a safety pin into a strategically ripped item of clothing. This is, in other words, for John D. Morton.
...Pere Ubu, Rocket from the Tombs, Electric Eels, Mirrors, Destroy All Monsters, New Race, The Deviants, The Styrenes, Suicide, Sonic's Rendezvous Band, Halo of Flies, Radio Birdman, Squirrel Bait, New Christs, Celibate Rifles, Butthole Surfers...
True Crime applauds orchestral excess & high drama, defiantly out-of-step string arrangements & wildly overblown sentiments (that are not self-involved diary entries from precious 18 year olds). Pretention is underrated. Give us the opium poet fixations of Mark E. & Patti Smith, the Paris Commune tribalism of Wire, the surrealist bent (Breton, Jarry, Ionesco) of Pere Ubu, the Nelson Riddle/Percy Faith string epiphanies tagged on to overwrought pop songs...
...Nancy & Lee, Scott Walker, Poppy Family, Serge Gainsbourg, Burt Bacharach, John Cale, Cabaret Voltaire, Death in June, Fred Neil, Joe South, Cilla Black, Van Dyke Parks, Love, Ray Price, The Renderers, The Association, Tindersticks, Free Design, Madrugada, Dusty Springfield, Bobbie Gentry, Mike Johnson, Walkabouts, Game Theory, Paris Sisters, Thin White Rope, Jack Blanchard & Misy Morgan, Devastations, The Church, Jim Reeves, The Flies, Francoise Hardy, Claudine Longet, Sylvie Vartan, Jacques Brel...
True Crime is exotic...a corpse nearly liquefied on the thin green carpet of a fusty Balinese hotel room in the middle of the afternoon, Pontarlier spilled across the bloody sheets, a diary written in invisible ink on the bedstand, a human finger adhered by blood & seminal fluid into the 9-hole of a black rotary telephone, and a young boy of twelve shivering naked in the closet, huddled beneath 20 or 30 tailored white Seville Row suits, which dance slowly like opium-addled prostitutes to the swoop of the teek wood blades of the ceiling fan.
...Martin Denny, Cannibal & The Headhunters, Les Baxter, Brasil '66, Esquivel, Arthur Lyman, Korla Pandit, Yma Sumac...
True Crime is the test monkey clinging to the fuselage of a rocket aimed for outer space, failing only because of the unforgiving nature of cosmic expansion.
...Hawkwind, Can, Faust, T.O.N.T.O.'s Expanding Head Band, Lucifer, Silver Apples, Throbbing Gristle, United States of America, Spacemen 3, Loop, Jessamine, Opal, Gary Numan, Kraftwerk, The Black Angels, Tangerine Dream, Gris Gris, Funkadelic, Lee "Scratch" Perry, The Warlocks, 13th Floor Elevators, Os Mutantes, Psychic TV, Serena Maneesh, ZZZ, Boris, Acid Mother's Temple, Amon Duul, Goblin, Hubler & Schwab, Walter Wegmuller, Burnin Red Ivanhoe, Vibracathedral Orchestra, Sun Ra...
True Crime gnashes our teeth gleefully to gravity-defying white noise, skronk, prog brut, gripping primitivism & rebellious clang in all its forms.
...Sightings, Erase Errata, Moondog, Captain Beefheart, Einsturzende Neubauten, Non, Hella, Lake of Dracula, Cock ESP, Lightning Bolt, Mars, Half Japanese,The Contortions, Live Skull, Mahogany Brain, Dead C, UT, Lydia Lunch, Happy Flowers, My Name is Rar Rar, Godz, Scissor Girls, Giant Sand, U.S. Maple, The Thrown-Ups, Distorted Pony, Animal Collective, Wooden Wand & TheVanishing Voice, Ariel Pink, Black Dice, Xiu-Xiu, Red Krayola, Ghost, Deerhoof, Locust, Chinese Stars, Hospitals, The Shaggs...
True Crime worships at the altar of automatic writing & the music & literature of mental illness; of artifice & hoax photography; of hodads the world over; of the degraded splatter of No New York; of graffiti scrawled onto a subway bathroom wall after a hostile blow job; of the junkie yawlp of scarf rock, embodied by Nikki Sudden, Chamber Strings & Johnny Thunders; of the innocence of '60s girl groups & Laurel Canyon beatitudes sewn gracefully into the fabric of Avant Garde hoodoo by Kenneth Anger, Jack Smith, Ken Jacobs, Nick Zedd, Richard Kern, Boyd Rice, Anton LaVey & Genesis P'Orridge; of lascivious, lurid R & B from Esquerita, Candi Staton, Andre Williams, Ike Turner, Isaac Hayes, Funkadelic, Little Richard, Joe Tex, Laura Lee, Bettye LaVette,Wayne Cochran, Timmy Thomas, Rufus Thomas, Bar-Kays, Larry Williams, Charlie Rich, Cab Calloway & Louis Jordan...
True Crime rather wilfully ignores gods who need no further elevation -- Dylan, Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, Elvis Presley, Black Sabbath, The Who, The Beatles, Velvet Underground, Parliament, George Jones, Tom Waits, The Clash, Merle Haggard, Neil Young, The Stooges, Ralph Stanley, etc. We tacitly acknowledge their influence & will speak no more of it, except in passing.
True Crime believes that Sister Rosetta Tharpe duck walks more convincingly than Chuck Berry, and hope you do as well (sentence intentionally ambiguous).
True Crime does not believe in clarity per se, and opts for a style as infuriating, loopy & borderline psychotic as the music the writing intends to describe. Thanks for your attention.
-Charles Lieurance, Austin, Texas, June 6, 2006
Made with the MyTheme myspace editor
