07:24 pm
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I think when I tally up all the shows I’ve seen in my lifetime, I believe that the band I saw the most often was Pussy Galore. I must have seen them playing around New York City anywhere up to twenty times, including once in what seemed like a squat in the East Village (with Richard Kern’s band, The Blacksnakes) where everyone was given a tab of acid when they walked in with the admission fee. I confess to taking mine! (The handbill, below)
Pussy Galore were the band with the heaviest GROOVE I’d ever experienced, an almighty GROOVE, that moved entire audiences as one piece. They were what I’d call a body band. You really felt them in your gut. Their shows were normally so loud that you were helpless to resist that fucking insane GROOVE. You and everyone else in the room.
But they never got even close to capturing their live sound on record. It was always a tinny approximation of what their live shows sounded like and their albums were annoyingly low-fi and deliberately annoying at that. Nihilistic ear bleeders, they were. I could never play them. But live it was a totally different story. They almost bordered on funky live!
The Brain Mush audio blog has a neat Pussy Galore rarity and that is the cassette only cover version they made in 1986 of every song on Exile on Main St.! I bought mine at the legendary East Village fanzine store See Hear (I lived down the block and stopped in there frequently. I’d often see Thurston Moore who seemed to show up there as much as I did). Apparently they got a cease and desist letter from the Stones lawyers real fast and it became an instant collector’s item. Now it can be yours.
