Zero Boys – History Of – Review

zeroboys200Zero Boys

History Of (Secretly Canadian)
By Craig Regala

OH! Fuck me! I had no idea this was extant or I woulda been rubbin’ my ass and hollering Haroo! Haroo! The Zero Boys were a got-damn fantastic punk band from the second generation nation, after the mid/late ’70s shit hit the (few) fans and the dis-ease spread. Every fucking ’70s punk bands’ sales combined were about, oh, 15% of Boston’s first LP after that platter steamrolled ’77. But every noggin’ Dead Boys, Pissholes, Saints, Buzzcocks, Slaughter and the Dogs, Pagans, Ramones, etc. bumped was dented for good. Thankfully, this reenergized many of ‘m and they decided to get after it. This is crucial as much as the next fact is incidental/important.

Today, I took the puppy down to Mags (Magnolia Thunderpussy. I worked there in ’87 and they’d been sellin’ rock recs at least a decade before that. Crucial shop for mid-Ohio) where I live, and rock. (I rock pretty good. Like at that Suede Bros., Sin Hombre, Karma To Burn show in April, sporting late-’80s silk suit, Cuban heels + pit action = pretty fucking jake, right?) I was gonna buy my 17-week-old Sheltie-bred a Ramones “onesy.” Went to hook the new Entombed (easy there, cowpoke), and Deadbird. Bought Sepultura’s Roots used, too, viewed the unbought onesy that was unbought for the reason detailed herein.

So, the cranky fuck at the counter at Magnolia’s (Alex: His band, The Feelers, are stone-duh-spurt-spazz punker/puker doofs that woulda opened for the Zero Boys if they fuckin’ had the brains to hop in Mr. Whipple’s transport machine and jump back two and a half decades) is spinnin’ History Of, and I recognized a few tunes and DID NOT recognize a few. I “spun” the first Zero Boys LP, Vicious Circle, a couple hundred times in the few months after I taped it from WALF’s (Alfred MF’G! University!) library. When I moved to the great plains of Columbus, OH, I subsequently turned many a mid-Western lunk at’m (they shoulda known these fellow Midwesterners anyway) as the decade waddled and blapped toward the year punk broke. History Of has a few of the tunes, maybe in different form (look, I’m writing this as a I listen, or al dente, as the Italians would say), and I’m not parsing details, but this is as ass-kickin’ as anything off the Vicious Circle LP and has the whole early, rare-as-hens-dicks EP appended. As it’s a “history of,” some of the LP should show up. Fuck, the whole thing should show up everywhere, even though the bulk here was gonna form the basis on LP #2, which America needed, but didn’t get. Oh well, fucked again.

Think of the gush of the best garage/kick-ass rock and roll from the Beatles’ black leather period to Sweets’ “Ballroom Blitz” and the stuff I was talking about above shoved through a hot-wired heart-animating many of our finest punkers-to-be (and truthfully, many metal-haids) to hammer it home. This is the nano-second where “punk” ramped into “hardcore.” Great tunes exist, cool bass parts drive the songs, and well-thought/spat-out lyrics help a great drummer pave a long, wide road traveled by The Supersuckers, Green Day, The New Bomb Turks, Mortal Micronotz, The Left, Coke Dares, and a jillion and a half others. Peers? DOA, X, Agent Orange, The Effigies, Circle Jerks: All songful bands with a lotta juice.
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