AntiCurrent Archives Vol 12- William Elliott Whitmore: Radium Live in Los Angeles

This is the twelfth edition of the "AntiCurrent.com Archives", a collection of rare bootleg-albums I'm releasing through this blog. Click here to view all past AntiCurrent.com Archive Albums.

William Elliott Whitmore at
The Mint

Not enough musicians in the world treat their fans as well as William Elliott Whitmore. There's something special to the rarity of a person willing to hang out with their fans before and after shows. Matter of fact, I've only witnessed with four performers... Jello Biafra, Penn & Teller, and Whitmore. Got a question for him? Want to purchase an album off him? Want to just shake his damn hand? Hang around a while and he'll pop up and be more than willing to spend some time with you. Pretty goddamn admirable I gotta say.

Thursday's show at The Mint was the same. I got in line as the doors opened and there he was, talking

to a fan and just hanging in line. I generally avoid talking to performers I admire, there's something frightening to me about demystifying a talent you truly dig. Plus there's something really weird about seeing how fans interact with someone they really, really look up to. People act differently, they stare at you through the corner of their eye and then approach you with overly-prepared words and most of the time it's a horribly awkward fuck of an experience.

Horribly framed
cell-phone pic

With all that said, I've had a few encounters with WEW just from the fact he's always around and so damn ingratiating. Mistakes, all of them. In Orange County I drunkenly told him I loved him, at the Knitting Factory in LA (RIP) the girl I was with almost puked on him (and did puke next to him), in Sydney the girl I went with cried through his entire set and I had to reassure him that she was OK, and at a bar my best friend in the world also balled his eyes out through the entire show (weirdly reoccurring theme huh?).

See? Take it from me people, don't meet your idols. More than often you do dumb shit.

To get back on track, The Mint is a great little bar with great sound and is incredibly intimate. Also they lack asshole security guards so I decided to bring a Zoom H6 recorder in and bootleg the performance. Recording performances you go to I feel is a lost art. In old bluegrass bands most people in the crowd did it. Bands like The Grateful Dead encouraged it and today Hank Williams III allows you to record any show you'd like and even has a "Respect to the bootleggers" speech. Is Whitmore cool with it? He seems like a pretty cool guy and I was going to ask him, but he seemed busy so I didn't wanna bother him. I'm just going to assume he's cool with it until I hear otherwise. As a wise man once said, its smarter to beg for forgiveness than to ask permission.

Front Cover

The set was amazing as always. Staples such as "Diggin' My Grave" and "On the Chin" were played and even more exciting for me, I got to see him play electric for the first time. Hearing him strum that Bilt Zaftig semi-hollowbody and scream with a death-rattle yell on "Healin' To Do" was other-fucking-worldly. Plus his acoustic broke a string towards the end so he played the electric on "Old Devils" and it was sick as shit.

It's always cool seeing his new set and I've heard damn-near every song I've ever wanted from him... except for the one I've always truly wanted to: "Trespassers Will Be Eaten" (off the bootleg "Legalize Freedom", available here). My buddy requested it at a gig once and Will said he forgot that he even recorded the song, let alone how to play it. Fair enough, a strange song off of an old demo is a bit more than a "deep cut" as they say.

Back Cover

For not having a board feed (I nearly tried to bribe the soundtech but opted against it) and just leaving the H6 in my pocket, I'm pretty damn pleased with the results. I recorded it at 24bit/96khz, de-noised/EQ'd/normalized it with Adobe Audition and output it as 16bit FLAC files and 320kbps MP3's. I edited a little bit of the downtime out of the performance just to keep the album at under 80 minutes (max CD length). Past that, this is the show how it happened, and it's pretty goddamn great considering the recorder was just nested in my pocket with the XY mic pointed toward the speaker next to me.

Before you listen to this, I should apologize to both you and Whitmore, I'm the asshole guy yelling in grunts and the one that says "don't be a pussy" when it came do doing shots. What can I say, you can take the boy out of Ohio, but you can't take the Ohio out of the boy.

There used to be an inherent evil in bootlegs that seemed unavoidable, someone selling someone else's hard work for profit. Thanks to the internet, that can now be avoided. As always, I'm releasing this for free and without any ad-revenue generated from my blog or website (take note lawyers, I'm do this for the love of it and when my AntiCurrent server is factored in I'm making a sizable loss). If you dig this, please go and buy an album or even a beer-coozy off of Whitmore, he's more than deserving.

Without further ado, here is William Elliott Whitmore, "Radium Live in Los Angeles" on 5/28/15.

Download The Entire Album and Cover Art Here:
FLAC Version:
MP3 Version:

The tracklist is:
1:  Lift My Jug
2:  Civilizations
3:  Old Bill Jones
4:  Hell or High Water
5:  Johnny Law
6:  Can't go back
7:  Healin' To Do
8:  Don't Need It
9:  Hard Times
10: Don't Pray On Me
11: Diggin' My Grave
12: Do Something Impossible
13: South Lee County Brew
14: Sally Bangs
15: Ain't Gone Yet
16: On The Chin
17: Does Me No Good
18: Old Devils
19: Mutiny

AntiCurrent Archive Vol 4: Kick A Cunts: 1604 Demos

For the fourth edition of the "AntiCurrent.com Archives", a collection of rare albums I'm releasing through this blog, I'm releasing the first band I ever recorded.  Click here to view all past AntiCurrent.com Archive Albums.

Back in 2002 The J's (See Previous Blog as to who we were) began hanging out with Nick Jones, the bassist of The Kick A Cunts, whom we knew from our high-school. 3/4 of the band was based out of the city of Middletown and we were based out of the country where Nick went to school with us. We went one day to check out their rehearsal spot which was located in the basement of the lead singer Chirs Kay's house, dubbed 1604 after the address of the house. We soon began to visit more and more (as did many people and bands in the punk scene) until we just began to go over near everyday.

1604 allowed the scene a place to watch The Kick A Cunts (a, if not the predominant band in the scene) practice, have the occasional show, and most importantly at the time, a place to drink. Many crazy nights were had there, and I can recall far less than I actually participated in. It wasn't out of place for us to run and take shelter at 1604 once or twice a month with the cops not far behind some member of the group, leaving the cop to just knock on the door for half an hour before giving up in defeat.  

The band consisted of Nick Jones on Bass, Chris Kay on vocals, J.D. Attenborough on drums, and Derek Busch on guitar. The Kick A Cunts played streetpunk with overtones of The Exploited, The Unseen, The Virus, and others. As my group of friends started hanging out there more and more, I began to hang out a lot with J.D. and he quickly became one of my best friends (and I'd eventually join his next band, The Jackoffs).

By the end of Chris moving out, which caused the end of 1604, the place had meant so much to all of us that the entirety of The J's and The Kick A Cunts (and many others in the scene) got a tattoo of the numbers "1604". Mine are located on the back of my neck.

Somewhere around this time I bought a 6 track recorder with the intention of starting my own band, and brought it over to their rehearsal spot to test it out. The idea was to take my very limited knowledge, record the band as a whole, and then track by track overdub each member. I recorded their entire set at the time with 2 mic's feeding into one channel as the master, but the loudness of the cramped basement and all of our lack of patience never saw the fruition of a full album. What it did produce is what is here, a debatably decent quality 9 song demo of the entire band playing live.

I gave this out half a decade ago to the members of the band, but having no formal audio experience yet, the recording was slightly sped up and reeked of tape hiss and terrible EQ. So when I started this Archive release through my blog, I knew one of the first things I wanted to do was to go back to the original tape, recapture it, and remaster it, releasing it here with both the optimal sound (considering the source) and decent artwork.

So without further bullshit, here is the remastered version of The Kick A Cunts demo, named after their (and in my opinion, the entire Middletown Punk scene's) birthplace: 1604

Download The Entire Album and Cover Art Here:
MP3 Zip Archive

The tracklist is:
1. Shit Face
2. Fuck Mike Jones    
3. True Cunt Like You      
4. Dirty Punx
5. Media Brigade  
6. Die My Darling    
7. Punx Not Dead
8. Spikey Hair Drunk Punx    
9. Tool Sucks

AntiCurrent Archive Vol 2: Street Dogs: Savin Hill Demos

Greetings, for the second edition of "AntiCurrent Archives", a collection of rare albums I'm releasing through this blog, I chose one of the best punkrock demos I've ever came across.  Click here to view all past AntiCurrent.com Archive Albums.

The year was 2002 and Mike McColgan had been notably absent from Punk since quitting the Dropkick Murphys in 1998 to become a firefighter. Thankfully for us, living out this lifelong dream was not enough for him and thus, he created this demo with the ex-drummer from Dropkick Murphys, Jeff Erna (who played drums on the Boys On The Docks EP), Bill Close from The Freeze, and Rob Guidotti of The Bruisers (Al Barr's band before Dropkick). This demo quickly circulated at the time, and there's damn good reason for it... it's raw, aggressive, well planned, and damn near genius Boston punkrock (I actually prefer these versions to the properly recorded ones on "Savin Hill"). However, in recent years, it has became harder, and harder to get your hands on.

If you enjoy these, go and buy "Savin Hill", these are great stripped down versions of these songs, but in the end, it is just a demo, the album is a much more cohesive example of their sound at the time.... matter of fact, go and purchase their entire catalog if you enjoy this as they have yet to have an album that disappoints.

Download The Entire Album and Cover Art Here:
Mp3 Zip Archive

The tracklist is:

1. Locked & Loaded
2. Star
3. Mystery Box
4. Justifiable Fisticuffs
5. When it Ends
6. Cut Down On The 12th
7. One Of A Kind