“A Pause Before Beatings Resume” was inspired by the sound a phonograph needles makes when it reaches the end of the record but fails to return and you’re already out.
Samples by James “Sonic Reducer” Nugent.
Mix Tape
1977: Mix Tape (Track 08)
So what — “Penance.”
Samples by James “Pissing in a River” Nugent
1977: Mix Tape (Track 07)
“Palpitations” is about the sensation you get standing close to loudspeakers. The lows that reverberate in your chest. The drumming that realigns your heart beat.
Samples by James “Iggy” Nugent.
1977: Mix Tape (Track 06)
“Spleen” is a riff on a Baudelaire line from “Good Dogs” in his Le Spleen de Paris.
I sing in praise of destitute dogs, under-dogs, whether those who wander all alone through the tortuous ravines and gullies of the vast metropolis, or those who have said to some old outcast, with a wink of their witty, spiritual eyes, ‘Take me along with you, then perhaps we can make some sort of happiness out of our two poverties!’
Samples by James “I Wanna Be Sedated” Nugent.
1977: Mix Tape (Track 05)
“Monk Bought Lunch” is about aloneness. About singularity. About the numbers 1 and 11.
Words by John Burgess. Samples by James “Son of” Nugent.
1977: Mix Tape (Track 04)
I was 19 in 1977. “When You Spit On Me” expresses the accumulation of the boredom-apathy-indifference continuum of my teenhood.
Words by John Burgess. Samples by James “I’m So Bored” Nugent.
1977: Mix Tape (Track 03)
Wrote “Epicene” as an elegy for Lou Reed, who died in 2013. Issue Number 1 of Punk magazine called him “the original street punk turned fine artist.” Two reasons he still matters: Velvet Underground and Street Hassle.
Word by John Burgess. Samples by James “Velvet” Nugent.
1977: Mix Tape (Track 2)
“If I had more time I’d like to get to know you” is part of a suite, of sorts, for Sid Vicious; one thread that runs through my next book 1977.
Words by John Burgess. Samples by James “Screamer” Nugent.
1977: Mix Tape (Track 1)
Re-entry is an opening salvo to recall the feeling of the times as a starting point for writing a punk history of upstate NY and 1977.
Words by John Burgess. Samples by James “Starter” Nugent.
JB 