More Piss on Yer Parade

It's happened before, and for a while now he'd been threatening to do it again. Tim Warren, il duce of the Crypt family of fine record labels, recently closed shop at the Brooklyn store --the last good R'n'R record store in NY?-- and US mail order, and packed it off for Germany.

I don't know the circumstances (I suppose a real journalist would get the story --Washington Post I ain't), but I can imagine how tough it's gotta be for record stores/wholesalers/labels these days, what with downloads, the bad economy, and the all-around shitty taste of the music consuming public.

Speaking of the public's shitty taste, here are a few ads for the Crypt label. These were always good for a gob in the face of the music underground that, to hear Warren tell it, never gave Crypt no respect. These three date from the late 80s-early 90s. They're pretty typical of the kind of thing you'd see in 'zines back then. What the hell, the blogosphere is just the modern version of 'zine-dom, so why not reproduce these ads as a sort of tribute? For me personally they provided early exposure to an alluring world of Raunch 'n' Roll sleaze. Funny, Crypt's always been the red-headed stepchild of underground music, but everyone knows about 'em. I doubt I've got to tell anyone about the Back from the Grave, Sin Alley, Desperate Rock 'n' Roll, Strummin' Mental, and Las Vegas Grind comps, or their role in shaping garage rock over the past 25 years.


These ads all originally ran in Forced Exposure, which, tho sympathetic to the raunch, was pretty heavily into the very "prog rock shit" under attack here. The crude layout, cartoons, and insults always made me laugh, and had a way of making me feel like a jerk for listening to anything not released by Crypt. I like how the thanks ("to cool stations that have the BALLS play raw indy shit") were often balanced by big Fuckyous ("to pussy stations that play Elvis Cosdildo" etc.). And dig the artwork by Dan Clowes and Mort Todd.

The last one here dates from the 1st time Crypt bailed for Hamburg, circa 1990. It kinda shows how little has changed over the years. Maybe you could add a couple more types of douche-bag music consumer (see the longhairs at bottom), but that's about all. Anyway, it's still possible to order stuff from them, but Americans now gotta pay overseas shipping. I'll miss the store, where Tim would insist that you play your selections on the store turntable, often while demonstrating his talent for keeping several simultaneous conversations running --with other customers (when he had 'em), with the dog, over the phone.