Hardball, by BOB CITY

Hardball

by BOB CITY

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1.	Swamp Buggy Racing 03:31	buy track
2.	Dead Man 03:28	buy track
3.	Riverboat Sandwich 04:34	buy track
4.	Giggy Buford's Knife 03:49	buy track
5.	Swing (Balls) 03:30	buy track
6.	Right Where It Counts 04:18	buy track

about

Don’t ask me about details. The late nineties remain cloudy at best. The bar (Bernie’s) was between my job (a pizza joint) and my apartment (above another - thankfully quieter - bar); most days I left work around five-ish and got sidetracked into subterranea until two or three. Sometimes six. The bassplayer in “my” band was dating the bassplayer of some other bands. He had a new one. "We should go." So there we went. Of course. Black Labels in hand, Jim Beam burnin’ cold under our chestbones. Breastbones. Whatever. Front o' the six-inch-high “stage”. No expectations. Then it hit. Dual/dueling Gibsons, dual/dueling Marshalls. Like a fucken train or some horseshit, but this time it ain’t. (Horseshit, that is. My brain's pummeled like a pinball just from the memory of it. A better vocab is outta reach.) Their songs lurched around, in and outta sync with their swaying singer. Man the bands in this town have always been good but this was somethin’ else. People just didn't bother like this anymore, ‘cept in between the grooves of some dollarland seventies wax. But even that was hardly ever like this. Sinister bordering on actually evil. Once, I took the fully-cranked headphones off while Jeremy was recording vocals and he was actually LOUDER out in the room. No amplification. Terrifying.

The riffs they dicked around with while they were tuning were better than your band. Rumors that they’d climbed outta the sludge left moldering after a band called Porn On The Cob (fer chrissakes) kicked the holey bucket could not be corroborated. They had this song “Bridgewater” that fucken leveled entire blocks but they’d feign ignorance when anybody wanted ‘em to play it, then do “Am I Evil?” instead. A goddam cover of a cover. Ridiculous. But how couldja be mad? All the normal rules didn’t fucken apply. The level they were operating at made even The Godz - who are rock and roll machines, lest ye forget - look like little plastic wind-up toys.

People talk (and talk, and talk) about great “rock‘n’roll” but they’re just playin’' a reprehensible little game of suck-off-the-aging-and-or-dead-popstar under a nigh-on meaningless banner that crumbled into a rancid pile decades prior. And capital-R Rock itself was just the loud, slow blues. Who the fuck needs that? Bob City didn’t play the goddam blues. Their depravity didn’t hafta have a punchline. Hell, I don’t need to tell you that. No one buyin’ this record is new to this shit. That said - and all so brutally beside-the-point questions of “authenticity” aside - this is the REAL GOD-DAMNED DEAL. And we badly need this little document to remind us that it can be done. Maybe it ain’t easy, it sure don’t happen too often, maybe it dusts past most of us on its way to give fading away the finger, first time around. But indeed the sweet, sticky, spoiled-beer stench of basement barrooms belches out indescribable genius every great once in a while, kids. Revel in it, while ya still can.

-Nick Action, for Creem Magazine

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released January 20, 2023

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GOOD TIMES Rock N Roll Club New York, New York

GTRNR is a small NYC record label that runs out of my print shop in LIC

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