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frankportman
 2y ago
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https://youtu.be/vT0Pz5XuUYM Gesælig Wodensdæg to ēow! Here's more from Southampton, UK, Summer of '92, minor secrets of "Merry Fucking Christmas" revealed! One of Jon von's most memorable tunes, we recorded it rather quickly and dirtily along with two other tunes ("Let's Be Together Tonight" and "Speed Racer") for the Strum und Bang 7" on Spain's Munster records in advance of the tour that took us across the Atlantic and landed us in England. Had we continued as a four-piece after that tour, I imagine we'd have re-recorded it more properly as we did with "Together Tonight" and included it on the Gun Crazy or the Our Bodies album. But it was not to be. At that time, my guitar set up was a 100 Watt Marshall half-stack, that Les Paul Jr. (or Sr., as here) and, as you may be able to detect, a fuzz box and a wah pedal. (It was either a Morley or a Cry Baby, I can't remember which. What I do remember is it was kind of creaky and sticky and the front switch-on button didn't always switch on: you just had to stomp and hope for the best.) As you can see, I used to have quite a lot of fun doing my crude, primitive Ron Asheton thing (which came to me by way of Kent Steadman and the Celibate Rifles: "there's no great mystery to it, mate. Ya jist ride it like a.. ya know, what are those things? Skateboards, like.") I am well aware that it used to irritate people. That's obviously a large part of why I did it. But I stopped doing the pedal thing shortly after this show, because at a subsequent gig somewhere in Germany, some kid deftly disconnected and stole both the wah and the fuzz box from the front of the stage after the set. I was obviously pretty mad about that, but there wasn't much to be done. I certainly wasn't going to pay European prices for that kind of gear just for the sake a few more shows, and it didn't matter all that much, so I just decided to go without for the rest of the tour. What I learned was, I quite liked the simplicity of pedal-less-ness. They were always coming unplugged anyway, and having one thing fewer to trip over was a big plus for a clumsy guy like me. I basically never used a pedal again, and I suppose it influenced the fact that I stopped playing quite so many solos around that time. So, unknown German thief, you influenced the sound of a generation, sort of, and I hope you're proud of yourself.
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The Mr. T Experience - "Merry Fucking Christmas"

MTX live at the Joiners Arms in Southampton, England, July 8th 1992, in front a few dozen shouting, sweating, vibrating teenagers, one of whom happened to have a running camcorder in his hand. It's pretty rough, but so were we, and it's probably the best live video document of that era of MTX as th...

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