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 Beef People vinyl coming soon! read about it here.

The Beef People at Muldowney’s Pub in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1985. Brian on voice, Willie on bass (looking 12), me on guitar (looking 16).

When our hardcore punk band the Beef People went into Inner Ear studio in 1985, we had a totally inspired slam-bam-thank-you-ma’am drive-by drive-through recording experience.We set up, Don Zientara twiddled some knobs and did a quick check, and we recorded a half hour of AMAZING sounding amazing punk rock.

Half of this ended up as our only record, a 7″ vinyl E.P. called “Music For Men” (on John Beers’ “Catch Trout Records” label). (Download here.) The other songs never saw the light of day. We considered releasing them as a second EP called “More Beef”, but it never happened. Drummer Jack Massey sent me a CD the other day, and I was so friggin’ happy! I haven’t heard these songs in over 20 years.

They’re GREAT!

I think they’re better than the stuff we put out on vinyl.

I’ve digitally remastered them, and put them online for free downloads.

Click to download the song “Lots”

Click to download the song “Industrial Jelly”

or, DOWNLOAD A ZIP OF THE WHOLE THING (15 meg zip of Mp3s)

(MP3s removed because a very cool UK record label, Damaged Records , are releasing VINYL of the Beef People EP, combined with the unreleased tracks, which are great.)
These nine new (old) tracks are:

Fetus In Formaldehyde

Industrial Jelly

Living in a Gas Chamber

Lots

Move It

Pavlov’s Dog

WTJU Beef Talk

Kicked Out (demo)

Kids Under 12 Eat Free (Demo)

The six tracks from the Inner Ear session are: “Fetus In Formaldehyde”, “Industrial Jelly”, “Living in a Gas Chamber”, “Lots”, “Move It”, “Pavlov’s Dog”.

I play guitar on the them. Brian Childers sang, Willie MacLean played bass, and Jack Massey played drums. In addition, Brian played paper cutter and I played keyboards on “Industrial Jelly”.

To the best of my recollection, the songs are about the grind of work (”Industrial Jelly”), air pollution (”Living in a Gas Chamber”), consumerism (”Lots”), conformity (”Pavlov’s Dog”), laziness (”Move It”), and having dark secrets (”Fetus In Formaldehyde”).

I did not play on the demos:
“Kids Under 12 Eat Free” and “Kicked Out” (Though I sang on “Kicked Out” on “Music For Men”.)

Jack says of these demos: “Either Rob (Buckingham, the first guitarist, who got kicked out of the boarding school for having a girl in his room) or Willie played guitar on “Kicked Out” and Childers sang. I think Willie played guitar, Brian played bass and sang on “Kids Under 12″. I wrote the music and lyrics (sophomoric to say the least-I couldn’t touch Childers in the lyric department). We recorded both at Blue Ridge on a Tascam 4-track cassette recorder. I remember recording Childers’ vocals in the large shower area for the reverb effect!”

The last track, “WTJU Beef Talk” is John Beers talking on the radio about the Beef People (and the show the band had upcoming with Social Distortion).

The Beef People at Muldowney’s Pub in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1985. Some cute girl is checking me out. (Donna Bible, my girlfriend at the time.)

Brian plays dead at the Blue Ridge School. Beef People bass player Willie MacLean took this photo. It’s so awesome it should be in a museum.

left to right: Stephan Sadovic (friend of the band, student at Blue Ridge School), Brian, me. (taken at Blue Ridge School).

Happy ending photo.

left to right: Brian, Willie, Beef People friend Tony. (taken at Blue Ridge School, though it looks like it could have been at a council tenancy in london).

This entry was posted by Michael W. Dean on Tuesday, January 15th, 2008 at 2:14 pm and is filed under The world is a strange and beautiful place. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.