This is the week that Max G. Morton's Indestructible Wolves of the Apocalypse Junkyard is born. In celebration, we offer you a soundtrack to the stories selected by the author, along with passages and notes by Morton, directly related to the selected song. Enjoy/Indulge.
First you will need this:
Indestructible Wolves Part 1
1) Void- Who Are You
2) Milk 'n' Cookies- Tipically Teenage
3) Epicycle- High School Junkie
4) Alice Cooper- Public Animal #9
5) The Expelled- Dreaming
6) Last Resort- Soul Boys
7) Vivien Goldman- Private Armies
8) Dexys Midnght Runners- There There My Dear
9) Chrisma- Black Silk Stocking
10) Suburban Lawns- Gidget Goes to Hell
11) Chardon Square- 65 Film Show
Then you will need the rest:
Indestructible Wolves Part 2
12) Red Cross- Clorox Girls
13) Dwight Twilley- Looking for the Magic
14) Laughing Hyenas- That Girl
15) The Flirtations- Heartache
16) Black Flag- Out of this World
17) Sparks- Underground
18) Nick Gilder- Tantalize
19) Comsat Angels- Total War
20) Patty Waters- Black is the Color of my True Love's Hair
21) Marie Hoy & Friends- Shivers
22) Billy Harper- Capra Black
23) The Smiths- Asleep
If you should feel so inclined:
Click HERE to learn more about Wolves and HERE to order a copy .
And finally, notes from the author regarding the above playlist:
1) Void- Who Are You
START… how all things should.
2) Milk 'n' Cookies- Tipically Teenage
Remember being too young and the only kid in your school that truly liked rock n’ roll? And just when you're about to press the ‘get out of this world’ button you see some older transfer student who just stepped out of the pages of Creem magazine and it just makes everything all right. The sex of the object is invalid, it could be a girl with a rock n’ roll heart or it could just be your new best friend who is planets away from you on the cool meter. Glistening rays of reflective cool transfixed my hardened eyes, as Howie held the diamond of the vinyl graveyard in his hands. The pop aura transformed the dangling spiderwebs into cotton candy, the dried blood into glitter, my uniform standard black shirt into candy cane stripes. I could see Justin, Ian, Sal, and Mike from afar and just knew that these eyes would never see anything like them again. I needed to know them. I just had to learn everything about these guys but shockingly enough there was no functioning time machine in Howie’s apartment. The record even spun in my head for a brief second, kinda blurry, kinda dreamy, before the needle actually dropped. The opening notes of “Dee Dee” kicked in and for once in my life a record sounded like it was suppose to. The tension of my upcoming move was in the trash and I was forever stuck on a star.
I spent my entire six months on the West Coast trying to find a copy of the Milk n’ Cookies record. No one knew anything. The internet was not an option and I was desperate. It’s silly but I honestly had these fears of dying without owning that record. It gave me a new hobby going from city to city rushing to the used M section, day after day. Once back in the New York groove, Bleeker Bob had changed my name to Milk ‘n’ Cookies, he would shout it on the street whenever he would see me. Once he even called me to tell me that he found a copy, I ran out of my work sparkling down the block but it was only a cruel prank. A few months later the call finally came in. I had to borrow a credit card because my obsessiveness did not trust that they would hold it if I sent a money order. The record was sealed and came from an avid collector who had recently hung himself. If only he would have opened his Milk ‘n’ Cookies record...
3) Epicycle- High School Junkie
Fueled by hatred for my surroundings and peers, I knew that this would never be my home. It was time to redefine the psyche with a celebration through a carnival of grotesque and beautiful balance. Every night I astral projected myself out of a three-chord city and delved into the grayish slip of space between dreams and the wakefulness nightmare images that violated my found landscapes. Each night I drew the same death card as I performed very scientific experiments on myself with combinations of weed, speed, rush, paint thinner, Freon, stolen liquor, medicine cabinet grab bags, reality bending, seedy films, midnight bike rides through hell, and images seen through the windows of young single neighborhood moms and their daughters. I was a teenage explorer with enough angst in my pants for the whole haunted town.
4) Alice Cooper- Public Animal #9
Everyday, when mother and I took a wolf and cub ride through riot city to get me to school on time, there would be a line of mutant, drugged-out, violent, sex-crazed creatures of the night still out on the streets in that early morning foggy daylight. Hours after the sidewalk streetlights of the night told themselves to turn off, there would always be a few post night stragglers standing around in plain morning view. Unlike the streetlights, they were never programmed to receive the message that their shift was through. There were always at least a few out there, chain smoking and staring down the rush hour traffic, wearing their army jackets and quarter-sleeve concert jerseys, punching people off of their bikes or just practicing with their nun chucks at nine in the morning. They looked like they were thirsty for blood and obviously hadn’t slept a wink the night before. At night in my bed, I always wondered what was going on outside and always wondered what fires of hell were being invoked a few blocks away. Rape, murder, and summoning were all in a night’s work for the devil boys just down my street, and sometimes it would be too much for me to even fall asleep. It really turned me on just thinking about all the wrong things that were probably happening to some random, innocent victims. Maybe the lowlifes didn’t catch any intruders in their wash that night, but I’m pretty sure they were drinking Jack Daniels and giving each other Indian ink tattoos.
5) The Expelled- Dreaming
For the most part practical dreaming in suburbia was crushing. Isolated weekends spent in my head with “Dreaming” going round and round, again and again. Yes, loneliness can get that gruesome. She never landed nor did she ever just so happen to be the new girl in school. If she did, clearly she would have been thin, sported a bleached chelsea, and spit an English accent thru her chipped teeth.
6) Last Resort- Soul Boys
There was nothing quite like the wolf factories of the 1980's. Churning out the indestructible ones and creating pavement out of the sheep. Undesirable dance floors in dim lit neighborhoods tiled in blood, sweat, and cheap malt. Ring around the skinhead island where someone always got their head kicked in by a drunken teen-rage steeltoe. We could have been anything (that we wanted to be).
7) Vivien Goldman- Private Armies
"If the heavy metal boys or the boys in blue don't like the look of you, you better watch out."
8) Dexys Midnght Runners- There There My Dear
"Dear Robin,
You're always so happy, how the hell do you get your inspiration? You're like a dumb patriot. If you're supposed to be so angry, why don't you fight and let me benefit from your right? Don't you know the only way to change things is to shoot men who arrange things, Dear Robin, I would explain but you'd never see in a million years. Well, you've made your rules, but we don't know that game, perhaps I'd listen to your records but your logic's far too lame and I'd only waste three valuable minutes of my life with your insincerity."
9) Chrisma- Black Silk Stocking
It was like a Roxy Music record cover had come to life on Sunset Boulevard. Drunk on the visuals of black silk stocking fantasies and perpetual oblivion, I wanted to throw her up against a filthy love-stained wall to the backdrop of an even filthier city, run my dirty fingernails over her messed up little head, in the name of getting to know you better.
10) Suburban Lawns- Gidget Goes to Hell
When my mind had finished wandering off between the legs of the young girl that I was watching, I realized I was still in the muddy land of mass destruction that seemed to be not of this Earth. It was my neighborhood, not a J.G. Ballard story, but with the mass amounts of car parts, doll heads, whiskey bottles, wild dogs, smashed TVs, used condoms, and the fire that was rapidly starting to grow and consume the other bits of blood stained trash, someone might have argued otherwise. I was so turned on by knife wounds, black eyes, rope burns, and girls like her more than I should have been. I loved the awful world I had discovered, and the next to naked Debbie Does Demons had likewise just discovered me.
11) Chardon Square- 65 Film Show
Should I listen to "Asleep" one last time? Was it time for me to shed and say a little something? Death/dying, love/hate. The Smiths, the drugs, books, records, and films that I’d bought. All the girls, all the lies, the heartache, and the cites. Why wasn’t Milk n’ Cookies the biggest band ever? Why didn’t Edwige Fenech love me? Black teacup Chihuahuas are the cutest. My poor mother! Dexys Midnight Runners. The cross-eyed bar tender. Why hadn’t Annette Haven been my baby sitter? Why wasn’t Seka my next-door neighbor? Thank you American hardcore. Would I ever own the Chardon Square single or The Quick ten-inch? Why were there no Czech whores on the plane? I was never going to meet “that girl” that I used to dream about as a young magical child. Why didn’t Angelica Kitchen cater the flight? All the girls that I had seen naked, all the girls that I didn’t get to see naked, Black Flag at the Cuban Club, my youth, all the ugly fucking people on the plane. All of those amazing records that I just bought? Did the fight attendant still shave everything? Why were they not handing out the booze? Would I leave a beautiful corpse or what? Would anyone care? Would there be a party? Would Morrissey ever deliver his comeback? Would anyone ever make another good record laced with genuine heartbreak? Why did Helmut Newton not have a theme park? My mind was racing with those hot topics and more. I was high on memory. It was like I was overdosing on a futuristic drug, totally amazing. It was all coming down, people were screaming, the lights had gone out, and my eyes were screwed tight. Towards the abyss of the unknown I took a deep breath and I thought, “This is it.”
12) Red Cross- Clorox Girls
O.D. used to date the hottest frosted flake I had ever seen, and she looked like the daughter that Stacey Q and Traci Lords never had. A nineteen eighties massacre poured into sexy jeans. I can still to this day visualize the angel in a half shirt leaning up against the brick wall behind the bowling alley, smoking a cigarette. Tragedy wore ninety-nine cent lipstick.
13) Dwight Twilley- Looking for the Magic
From the ages of nine to twelve, I spent a lot of time in my own little world. I spent my afternoons staring at Warren magazine and inventing invisible zombie girlfriends for myself. I lavished many hours talking to my imaginary friends. It was all part of the temporary balm that I applied daily to relieve the agony and heartbreak of dealing with the real world that from time to time I was forced to breathe in. Records, comic books, late night television and ghoul girls seemed so much more interesting to me than the shit that the other kids were concerned with.
14) Laughing Hyenas- That Girl
Conjure your favorite Tamla Motown singer covering your favorite Laughing Hyenas song on a broken walkman with dying batteries. It was breathtaking to be in the same room as one of those girls that had great hair and smoked with style, one who would have never looked twice at me, or at any of my bald, angry, ugly friends trying to attract her with our animalistic charms outside some dance club on a random week night, back in nineteen-eighty-whatever.
15) The Flirtations- Heartache
At sunrise, I found two dead roses taped to my door, along with a cat scratched note that turned out to be the strangulation that life had been planning for me. It was truly a mess unlike her usual charming proposals that I would find waiting for me after work. Concrete and neon was more my scent than hers. I always thought that the incomprehensibility of her goodbye had to count for something in my favor. The note basically said that we are too much alike and people like us weren’t met to feel that good. I made her panic.
16) Black Flag- Out of this World
Under the dark stars, in an even more altered mind state, I sieg hailed a cab and went on a crimson base-light ride through World War III. I screamed for the driver to transport me directly to the hospital. The streets had turned into a flaming infrared nightmare and people were screaming and crying while a street-corner prophet laughed at me with huge gleaming teeth. Pointing and staring was rude, and a personal pet peeve, but when I was on drugs and they had two heads, it was grounds for cold-blooded murder. I had atrocity on my mind, and outside the car I saw a new breed of war. It was panic on the streets of Armageddon, and as suburbia melted into a blazing, volcanic wastelandscape, I grew more and more frantic. I had become the guy that every cabbie was warned about, and I was frantically asking him, “Why are they laughing at me?” and “When did the war start?” and screaming “Come into to the hospital with me, it’s your only chance to make it out alive!”
17) Sparks- Underground
Soon, no longer satisfied with blue screen violence and the video fantasies that played out in my head, I was ready to sever the last sinew of the on screen adventure hero romance of my youth. I was ready to puncture through the final childproof sockets and plug into the apocalypse junkyard.
18) Nick Gilder- Tantalize
Mechanically, love's the most unrealistic possibility and that is why I am choosing you for my last thought before I float into the unknown.
19) Comsat Angels- Total War
Sometimes, on the right chemicals and the right amount of sleep, a new body felt like a new drug. We rolled around on the carpet touching, feeling, biting, pulling, and choking one another. My fingers were breathing while she gripped my hand. She bit me in the mouth so hard that I had blood pouring off my tongue. Our embrace was deadly, and it was like part of us was reborn as another part of us died. The inhuman contact was great, but our reflections in the glass weren’t so pretty. We were in love and looked like total war.
20) Patty Waters- Black is the Color of my True Love's Hair
I also took a chance that day on a record by Patty Waters. The cover really spoke to me, and much like that witch trip, that album changed my life. New Orleans was the type of electrocuted city where every corner had something for sale to get me through the past, present, and future heartaches of the modern age. After buying my records, I bought a dried up bat and some special candles. As I left the shop, the eerie chill of familiarity in a very unfamiliar place struck me down. The street was dim and smoky, like a scene from an old Jack the Ripper movie. As if in a dream, or perhaps even a moment that had actually taken place before, I heard a seductive voice come from a dark corner that propositioned me, "I want to be the one that makes you fly higher than ever before." I responded with pure confidence, as if I had been up all night memorizing my lines, and asked, "Girl, you got that angel's dust?" She laughed and said, "No, but I got the devil’s pussy." What a brilliant sales pitch.
21) Marie Hoy & Friends- Shivers
She lived in New York most of the year and seemed years ahead of everyone and everything else I knew. I was so awkward and unsure of myself around her; no one in my town looked, talked, or thought like her and out of all people, she chose maladroit me to hang out with and I wasn’t sure why. In the middle of the deathrock record that I wasn’t into yet but bought the next day, she told me to hit her in the face. I instantly had flashbacks of my father’s domestic habits and refused, but she explained that it was different than that, and that if I wanted to touch her, then I was going to have to punch her. The first time I hit her she made fun of me for holding back too much, and the second time I hit her I drew blood, which made her smile and attack me. I never even had a chance.
22) Billy Harper- Capra Black
The unreachable moon looked poisoned, as if it was about to blow. I tried to find her in the stars as I searched for the words that I would have to carefully choose when I delivered her message to the rest of the world. Staring pensively as New York kept it’s rapid pace, as if nothing had happened, I stared until the end of the world.
23) The Smiths- Asleep
STOP… how all things should.
