Superdrag has a new album, Industry Giants, which comes out tomorrow. And not only did the band allow Buzzgrinder to stream it, but John Davis was also kind enough to take over the posting duties for the day. So the staff gets to sit at home and eat bon bons.

Surely The Minutemen will never be forgotten, but when asked to contribute an entry for the Remember… column, they were the first band that came to mind. I can remember very clearly the first time I ever heard their music. I was a few years too young to have witnessed it first-hand. But I was fortunate enough to have a cousin a few years older, who was into good music and didn’t mind me hanging around and listening to records. Now he’s the bass player for Knoxville punk heroes The Rude Street Peters. When I was still in middle school, he was playing me records like The Punch Line, 3-Way Tie for Last, Flip Your Wig and New Day Rising. I can still remember the album covers.

Little did I know then that music from SST bands like The Minutemen, Black Flag, Descendents, Dinosaur Jr. and Hüsker Dü would become such a huge part of my life for the next 20 years. I was later exposed to SST Records and The Minutemen on the Santa Cruz skate video Streets on Fire; SST provided the soundtrack. The Minutemen’s Paranoid Time (probably my favorite Minutemen song) blared while Jason Jessee ripped it up at the Fallbrook Ramp. I had no frame of reference then for how groundbreaking the band was — I just loved the song. I still do. It came out on their first record, Paranoid Time, in 1980.

With just seven songs, clocking in at 6 minutes and 42 seconds, Paranoid Time fired the opening salvo in The Minutemen’s campaign. It was/is a fiercely original statement, and is probably my favorite Minutemen record. It also contained Sickles and Hammers, the instrumental, which was later covered by Sebadoh on Sebadoh III.

Here’s the Jason Jessee part from Streets on Fire:

And here’s The Minutemen live at The Starwood, 1980:

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