Have Another Beer While We’re Here.

Punk Rock Historian and Professional Consultant

Hudley Flipside

For an old gal who still writes letters and keeps her PO Box open though often quite empty.

Dad served in WWII and was once stationed in Adelaide Australia. I recently talked to a professor from Queens University of Technology (urban coastal city of Brisbane) John Willsteed about Punk Rock for an academic book, and I have a few friends from the country. Recently longtime friends the Talley-Jones’s went on an amazing journey in Australia. Yet for me it is selfishly always about The Saints.

Writing letters has always been my thing. I might have written them unreadable at first, but I often would get intelligent and friendly responses. Either way I keep writing them to companies, authors, and friends. In my twenties working on a fanzine, I did spend a great deal of time reading and typing up letters from fans and adversaries for Los Angeles Flipside Fanzine.

One letter I wrote in the late 1970s was to the band The Saints. I never got a response. It was about their Prehistoric Sounds Album I had a question for them.

I remember writing the letter on an old manual typewriter in my parent’s house looking over at the Verdugo Mountain Range of the San Fernando Valley. White out, finding a stamp and an envelope and walking to the Post Office to mail it is a consistent and blurry memory for me, but a true one.

I’m inspired by the band’s edition of a type of horns background band sound. Or as they say a horns section. An incredibly unique sound for me as a youngster. So, I wrote to the record label at the time. Whatever address was on the inside insert or record label for HARVEST. How silly that was but now I find it a very endearing thing for a fan to do.

I saw on Facebook that Prehistoric Sounds came out September 8, 1978, now is a wonderful time to celebrate this album.

Finding out about the Aints much later I can see a band that includes that sound I was curious about. Specially from one of my favorite songs. A nice continuity and happy way to see the endurance of an album, scene, song, or people. Bringing back all those good feelings too!

It’s still a thrill for me.

At one time I talked to music friends about a mystical journey of going to see Chris Baily sing in a pub in Australia. As the story goes, he would go to pubs and sing his songs. One of my friends who was thinking of going along is a local Los Angeles friend whose name is also Chris Bailey.

What dreams I had. A dream is now over due to Christ Bailey of The Saints recent demise, but I still hold the need to visit Australia someday, regardless.

It is so good to be in touch with Ed Kuepper though this electrical fire and still learn things about music, this place here on the internet. That he makes himself very accessible is sweet. I am only one of many fans who are listening.

This story I share is very comforting in a clever sort of way. I think the three fates Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos are my friends.

Being Unladylike

Punk Rock Historian and Profession Consultant

Hudley Flipside

We have not yet learned to value the creativity, courage, and competence required to negotiate the ordinary but devastating frustrations and crises of human experience.
Jacobs, Ruth H. Be an Outrageous Older Woman Harper Collins. Kindle Edition.

“Alone with just a little bit of soul, right now, now, baby
Darling, everything is gonna be alright
One more time, just one more time, baby…”

What strange times we are living in. The contrary nature of life is overwhelming. Nature seems a bit outrageous and shrilling.

Just last week youngest son was meant to go on his first Geophysics lab above Ojai, California. The coastal regions to studying the mighty earth and her movements.

Then he went to one party with ten friends. The only time in a long while where he felt safe. Then right before the event he got the Covid19 tracer call. He did not get to go to his well planned out lab. That was last Monday. Most likely the worst day of his life. The family all tested negative. We were lucky. Yet I was mad as hell.

The opportunity will come again because that is his major.

Security is a good need, I think. I did not always feel this way.

Today while watching some news about the floods in Kentucky a commercial came on. I don’t know what was being sold but the song caught my attention. It was the song Security.

Otis Ray Redding Jr. (September 9, 1941 – December 10, 1967) was an American singer and songwriter. He is considered one of the greatest singers in the history of American popular music and a seminal artist in soul music and rhythm and blues. Nicknamed the “King of Soul”, Redding’s style of singing gained inspiration from the gospel music that preceded the genre. His singing style influenced many other soul artists of the 1960s. Label: Volt – 45-117, Vinyl, 7″, 45 RPM, Single, Promo 1964.

But my favorite recording of this song is by, well you know, The Saints.

Label: Harvest – HAR 5166

Format: Vinyl, 7″, 45 RPM, Single Country: UK 1978

What do you do if they call you shrill because you demand your rights? You don’t get anxious about being unladylike. You realize that a man who fought for his rights would be considered appropriate and that ideas of what is ladylike have been used to control women for centuries. You translate shrill to assertive and smile smugly. Congratulate yourself that you have learned how to be assertive in your later years despite your socialization to be a “good girl” and cave in when confrontation arises, fearful of censure.
Jacobs, Ruth H. Be an Outrageous Older Woman, HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Chris Bailey’s psychic being is still very strong!

“A gentleman with the mad soul of an Irish convict poet’: remembering Chris Bailey, and the blazing comet that was The Saints.”

~ John Willsteed

Published: April 11, 2022 9.44pm EDT.

“Chris Bailey isn’t the first of our creative children to leave this life behind and move on into memory. With their passing, like the returning comet, the past is freshly illuminated, allowing us to look back at our young lives. Back when the future was broad in front of us, urged on by voices like Bailey’s to open our eyes and see the world.”

Rendering of the band The Saints. Hudley Flipside, 2010.

I have often written that the band The Saints is one of my only addictions in my life. After the death of Chris Bailey, (now one year ago).

I have been grieving him and a general time shift. The 70s, 80s, 90s, 2000s, 2010s and now. Over 40 years. This band led me on a path into a different realm of being. I found a bunch of misfits like me.

I found my voice and I awoke from a kind of existential youthful experience to find myself and my soul. Music, friends, and a punk community that still holds my heart. Yet also knowing Chris Bailey was born the same time and so close to mine … we share these same generations or ten-year changes.

Youth to adulthood and being senior citizens. As this post explains so much more in an indirect way too. In my grief I decided to do something that I do once in a while to soothe my soul. I reached out to Carl Jung books. What came to mind yesterday was something from one of Carl Jung’s Black Books. Volume two page 175-6.

I read from the last paragraph. I call it random reading. The intuitive response is amazing to me. Encouraging action also. So, with this so much is shared, and I am content to move on past my grief. Into a new season of life knowing that,

“the world beyond, where men are whole and complete, unlike here. The saint’s halo also characterizes his transcendent shining light, his psychic being.” (p.162) The Black Books, Volume Two, Carl Jung

Life endures … this gives me hope maybe like finding the Sun!

“In this moment the enormous tension was released and like rain it swept away [57/58] everything that was tensed, too highly strung. And soon sleep returned and brought with it a curiously beautiful image.” {138}

“Forms walked clad in white silk in a colored atmosphere. Each surrounded by a strangely fragrant, glowing tinted aura, some reddish, the others blueish and greenish.” {139}

{138} “This paragraph was replaced in LN by “Then I had a second vision.” ” (p.162).

Picture.. reversed.

The Saints (Barry Francis, Ivor Hay, Janine Hall, Bruce Callaway, Chris Bailey) at The Hero of Waterloo, Sydney. 1980. Picture by Judi Dransfield Kuepper.) Image taken from article by John Willsteed,

https://theconversation.com/a-gentleman-with-the-mad-soul-of-an-irish-convict-poet-remembering-chris-bailey-and-the-blazing-comet-that-was-the-saints-181059?fbclid=IwAR3o-g8RRKpyNxgIQ6x7QsihP9fTBaDqaBZhzozuQI0oHlaWVenjLWeZ_F8

“Jung recounted this dream to Aniela Jaffé and commented upon it as follow: This is some kind of in-between realm (the term definitely occurs in the original version of the dream) The idea was that if one is confronted with the shadow- as was the case through the experience of Siegfried’s dream then the idea comes:

I enter into a twilight: I am this and yet also something else. And this doubleness an abdication of the unconscious, which reached strangely far beyond me.

Like a saint’s halo- This has a strange effect on the attitude toward the human being.

If one is in the company of several persons, and one knows them and knows about their shadows, one then sees these people as they are, but are also something entirely different. They are surrounded by a strange sphere. They live in a strange, light-colored sphere, which circumscribes their ‘other’ state.

This seemed to me to be like a vision of the world beyond, where men are whole and complete, unlike here. The saint’s halo also characterizes his transcendent shining light, his psychic being.”{139} (MP, p. 170)

The reminder of this entry was replaced in LN by “I know, I have stridden across the depths. Through guilt I have become newborn.” (p.162)
Carl Jung’s Black Books. Volume two page 175-6.

Siegfried’s dream

http://mlwi.magix.net/siegfried.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Books_(Jung)

The Forgotten Room.

Mana

th (17)

“We know that something unknown, alien, does come our way, just as we know that we do not ourselves make a dream or an inspiration, but that is somehow arises of its own accord. What does happen to us in this manner can be said to emanate from mana, from a daimon, a god, or the unconscious…”

Pg 336 Par 2 Memories, dreams, reflections ~ C.G. Jung

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The yard is the shape of a crescent moon facing west. The cypress trees line the crescent shape that enhances the progression of the equinox in the night sky. Last night walking out into the darkness looking up,

“Hello Jupiter.”

Wings like a moth, or a big barn owl, or a giant bird swam through the darkness towards the south. Very high in the dark sky. A very large bird just west of Jupiter. A foreign site next to the consistency of the progression. All captured within the eyes of this little backyard. The ascending full moon was low on the horizon yet the light-numinosity surrounded the large creature.

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The Saints full LP 1977 (I’m) Stranded

Livin’ in a world insane
They cut out some heart and some brain
Been filling it up with dirt
Yeah, baby, don’t know how it hurts

Most of my friends know the story but in case you don’t… here it is… I like this band because this LP is the first one that I purchased as a baby punker; the first vinyl that I listened to as I was being slowly brainwashed by the ideals of that nasty punk rock.

I purchased it at a thrift store on Sherman Way and Owensmouth in Canoga Park in the San Fernando Valley, CA. 1978

(I’m) Stranded is the debut album by Australian punk rock group The Saints which was released by EMI on 21 February 1977.

The Singing Saints….

April 10 2022… Goodbye….RIP maybe?

Chris Bailey is the co-founder and singer of rock band The Saints. He was born in Nanyuki, Kenya in 1959 to Irish parents. Bailey grew up in Belfast, Northern Ireland until the age of seven, when his family immigrated to Australia.

The is just a little tidbit about my all-time favorite punk singer. He has a nasal, deep, crackly voice. His deep Irish voice comes warmly through with his unique singing. A brilliance from my generation that lives today. I don’t believe in heroes, but I can say that this man has inspired me to do things I might not have done. If I could go back in time, I would arrive around the time this underground band The Saints were forming. Australia I would be there! I would try to hang out with them and be a friend. Yet, this is just me dreaming.

I love their music and anyone that knows me knows this and I am sure gets sick of me saying it. I found out today that one can continue to say things that they like. I can and I will!! I have been guilty of complaining a lot lately. I have been hurt and betrayed in my life, but The Saints have a song for every feeling I have. I can listen to their music and there is Chris Bailey comforting me, enraging me, and inspiring me. I would like to image loving me too. He will always be a part of my life. I love him… it is an Irish thing….and an Aussie thing too!