Chuck Eddy dusts off his old vinyl and scratches his head. We all win.

Greetings, BLURT readers. This column’s theme is fairly simple: Basically, I sort alphabetically through my shelves for dusty old 7-inch vinyl indie singles from acts that aren’t household names, and try to figure out why I wound up keeping them in the first place. The first two installments appeared at Idolator.com; this month, I pick up in BLURT where I had left off.

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BROKLYN BEAST “March of The Oil Barons”/”The Vampire Strikes Back” (Broklyn Beats, 2002): Clearly there’s a concept of historical importance here, not to mention a craft project: The label – featuring a photo of George W. Bush with fangs drawn on his face — is not actually on the disc, but rather on a sticker inside the sleeve, ready for the listener to cut out and apply. “Since United Records wouldn’t print our label you get to do it yourself!,” exclaims a Brooklyn-addressed press release, which I also tucked into the sleeve. That same one-sheet explains that the record is “a one-off experimental breaks project with production by label heads doily and Criterion,” and calls the music “hard dub and chug fun for the summertime,” which overstates matters somewhat: I hear skipping vinyl noises, cartoon-like sound effects, distorted scratch sounds, all switching gears and shaped and repeated into a clanging facsimile of a rhythm. Sort of reminds me of the early works of U.K. industrial band Test Dept. The flipside is equally repetitive, but faster, and even more disruptive, with abrasive horn-sample additives. An intriguing curio that tries to answer the question: “How far from what people think of as music as you can go and still maintain a recognizable beat?” Not quite this far, but maybe close. (www.broklynbeats.net )

THE BUNNY BRAINS/DESIGNER American Swiss/Cheese Single (LHG, 1996) I saw clamor-crazed Middle Atlantic combo the Bunny Brains play live a couple times (rabbit outfits were involved once), and I should disclose that one of their principal participants, Dan Seward, is the brother of my very good friend Scott Seward, the funniest metal critic on Martha’s Vineyard. Also, I should note that Scott once helped name one of their songs (on their 1995 Beach Bunny Bingo 10-inch EP) “Bring Me the Head of Trent Reznor (Chuck Eddy Mix),” and in 2000 they put out an anthology entitled Sin Gulls: Goring St. Eddy. Other than that, though, I honestly have no connection with them at all, and I’ve never been able to keep straight their apparent feud with some phony group of alleged Bunny Brains alumni who also claim to be the Bunny Brains. Or used to. Or something. Anyway, they split this four-song 7-inch with a Swiss band, and I only realized just this second that both sides weren’t by the Bunny Brains! The two Designer songs on the “Swiss Cheese” side are “My Favorite Toy” and “Beach Bum”; the former has a silly falsetto vocal lightening the horrendous heaviness of some slowly accelerating Flipper-style guitar sludge, while “Beach Bum” actually brandishes some semblance of surf guitars beneath its strangulated Gibby Hayes (of the Butthole Surfers)-style vocal. The “American” (as in Bunny) side soars 80 miles high in “1000 Years Ago” and digs appropriately into some Amon Düül sci-fi fuzz before getting cut short in “Space Noise Symphony  3 (1^st Movement).” Strangely, the Swiss side does not have more holes in it. (www.myspace.com/thebunnybrains )

CHEETAH CHROME & MIKE HUDSON “Downtown Beirut”/”Nothin’” (Or, 1995) I knew Cheetah Chrome was the Dead Boys (and, before that, Rocket From The Tombs) guy, of course, but I might not have remembered that Mike Hudson was the Pagans guy if I hadn’t received a frequently entertaining 159-page memoir by him called Diary Of A Punk: Life And Death In the Pagans last month. Still, these are clearly Clevelanders aging in New York, and they made a way better single in 1995 – almost two decades past their primes – than most would have predicted. “Downtown Beirut” has the sort of hard and lowdown post-Stooges guitar scritch that I would have called “grunge” before that word got codified into a clearly defined genre, and it seems to be about survival in a war zone – love in the middle of a firefight, Vietnamese babies on their mind, that kind of thing. “Nothin’” chronicles a war zone of its own: “just another junkie out of Avenue C,” watching his back for brothers who’ve been hunting for him. “You used to get what you asked for/But not anymore/And I’m just trying to score,” vamping down to a spoken-word section about quitting, giving up. “Baby, I got nothin’/You got nothin’, too.” In 1995, Avenue C was still a good place for the people in this song. Not anymore, though. (www.cheetahchrome.net )

COCOCOMA “6 ¼ - 125”/Take My Time” (Goner, c. 2006) Recorded December 2005 in their hometown Chicago, so my release-year guess can’t be too far off. Either way, this speedy, muffled nugget is the sort of revisionist garage punk that genre addicts pretend rocks harder than it does simply because it’s so inept and incoherent, and it’s got a Mad-type drawing on its sleeve to match (quaintly old-timey handlebar-mustached soldier handing a bomb to a baby in a stroller). You know the routine: sounds like a first take, and isn’t necessarily better for it. The A-side’s title is pronounced “six and a quarter, one twenty five,” and what saves it are gang-shout harmonies trying to sound inebriated, and the fact that it’s over before you can get too annoyed; some apparent sax blat doesn’t hurt. “Take My Time” is even less of a tune, with audible but incomprehensible vocals. Over a whole album, the shtick would get oppressive (and when I heard this band’s CD, it did just that), but at single’s length the slop makes for a halfway diverting novelty. (www.myspace.com/cococoma)

NIKKI CORVETTE ”Love Me”/”What’s On My Mind” (Rapid Pulse, 2003) In Detroit, Nikki is something of a new wave legend, and these are the same sort of hard-popping, glam-riffing, sugar-sweet bubblepunk crush trifles she’s made on and off since the late ‘70s, when her three-girl Corvettes served as a missing link between the Runaways and Go-Gos. “Bonkers boogie from the new wave Betty Boop,” a Detroit News critic raved in 1979. “If Marie Osmond were a juvenile delinquent.” Bomp reissued 16 early Nikki and the Corvettes toons on CD in 2000, and a nifty comeback disc called Back From Detroit came out on Dollar Record Records in 2006. This single, Detroiters will be ashamed to hear, was recorded in Minneapolis and released in Connecticut. But both songs are still innocent come-ons, equipped with super duper hooks just like always -- Nothing more, nothing less. And judging from the three photos included, Nikki still looks adorable. (www.myspace.com/nikkiandthecorvettes )

Chuck Eddy is the former music editor of the Village Voice and the author of several books, including the greatest book on heavy metal ever written, Stairway To Hell. He won’t admit it, but he knows more about rock ‘n’ roll than the entire accumulated BLURT brain trust.

[Pictured: Bunnybrains, Nikki Corvette]

A Column on the Rescued and Reissued

To kick things off we start at the top, with recent reissues on four legends from the worlds of soul and country: Willie Nelson, Buck Owens, James Brown, and Otis Redding.

Icons of Soul and Country

One Hell of a Ride, a four-disc set just issued by Columbia/Legacy (www.legacyrecordings.com), is the first compilation that aims to span the entirety of Willie Nelson’s now five-decade-plus body of recordings. It could probably only have come about as a result of the relentless consolidation that’s been a feature of the major label world of late; whatever the uses and disadvantages of that state of affairs, the result here is the ability to compile an overview that dips into and plucks from Nelson’s work on nearly all of the labels he’s spent time with, from Liberty to RCA to Atlantic to Columbia to Island to Lost Highway. The set starts at the beginning with the first song Nelson ever recorded, “When I’ve Sung My Last Hillbilly Song,” and then bookends to a close with a 2007 re-recording of the song, issued here for the first time (the comp is otherwise devoid of previously unreleased material). In between, it largely succeeds in representing the multifold aspects of Nelson’s long and restlessly prodigious career. There’s a nice sampling of his early recordings for Liberty (many in the Ray Price style but, even then, always with Willie’s own distinctive stamp), of his wilderness years with RCA followed by his breakout and outlaw success at Columbia, of his duet recordings with Waylon and with a seemingly unending stream of country (and other) legends, of his tax-debt record and his left turns with Island during the 1990s. Even Willie’s misbegotten reggae record gets a nod with the inclusion of his version of “The Harder They Come.”

Buck Owens put out a ton of live records: six in the U.S., and three more in overseas markets, including “Live” In Scandinavia, which came out in Norway in 1970. It was his fifth live release in as many years; all but one of those have been reissued by the Sundazed (www.sundazed.com) label’s comprehensive Buck Owens preservation project. For all their frequency, Owens wasn’t simply churning out carbon copies; each of his live discs has its own distinct character. And ”Live” in Scandinavia is different than all of the counterparts that preceded it in offering a snapshot of what a Buck Owens show had become circa 1970, rather than just documenting Owens and his Buckaroos in concert. Buck doesn’t even take the stage on the record until it’s half over; the first half is given over to the “Capital Caravan Show,” that is, Buck’s version of the classic country package show. So we hear right-hand man Don Rich and the Buckaroos warming up the crowd with several tunes (including not one, but two of the Band’s songs), followed by Buck’s son Buddy Alan, still wet behind the ears in the music business (and it shows) and then the Hagar twins, who inject some goofing into their Bakersfield twang. The star of the show arrives and basically does a selection of hits that are compressed into medleys before being joined by son Buddy and the Hagars for a couple of tunes. The upshot is less Buck, but more of a sense of what it was like to see a Buck Owens show.

Hip-O Select (www.hip-oselect.com) is now up to its fifth double-disc volume in its James Brown complete singles project, and by the end of this installment (The Singles Volume Five: 1967-1969), it’s still only 1969. Now the series is really getting to the prime stuff, to singles with which the Godfather would delineate the meaning of funk — “I Got the Feelin’,” “Goodbye My Love,” “Say It Out Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud),” “Licking Stick - Licking Stick,” “Give It Up or Turn It a Loose,” to name a few — along with classic R&B throwbacks like “You’ve Got to Change Your Mind” and scads of funky, bluesy, and soul-jazz instrumentals. There was room for all of it, because Brown was putting singles out at a prodigious rate — 20 or so 45s, sometimes two a month, in the 16 months covered by this set. The singles are arranged in chronological order of issue, rather than recording date (although that information is also provided for those who wish to program), which may not serve to illustrate Brown’s musical development per se but has the virtue of mirroring the way his audience heard Brown’s music develop. It can also remind us of the context in which that audience heard songs such as “America Is My Home” and “Say It Out Loud,” the former of which, recorded a full year earlier, Brown chose to issue as his first single following his famous appearance at the Boston Garden the night after the assassination of Martin Luther King; three months later, he answered the criticism that “America” had stirred up by putting out “Say It Out Loud.”

A Georgia product like James Brown, Otis Redding followed Brown’s footsteps out of the Macon chitlin circuit to wider success. The reissue mavens at Rhino (www.rhino.com) have given the arche deluxe treatment to Otis Blue/Otis Redding Sings Soul, arguably the finest album (if only because his premature death precluded further opportunities) from one of the greatest of soul singers (a status secured in spite of that premature death). The record with which Redding hit his stride and came into his own, it gave the world soul standards (“I’ve Been Loving You Too Long”), re-defining covers (Sam Cooke’s “Change Is Gonna Come,” B.B. King’s “Rock Me Baby” and, especially, Redding’s turnabout-is-fair play co-optation of the Stones’ “Satisfaction”), and one song from which even greater things would come (with ’Retha’s reworking of “Respect”). This double-disc version comes billed as a “collector’s edition,” and that’s truth in advertising. What you get is a thematic expansion of the original. The bulk of the set is taken up by the mono and stereo versions of the LP. It’s filled out with related singles and B-sides, a couple of alternate versions or mixes (including a pounding, sped-up 1967 studio version of “Respect” that is simply mindblowing) and live versions of album material plucked from the In Person at the Whiskey A Go Go and Live in Europe albums. It’s a fitting treatment of a monumental soul record, but likely one that only collectors and serious genre devotees will find sufficiently attractive to shell out for.

Stuart Munro moved to Massachusetts from the Great White North over 20 years ago. He still likes living in America, where people continue to tell him that he seems familiar, yet somehow strange. A tip of the hat to the fine folks at Miles of Music (www.milesofmusic.com) for allowing him to resurrect the title of this column.

[Pictured: Willie Nelson, by Don Hunstein/courtesy Sony BMG Legacy]

SEE THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM

Good luck, Senator Obama.

What am I to make of this place? In the words of Eliot, “How shall I presume?”

I am driving to Madison, Indiana, a ways off the interstate. The two-lane winds between lush farms. The livestock looks healthy and well bred and the machines all look brand new, pickups, cars, tractors, balers, bush hogs, riding lawnmowers—especially the ones which are ridden exclusively by older white guys. Some of the lawns exceed the four acre mark, but every inch is mowed. One of my bandmates remarks that these are some lawn-cutting sons-of-bitches out here. My friend, Leslie Silko, once referred to Texans as, “The People of the Lawn,” but Texans would have to do some serious irrigation to get lawns like these. Nice place they got here. And, they've got the necessary mowers and the gas to put in them.

They're prosperous, and, judging by their billboards, they're also religious, and they're… pissed off. One sign reads, “Your New Age Christ according to Oprah, will not save you.” Another says, “Heartbeat: Eighteen days after conception.” Yes, I'm sure most mothers’ hearts are beating eighteen days after they conceive. The next day, on the way down to Louisville, I see a billboard that reads, “Saturday, the true Sabbath, changed by the Antichrist.” One pickup has a “Terrorist Hunting License” window sticker with a picture of Osama Bin Laden, or maybe just some anonymous A-rab in the crosshairs.

These were my people once. I was never a Hoosier, but I was, and still am, related to middle Americans. They weren't always so angry, or so violently Christian. Someone has convinced them that they are in danger and that only Jesus and George W. Bush can save them. With Senator Clinton bowing out, Senator Obama will now have to try to win these people over. Good luck, Barack.

Of course, Hillary would have had a hard time with this lot too. Her husband, an Arkie, could talk the talk, but even he was branded by the gun press as “Handgun Control, Inc.”

Just you watch. No one will want to be called racist, so many rural Midwesterners, economically strapped from eight years of Bush policy, will still say they can't vote for Obama because he's a Democrat and therefore not totally committed to preservation of the second amendment as we now know it, as if any president would have time to mess with the Second Amendment in the current economic climate. No, when they say they can't vote for Obama, their real reason is that he's black, plain and simple.

Now, the Republicans get to run a former POW against a black man, and we all know they're rejoicing. I know Clinton shot herself in the foot when she "misspoke" about the sniper fire in Bosnia. The Republicans didn't have to engineer her downfall as they did Edmund Muskie's in 1972. But, I'm still haunted by the words of the Deep Throat character in All the President's Men: “They didn't want to run against Muskie, they wanted to run against McGovern, so look who they're running against…"

Look who they're running against now.

Good luck Senator Obama. You now have my vote.

Singer-songwriter James McMurtry lives in Austin, Texas. When he’s not touring, you can see him at the Continental Club every Wednesday, ‘round about midnight. His latest album, Just Us Kids, is out now on Lightning Rod Records.