Ragman Records Archives

Stuff I’m looking for:

• Cover art of No Consensus Sun Shines Like Tomorrow
• Exit Drills Broke-Ass Demo 2002
• Any recordings of She-Ra
• Any recordings of Mickey Moore

Comment this post if you’ve got one or more of these.

Page_5_Girl-Live_at_Steve_and_Lauras_Wedding_Reception.zip (42.8 Mb)

Page 5 Girl’s farewell performance, after a year-long hiatus, was at Steve’s wedding reception. Recorded by Tyler Crew.

Page_5_Girl-Live_in_the_McGuires’_Garage.zip (32.8 Mb)

While Page 5 Girl is usually thought of as the Potter/Caruso/Hoffman/Peck lineup, the band actually went through several other incarnations — after all, it started off as just Steve. For live recording of another short-lived P5G lineup, see > The Night of Psycho E. The lineup heard here was thrown together when Matt McGuire wanted Page 5 Girl to play a house show in his parents’ garage but half of the band couldn’t make it. It sounds like Peter Vanderwall is on drums (lots of triplet fills), but I’m not sure who else. It’s an extremely loose set, almost more of an impromptu jam session loosely based on Page 5 Girl’s songs.

Page_5_Girl-Pitch_Control.zip (106.1 Mb)

An oddities collection made up of recordings from rehearsals. Even rawer than usual for Page 5 Girl, and some interesting improvisations and tossed-off ideas as well.

Page_5_Girl-Evil.zip (45.7 Mb)

So funny thing, I continued running TapeSNotRecords in some form alongside Ragman Records, and would occasionally go so far as to make up my own albums of stuff that didn’t get on Ragman tapes. The “Evil EP” is sort of a “mega-single” for the Page 5 Girl song “Evil,” packed with an assortment of outtake tracks from the Chick Capsule sessions and a few other bits of b-side-worthy material.

Page_5_Girl-Chick_Capsule.zip (102.3 Mb)

Of course, a Stacy Peck theme day wouldn’t be complete without some Page 5 Girl. I won’t be posting the entire P5G discography today, as it’s quite large and there’s a lot of stuff I haven’t scanned in covers for; we’ll save the rest for a future date on which I’ll also go into the band history. Here, however, is Page 5 Girl’s main album. Musically we were a bit like a mixture of The Pixies, Gang Of Four, Flipper, and Beat Happening — easy to dance to songs with super-simple basslines and song structures, clattery dissonant guitar, and Steve Potter’s smooth vocal delivery rattling off cool-sounding abstract space-cowboy shit.

Thanks_But_No_Thanks-I_Stole_a_Beer.zip (88.3 Mb)

After Stacy moved to Seattle, she did this solo project, which produced this one cassette album, of which she sent many copies back to us in C.F. I hope she doesn’t bug out over me posting it up here after all these years, because I didn’t ask permission. It’s pretty awesome though, a bit like T-Bag but a tad moodier with more instrumentals.

My_Mentor_Al-Carpet_and_Other_Ways_to_Die.zip (77.9 Mb)

Somewhere between Page 5 Girl and E.D.I.T.H., Stacy, Matt McGuire, and I decided to start a band called My Mentor Al. There wasn’t a clear direction we wanted to go with it, exactly. Eventually Steve Wilson and Joe ended up joining in, and we started recording stuff. Stylistically, it was a intriguing compromise between the more experimental 4-track recording projects and the more rock guitar-based live performing bands, but we only ended up doing one gig, and it was an annual local band tribute to John Lennon that Stebs used to do. We practiced our three songs for it like crazy: a hip-hop/funk mutation of “Instant Karma,” a sneery punk version of “Paperback Writer,” and a relatively straightforward, somewhat revved-up version of “Ticket to Ride” in which I ended up accidentally ad-libbing “I think that living with me is bringing me down/’Cause I can never be free when I am around.” Somehow the high standards demanded by the original core group drove Joe and Steve away from the project, I guess they never figured it was actually a serious band; we ended up discovering Josh Schneiderman and forming E.D.I.T.H. Matt McGuire now resides in Olympia, WA and plays accordion in the folk-punk (or is it punk-folk?) band The Pasties (not to be confused with the NYC power-pop band of the same name).

TBag-The_Blues_Album.zip (87.3 Mb)

There were a lot of really good T-Bag tracks left that didn’t find their way onto Wow Babies!. I’ve collected some of my favorites among them into this oddities album.

TBag-Wow_Babies.zip (148.9 Mb)

Having just recently posted Exit Drills in the Home and Lost in Pez-Land, it seems like a good time to have a Stacy Peck theme day. Like many, Stacy came to the Ragman scene with no musical experience and immediately ended up in one or more bands, namely Page 5 Girl and T-Bag, and through that, over time, became quite skillful. Her best-known works in Cedar Falls involved playing bass in the early lineups of Exit Drills and The Mittens. Currently she resides in the Seattle area and plays drums in a really excellent band, Telepathic Liberation Army.

Early on, however, Stacy had “guitar lessons” with Joe, whose idea of guitar lessons was to do a recording project. Joe and Stacy recorded a ton of interesting tracks as T-Bag, and out of them came this cassette album. The original was a 90-minute cassette, but unlike in the case of the first two Bludy Noz tapes, I have not trimmed it down to CD length for this posting because I figure, having not been in the band, it’s not my place to pick which songs to leave out.

Stuff I’m looking for:

• Cover art of No Consensus Sun Shines Like Tomorrow
• Exit Drills Broke-Ass Demo 2002

Comment this post if you’ve got one or more of these.