Genealogy

I was in the car today listening to Social Distortion. Their self-titled 1990 album, which is awesome. By the way, you can stream their new album online, and for every 100,000 listeners amazon is going to drop it's price by a buck. That's cool.

Anyway, I was listening away, happy as a clam, and during the third song "Story of My Life," and all of a sudden my brain went: "Carl Perkins." Actually, it came out in the voice of the guy from Mystery Train, which made it all a bit hilarious. What if that's my inner voice? This got me to thinking. I may have another link in my mental map of music history. But I can't really work it out, so I'm appealing for help. I'm gonna ask someone I know who is smart about this and will report back.

Anyway, and this is probably not new news, but I was thinking about how the Carl Perkins line of early r&b/rock clearly flows to California and manifests in bands like Social D. And then I was thinking about the wider culture of what I'm going to call California punk, mainly because I don't know enough of it to have a more appropriate or specific term. But I'm talking about everything from Social D to The Descendents to The Dead Kennedys. Maybe this should extend outward to bands like Black Flag, too.

I'm thinking mostly thematically in relation to the songs, rather than musically, but I still stand by my idea that Social D sounds like Carl Perkins. Anyway, then I was thinking about how important California punk was to metal in the mid-80s. Anybody who's ever seen Jeff Hanneman's guitar will know what I mean.

So now I'm trying to figure out exactly how the cow we get from Sun Studios in Memphis to Reign in Blood. And this is all I've got, so any help is welcome.