The Bags ‎- All Bagged Up (The Collected Works 1977-1980)

With the great Alice Bag and Pat Bag aka Patricia Morrison (Gun Club, The Sisters Of Mercy!). Amazing, ripping, scathing LA punk... original recordings on the legendary Dangerhouse label! After years (literally) of hunting, researching, tracking down cuts Artifix is proud to present All Bagged Up, the collected works 1977-1980. This LP represents everything the label could dig up by LA's infamous BAGS. Featured on this LP are: Tracks 1-4: The Dangerhouse Recordings 1978 “Survive,” “Babylonian Gorgon,” “We Don't Need the English,” “We Will Bury You.” Tracks 5-8: Live at the Masque Recordings 1978 “TV Dinner,” “Violent Girl,” “Animal Cal,” “Chainsaw.” Tracks 9-13: Live in Portland, Oregon November 25, 1979 “7 and 7 is (Love),” “1,2,3,” “Gluttony,” “In Love With Romance,” “Survive.” Tracks 14-20: Assorted rehearsals, live, demos, and alternate takes.

 By deathpunk Sep 03 2022

I've always found it fascinating how some of the best music to come out of the SoCal underground in the late 1970s and early '80s came from groups that had essentially begun as joke or novelty acts. The Urinals went from ham-fisted performances of the Jetsons' theme song on toy instruments at dorm parties to writing the incredible shimmering tracks that later graced their excellent full-length as 100 Flowers. In less than 18 months, The Crowd evolved from an intentionally stupid dayglo-surf pogo group into a melodic powerhouse, expertly combining a slew of stylistic influences into their sound and producing what is easily one of the best LPs to come out of the whole geographical scene and era, the transcendent A World Apart; had it been released 15 years later, during the peak of punk's commercial appeal in the mid-'90s, those guys would have been headlining the Warped Tour with a gold record. And The Bags originally formed as little more than an excuse for its members to perform wearing paper bag disguises, yet quickly added competent musicians to their line up and turned into a tight, intense and idiosyncratic live band and an early L.A. punk staple. All of these bands were frighteningly ahead of their time, and wound up creating some of the most timeless music in modern history - and all of them shared a genesis as groups that didn't even want to be taken seriously.

Despite their inauspicious origins, it didn't take long for the Bags to make a genuine mark in the then-burgeoning L.A. punk scene. Formed by bassist Patricia Morrison and singer Alice Armendariz in 1977 after a chance meeting outside an Elton John gig, the group was initially boosted by Nicky Beat of The Weirdos, who served as a fill-in drummer and helped the band secure occasional gigs at the Masque club, a labyrinth-like subterranean performance space that served as a hub for L.A. punk in its infancy. Their first shows saw the group members sport elaborate homemade paper-bag masks over their heads; this aesthetic of onstage anonymity soon fizzled out, however, after an inebriated Darby Crash leapt onstage mid-performance and tugged off Alice's bag in a moment of devilish impulse. Seeking to move the band forward, Alice and Pat recruited Terry Graham as a permanent replacement for Nicky Beat, whose commitment to the rapidly-ascending Weirdos left him with little time for side projects; Graham's addition was soon followed by that of Rob Ritter, an introverted kid who had previously played with Germs drummer Don Bolles in Exterminators - a Ramones-style act - before the pair picked up and moved from Phoenix to Los Angeles. The Bags' line up and sound was finally solidified when Craig Lee accepted an invitation to join them, shortly after Graham and Ritter came into the fold. Lee was several years older than the teenaged pair of Pat and Alice; he had played in a handful of L.A.-area bands (including the Cars, a proto-punk outfit that was a very early Masque staple and unrelated to the Ric Ocasek act of the same name) and was a prolific songwriter. With his presence came a sense of maturity and direction that would prove critical to the Bags' musical development.

From the time their main line up came together in early 1978 until the group's demise less than three years later, the Bags wrote and fine-tuned several dozen original compositions, and played countless shows in SoCal and up the west coast, gaining a significant cult following in the process. Sadly, though, as was the experience of many other punk-influenced groups and artists of the time, the lack of commercial appeal in the band's sound and a dearth of band-related revenue ultimately meant few opportunities to lay down their music to tape (for posterity and/or profit) in a proper studio setting. For more than a decade and a half, the Bags' entire commercially released output was comprised of a whopping five songs spread across a 7" single and three multi-artist compilation albums, most of which were pressed in limited quantities and quickly went out of print. This five-song catalogue doubled overnight in 1996 with the release of the Live From the Masque, Vol.1: Forming compilation, the first of a trio of discs documenting a series of benefit gigs in February 1978; of the five Bags songs included, four were previously unreleased in any form. And that was it: ten recorded tunes, four studio, six live. The lucky few who managed to purchase an extremely rare VHS or Laserdisc copy of The Decline of Western Civilization in the mid-'80s could add one additional cut to their list ("Prowlers in the Night"); however, it was not included on the soundtrack LP or made available in non-video form.

Though it somehow took another full decade after the Live at the Masque collection came out, the 2007 release of the All Bagged Up compilation brought a 30-year era in which the band's music was frustratingly inaccessible to a close. With a tracklist carefully constructed by the fine men and women at Artifix Records, All Bagged Up attempts to combine previously released but out-of-print material with live cuts, demo tracks and rehearsal tape excerpts to a succinct yet reasonably comprehensive retrospective of the band's brief career; all things considered, they have managed to do an admirable job, especially considering the limited source material at their disposal for the project. The bulk of the A-side is comprised of the Bags' best-known material, starting with their first and only single - "Survive", a generic but peppy foot-stomper, and "Babylonian Gorgon", a genuine classic penned by Lee shortly after joining the group - and two great outtakes from the same sessions which later turned up on the Yes L.A. and Life Is Beautiful So Why Not Eat Health Foods? compilations. These are followed by the aforementioned Live at the Masque cuts, which, despite what the title implies, were actually recorded at the Elk's Lodge in L.A.'s MacArthur Park neighbourhood; while "Survive" and the bland "Chainsaw" are little more than throwaways, the other three tracks give off an intense, anxiety-laden vibe that definitely feels like a blueprint for what would soon follow.

With the exception of an alternate mix of "We Will Bury You", and "Prowlers in the Night", which appears here in audio form for the first time, the remaining tracks on All Bagged Up are seeing the light of day for the first time. The studio/demo/rehearsal material spans the entirety of the Bags' existence; the raucous "Bag Bondage" is taken from the band's first demo, "Disco's Dead" is a commissioned studio performance from mid-1979 or so, and "Car Hell" was allegedly one of the last songs the group wrote before their dissolution. The real red meat of the compilation is in the remaining live tracks, though. A few live recordings from the '77-'78 Masque era are known to exist and have circulated over the years, but All Bagged Up thankfully focuses its sights on the band's later material, which is among their very best. Craig Lee's song writing was really starting to come into form in the first half of 1979 and beyond, and it shows in tracks like "Real Emotions", "In Love With Romance", and "Prowlers". The Bags were churning out killer tunes left and right over their final year or so of existence, and the growth of the band's sound is really evident in both their moodier material and the more upbeat, harmonic stuff. While I can appreciate the desire to keep their efforts down to a single disc / LP, it would have been nice to hear relatively clean-sounding versions of songs like "Atomic Beach", "Suffering", and "From the Start" in addition to the ones ultimately chosen for inclusion.

Sadly, by the fall of 1980, the Bags had fizzled out for the most part, with only the occasional one-off reunion gig to follow over the next decade (with the final one marking the premature death by O.D. of their enigmatic guitarist-turned-bassist, who had since co-opted the Rob Graves moniker). Their contributions to the burgeoning L.A. underground scene have been repeatedly acknowledged by numerous contemporaries and later groups who were influenced by their abrasive yet melodic brand of punk rock, and given the quality of the material on the posthumous All Bagged Up LP, it's easy to see why so many artists and music fans alike cite the Bags as a crucial cog in the American punk machine.

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1 Survive

2 Babylonian Gorgon

3 We Don't Need The English

4 We Will Bury You

5 Tv Dinner

6 Violent Girl

7 Animal Call

8 Chainsaw

9 7 And 7 Is (Love)

10 1,2,3

11 Gluttony

12 In Love With Romance

13 Survive

14 Car Hell

15 Real Emotions

16 Bag Bondage

17 We Will Bury You

18 Disco's Dead

19 Prowlers In The Night

20 Nothing's Going On In Here