Left Insane: Logo #315

South Bay avant punk band Left Insane had their logo designed by drummer Tony Cicero - from an original sketch by singer/guitarist Paul Radabaugh - in 1989. A masterpiece of simplicity and perspective, it graced the cover of the band's "Visa Weekend" 7" on No Reality Records, an unheralded record label with a catalog that includes Nip Drivers, Pinhead Gunpowder, and Crimpshrine. Radabaugh: "The rendering in your post is my drawing and that's what got used in most of the fliers and promo materials. Tony and Mark Segal (from the SST band Paper Bag, which hailed from deepest darkest Tarzana) cleaned it up a little for the "Toolbox" album." Cicero got his start in Carson - a suburb between Los Angeles and Long Beach with a really beautiful old movie theatre nearby in Wilmington - in 1979 with a band called The Meathooks (I'm told there are recordings hidden deep in the heart of Lomita). He left when SST superstars Saccharine Trust needed a new drummer; after Saccharine Trust, he played in Vida with Dez Cadena. One of the most complex, driven and creative of all the drummers working in the Southern California punk world in the '80s, he's criminally underrated and I'm not just saying that because he's on the payroll. Now he's in Black Love - my band - and we are absolutely dipped in chocolate gold to have him with us. Someone asked recently what Black Love sounds like. We sound like Nick Cave and P.J. Harvey watching scrambled porn - but not necessarily the same channel at the same time. Also: disorienting hard rock.

This just in: Black Flag / DOA / Danzig / Run-DMC drummer Chuck Biscuits has died of throat cancer at age 44; BrooklynVegan has the most comprehensive tribute to Chuck, including a video possibly from 1988 in which Chuck shows off his collection of cereals (!) including Fruit Brute, Fruity Yummy Mummy, Count Chocula and his favorite: Quisp (?!)

Also just in: Chuck Biscuit death hoax?!?

Update: Yes, he's alive. Move along, people - nothing to see here.

Logo #177: Saccharine Trust

Designer: Raymond Pettibon, 1981. Drummer Tony Cicero remembers this icon as first appearing in the liner notes for the "Pagan Icons" LP, but it may have appeared earlier. Saccharine Trust were at the nexus of punk and jazz, creating a sinewy, spiky and confrontational strain of art rock in their wake, becoming rather like the West Coast analogue of New York's No Wave - as near to such a thing as ever could be. They would tour many times with Black Flag and appear on multiple bills various times with their SST label brethren - living, in the words of Steve Albini, "like a slug and out of a garbage bag." Here they are at Perkins Palace sometime in the '80s, with the definitive Baiza / Brewer / Cicero / Hodson line-up, and here is an earlier incarnation.

This Day in Death:
Jacques François Antoine Ibert (August 15, 1890 – February 5, 1962). The composer.

This Day in Birth:
William Seward Burroughs (February 5, 1914 – August 2, 1997). The decomposer.