SHE - "Outta Reach" LP (Causeway).

She: is making me do something I do not want to do.

Steno pads in the physical realm, notepad.txt files on my laptop, and an infinitely long list that is in my own mental queue, but: sometimes the most anticipated of records can just slip through the cracks where these dimensions meet. Months after reading something Scott Soriano wrote about them, I believe in the warm up stages for getting copies for the distro portion of his excellent label, S-S Records, I added She's "Outta Reach" to to my ramshackle list(s).

This is were I say: much kudos to local shop Revolver Records for actually getting a copy of this for their store, an act which saved me a headache, a little bit of cash and produced this sentence: "Thank fucking god"! (Such profanity really is unnecessary, after all, but unavoidable when you are simultaneously excited and relieved).

Having an unhealthy enjoyment of "Girls in the Garage" style oldies but goodies (and obviously, the compilations which glorify them), which mostly spun off from an obsession with many of the female-oriented garage and power pop bands that were active throughout my earlier years of figuring things out (In other words, mid 90's output from labels like Sympathy for the Record Industry, Crypt, Estrus, etc): there were things about this that I found exciting.

Finding out Thee Headcoatees didn't really write any of their songs, and actually functioned as a Billy Childish unit that he was cultivating but not playing in, was (while an idea that I found interesting), a bit of a disappointment. The polar opposite would be the gained knowledge that She were writing and performing all of their material on their own, during a time where that was in fact not the norm at all: 1964-1971, Sacramento.

And they are incredible. Rough and raw 60's garage, played by five girls who apparently had "real life" attitude that this material apparently / appropriately lined up with, and results in some of the earliest output of riot grrl if you'd like to go that far, which I would. The Shangri-Las, after time-traveling to the future to check out the Frumpies and Huggy Bear, and then returning back to the late 60's, and toning it down a bit so that they didn't give the future away, completely. She could and would work now, and be every bit as valid, though they would be competing with a large peer pool, where their legitimate energy and spunk is replaced by louder amps and reverb.

To be fair I didn't need to hear anything to know that I wanted to get a copy of this, well to be fair, questionable LP. Questionable in that it's very obviously a DIY endeavor that someone who loves and respects them assembled. There's not much information on it at all, and the liner notes and (one would hope for) photos that would wrap this into a perfect piece of history are absent.

Ironically, the end result is a modern looking left-of-center punk record. Not that I would know anything about releasing an LP with art featuring cat heads on human bodies or anything, or wait, is it me that has a Channels 3 and 4 LP slated to come out any day now? I forget. ...but it's also the simple and tasteful approach of photocopy art, glued onto blank jackets that give this an, again, an ironically 2010 DIY feel. This, again, is not entirely a complaint, but I would have really done this differently.

My thoughts are this: if I took on this task, I would have wanted to glorify it as much as possible. I would have wanted every photo of them possible, writings from back then, scans of the lone single that they released: an elaborate package, I suppose. Not just because I would personally like that, but because it would peak others' interest who saw it. Sure: there was a short description sent out when the distributors got these, but it relies on the individual record store to print it out and tape it on if they want it to have an appeal to someone from Phoenix not-named James Fella, who already bought the one copy anyway.

And so despite loving every second of these ten songs, I find that a bit perplexing. I assume that getting the legal rights may have been an issue, but then again, maybe not: only two of these songs were ever actually released (as far as I could tell, anyway). And isn't that a bit perplexing too?

So I got curious, and what I found very easily was nothing that I wanted to see: while She in fact only had one single, they had 17 other songs that were never released back then, but all 19 appear on a legit CD issued by Big Beat Records from the UK. And this leaves me with two questions, one with an answer, one without.

Why did the person who put this out only toss ten of their 19 tracks on here? I really don't know.

There's a nicely done CD that compiles everything, and while I really don't venture into the CD world very often, it's situations such as this that will make me purchase one, even though it feels really alien and kind of silly.In other words, you could ask: is She making me do something that I do not want to? Yes, She is.