Old
3C Digital Jukebox
One MP3 from each of our releases is provided here for your listening
pleasure. The files
have been kept small to download easily, and they're not as high-quality
as those you'd buy online, but you're welcome to keep them. We hope you
enjoy the songs, and please use the provided links to purchase our digital
releases. Thanks.
Play
Track 24 | "Revolver"
Vena Cava, self-titled CDR
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Track 23 | "Pardon The Morning"
Mike
Hagen, The Ballad of Fungobat CDR
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Track 22 | "Lonely Heart" (Peck
of Snide) Various Artists, Twenty One and Hungover CDR
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Track 21 | "Seven Years"
Ron
House, Obsessed CD
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Track 20 | "20 or 30 People"
Ron
House, New Wave as the Next Guy CD
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Track 19 | "Internet is Just Bad Pot"
Thomas
Jefferson Slave Apartments, No Old Guy Lo Fi Cry CD
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Track 18 | "RnR Hall of Fame"
Thomas
Jefferson Slave Apartments, Bait and Switch CD
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Track 17 | "Bottle Island"
Thomas
Jefferson Slave Apartments, You Lookin' For Treble? CD
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Track 16 | "The Way She Runs a Fever" (Live, Pop
Shop, Cleveland, 1983)
Great Plains, Slaves to Rock N Roll CDR
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Track 15 | "We Are Carloadbuyers"
The New Normal, The Sprightly Sounds of The New Normal CDR
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Track 14 | "Pizza You"
Shades of Al Davis, Midwest Peace Talks Vols.1, 2 CD
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Track 13 | "Everyone Is Wrong"
Saint Paul & His Coalition of the Willing, Everyone Is Wrong CDR
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Track 12 | "Radio City"
Fungobat, Greatest Hits Vol.1 CDR
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Track 11 | "Still There's Hope"
Log, Logjammin' CDR
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Track 10 | "Black Sox Scandal"
Great Plains, Live
at the Electric Banana, Pittsburgh, 1985 CDR
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Track 09 | "Hollywood Years"
Log Almighty CD
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Track 08 | "Ahab's Leg"
Shades of Al Davis CDR
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Track 07 | "My Evil Friend"
Log, The Early Years CDR
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Track 06 | "Toward Picturesque"
Paul Nini, Life in These United States CD
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Track 05 | "No Beginning, No End"
Peck of Snide, Moot CD
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Track 04 | "Po Mo Fo PO Folks"
Great Plains, Cornflakes CDR
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Track 03 | "Vague Uncertainties"
Paul Nini, The Mannerist Age CDR
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Track 02 | "Old 3C"
Great Plains, Length of Growth 1981-89,
2-CDR retrospective set
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Track 01 | "Reference"
Log, Auto Fire Life CD
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Click here
to play the Columbus radio show that profiled the Log Almighty release.
How to purchase Old 3C downloads
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Puncture #44, Summer 1999 issue, review by Franklin Bruno.
Popwatch
#10, Winter 1999 issue, review by Dan
Vallor.
Shredding Paper #5, Winter 2000 issue, reviews by Matt Roberts.
The Other Paper, September 5-11, 2002 issue, review by Chad Painter:
Boston Phoenix, January 16-23, 2003 issue, review by Franklin Bruno:
House calls: Columbus's Great Plains scene
There's a poignant, even grim moment at the close of Obsessed (Moses Carryout), the solo debut by Great Plains/Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments frontman Ron House. After tracking his middle-age-crazy protagonist's troubles--first romantic, then existential-- through 11 songs, "Implicated" ends with an acoustic guitar that won't hold its tuning, a woozy lead part from TJSA guitarist Bob Petric, and House dismissing the value of the whole enterprise: "Don't condescend with music/Don't throw the scent off with music/Don't send me dead music."
Obsessed isn't a confessional album in any strict sense; its accompanying press is at pains to note that the songs were written in the aftermath of a close friend's marital difficulties. But House has spent the bulk of his adult life as a prime mover in Columbus's fecund rock underground - the scene that gave us the New Bomb Turks, Scrawl, and Moviola, among others--as fanzine writer (the Offense Newsletter), record-store co-owner (Used Kids), and musician. When someone who's been banking on the music's saving power for this long calls it into question, you can't help hearing the doubts as his own.
Another recent release gives us a snapshot of House and compatriots in, as the photo captions say, "happier times." Cornflakes (Old 3C) unearths 26 live and studio rarities by Great Plains, one of the Columbus scene's standard bearers. Most active between 1982 and 1989 (with the odd reunion gig since), the Plains are most often remembered for a single college-radio hit, the indie in-joke "Letter to a Fanzine," with its knowing references to 4AD and SST and its promo-scamming critic's rallying cry: "I like everything I get in the mail for free."
If you've heard only a single Great Plains song, it's probably this one, which is a shame. Although House's unsingerly whine helped pigeonhole the band as "geek rock," he was also capable of microphone-shredding desperation and unhinged vocalise, and his lyrics celebrated everything from civil rights ("Martin Luther King and Martin Luther Drinking") to bakery overstock ("It's day old, but it tastes great"), a combination that one previously unheard song on Cornflakes aptly labels "Po Mo Fo PO Folks." Behind House, the band's main sonic architects, brothers Mark and Matt Wyatt, conjured loose swirls of trashy guitar and cheap combo organ more akin to a Nuggets obscurity than to by-the-numbers barre- chord punk.
The 2000 double disc Length of Growth, which compiled Great Plains' early, self-released EP and three Homestead albums, is the best road map to the band's work. Still, Cornflakes fills in important peaks and valleys, with alternate takes of their rawest ("Chuck Berry's Orphan") and craftiest ("Serpent Mound") material, oddities like the country-styled "History of Sin," and songs slated for their never-completed final album. The real revelations are the discs' cover versions, which seem to have been chosen on the principle of maximum inappropriateness for House's voice. To hear "Everyday People" or Dusty Springfield's "Every Day I Have To Cry" run through the art-garage grinder is to hear the very foundations of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame cracking underfoot.
Cornflakes compiler Paul Nini was just one of several Great Plains bassists. But he's become the unofficial archivist/torchbearer for the band and, to an extent, the scene they helped build. Nini also fronts the Plains' sporadically active Web log, runs both Old 3C and the on-line distributor Popstream, and releases modestly scaled solo recordings at irregular intervals. The Mannerist Age, his latest, is split between sleek, clockwork instrumentals and understated vocal numbers with somber melodies and careful four-track arrangements akin to Elliott Smith's. But peel away the drum programs and delay-blurred guitars and you'll find Nini, like House, giving notice of his diminished expectations from a career in rock. "The Next Seattle" (which Columbus briefly appeared to be in the mid '90s) makes an earnest case for music's private satisfactions: "I don't want to be around/ When the side show comes to town . . . I'm happy by myself."
The Columbus music community, though still productive, has suffered some tragic losses in recent years. The prolific, hard-living Jim Shepard (Vertical Slit, V3) hanged himself in 1998; guitarist Jerry Wick of punk-rock true-believers Gaunt was killed by a hit-and-run driver while bicycling home in January of 2001. Their stories may be one factor in the self-questioning, sometimes bitter tone of both Obsessed and The Mannerist Age. But life and music go on: a recent e-mail from Nini announced that a re-formed Great Plains (along with fellow lifers Mike Rep & the Quotas and Screaming Urge) played a home-town show on January 4, with House planning to "finish the lyrics" to some of Cornflakes' rougher numbers for the occasion.
The next big thing? Not likely. Condescending, or "dead" music? Definitely not.
Columbus Dispatch, 14 December 2006 issue, review by Curtis Schieber:
Everyone Is Wrong, Saint Paul & His Coalition of the Willing (Old 3C)
Columbus songwriter Paul Nini's "Everyone Is Wrong" plays as if it were written in one long, purging fit. The collection's unsettled tone suggests that the inspiration for these songs is deeper and longer-lasting.
Likely, Nini's period of dissatisfaction spans at least the six years of the current administration, whose spin on the war in Iraq provided the name for his band.
But one of the album's many strengths is that its author looks constantly deeper. Every barbed statement -- the title of "Jesus Is Spinning in His Grave," for instance -- is outnumbered by as many questions, moral dilemmas and moments of melancholy resignation.
Nini suggests that the true voice of community is what's missing. In and between the lines, he asserts that it's not a chorus represented by political doublespeak, the shadow reality of marketing and materialism, and definitely not the one presented to the world by the government.
The album opens with the cynicism and doubt of two versions of the self-explanatory title track and closes with hard, cold truth in a simple reading of Randy Newman's "Mr. President (Have Pity on the Working Man)," a song about the daily struggle to make ends. Nini suggests a cure best by example, rounding up a terrific collection of musical friends to help him bring the songs buoyantly to life.
Dagger Zine, 30 December 2006, review by Tim Hinely:
Everyone Is Wrong, Saint Paul & His Coalition of the Willing (Old 3C)
In these pages I've called people like Matthew and Joe Pernice underrated and overlooked, but those guys are as big as Axl Rose once was compared to Mr. Paul Nini. He is truly the guy who is underrated and overlooked. Through over 20 years of banging around the Columbus, OH scene and having played in bands like Great Plains, Peck of Snide and Log, the guy can’t even get arrested. Yes Paul, who looks like he’d be more comfortable in front of a pizza oven, wearing a big white apron, asking you whether you want sausage or pepperoni on that, is a damn good songwriter. "Everyone is Wrong (Again)" is a fantastic pop song complete with hooks galore and an amazing trumpet solo, while the awesomely-titled "More Akron than Cleveland" is all gentle melancholy. The acoustic instrumental "Kokomo Hum" is perfect for a quiet Sunday night with the lover of your choice (animal, vegetable or mineral?). 12 songs in all and even a few samples of Dubya. I have never been to Ohio (OK, when I moved out west in 1992 I drove through Toledo at midnight -- does that count ?), but after listening to this record I’m packing my bags right now.
The Other Paper, 4 January 2007, review by Karen E. Graves:
Enduring snapshot, or already dated?
Saint Paul & His Coalition of the Willing is a folksy new outfit headed by Paul Nini, known for his work with groups such as Log and Great Plains. The band's name -- along with it's wordy debut effort -- "Everyone Is Wrong, 12 Laments from the 2nd Bush Era" -- makes it's message abundantly clear.
Opening track "Everyone Is Wrong" begins with a sample of President George W. Bush declaring, "If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier -- just so long as I'm the dictator." Despite the heavy sentiment, musically the song bounces along with a laid-back jangle.
Unlike Bush, Nini's willing coalition is a large one. Featuring nearly a dozen players, the expansive cast of backing musicians includes members of outfits such as Moviola, Great Plains and Log. A pedigree like that makes it a virtual family tree of Columbus' indie scene. The album is indie folk with an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach to instrumentation, which includes guitars, accordion and melodica.
"Everyone Is Wrong (Again)" is surprisingly different from its similarly titled predecessor. While the former was an acoustic parade moseying down the street, the latter is Mardi Gras by comparison. Handclaps and horn bursts propel the song forward over a prominent bass line that, while subtle, still knows more about Motown than anything on the dreadful "Dreamgirls" soundtrack.
Following this rare burst of energy, the rest of the album is positively mellow. It's the sort of deliberate, hushed record that might appeal to fans of the Shins, Moviola or the Fruit Bats. The acoustic backing and slightly out of time dual vocals of "Isle of View" bears more than a passing resemblance to early Guided by Voices, with hints of the Byrds and the Who. Similarly, "Her Sublime T-Shirt Read" is a pleasant slice of lo-fi pop.
The album's shortcoming is that it tends to rely on cute lyrics rather than catchy hooks. Lines such as "She's more Britney than JLo," might be amusing now, but in a year will they be memorable or meaningful or funny? With expired pop reference points and timely political messages, the album could be an endearing snapshot of this particular moment in time. Or it could simply age instantly.
Then again, the album closes with a cover of Randy Newman's "Mr. President (Have Pity on the Working Man)." Updated with another notorious quote from President Bush, the song manages the feat of still sounding relevant more than three decades after its initial release.
Columbus Alive, 18 January 2007, review by John Ross:
Everyone Is Wrong, Saint Paul & His Coalition of the Willing (Old 3C)
References to President Bush's controversial war were common from rockers last year. But this inventive and intimate work from Paul Nini, a veteran of local bands Log and Great Plains, is more than a cheap shot at W. Instead it's a look at a world that's flawed but certainly worth saving with some laidback soul-searching and a bunch of engaging, down-home alt-country sounds.
The Byrds, the Jayhawks, vintage Tim Easton and the other usual influences are present, with some catchy and memorable twists: boogie-down horns, keys and bass on "Everyone Is Wrong (Again)," a layer of vibes on "More Akron Than Cleveland" and a soft vocal touch nearly everywhere else.
Tracks like "Caffeine & Nicotine" and "Everyone Is Wrong" also point a world-weary glare at the multi-instrumentalist himself, adding another dimension to an album far more sophisticated than the standard folk-rock Bush-basher.
AmericanaUK.com, 18 January 2007, review by Jenny Alder:
Everyone Is Wrong, Saint Paul & His Coalition of the Willing (Old 3C)
The title seems to suggest an angry, apocalyptic record, full of political ire and perhaps not too uplifting, an impression strengthened by the cover imagery's nod to master of misery Leonard Cohen's "Songs of Love And Hate." However, maybe the cheeky, bespectacled face in the corner doesn't look too fierce after all. Instead of reflecting the bitterness and disappointment of the second Bush era back at the listener, the songs are resolutely melodic, often upbeat and complete with horns and handclaps on "Everyone Is Wrong (Again)" -- even though everyone might be wrong Saint Paul implores us to "hold on to what you know is real." Although the politics is ever present ("The Kingdom, The Power and The Glory") and defines the whole album, so is love and the mundanity of life, the "Caffeine And Nicotine" that mean the world to him, and the girl in "More Akron Than Cleveland," who is much prettier than J-Lo. Paul Nini (the Saint in question) has a rich, balladeering voice, which adds depth to songs like "Jesus Is Spinning In His Grave," which seems Byrdsian in its wistful jangling. Nini, who has written all the songs here apart from the bonus track (a cover of Randy Newman’s "Mr President (Have Pity On The Working Man)") has made a record of delicate beauty and wistful longing, with a big heart and a big conscience.
CMJ New Music Monthly, January/February 2007, review by Eric Davidson:
Everyone Is Wrong, Saint Paul & His Coalition of the Willing (Old 3C)
The saint here is Paul Nini, who helmed the Columbus, Ohio rural-pop band Log for much of the ‘90s. This album is a predictably simmer-down into trad folk territory, but retains enough jangly accompaniment and some indigenous Ohio post-college rock harmonies. A few very barbed lyrical jabs at our Commode In Chief add spice too, but mostly Wrong is right for a sitting and thinking mood.
