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
Old 3C works with the good folks at IODA
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and the Amazon
MP3 store. Please visit these vendors (or many others out there
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Promotional
picture, circa 1995.
robertchristgau.com, 1995, 1997, and 2000, reviews by Robert Christgau:
Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments, Bait and Switch (Onion/American)
Formerly leader of the slovenly folk-rockers Great Plains, among whose achievements was the best song ever written about Rutherford B. Hayes, Columbus lifer Ron House demonstrates on this $800 debut album that punk and youth need have nothing to do with each other anymore. First five tracks rush by in a perfect furious tunefest, climaxing with a bar song called "Cheater's Heaven" that's ripe for total rearrangement by anybody in Nashville with some guts left. After that recognition is less instantaneous except on "RnR Hall of Fame," which comes with liner notes to match: "TJSA proudly accept the honor of being indicted by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame . . . " If indie scenes are so full of wordwise ne'er-do-wells like this, how come they never put it on tape? A-
Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments, Straight to Video (Anyway)
Ron House makes the sex life of an aging punk in an overgrown college town sound active, raunchy, and not without spiritual rewards--in addition to the professional shank shaker and the prostitute with her leg half chewed off, he fucks several women with truly enormous libraries. He also bids an unsentimental farewell to Lester Bangs and complains about the age of the spectacle. A-
Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments, No Old Guy Lo-Fi Cry (Rockathon)
He's always better when you listen to the words, and he's not making it any easier ("Internet Is Just Bad Pot," "Hell"). ***
Philadelphia City Paper, 1995, review by a.d. amorosi:
Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments, Bait and Switch (Onion/American)
With the renewed interest in white rhythmic attitude circa 1980s NYC-Soho, we must prepare ourselves for the art-noise resurgence. Bands like TJSA are having fun with "art" as well as commenting on the current alternative universe in which they breathe. TJSA, out of Columbus, Ohio, revel in taking the piss out of typical fan mentalities while playing extremely loud music. In snotty, sarcastic tones, singer Ron House implores you "to turn it up again" ("My Mysterious Death"), to read fanzines and to buy the T-shirts ("Is She Shy"), while all the while laughing in your face. The music replicates the sneer: cheap, driving guitars with bass lines that sort of duck underneath the material as opposed to acting as rhythm. Cheesy drums do their best to follow along, but House is too fast for 'em. House is sort of the Gilbert Gottfried of lo-fi.
yaleherald.com, 1997, review by Dushan Petrovich:
Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments, Bait and Switch (Onion/American)
Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments, Straight to Video (Anyway)
Sophisticated opinions about rock are useless, so here it is: Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments plays real rock based on strong rock licks, sweet-hearted and smart-assed rock lyrics, and post-punk rock culture smarts. If you need this stuff, buy these recordings. If you need help, read on.
Talking about rock licks is like French kissing over the phone. Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartment's guitarist, Bob Petric, works hard to get the subtlety and grace of loud rock anger to shoot out his amp at quick pace, usually wearing a Motorhead muscle t-shirt with a "humor me" sticker on his guitar. He never smashes his ax for shock or aimlessly wanks. He just plays hard and well.
Mild-mannered rock guru (clerk) by day, unmannered rock figure (singer) by night, Ron House is a veteran of Columbus punk's two-front war on Ohio's right-wing, Buckeye-fan, cock-rock lunacy and corporate castration of actual rock culture. Beer and wit see him through to rocksaving lyrics like, "Bombs away at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame/ Even if I got indicted I'd probably feel the same/ I don't wanna see the shotgun of Kurt Cobain/ I don't wanna see a wounded beast caged/ I don't wanna see the liver of David Crosby/ Blow it up before Steve Albini makes a speech."
As rock, Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments sounds best live, but for you folks who aren't "lucky" enough to live in Columbus, this band has put out two discs: "Bait and Switch" and "Straight to Video." When I bought the stuff from Ron at his day job, he said: "The second album sucks. It's more consistent than the first, but it's consistently bad." On the liner notes he adds that the second album "has been edited to fit your screen and to ensure the stability of our government." Shoppers beware, but I still recommend you buy both albums. If you don't like them, find me and I'll take them to trade back in Ohio where good children eat corn but starve for cheap used rock.
All Music Guide, three reviews by Karen E. Graves:
Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments, Bait and Switch (Onion/American)
After a bevy of cherished singles, Columbus, Ohio's favorite inebriated sons turned out this spit-caked debut full-length. How it managed to find its way out on a major label is anyone's guess, but it nevertheless confirmed Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments' stature as one of the most excellent rock bands ever to drink and spew its way out of Cowtown's sloppy bars and subterranean clubs. Bait and Switch is punk rock at its snotty, anarchist best, music to both revere (the band was championed by none other than Thurston Moore) and revile (Ron House's cat-screech voice is an acquired taste, to say the least). Depending on where you're standing in the crowd, the album is either fingers on the blackboard or a perfect, thrilling sort of mess. Skanky, violent venues were built precisely for songs like "Is She Shy," "Quarrel With the World," "Negative Guest List," and "You Can't Kill Stupid," all of which hold their own next to the thrilling cover of "Cyclotron" from Cleveland punk legends the Eels. The music is every bit as polarizing and polemical as, say, Rage Against the Machine, but far more satisfyingly resonant and authoritative because its jibes are nondenominational and self-effacing. House mines his traditional obsessions (getting drunk, dissatisfaction, sex, getting drunk) with typically witty and curmudgeonly spite. But scrape off the first layer or two of vitriol, delve beneath all the bluster and sarcasm, and he is surprisingly candid about grave subjects like cancer and death. And if ever there was a deserved guitar hero (just listen to the metal-splintered stylings on "Down to High Street") it is the criminally unheralded Bob Petric. Aside from a "love" tune and the attempted atmospherics of "Contract Dispute" (let's be honest, the Doors TJSA is not), though, Bait and Switch finds the band pissing into the fire, and its fans would have it no other way.
Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments, You Lookin' for Treble? (Year Zero)
Comprised of material recorded between 1989 and 1994, You Lookin' for Treble? is the musical equivalent of Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments' junior-high yearbook. A document of the band's early, occasionally awkward stages, the album is marked by lineup shifts (detailed in the liner notes) and the usual trappings of a new band trying to find its sound. Over the course of Treble?'s 20 tracks, the band gels into an abrasive, yet danceable, noisy punk outfit (fittingly heavy on the treble all the way around) led by vocalist Ron House who was quite clearly trying to distance himself musically from his recently disbanded bouncy rock/new wave outfit Great Plains. With the rhythm section in an almost constant state of turnover, the band's sound is defined by House's snide tirades and Bob Petrick's nimble guitar work characterized by a winning balance of barred chords and false harmonics (also present in Petrick's other first-rate outfit, Girly Machine). Of the songs included on You Lookin' for Treble?, only one, "You Can't Kill Stupid," ever found its way on to a proper Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments studio effort (a cleaned up take appears on 1995's Bait and Switch), though several others can be found on the band's impossible-to-find early singles and their infamous promo-only 10", as well as various compilation records (at least half a dozen of the songs are available on volumes one and two of Datapanik Records' Greatest Hits). You Lookin' for Treble? serves nicely as the missing link between House's exit from Great Plains and Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments 1995 major-label debut, Bait and Switch, on the American/Onion imprint. However, musically and production-wise Treble? can't hold a candle to later TJSA releases like Straight to Video.
Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments, No Old Guy Lo-Fi Cry (Rockathon)
Making the seemingly lateral jump from Columbus, OH-based Anyway Records to Guided by Voices' Robert Pollard's Rockathon, in 2000 the Midwest's most spirited punk rock institution, Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments, released what was to be their final record, No Old Guy Lo-Fi Cry. By far the best record of the TJSA catalog from a production standpoint, No Old Guy Lo-Fi Cry comes across as the band's angriest record since they debuted in 1995 with Bait and Switch, calling for the destruction of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. The difference between this record and TJSA's earlier releases is that whereas those records are brimming with the literate, snide, sexed-up lyrics and in-crowd rage that have become typical in the rock scene (not that anything about TJSA's interpretation thereof was ever very typical), No Old Guy Lo-Fi Cry seems, at times, more sad, frustrated, and personal than those releases dared to be. House's lyrics seem to be coming less from the character of the self-righteous barfly he so often inhabits and instead from more personal experiences, glimpses of which also seemed to show through occasionally in his earlier outfit, Great Plains. Another major variation between this and earlier TJSA records is that the band is not playing at full tilt through the entire disc. Slower-tempoed songs, like "Hell" and "Homeowner's Blues," take things down a notch without sacrificing momentum. Whereas previous efforts had the feel of being fully realized albums, No Old Guy Lo-Fi Cry feels a little cut-and-paste, with songs like "Rock Tree Traffic" seemingly tacked on at the last minute. When in February of 2000, following an on-stage spat between House and Petric, the band abruptly announced that they would be breaking up after their next show, TJSA's devoted segment of the music community seemed shocked to see them go. However, it seems possible that the band knew No Old Guy Lo-Fi Cry would be their swan song, as it features numerous lines hinting to the band's, or at least to Ron House's, growing disenchantment with his role as (only) an underground icon. Several songs spell out House's feelings in no uncertain terms, including "Zoned" ("I don't want to be known/As someone unknown") and "Homeowner's Blues" ("Local hero and anonymous/For him the two were synonymous/Aging barfly with a snob pretense"). The band reunited for two shows in 2001: One to benefit the family of the late Gaunt frontman Jerry Wick and the other to raise money to rebuild after Used Kids Records burned down in June of 2001. It seems unlikely that a more permanent reunion is in the works.
