Sunday 19 May 2013

Avalanche - Sweet Baby Brown Eyes 7" Bootleg BL-281, 1976

Along with such weighty topics as which of the 2013 fake Black Flags is the best (answer: this one), grillfat as a cultural touchstone is a subject close to our hearts, meaning that we're prone to running our mouths. It was on one of those grill-advised rants that we speculated that grillfat would be an unlikely candidate for KBD-style comp-age, given that grilldom is primarily the domain of the dollar bin ripper. So when we got wind of a boot being compiled from - where else? - The Boot, we thought we'd have to eat our words. Yes, contrary to predictions, Killed By Grillfat now exists (well, kinda. It's a Sharpie comp, so forgivably a few selections stray from the brief). But it turns out that even when we're wrong, we're right - at least half of the comp's track listing can be found languishing in dollar bins country-wide.

In that spirit, today we bring you a bang-for-your-buck grillfat knuckle-dragger, a relatively easy find for the tightwad digger. From their beginnings as the Bootleg Family Band, to their final single as Front Page and almost all of the Avalanche records in between, this band's output is uniformly turdly. The lone exception is Sweet Baby Brown Eyes, the second Avalanche single and a genuine butt-kicker. Lyrics about brown eyes are treacherous waters - was it really kicking that was on their minds? - but Avalanche navigate that minefield and emerge pretty much unscathed, leaving behind a song that is up there with the best of Fat Daddy and Taste in the Bootleg label discography.

The scuttlebutt is that other Killed By Grillfat comps are in the works, at least one of which promises to delve beyond the dollar bin into the realm of obscuro Australian hard rock mind-melters. Never have we so much looked forward to being 100% wrong.

Sweet Baby Brown Eyes [Download]

2 comments:

AussieRock said...

Thanks for this - not a track I've heard by this band before
Any chance of posting the B-side?
Either way - thanks for the share

badbum61 said...

Aw, c'mon, the Wizard Of Love 7" is one of my prized grillfat artifacts, and I'm not ashamed to say I bought it - albeit still for a dollar - as a new release!

On that topic, though....you're the guys who'd know if anyone does: is there any familial connection between Tony Naylor (Melbourne's white-Strat-playing in-demand session guitarist of the '70s) and Even's Ashley Naylor (Melbourne's white-Strat-playing in-demand session guitarist of the present day)?