Music to Kill By

In 1973, teenage fanzine writer Ken Highland first traveled from his small-town home in upstate New York to Brooklyn, New York, to jam with pen-pal Solomon Gruberger and his younger brother Jay in their living-room rock band O. Rex. Three years later, in early '76, Ken recorded the first infamous GIZMOS EP in Bloomington, Indiana and then joined the United States Marine Corps! Stationed in Maryland, near Washington, D.C., Ken quickly found his way into the burgeoning D.C. punk scene. He became friends with the Slickee Boys, and began writing songs on guard duty. Some of these became later Gizmos tunes, but the main project was a new band with the O. Rex brothers called The Afrika Korps. With help from Slickee Boys Kim Kane and Martha Hull, and the addition of multi-talented drummer Ken Kaiser, they recorded the MUSIC TO KILL BY album in the first few months of 1977. The recordings became free-for-all punk-rock 'super sessions' with various other Slickee Boys members, D.C. scenesters, rock writers, etc. joining in on the fun. The four-piece Afrika Korps (Grubergers, Highland, and Kaiser) played a handful of gigs (some with Martha Hull as guest vocalist), and then split apart. But their LP still stands as one of the most spontaneous and least trendy things to come out of the early Amerikan punk scene. Now, nearly a quarter century later, the Gulcher Records MUSIC TO KILL BY release features the original LP in its entirety, plus eight studio outtakes and four live tracks. A 16-page booklet with several unpublished photos details the history of the Afrika Korps. (Eddie Flowers, SLIPPY TOWN)