Something's Gone Wrong Again
Without even listening to to the songs I can tell you that they are from later then 1979. Mike Ness didn't start singing and writing for Social Distortion until very late 79 or early 80.The very tall about 6'8''Tom Corvin was the singer before Mike until about 1980 Mike just played guitar. Trivia Dave White bite off part of Mike Ness' ear.
Lude Boy and Telling them are definitly the smae tracks as on Hell Comes To Your House. However, I do not think the rest were the tracks cleaned up for Mainliner. For example Orange County Jail is a very different track then the Mainliner release Justice For All. I do not in anyway believe these are 1979 recordings. My opinion is that they are 1980-81 demo recordings done around the same time as the original Mainliner recordings. It is known that the different version of Telling Them from Hell Comes To Your House was a demo recording. I believe the rest of these to be the same.
I think the earliest demo is the first version of 1945 played on the radio by Rodney, around 1980. It was different than the posh boy version released on ROTR vol 2 and diff than the 45 version released after that. These tunes you posted are not all of the early SD demos floating around.
A real treat would be: studio versions (if they exist) of "Tearing Down the Stars and Stripes," "Social Distortion" and a few others they used to play live around '81-'82! I 've got a real crappy live recording of those tunes from Godzilla's (dumpy gig site in the San Fernando Valley on Vineland Ave.). Good times those were!
Totally unrelated, but Jim is correct and Mr. Corvin is now a reporter for one of my local television stations......and he is one tall motherfucker.
I've had these tracks on tape for years, and they were labelled as being 1980 demos.
Godzilla's was fun while it lasted,(not long) I think it closed like 6 months after the Cuckoo's nest in costa mesa closed. Some good Social D. gigs in both places.
Fred... what other early demos are available?
They have a pretty good list of what's avaible here:
http://www.sxdx.com/discog/boots.html
don't forget about Kerry "carrot"Faye on drums, and Dennis Dannell on bass with SD when they were a trio.
These are the 'Early Demos: 1980, 1982'
if you want the first, the very first, social distortion demo, ask casey royer what ever happened to the cassette we recorded in '79. yeah, cassette. we all stood around a single mic, me, agnew, casey, and ness, and layed down three or four songs. at the time, casey said he gave it to a surf punks promotor for a gig with them at the santa monica civic center. we didn't get it. i quit later that summer. but i never found out what happened to that tape. and it's the first recording. now that would be something to hear...
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