Every week, SPIN digs into the catalogs of nice artists and highlights songs you won’t know for our Deep Minimize Friday collection.
In historic Greek literature, the misplaced metropolis of Atlantis was a fictional island that sank into the Atlantic Ocean. In late ’70s Washington, D.C., Atlantis was briefly the namesake of a key venue for the town’s punk scene, which itself was the namesake of a music from one of many scene’s most beloved bands. Appropriately, that music remained misplaced, or at the very least unreleased, for over a decade after it was recorded.
The Atlantis was the identify of a membership on F Avenue in downtown Washington, D.C. from 1977 to 1979, and a number of the earliest Dangerous Brains reveals befell there. The primary time the quartet recorded a demo at Inside Ear Studios, which on the time was only a 4-track in Don Zientara’s basement, their repertoire included “On the Atlantis.” Each line of the music ends with “on the Atlantis tonight,” though frontman Paul “H.R.” Hudson’s vocal efficiency is such a blur that it’s arduous to discern every other lyrics for certain—the lyric transcription website Genius asserts that he merely repeats “We’re residing on the Atlantis tonight.”
By the tip of 1979, the Atlantis had closed for transforming, and Dangerous Brains, working out of venues the place they have been welcome of their hometown, had written the anthem “Banned in D.C.” and relocated to New York Metropolis. Exceptional video footage of a Dangerous Brains present at CBGBs in December ’79 options H.R. doing a backflip in a go well with and tie throughout a blazing efficiency of “On the Atlantis.”
Setlist.fm’s final recorded occasion of Dangerous Brains performing “On the Atlantis” was in March 1980. Two months later, the Atlantis reopened because the Nightclub 9:30, finally relocating to a bigger constructing below the identify 9:30 Membership. Dangerous Brains by no means recorded “On the Atlantis” for any of the band’s correct studio albums, maybe just because the membership they wrote the music about was not known as the Atlantis. So many of the world by no means heard the music till the 1979 demo was launched as Black Dots in 1996. In 2023, the house owners of the 9:30 Membership opened a smaller close by venue that was named the Atlantis in tribute to the ’70s membership. Dangerous Brains, who final toured in 2017, have by no means carried out on the new Atlantis.
Three extra important Dangerous Brains deep cuts:
“Perspective”
“Perspective” was the primary of a number of Dangerous Brains songs the place H.R. sang about ‘P.M.A.’—as in “optimistic psychological perspective,” an idea popularized within the Thirties by self-help writer Napoleon Hill.
“Re-Ignition”
“Re-Ignition” from 1986’s I Towards I has grow to be an unlikely hip-hop staple, sampled in songs by Chubb Rock, Lil Jon, and a couple of Black 2 Sturdy.
“Till Kingdom Comes”
2007’s Construct a Nation options a number of the band’s most interesting conventional reggae materials. “Till Kingdom Comes” was bolstered by a lush association together with a horn part, keyboardist Jamie Saft, and percussionist ‘Nathaniel Hornblower’ (an alias of the album’s producer, Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys).
