MOVING TO AND FRO – SEPT 4

Announcing the first ever US vinyl release of Chris Newman’s seminal 1986 album Moving To And Fro, available September 4 – distributed through Burnside Distribution – ask for it at your local record store.

Moving To And Fro album cover, vinyl records

Recording engineer: Tom Robinson
Mixed and mastered for vinyl: Jack Endino
Details: 180 gram black vinyl
Recorded: May 1986
Credits: Chris Newman, guitar, bass, vocals; Sam Henry drums
All songs written by Chris Newman

SIDE ONE:
1. Monster
2. Put Down
3. Strangers
4. Frenzy
5. Red Blooded

SIDE TWO:
6. Anywhere USA
7. Friends
8. Graveyard
9. Wait For Me
10. Gold Fever
11. Something On My Mind

Moving To And Fro was recorded on 8-track over a period of three days at Greg MacDonald’s warehouse in Portland, Oregon. It was recorded in May 1986, and self-released on cassette the same summer. Chris dubbed the cassettes, xeroxed his own hand-drawn cover art, and sold the cassette at his shows and by hand-carrying them to independent record stores in Portland, Seattle, and San Francisco.


Chris wrote the songs, sang the songs, and played bass and guitar. Sam played drums.


Chris felt that Moving To And Fro was enough of a departure from the Napalm Beach sound that he decided to release the cassette as a solo album. Nonetheless, they did perform the songs with Napalm Beach. In 1988, a label associated with Berlin’s Ecstasy Club called Love’s Simple Dreams (L.S.D.) released a modified version of Moving To And Fro as a Napalm Beach LP in Germany. No version of this album was released on vinyl in the U.S.


Chris died in 2021 and Sam died in 2022. Engineer Tom Robinson kept the original 8-track masters and in 2023, sold them back to Chris’ estate. Engineer Jack Endino digitized them, remixed them, and remastered them.


This is “Moving To and Fro”as Chris originally intended it to be heard, with all the Chris’ original songs intact in their original order, to be released for the first time on vinyl in the United States, a mere forty years after recording.


Red Blooded

Skullman Music, Skullman Records

How Chris conceived it: Skullman Music was his music publishing business. Skullman Records would be the label where he released and distributed his music.

In 2009 I/we decided to simplify it all under the moniker Skullman Records. However, it’s pretty clear by now that the way media is going, physical media (“records”) is a fluid thing, while the music goes on. Also, as archival materials become more available, I now see how often Chris used “Skullman Music” (not “Records”) on his hand-made cassette labels.

At some point in this journey (maybe around 2016) we tried to shift from “Skullman” to “Newman Music” as a means of distancing from the camp horror imagery and some of the not-so-camp baggage that came with it, projected falsely on us. But it turns out that none of this is without baggage, not even the name “Newman.”

For all these reasons, I’m leaning back now to calling the business Skullman Music, as Chris did, beginning around 1984.

Rock & Roll Hell now available to stream

I’ve made the 2002 Zeno version of 1983’s Rock & Roll Hell available to stream via all the usual sources. Full album downloads can be purchased from Amazon. This is the long version, combining the 1983 cassette with the New Years Eve 1982 “Napalm Beach – Live At the Met” (where they opened for the Wipers) CD and some songs from another performance opening for Wipers at the 13th Precinct.

The Wipers set from New Years Eve 1982 was released in 2018 by Jackpot Records on a separate album. This seems to have been a pretty important night because from what I understand it would be – unbeknownst to Chris at the time – the last night of the club. The Met closed New Years Day 1983. This – along with other club closures in Portland and Seattle – became part of the motivation for Napalm Beach leaving Portland for San Francisco later that year. Fittingly, the first song of the Wipers’ set was “Alien Boy” with the lyrics “go and get your gun because you got him on the run, he’s an alien…” The last song of the Wipers set is “Mistaken Identity.”

“Target – to be a target for reaction… to be a target for destruction”