Pagans, The
Pirate's Cove 9/24/79
Cleveland punk exclusively released for Record Store Day 2015 ! Your punk enablers at Thermionic are back again with another RSD rarity! The Pagans flame burned brightly for just a few short years, long enough to produce four ""godlike"" seven-inchers and, post-mortem, a raft of archival collections and reunion recordings. Thats the beauty of the Pagans-they never ""made it."" Instead, they are true bastard sons of the city of Cleveland, often overlooked and under-appreciated. The Pagans emerged in 1977, in all their sloppy glory; but by 1983, bands like The Exploited, Discharge, and GBH had come forward with a new type of more aggressive punk; the world that the Pagans had created was already almost gone. Their contemporaries were either broken up, dead, or worse (in the minds of many), had gone mainstream. But as Mike Hudson puts it, the lack of success was the best thing to ever happen to the Pagans: "If wed have been rock stars, if we had gotten that kind of treatment, that kind of money... wed have all been dead." In this case, we have the Pagans not dead but very much alive, ripping through fourteen songs, recorded live by Paul Marotta at the Pirate's Cove in Cleveland.