THE MIKE GUNN - Live, Rare, and Demo Recordings

The Mike Gunn was a garage band from Texas in the early 1990s, who played psychedelic rock with a particular slant towards Black Sabbath and smoking pot.  Composed of the members John Cramer, Tom Carter, Scott Grimm, and Curtis Mackey, they released several albums of quality dual-guitar jams and odes to their bong.  At one point they even included a good cover of Hawkwind's "Master of the Universe" on the excellent 'Assassins of Silence' compilation (thanks Doug!).

The Mike Gunn put out a handful of now-hard-to-find releases, then broke up.  The albums have names like 'Hemp For Victory', 'Durban Poison', 'Almaron', 'A Dream About Jim', and 'Coduh'.  Afterwards the former members went on to found DunLavy, Charalambides, Project Grimm, and are peripherally connected to the Linus Pauling Quartet.  All are Texas-based psych bands of various styles.  However, IMHO none have reached the sheer 'blanga' power of the original Mike Gunn.


Contained on this DVD-R are a series of ten extremely rare "private issue" releases that came from a former band member, containing demos and live recordings, including one album that (IMHO) is the best recording that they ever put together (but never released):  'The Book Of Zogg'.  In addition, there is a recent rare live appearance by Dunlavy, plus a live show by Linus Pauling Quartet (warning: contains no official Mike Gunn members).

These releases each had their own name and release number, but had only minimal cover art and recording information.  Each cover image was a section of a cartoon about a magical slug(??), and the back cover was simply a white sheet with the tracklisting on it.  Included with this DVD-R are copies of each of the cover cartoons (in PNG and TIF format), and a text file for each recording listing the (few) words that appeared on the back cover.


This DVD-R disc contains the following audio recordings:

DSL01 The Mike Gunn - 4-Tracks For Victory

DSL02 Bongtooth - A Big Steaming Pile Of Love

DSL03 The Dun Lavy - Belmont

DSL04 The Mike Gunn - A Typical Disaster (2CD)

DSL05 The Mike Gunn - Tomless

DSL06 The Dun Lavy - Mighty Fist Of Doom

DSL07 Bun Crevice - A Pathetic Collection

DSL08 The Mike Gunn - The Book Of Zogg

DSL09 The Mike Gunn - Scraping The Ooze

DSL10 The Dun Lavy - Perfectly Fried

Linus Pauling Quartet - Rocking Like Germans Do

The Dunlavy - Live at the Texas Psych Fest

+ an autorun copy of mkwAct (Windows) for decompressing the SHN format


Bongtooth and Bun Crevice were predecessor bands to The Mike Gunn composed of some of the same members.

The Dun Lavy (aka Dunlavy) is a post-Mike Gunn band by former member Scott Grimm.

Linus Pauling Quartet is loosely-related and from the same area ("friends 
of the band") which includes Ramon Medina, who served in the recording studio 
for several Mike Gunn albums and also co-wrote a few tunes.


Some web references:

Worship Guitars - 
  http://www.worshipguitars.org/faq/gunn.html
  http://www.worshipguitars.org/dunlavy/

History of Rock Music - 
  http://www.scaruffi.com/vol5/mikegunn.html

Psychedelic-Music.net - 
  http://www.psychedelic-music.net/pmdb/db3/db_band.php4?id=374


I hope you enjoy this short-lived and little-known (but EXCELLENT) band!


Captain Cloud