Melvins - 2013 - A Tribute to Pop-O-Pies

 

Amphetamine Reptile Records – Scale 139

“Timothy Leary Lives” is exactly the kind of song the Melvins should cover: repetitive, aggravating, historically peculiar and balanced somewhere between a joke and a legitimate experiment in endurance. Pop-O-Pies emerged from the early San Francisco punk underground with a method that treated limited material as a creative advantage. Their first years became notorious for stretching a punk version of the Grateful Dead’s “Truckin’” across entire performances, testing how much identity could be built from one song repeated beyond reasonable limits.
The Melvins understand that impulse completely. Their version of “Timothy Leary Lives” does not attempt to transform Pop-O-Pies into something more respectable or technically impressive. Buzz Osborne grips the song’s primitive central movement and allows repetition to perform the work. Each return becomes heavier, stranger and slightly funnier because the band refuses to behave as though a more sophisticated destination is required.
Trevor Dunn’s double bass gives the track a wonderfully awkward physical foundation. Instead of a familiar electric-bass grind, the strings thump and scrape beneath Buzz’s guitar, making the song sound handmade and slightly unstable. Dale Crover keeps the rhythm blunt enough to preserve the original punk simplicity while adding the unmistakable weight of the Melvins.
The title carries its own period mythology. Timothy Leary became a portable symbol for psychedelic liberation, irresponsible drug evangelism, countercultural optimism and the moment when altered consciousness became public spectacle. Declaring that Leary lives turns the man into an idea capable of surviving every attempt to ridicule or institutionalize it.
The Melvins do not treat that survival reverently. Their performance sounds like a chant overheard from a basement whose occupants have repeated the phrase long enough to forget whether they believe it. Psychedelic revolution has become a stubborn riff, still alive partly because nobody bothered to switch off the amplifier.
“Romance,” originally by Sacramento’s Tales of Terror, carries a different kind of Bay Area damage. Tales of Terror played punk with the recklessness of a band treating the stage as a temporary accident zone. Their music was fast, filthy and funny, but never controlled enough to become tidy hardcore.
The Melvins slow that recklessness just enough to reveal the ugliness inside the song. “Romance” does not bloom into tenderness. The title becomes sarcastic, a label attached to damaged affection and impulsive behavior. Buzz’s guitar gives the track more density while Crover pounds beneath it with the force of somebody dismantling the room around the relationship.
Dunn’s vocal contribution adds another unstable personality rather than smoothing the performance into one recognizable Melvins voice. The tribute feels communal, connecting musicians whose histories run through punk, experimental music, jazz and the wider underground without turning those connections into a solemn family tree.
Pairing Pop-O-Pies and Tales of Terror is inspired because both bands represented versions of punk that resisted clean historical packaging. Pop-O-Pies used conceptual repetition, parody and musical limitation. Tales of Terror used speed, chaos and self-destructive humor. Neither fits comfortably inside the simplified story of hardcore becoming faster, stricter and increasingly serious.
The Melvins inherited both freedoms. They learned that one riff could become an entire world and that punk could remain ridiculous without becoming harmless. Their heaviness was never built from metal alone. It grew from underground bands willing to repeat bad ideas until they became great ones.
The seven-inch preserves that lineage without embalming it. Two songs, red-splattered vinyl, grotesque clown artwork and no lecture about historical importance. The Melvins pay respect in the most appropriate way possible: they grab the songs, increase the weight and leave fingerprints all over them.
Timothy Leary still lives. Romance remains dead on arrival. Somewhere between them, Bay Area punk continues laughing at its own funeral.