In 1991, I was in a short-lived punky DIY band with a weird rich guy I'd met at ABC no Rio (not a place where one typically meets rich guys). To my 1991 brain, he had seemingly unlimited funds with which to buy new records, and one of the things he turned me on to was a band called Nuisance.

By association, and from my distorted view from the opposite coast, Nuisance appeared to be part of the East Bay/924 Gilman St. punk scene. Upon closer inspection, they were a complex, fuzzed out guitar band with big Neil Young (whom they covered) vibes, only recalibrated for audiences who were into stagediving and petty larceny. Their songs were smarter and more sophisticated than a lot of what I was listening to back then, and I got really into their first album ("Confusion Hill"), which in hindsight I now realize opened up a lot of other musical doors for me which I might never have otherwise entered.

The weird rich guy (WRG) had an unusual batch of music scene connections, and one of them was Pat Duncan, who helmed the late night punk/hardcore show on WFMU for zillions of years. Pat had live bands on his show every week, and WRG would frequently sit in on the sessions live in the FMU studios (which at that time were still situated on the abandoned campus of Upsala College in East Orange.) Needless to say, I was pretty floored the night that WRG invited me to tag along to see Nuisance perform on Pat's show.

Memories of the actual performance are hazy (there's a VHS copy of it somewhere in the back of my closet which I hope to digitize someday), but I know they burned through a lot of songs that eventually wound up on "Confusion Hill", which has remained one of the few records from that era and that scene which I frequently return to.

Typical of many releases from the Lookout Records catalog, "Confusion Hill" suffers from kinda crummy production with the vocals buried in the mix and the drums sounding like suitcases being whacked with sticks in a dingy basement somewhere. But just this week I learned that said album was reissued back in 2021 with an all new mix, and the sample tracks I found on Soundcloud are FANTASTIC and have totally reignited my appreciation for this unique and mostly-forgotten band.

The reissue is vinyl-only and limited to 250 copies, but still appears to be available via Lavasocks Records. I'll let ya know when my copy gets here, but in the meantime, check the streaming version with the link below. "Nicotine" remains a killer jam for the ages, and wow, that guitar solo was definitely the jammiest thing circulating in my universe circa 1991!

https://soundcloud.com/user-261245163/sets/confusion-hill

#Nuisance #LookoutRecords #VerySmallRecords #924Gilman #wfmu #abcnorio