The EXTRAS: Ugly American

They were hot. They were happening. Then they were gone.
One Saturday afternoon in the summer of 1982, Albany-based punk band the EXTRAS
visited a Schenectady recording studio and laid down their entire set list -
16 blistering tracks. It was the last time the power trio would ever perform.

By the time Monday rolled around, the band’s lead singer, bassist and songwriter Mark DeForge was serving prison time. Drummer George Lipscomb and guitarist Eric Van Sleet
got on with their respective lives.
After being released from prison, DeForge relocated to Taiwan, where he lived and worked as a teacher for the next 15 years. The songs that the band recorded have gone unheard, until now.

Disappearing from sight for more than 20 years ago, the tapes have been secured, digitized for CD, and issued by Last Vestige Music as The EXTRAS: “Ugly American.”
Most of the songs are DeForge-penned creations, from the MC5-inspired title track to the catchy Monkees-gone-haywire sounding ditty, “Down the Drain.”
A Ramones-ian lobotomized treatment is granted the traditional tune, “Erie Canal” - the first ode to the western waterway since The Weavers paid homage to it in the mid 20th century.
The sustained guttural attack applied to a second cover song, “Are You a Boy or Are You a Girl?” is so sonically frenzied it renders Jayne/Wayne County’s notorious version lame in comparison.

Van Sleet’s guitar style borrows from the Sex Pistols’ Steve Jones’s book of crunching tones, while Lipscomb’s beat is a steady reminder of the heavy metal ‘70s cymbal ride.
The band as a whole brings back memories of groups like Boston’s La Peste, New York City’s Dictators, and The Cramps.
It also sends home the message that no matter how far audio technology has come in the past 20 years - or for that matter where it may go in the future - nothing can quite duplicate the aural essence captured live between the garage and the grunge eras.

“Ugly American” hits its creative peak on the final approach. “30 Secs. ‘Till” pays a safety-pinned nod to avant-noodler John Cage’s “Silence” and leads to the wonderfully pre-politically correct era’s lyrically inappropriate and equally hilarious “Italian with an I.”
The “ballad” outsmarts the Dead Milkmen at their own smarmy game and revels in the amorous tales (or lack thereof) of a particular waitress and her sister. Quipping in laughter to the very end, even as the curtain was falling on the band’s reign.

by Thomas Dimopoulos / published in The Saratogian