When I was in my late teens, I was doing a lot of tape trading - mostly early California hardcore bands from the early '80s, like FEAR, Black Flag, Angry Samoans, those sorts of groups. I had been in touch with a longtime Winnipeg-area trader named Chris for years, and we'd gotten to the point where we'd periodically send each other unsolicited parcels of live shows on CD/DVD that we thought we other would be interested in. One such package that I received from Chris included a DVD simply labelled "Personality Crisis - Audio", as well as three additional discs with more specific notes attached. I'd heard of the band, but was not familiar with their music, and the other contents of the parcel must have caught my eye to a greater degree, because the P.C. discs simply wound up getting stashed in one of my many binders of live discs without ever being played. Fast forward several years, and I was living in a different city and living a different life that was continuing to rapidly change - including in ways that were unhealthy and unsettling. In an effort to downsize my bootleg collection somewhat, I decided to rip a bunch of my old traded discs to a new 500gb external drive I'd bought (which was a huge amount of storage back then). And when I came upon the "P.C. - Audio" disc, I realized I'd never actually looked at what the disc contained. So I popped it into my laptop, and found several dozen live shows and demos from 1981 to '84, all in FLAC format. When I started listening, I was impressed right away - and by the time I made it through the collection of recordings in chronological order, I was completely blown away by the incredible music that'd been effectively collecting dust in the corner of my bedroom for years. Those shows were all I listened to for a solid month. What really struck me was the inclusion of only a single studio album on the disc - how had a band with **this** many phenomenal songs to their name only released two LP sides worth of them? There were probably 40 or 45 unique songs spread across those shows, and the majority of them were as strong or stronger from a composition standpoint than a lot of my favourite bands' outputs. It just blew me away that these tunes had gone unheard for so long. I soon decided I was going to comb through the P.C. shows for the best performances of each song, clean up and remaster the audio as best as I could, and put together a live "best-of" compilation. My thought was that if I did a great job, someone in a position to do so might hear the finished album and realize it was too good not to formally release. As this was happening, I was getting heavily into heroin and speed, and was acutely aware that whatever control I had over my life was beginning to slip away from me. In retrospect, this project was probably just an attempt to distract myself from the pain and suffering looming on my personal horizon - a way to not have to face my rapidly escalating habit, and the trauma that underlay it in the first place. But whatever my motivations may have been, I quickly became consumed by this goal. The first step was trying to figure out a tracklisting for each recording. As the band only formally released around 18 songs - on their sole LP and a handful of compilations - I had nothing I could cross-reference to try and pin down most of the songs' titles. It took me a solid month of poring over Chris Walter's book about the band looking for unreleased titles, digging through the Wayback Machine for old fanzine scans, and playing back segments of low-fidelity audio in an attempt to decipher Mitch's howled vocals before I was able to pin down almost all of the titles with relative certainty. There were a few that I had to give monikers to myself, for lack of an alternative - "Bliss in Black", "Cruel Hand", "Small Portion". I then spent several months painstakingly editing the raw audio recordings to try and make them more palatable to the ears. Some were decent soundboard tapes to begin with, and needed little work; others were little more than an aural blur, and it took many speed-fuelled all-nighters to get a product that was actually somewhat listenable. If I'd been more reasonable with myself, I probably could have finished the damn thing by the end of the year, but my perfectionism always left me feeling unsatisfied with the end results of these editing sessions. I worked, and worked, and worked, still thinking I would finish the project sooner than later, even as various other facets of my day-to-day life continued to spiral. Then, I lost my job, and soon after, my laptop died - and then I was evicted from my house. The hard drive with all of my work went into storage, and I bounced around from one sketchy arrangement to another until I managed to quit using for a bit and moved into a new apartment. I still couldn't afford a new computer, but I had the hard drive, and planned on finishing the project eventually. Sadly, I couldn't stay on the wagon, and wound up being sent to rehab with little say in the matter. While I was there, my new landlord - understandably vexed by the lack of rent cheques coming his way - packed up my shit and sold everything of value to try and recoup his losses, including the hard drive in question. I was crushed, to put it mildly. Out of the thousands of shows that disappeared, the Personality Crisis ones probably hurt the most. The whole ordeal made me lose interest in tape trading - and music in general, for the most part - for years. I left rehab and was high again within two days, and spent several more years systematically rendering everything good about my life into dust. Thankfully, the story has something of a good ending: I did manage to achieve long-term sobriety in 2018, and have since gone back to school and rebuilt my relationships with my family. I even rekindled my interest in live recordings during the early phase of the pandemic. It still hurts when I think about losing those P.C. shows and the results of all that effort, though - both on a personal level (because I'll likely never get to hear those rare songs again), and on a deeper one (because it looks like no one else will, either). Sounds Escaping put out a very nice compilation a few years back that is fairly representative of the band's work - and which corrected a mistake in the notes that came with my original disc (I'd received the S.F. demo labelled as "1982-05 @ the On Broadway") - but which doesn't delve into the band's later era at all, which is a real shame. Maybe someday we'll get a comprehensive collection that truly represents the very best of Personality Crisis' output. If I still had the source recordings, I'd do it myself, but alas - it just wasn't meant to be.
Very cool to see this now, although I would have liked to see Mitch there. Personality Crisis-Creatures For Awhile is an all time favorite album of mine, I still listen to it regularly and when I do I have to play the whole album. I love every song and for me it is not only just a great hard rock/ punk banger of an album, it is unique and special and as and album listen it goes in my top 10.
It’s crazy. I’m in Winnipeg and wasn’t familiar with the address of the venue for the Minor Threat show and decided to look at with Apple Maps and it shows that it’s now the Wave Church, a low income outreach centre.
what a legendary band. So raw and aggressive and the demos when walter was in the band hold up on their own too. I wonder what jimmy is doin these days...
When I was in my late teens, I was doing a lot of tape trading - mostly early California hardcore bands from the early '80s, like FEAR, Black Flag, Angry Samoans, those sorts of groups. I had been in touch with a longtime Winnipeg-area trader named Chris for years, and we'd gotten to the point where we'd periodically send each other unsolicited parcels of live shows on CD/DVD that we thought we other would be interested in. One such package that I received from Chris included a DVD simply labelled "Personality Crisis - Audio", as well as three additional discs with more specific notes attached. I'd heard of the band, but was not familiar with their music, and the other contents of the parcel must have caught my eye to a greater degree, because the P.C. discs simply wound up getting stashed in one of my many binders of live discs without ever being played. Fast forward several years, and I was living in a different city and living a different life that was continuing to rapidly change - including in ways that were unhealthy and unsettling. In an effort to downsize my bootleg collection somewhat, I decided to rip a bunch of my old traded discs to a new 500gb external drive I'd bought (which was a huge amount of storage back then). And when I came upon the "P.C. - Audio" disc, I realized I'd never actually looked at what the disc contained. So I popped it into my laptop, and found several dozen live shows and demos from 1981 to '84, all in FLAC format. When I started listening, I was impressed right away - and by the time I made it through the collection of recordings in chronological order, I was completely blown away by the incredible music that'd been effectively collecting dust in the corner of my bedroom for years. Those shows were all I listened to for a solid month. What really struck me was the inclusion of only a single studio album on the disc - how had a band with **this** many phenomenal songs to their name only released two LP sides worth of them? There were probably 40 or 45 unique songs spread across those shows, and the majority of them were as strong or stronger from a composition standpoint than a lot of my favourite bands' outputs. It just blew me away that these tunes had gone unheard for so long. I soon decided I was going to comb through the P.C. shows for the best performances of each song, clean up and remaster the audio as best as I could, and put together a live "best-of" compilation. My thought was that if I did a great job, someone in a position to do so might hear the finished album and realize it was too good not to formally release.
As this was happening, I was getting heavily into heroin and speed, and was acutely aware that whatever control I had over my life was beginning to slip away from me. In retrospect, this project was probably just an attempt to distract myself from the pain and suffering looming on my personal horizon - a way to not have to face my rapidly escalating habit, and the trauma that underlay it in the first place. But whatever my motivations may have been, I quickly became consumed by this goal. The first step was trying to figure out a tracklisting for each recording. As the band only formally released around 18 songs - on their sole LP and a handful of compilations - I had nothing I could cross-reference to try and pin down most of the songs' titles. It took me a solid month of poring over Chris Walter's book about the band looking for unreleased titles, digging through the Wayback Machine for old fanzine scans, and playing back segments of low-fidelity audio in an attempt to decipher Mitch's howled vocals before I was able to pin down almost all of the titles with relative certainty. There were a few that I had to give monikers to myself, for lack of an alternative - "Bliss in Black", "Cruel Hand", "Small Portion". I then spent several months painstakingly editing the raw audio recordings to try and make them more palatable to the ears. Some were decent soundboard tapes to begin with, and needed little work; others were little more than an aural blur, and it took many speed-fuelled all-nighters to get a product that was actually somewhat listenable. If I'd been more reasonable with myself, I probably could have finished the damn thing by the end of the year, but my perfectionism always left me feeling unsatisfied with the end results of these editing sessions. I worked, and worked, and worked, still thinking I would finish the project sooner than later, even as various other facets of my day-to-day life continued to spiral.
Then, I lost my job, and soon after, my laptop died - and then I was evicted from my house. The hard drive with all of my work went into storage, and I bounced around from one sketchy arrangement to another until I managed to quit using for a bit and moved into a new apartment. I still couldn't afford a new computer, but I had the hard drive, and planned on finishing the project eventually. Sadly, I couldn't stay on the wagon, and wound up being sent to rehab with little say in the matter. While I was there, my new landlord - understandably vexed by the lack of rent cheques coming his way - packed up my shit and sold everything of value to try and recoup his losses, including the hard drive in question. I was crushed, to put it mildly. Out of the thousands of shows that disappeared, the Personality Crisis ones probably hurt the most.
The whole ordeal made me lose interest in tape trading - and music in general, for the most part - for years. I left rehab and was high again within two days, and spent several more years systematically rendering everything good about my life into dust. Thankfully, the story has something of a good ending: I did manage to achieve long-term sobriety in 2018, and have since gone back to school and rebuilt my relationships with my family. I even rekindled my interest in live recordings during the early phase of the pandemic. It still hurts when I think about losing those P.C. shows and the results of all that effort, though - both on a personal level (because I'll likely never get to hear those rare songs again), and on a deeper one (because it looks like no one else will, either). Sounds Escaping put out a very nice compilation a few years back that is fairly representative of the band's work - and which corrected a mistake in the notes that came with my original disc (I'd received the S.F. demo labelled as "1982-05 @ the On Broadway") - but which doesn't delve into the band's later era at all, which is a real shame. Maybe someday we'll get a comprehensive collection that truly represents the very best of Personality Crisis' output. If I still had the source recordings, I'd do it myself, but alas - it just wasn't meant to be.
Very cool to see this now, although I would have liked to see Mitch there. Personality Crisis-Creatures For Awhile is an all time favorite album of mine, I still listen to it regularly and when I do I have to play the whole album. I love every song and for me it is not only just a great hard rock/ punk banger of an album, it is unique and special and as and album listen it goes in my top 10.
It’s crazy. I’m in Winnipeg and wasn’t familiar with the address of the venue for the Minor Threat show and decided to look at with Apple Maps and it shows that it’s now the Wave Church, a low income outreach centre.
what a legendary band. So raw and aggressive and the demos when walter was in the band hold up on their own too. I wonder what jimmy is doin these days...
RIP JON