Listen: Purple Heart / Margaret Explosion
Purple Heart / Margaret Explosion

There was a pretty daunting documentary on some sci-fi or mystery channel a few nights back, which I started watching at around 3:45 AM, trying anything at that point to cure my insomnia. Not only did the unsolved murders in North America theme fit the late, late hour, but so too did it’s soundtrack. Set to music which kind of replicated the old MYSTERY THEATER radio series theme but with more subtle menace, it made me wonder, were there any singles ever recorded that might indeed capture all this as well.

A few nights later, I was playing through stacks of around ten 7″ singles at a pop, throwing them onto my RCA changer. I really love that player, even if the permanent large center spindle eliminates UK 7′s altogether. Oh, and there’s one final detail about these machines, the last record in the stack, which ends up as the top one on the turntable, will play repeatedly until you manually shut off the device.

Last one in that stack: ‘Purple Heart’. Playing through for a third or fourth time, it suddenly struck me that song perfectly satisfied my quest for a 7″ with true sonic soundtrack paranoia qualities.

Play this alone in your country cabin during a thunderstorm and don’t be surprised by a visit from some Richard Speck wacko. ‘Purple Heart’ has the qualities to conjure up such thoughts.

Listen: Screamin’ You Head / Hi-Techs HiTechsScreaminYouHead.mp3

It’s always good fun to be releasing local records out of the scene you create. This is what we all did during the late 70′s, not only in Rochester, but every town was on fire with this stuff then. Dick Storms who owned one of the local record stores, The Record Archive, started a label to release stuff for us all. And one of best were The Hi-Techs. Paul had played drums in the early New Math, and on the ‘Die Trying’ single. Things seemed to take and last forever then, but looking back, it all moved pretty quickly. Paul left and started The Hi-Techs with his wife Peggi, they eventually morphed into Personal Effects and later still (as well as presently) into The Margaret Explosion. This was their second single as The Hi-Techs, a double sided little masterpiece. Roger & I played this a lot on our show. It still sounds fantastic.