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oh yeah that was fun and a good warm up as i'll be revisiting 1981 with 'X' tonight

I saw The Judy's at The Agora Ballroom, opening for The B-52's on their "Mesopotamia" tour. Can't remember how old (young?) I was, but I do remember my dad begrudgingly drove my friends and me to the show. It was our first concert ever, and we'd never heard of The Judy's. Having David Bean pour pitchers of water over all of us while singing "Guyana Punch" as their set closer blew our little minds—and washed our spray-on glitter hair color right down onto our homemade trash bag and duct tape new wave smocks. We screamed and screamed and screamed. Then Fred, Kate, Cindy, Ricky and Kieth all came on stage to the pulsing beat of "Planet Claire" and we literally exploded. It was our own Woodstock. A few days later, when I recovered, I rode my bike to the mall and used my allowance to buy The Judy's Washarama LP at Hasting's Records (inexplicably stocked in the 'imports' section), gasping at its glorious Jamie Reid-influenced cover design. Now that I'm an old man, I've long since burned the LP and uploaded it into my iTunes (along with a few other Judy's oddities) and it STILL gets played regularly. Whenever I play it in the house my boyfriend, a Yankee, says something like "...that's the damn new waviest thing I've ever heard." I've even been surprised to discover that at the esteemed WFMU, in New Jersey, The Judy's are known and respected by many of the obscure music braniacs on staff.

Robert, your story and interview was the first thing I ran across when searching on the web years ago, wondering "...what ever happened to?"

While The Judys might have been the only Houston band from that era to connect with Dallas audiences, the REAL genius act from that particular time and place was Culturcide.

The Judys were trustfund kids with expensive equipment and matching stage costumes. In an era when punk rock was truly new and disturbing, there was nothing at all threatening about The Judys. They looked like a cross between Pee Wee Herman and a live-action episode of "The Jetsons".

Culturcide, on the other hand, were using tape loops and banks of tape players years before anyone had ever heard of sampling.

They were also famous for the phrase - "Home taping is killing the industry - so keep doing it." Two decades later, file-sharing (the home-taping equiv for this generation) has destroyed the industry.

And David Bean is lookin' fat.

I loved the version of All the Pretty Girls by Lovie, on their cd, which they did last w/end at City Tavern, which by the way was a fun place to hear music, good, fun crowd.

Dear Liles, When the Judy's came out, rock'n'roll was all about drug-sodden longhair 70's dinosaur arena rock with overwrought guitar and too many drumkits. The Judy's cropped haircuts and clean look was as absolutely punk as you could get, since the idea of punk was to rebel against the 70's machine, they did it cooler and smarter than anyone else. No wonder they are remembered so much better than Culturcide, who were more like low-rent Big Boys. By the way, you look terrible in green.