Album Notes

The first time I set foot in Chicago I climbed out of the cab outside the Metro on Clark Street and saw this big Viking lad dragging his snake out of a big white truck. That was Timothy R. Powell one half of the dazzling Last Time Round Record consortium and owner of the Metro Mobile recording operation. Unbeknownst to us Johnnies he was setting up to record our first ever show in Chicago half way through our first ever tour of the States. It was the summer of 1985 and even littler did I know that this strange city would one day be my home. Terry Nelson, a college DJ on WZRD in Chicago, who hung out with the Mekons in Brixton for a few months back in 83, organized the gig through the late, great and sadly missed Ruth Polski, our agent in NYC. We'd been zig-zagging back and forth across the country on those multi-voucher airline tickets that sent us stumbling into the same bar in Detroit airport every afternoon no matter where we'd played the night before. We traveled light with two battered guitars, Hugo the drum machine in his heavy metal silver ammo box and Tommy from the Mekons doing our sound. It was
a great, weird, event-packed tour that peaked just right that particularly bonkers night in Chicago with us Three on about the toppest form we ever really summoned up so thank Neptune the buggers taped it!

Timothy baked the tapes, cranked up the volume & added a few tracks that had to be left off the original vinyl SO here you have it: The Three Johns Live In Chicago!

- Jon Langford, Chicago, 2004

From: Robert Christgau, Christgau's Record Guide: The
80's, New York, Pantheon Books

The Three Johns: Live in Chicago (Last Time Round
'86).
Indies cater to collectors, and collectors will buy any old shit. Yet this verbatim show isn't just specialist product. The impolite patter includes a clarion call for international socialism, and the cover versions are droll if a tad conceptual - T. Rex as the Eagles, 'Like a Virgin. There's half a carload of new songs from a writing machine that's already filled two LPs and two EPs since 1985. And if the remakes aren't revelations, most of them are copped from album one, which is now third in line at the checkout counter. B +