Drano and Bags and the IRS

So I had picked up my long unlistened-to promo copy of Cold by Frosted, also known as the short band project fronted by ex-Go-Go Jane Weidlen. I was going to write a review (it is a decent collection of pop-punk tunes, and actually is better than much of the pap on TRL/MTV/Clear Channel) and in the process went looking around to see what Jane was up to these days, as the album was a decade old. I had a thing for Jane in the 80s (she was the only attractive girl in the lot, and wrote the only solo Go-Go material I really enjoyed, including the maligned AOR track Rush Hour).

Which led me to a reference to the early L.A. punk scene (of which jane and the future Go-Go's were a part of believe it or not, originally under the name Jane Drano), on Alice Bag's website. If you are interested in a good corpus of material on late 70s Los Angeles punk, her site is a treasure trove, including a recent interview with Jane, and a lot of dirt on the scene, as well as her blog, which provides some novel distraction. There is also a mountain of trivia on Jane here.

Jane herself seems to have kept busy recording more tunes, acting (and I do not just mean in that moronic celebreality show on VH-1), and do the occasional photo shoot with Playmates (Dita Von Teese) . At almost 50, she appears to still be a human dynamo with a tweaked out voice and great knack for a hooky melody. Go Jane.

p.s. Somewhere in all this I also found a page listing her related to the great I.R.S. label (the single greatest record company for post-modern 80s rock in my opinion). I mean, I still remember when MTV showed The Cutting Edge and segments like 120 Minutes were pretty much showcases for I.R.S. acts.