Sleepers >> I love to listen to the mirror break

Sleepers - "Let Me Free"
(unreleased, 1980; Tim/Kerr Records, 1996)

Last night I rescued about 30 ladybugs from my bedroom; they somehow get inside via the foam weatherstripping along the window A/C unit and huddle up for warmth during the winter.  They also hide in the black rubber weatherstripping on my car, since I guess it absorbs heat.  The Sleepers were a mercurial San Francisco punk / post-punk band with artsy leanings and cool basslines.  Singer Ricky Williams was a notoriously strange guy, known for keeping various amphibians as pets (hey, I did that for over a decade and look how I turned out) in his dark living quarters, as well as more bizarre and destructive drug-induced activities.  He was also the original singer of Flipper and the original drummer of Crime.  This funkily-propulsive, yet eerie and hypnotic, song can only be found on their compilation CD called The Less An Object.  (It's not on the LP version.)  The album has one of the strangest album covers I've ever seen, and fascinating liner notes.  This is one of those rare occasions when one of the previously-unreleased tracks on a disc turns out to be the best thing on it by a mile.  Unfortunately, most of the band's other songs sound almost nothing like this one, but their 1980 7" ("Mirror" / "Theory") is pretty remarkable.  Williams died of an apparent drug overdose in 1992.  As for the title of this song, maybe it came to him after one too many nights of staring into his newts' misty terraria and wondering what they were trying to say to him?... though it's probably about his own mental illness.  Coincidentally, one of my memories of living in San Francisco as a kid in the early '80s was bringing a little toy rubber newt to a Golden State Warriors game and playing with it incessantly rather than paying attention to the game.  That was my only Warriors game, though we went to a bunch of 49ers games when they were winning all those Super Bowls.  Here's a punk newt with a mohawk:

Planets with similar climates:  CAN - "Mushroom" (1971), Sonic Youth - "Master-Dik" (1987), Shady Crady [later called Mercury Rev] - "Clamor" (1988), Talking Heads - "Once In A Lifetime" (1980), The Church - "Shadow Cabinet" (1984).