Leisure Class
Formed in Detroit in 1977 as Mr. Unique & the Leisure Suits, the band got their start as the opening act for The Mumps (featuring Lance Loud) and local favorites like Flirt and Destroy All Monsters. In the following years, they managed to amuse, annoy, and antagonize all manner of audiences before finally releasing their four-song EP, Mr. Unique & the Leisure Class in 1983. The record received generally favorable, though puzzled, reviews from Dennis Loren in the Metro Times, who found "something to offend everyone", and Ira Robbins in Trouser Press.
The band moved to New York, making their debut at CBGB in 1984. Venues for the band during this period included CBGB, 8BC, SNAFU, the Henry Street Settlement, the Kitchen, the Gas Station, the Lone Star Roadhouse, Under Acme, Woody's, Beowulf, and Tramps. Their performances featured, at various times, writer Herbert Huncke, impaled goat's heads (causing a trombonist to quit in disgust), and a two-story prison (designed and built by conceptual artist and photographer Misha Gordin.
The iconoclastic band recorded at least three albums' worth of original material, none of which managed to make it to a major label release. At last, 2004 saw the release of 36 songs on the two-CD compilation, Leisure Class Recordings 1979–1994. Since that time, lead singer and lyricist Dimitri Mugianis was the subject of the 2009 documentary film by Michel Negroponte, I'm Dangerous With Love, and Leisure Class was profiled on the National Public Radio show, Day to Day. The 2010 compilation Parents Night at the Leper Colony has been called "a splendid one hour introduction to this criminally overlooked band."
Read more about Leisure Class: Discography
Other articles related to "leisure, leisure class, class, leisures":
... Conspicuous leisure is a term introduced by the American economist Thorstein Veblen, in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) ... The term denotes visible leisure for the sake of displaying social status ... The term is generally reserved for those forms of leisure that seem to be fully motivated by social factors, such as taking long vacations to exotic places and bringing souvenirs back ...
... Unique and the Leisure Class (Leisureco LC 1) 1983 Leisure Class Recordings 1979–1994 (Leisureco LC 002) 2004 We Went and Recorded It Anyway The Best of Pop-Punk ...
... With the 1936 Matignon Accords, the working class could enjoy for the first time two weeks holiday a year ... existed, they had been restricted to the upper class ... But the Popular Front's policy concerning leisures (otium in Latin) was limited to the enactment of two weeks holiday ...
... The Theory of the Leisure Class An Economic Study of Institutions (1899) proposes that economic life is driven by the vestiges of the social stratification ... profession, and other less labor-intensive work, the elementary leisure class ... division-of-labor system, and emulated the behavior of the leisure class, the high-status social group of the tribe ...
Famous quotes containing the words class and/or leisure:
“There is a certain class of unbelievers who sometimes ask me such questions as, if I think that I can live on vegetable food alone; and to strike at the root of the matter at once,—for the root is faith,—I am accustomed to answer such, that I can live on board nails. If they cannot understand that, they cannot understand much that I have to say.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A healthy man, with steady employment, as wood-chopping at fifty cents a cord, and a camp in the woods, will not be a good subject for Christianity. The New Testament may be a choice book to him on some, but not on all or most of his days. He will rather go a-fishing in his leisure hours. The Apostles, though they were fishers too, were of the solemn race of sea-fishers, and never trolled for pickerel on inland streams.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)