X-Mas Time (For The Skins)

I don't collect a whole lot of bands, but I really enjoy the ones I actually do collect. Good Clean Fun is one of them. There are tons of colours and probably as many sleeves of their releases, so hunting down variants is a lot of fun, especially since their discography is not documented very well. I still stumble across some new variants I didn't know about before here and there. This record is a good example. I already had three different copies of the Good Clean Fun / Throwdown split, and I knew that there are test pressings for this release because I once saw one listed among a Throwdown collection, when I came across this version with green vinyl and this weird copied cover a few years ago. It's either out of 30 or 34. I've seen both numbers since then.
So anyway, I saw this variant on someone's howsyouredge? list and contacted the person. He was down for selling the record and I was glad to be able to add another Good Clean Fun record to my collection. This was when the other guy was on a trip at the time and shortly before I went on a trip, so I told him I'd contact him once I was back. Which I never did because I forgot about the whole thing for some reason I'll probably never be able to figure out. This was summer 2013. The whole matter completely slipped my mind until I did some cleaning up in my e-mail account at the end of summer 2014.  I found our correspondence, finally wrote him back and lo and behold, he still had the record and was still willing to sell it to me. Great! Better still, he had some other records I'd been looking for for quite some time, so I managed to cross off three records of my want list instead of just one. Awesome!

This Good Clean Fun release is kind of weird. First of all, Good Clean Fun and Throwdown don't exactly scream split release, but maybe the bands were really close and I'm just ignorant to this fact. Second, they each play one of their own songs and a cover. So far so normal, but the choices of cover songs is a little strange. Good Clean Fun actually play a cover of a cover. Plus the original became really famous only through yet another cover. Got it? Here's what happened. Iron Cross from Washington, D.C. wrote this song Crucified, which is also where the crucified skin motive comes from. Agnostic Front covered the song on their Liberty And Justice… LP and I'm under the impression that this version is arguably better known than the original. In the late 80's Crucial Youth decided to write some new lyrics for the song and released it as X-Mas Time (For The Skins) on their Crucial Yule 7". And that's the song GCF decided to cover for this release. Throwdown cover Jingle Bell Rock, which is even weirder if you ask me.

This is the rarest version I own. As you can see, the cover is not really a cover. It's two separate sheets of paper that were neither folded into a cover nor glued together. It's #14 either out of 30 or 34.