With CDs firmly established as the dominant music listening format, the collectors who formerly clung to their turn-tables have had to change their tune. The shiny digital discs are proving themselves to be a music fan’s best friend, as three classic Northwest bands—the Heats, the Cowboys, and the Lewd—have been revived on recent CD releases from Seattle’s Chuckie-Boy Records.

The Cowboys, Jet City Rockers

The Heats, Smoke

The Lewd, Kill Yourself . . . Again

(Chuckie-Boy Records)

Pulling these songs from the realm of $100-an-album collector fodder and making them available to a mass audience is the mission of Chuckie-Boy’s Michael Stein. “Good songs remain good songs,” he says. “This stuff has been sitting on people’s shelves unheard.”

The three releases have only been on the market a short time, but the Lewd’s CD has already proven a big seller in San Francisco, especially after the influential hardcore zine Maximum Rock ‘n’ Roll published a cover story on the band. “That’s like getting a blessing from the pope of punk,” notes Stein.

Re-releases also pre- serve the musical performances lurking on decaying 20-year-old master tapes, creating permanent digital versions of the songs. Given the studio tricks now available, some of the new masters sound better than ever. Heats guitarist/singer Steve Pearson marvels at digital mastering ace Steve Turnidge’s work on the version of “Let’s All Smoke,” resurrected for Chuckie-Boy’s Smoke: “I don’t ever recall hearing that song sound that good.”

The Heats were an immensely popular early-1980s power-pop band, and one of the first Seattle club bands to play sets of original songs. Smoke is basically a re-release of the Heats’ 1980 local hit album, Have an Idea, with the addition of “Let’s All Smoke” (recorded for the album, but left off) and a 1983 demo of “In Your Town.” Have an Idea, honored as one of Goldmine magazine’s 50 best power-pop records of all time, features a professional production job rare for its time, and it still sounds great. “It represented a great period of time,” says Pearson. “There’s a certain magic of sound that comes off that record.”

The Lewd were an early Seattle punk band now best remembered for the single “Kill Yourself,” and for their bass player, Blobbo, who reclaimed his birth name of Kurdt Vanderhoof and went on to form the successful late-1980s band Metal Church. Vanderhoof remastered the Lewd catalog for Kill Yourself . . . Again, which includes the original single, an excellent 1982 album (American Wino) released after the band’s relocation to San Francisco, and a selection of demos. His completist tendencies sometimes get the better of him; a couple of songs from the band’s first demo recording would have sufficed, rather than all eight.

In contrast, the Cowboys record is as notable for what’s missing as for what’s there. Although one of Seattle’s biggest early-1980s new-wave acts (second only to the Heats), the Cowboys single “Rude Boy” is the only song recorded at the peak of the band’s powers: The original lineup was all but disintegrating by the time they entered the studio to record their uneven 1983 EP Jet City Rockers (also the name of the Chuckie-Boy re-release). “If we would have known what we know now, we could have recorded a lot better,” says Cowboys bassist Jack Hannan. “We were just young guys doing what we were told.” By the time the Cowboys released a full-length recording (1985’s How the West Was Rocked), the band had changed members and its sound, adding a keyboard player.

Jet City Rockers, assembled with songs from four vinyl releases, provided Turnidge and Stein with their biggest compilation challenge. They included the entire Cowboys EP, but just half the tracks from the album. The “Rude Boy” single made the grade, but not its B-side, “She Makes Me Feel Small.” Other decisions were dictated by sonic limitations. Stein had hoped to resurrect Cowboys vocalist Ian Fisher’s pre-band solo single of “Girls Like That,” but was defeated by a poor mix and the lack of a proper master tape (he did manage to include its B-side, “It’s a Riot”). Hannan also located an early Cowboys demo tape, but too late to be considered for the record.

On Smoke, the Chuckie-Boy potentates merely changed the song sequence and restored the earlier recordings from the Heats’ debut single (“I Don’t Like Your Face”/”Ordinary Girls”), plus adding the two extra tracks. Their most controversial decision was to drop one song from the original Have an Idea lineup (“Questions, Questions”), a call Stein says people are still griping about. He’s also gotten a few complaints about the retro nature of Chuckie-Boy’s releases. “It’s still good,” is Stein’s reply to anyone who asks him why he’d want to put out a bunch of old stuff. “It’s the real thing. It’s not played by people who want a career in a band.”