It was the summer of 1995, a balmy one if I recall, and I had boosted my parents’ Ford LTD Crown Vic to drive out to some random suburban VFW hall in Pittsburgh’s eastern suburbs. Hardcore shows weren’t much of a thing in these days, to say nothing of the ones where half of the bands on the flyer don’t show up. Not exactly the kind of place where you expect to get your mind ripped open, but I believe a strong element of surprise is what gets us through dead times. Besides, was there no deader time than the mid-‘90s, when the bloat of alt-rock malaise ran through radio speakers like a gallon of ice cream out in the sun? When we had become bored with guitars, but considered new wave unthinkable? Nary.
Back to the night in question. My friends’ band Davenport plays, and then the next band starts loading their gear onto the stage. I spot a Casio keyboard with no stand, full guitar and bass stacks (as opposed to Davenport’s more conservative half-stack amplification), and a mysterious wooden box with footswitches leading out of it. I’m pretty sure they were hauling their own PA as well. The Casio was plugged in and leaned against a wall. The vocalist flipped a switch and electronic drum beats flooded the air. He asked if the venue could turn off the overhead lights, and that the audience, about a dozen strong between us, takes a few steps closer to the band. Guitarist, bassist, and drummer were at the ready, a thick hum of feedback hovering over the synth in an incredibly tense prelude to something we weren’t prepared for. You know how a storm can roll in over the horizon and choke out the sun, and you can’t help but stare at the darkest cloud bank, knowing all hell could break loose from within?
Well, it did.
Lightning struck in that dark room as the singer hit the footswitch and drenched the band in a blinding battery of strobe lighting. Guitar lurched forward, bass pointed threateningly towards the drop ceiling, and drums shattered whatever calm was left in an eye-rending display of stop-motion chaos, low-slung and dangerous. The vocals sounded inhuman, as if someone was willfully forcing out his last breaths. Riffs collided into one another and dropped out altogether, lost inside drum fills and incessant ranting. Every 90 seconds, the noise would shift, the singer walking back to the Casio and kicking the keys, causing a new drum pattern to break out. This went on for about ten minutes, twelve tops, before the guitarist had broken five strings across three guitars, and had run out of the replacements needed to finish the set. Then the houselights flickered back on, the noise receded, and the singer said, “We’re The VSS, we’re new, we don’t have any records for sale, thanks for coming out.”
That singer was Sonny Kay (pictured at right) and that guitarist Josh Hughes, both formerly of Gravity Records hardcore band Angel Hair, who’d recently broken up. The VSS was their immediate offspring, so new that they were still peddling Angel Hair’s posthumous 12” EP, hot off the press. They were joined by bassist Andrew Rothbard and drummer Dave Clifford, and in the decade since this show had passed, you may have seen these guys in a number of other outfits–Kay both on the mic for Year Future, and behind the scenes for now-defunct label Gold Standard Laboratories (one-time home for the Locust, Gogogo Airheart, and Le Shok), and the rest of the band in the groups Slaves and Pleasure Forever (Clifford now plays as a member of Isis side project Red Sparowes). But the lava that flowed from the VSS’ open veins was that of a minor-scale revolution, one which shook complacent heads until they rung like church bells. Previous attempts at such spastication were led so far underground as to devolve into atonal wrecks (check out Antioch Arrow on YouTube to catch my drift), but the VSS made significant strides in not only organizing post-hardcore fervor with thickened rhythms and spidery guitar lines, but also locked down past and future ideas into an unstable present. Cordoning off staunchly Gothic overtones with an eye towards seductive and memorable performances, and injecting it with punk energy, theirs was a cataclysmic sound, and moreover, a uniter of scenes that didn’t really know each other existed. Imagine the Germs footage from The Decline of Western Civilization as performed by Christian Death circa Only Theatre of Pain, with a horde of vampires attacking the crowd mid-set, and you were getting close to what the VSS had to offer.
Having existed for only two brief years before splintering, their limited recorded output (a couple of seven-inch singles, and one album, the superb Nervous Circuits), the VSS opened more doors and influenced so many young, malleable minds that their due has been long in coming. They made it OK for bands like the Faint to drop the guitars and pick up the synths and the eyeliner, and paved the way for grandiose performance art a la Fischerspooner to embrace similar sounds. They also cleared out the stumbling blocks that kept hardcore and alternateens from discovering a new wave past written out of their histories. And in a sense, they helped to edge a rock audience closer to the dance floor, even if their music was too hectic to keep time. Moreover, they proved that such musical miscegenation could not only be pulled off, but could make abstract, non-linear sense to all who witnessed it.
If you weren’t lucky enough to be there at the right place and time, don’t sweat it; Hydra Head has just reissued Nervous Circuits in a deluxe edition, containing the album itself, a bonus disc of live sets, demos, and unreleased tracks, and a DVD containing four live sets of the band in action. Pick it up and witness an underground rock scene allowing itself to be torn from its moorings.
Regional talent pockets are mystifying phenomena. For techno heads it must be quite vexing to contemplate that three of the genre’s pioneers, Derrick May, Kevin Sanderson and Juan Atkins, all hail from rural Michigan’s Belleville High School. Fans of free jazz are likely even more titillated by the list of the vanguard pantheistic fixtures who came through I. M. Terrell High School in Fort Worth, Texas–a school named in honor of the prominent African American Texas educator. It was originally a secondary school set aside for the town’s black students who had enough latitude to pursue that level of education in 1882 and is now an elementary school.
In the early ’50s the Terrell school graduated saxophonist and 2000 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee King Curtis. Curtis was a mainstay session player and producer of soul and R&B records for Aretha Franklin, The Coasters, Sam Moore, and many others throughout the ’50s and ’60s up until his very early demise in 1971.
Taking nothing away from Curtis’ impressive and prodigious list of accomplishments, especially considering he died at the tragically young age of 37, I. M. Terrell’s less congruent but more compelling alumni constitute a veritable Who’s Who of what became the avant-garde (and often controversial) genre of free jazz.
Between 1948 and 1958 Terrell saw pass through its halls–and more particularly through the musical instruction of band teacher G. A. Baxter–saxophonists Ornette Coleman, Dewey Redman (pictured below), and Julius Hemphill (pictured above), as well as drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson.
I would run down that list again, but you can just go back and read it yourselves.
Contemplating the expansive global influence of those four musicians as well as perusing a list of the people they played with is what you might call a real mind fuck.
Ornette Coleman, albeit on the immediate heels of John Coltrane’s stunning and irreversible inversion of bee bop, essentially invented or at least defined “free” jazz. There was not a post-punker worth their salt, from Thurston Moore, to Henry Rollins to the Laughing Hyenas’ guitarist Larissa Strickland, who didn’t cite Coleman as an influence.
To further tighten the knot between these jazz deities and the reach of their influences, Shannon Jackson, after doing several records with the pianist every jazz purist loved to hate, Cecil Taylor, as well as swatting the skins on at least three Albert Ayler records, formed a trio that could only be neatly categorized as fusion–and to try and define the extent of the elements they fused would be light years out of my league. Nevertheless, the other two players in this project, The Decoding Society, were a pre-Living Color guitarist Vernon Reid and a pre-Rollins Band bass player Melvin Gibbs.
Jackson played with so many avant-garders, including his old townie, Coleman, it would take another website worth of server space to cover them all. Jackson was not only a drummer but became an accomplished horn player and composed music for 23 albums of one or another of his projects, not to mention being the song starter for the legendary, and oft name-dropped influence on every conscious NYC post punk band, the totally improvisational Last Exit, with bassist Bill Laswell, sax man Peter Brötzmann and one of the most distinctive guitar stylists there ever was, Sonny Sharrock.
Julius Hemphill was, of course, the founding force behind the fabulous World Saxophone Quartet. And Dewey Redman, father of present-day jazz star Joshua, was considered among the most skilled sax players of his day and an important innovator of the free jazz form.
G. A. Baxter taught them all.
I interviewed Shannon Jackson for a personal video project a few years back and could not quite get him to agree that the Fort Worth free jazz phenomenon was anything but coincidence. The way he thought of it was comparable to one day when he ran into two friends from different countries and different walks of life at an airport ticket counter. Jackson did, however, admit that Mr. G. A. Baxter, who Jackson described only as a short man of “black German” heritage, was a steadfast disciplinarian but with a pragmatic lenience. According to Jackson, Baxter’s imperative was to every year win the statewide, black high school band competitions, held annually at Prairie View A & M University, a traditionally black institution of higher education in Prairie View, Texas. This is where Baxter’s disciplinarian traits were applied. On the other hand, Baxter would open the band room at Terrell High for Jackson and his fellow classical composition class and school band mates everyday during school lunch hours and allow them to play unsupervised.
When I asked Jackson to consider what I perceived to be his involvement in projects (i.e., Ayler, Coleman, Last Exit) that had great influence on rock musicians, and asked him if he liked rock music, or if he was ever going for a rock sound, he flatly replied, “no.” He ended up playing in electric bands like Decoding Society, Power Tools and Last Exit because it allowed him to express his physical approach to the drums unfettered by the restraint necessarily dictated by circumstances where acoustic pianos and horns were the feature instruments.
All the Fort Worth guys started in what was then a small town in a racially miserable setting in a state where open debate on race is so taboo that discussion of it is still stifled to a muffled murmur. They all played blues, R&B, even country in the case of Jackson. Jackson’s family home, where he lives today, was firebombed and nearly destroyed by rednecks when he was a youngster
Ornette Coleman once said, in an interview the late 1990s–this is paraphrased–that of all the places he has been, Texas is the one place he had no idea about. Fort Worth has hosted a jazz festival for several years, the administrators of which had trouble finally agreeing to terms acceptable enough to Jackson for him to play the festival even once.
Having lived in three different cities in Texas I noticed how aggressively the Texas community tries to erase its own history before it even becomes identifiable. They will have to go to great lengths to erase the legacy of G. A. Baxter and the kids out of I. M. Terrell High School in Fort Worth
We were on the sidewalk out front of the Antenna Club in Memphis, late one winter’s eve. I was gassed up with triple-distilled courage and standing next to Barkmarket’s tour manager, Brian. To my other side was my bass player. He and I were brandishing the two components of our van’s steering wheel Club®. The three of us (this is how I remember it anyway) were facing down the venue’s owner and two or three huge motherfuckers–a bouncer and a couple of massive meat mounds–fellas chummier with the owner than with us. The guys from Barkmarket might have been just behind us or on the periphery, but their rhythm section (drummer, Rock Savage and bass player, John Nowlin) weighed all of two hundred pounds between them. Anyway, we were in a shouting match over fifty dollars. Barkmarket, a trio from Brooklyn, NY, had booked a tour and my band had butted our way onto a few of the dates trying to get gas money from California back home to Detroit. Brian insisted that the owner had, in advance, agreed to pay my band fifty dollars as a late add to the bill. It was a Sunday or Monday, the show had been a disaster at the door, and now he didn’t want to pay us anything and was calling Brian a liar and a troublemaker.
After a few minutes of this, the owner went back inside his bar and seconds later a car engine revved somewhere behind the building. All of a sudden a souped-up Mustang with glass packs came roaring and squealing out from the alley behind the club and tried to turn onto the side street. The driver lost control and ran smack dab into a telephone pole. He slammed it in reverse but the front end was wrapped around the pole, so, with tires screeching and smoking, the car started wheeling itself around the pole, still tethered to it by the front end. It finally came loose and the rear end of the car smashed into the corner of a neighbor’s front porch. We could now see that the windshield was spider-webbed where the driver’s forehead had shattered it. When he put it in drive it was instantly clear that the radiator, fan sprocket and whatever else, were jammed up from the collision and the car wasn’t going anywhere. He managed to get it into a spot off the street, right next to telephone pole. With steam billowing from under the hood, the club owner wrestled the door open and emerged unsteadily from the car. Blood streamed down his face as he staggered off down the side street, into the night, and we saw no more of him.
So, with the fifty-dollar issue settled we started to load our gear into the van. Only when we got to Barkmarket’s van, three of the tires were flat, all bearing six-inch long knife slashes to the sidewalls. A note on the windshield read, “Love Memphis. Don’t Dis Elvis,” apparently in reference to some innocuous wise crack Barkmarket’s front man, Dave Sardy, had made at the expense of The King.
While we drank at the bar across the street waiting for the tow truck there was a murmur-cum-rumbling spreading through the local patronage and a number of nasty glances were cast our way. Apparently one of the bartenders sensed trouble brewing and made a phone call. A couple minutes later a cop car appeared on the street in front of the bar, where it sat until the crippled van and all seven of our Yankee asses were spirited away to the refuging hospitality of strangers.
If you are already hip to Barkmarket, I hope you enjoyed the story. If you are not, they started releasing records in 1987. Their third effort, Vegas Throat (Triple X, 1992), saw them distinguish themselves from an immense field of dirgey, drop-tuned, New York “industrial noise” bands. Their distinctive characteristics may have been the novocaine-free tooth-pulling, melodic grind of their music and the sardonic wit of Sardy, which wasn’t immediately apparent in what at first could be taken for unedited, throat-mangling, vocal catharsis.
Barkmarket was all hooks embedded in a tangle of weird noises and franticly precise tribal drum beats, which often got washed over by the preponderance of elegantly distorted and percussive bass guitar underneath Sardy’s (who produced all of their records) deftly open-tuned wall of six-string sorcery. They were rarer still, among bands of such sonic might, in that their records were pert nigh as powerful as their live set.
Rick Rubin signed them to Def American Records after Vegas Throat and Sardy become steadily involved in engineering and producing Rubin-related projects in Los Angeles studios. Barkmarket continued to make beautifully jagged-edged records. Sardy said that after he handed over to Rubin Barkmarket’s freshly completed third recording for Def American–a typically swampy slag heap of infectious metal mash-ups–the enigmatic legend listened to it and his only response was, “I thought you’d be over this shit by now.”
Well, although Barkmarket never got over it, they did, quite unfortunately, quit doing it around 1997.
Discography:
1-800-GODHOUSE (Purge/Sound League, 1987)
Easy Listening (Brake Out, 1989)
Vegas Throat (Triple X, 1991; re-mastered and re-released, Def American, 1992)
Gimmick (Def American, 1993)
Peacekeeper Vinyl EP (Man’s Ruin,1994)
Lard Room EP (American Recordings, 1995)
L. Ron (American Recordings, 1996)
As the 1980s dawned, American punk found its voice. Hardcore acts scowled and grimaced in hundreds of regional scenes between Black Flag’s angry West and Minor Threat’s steely-eyed East. Despite hardcore’s sonic standardization, powerful music abounded–but humor floundered. So when a gloriously goofy band like The Meatmen emerged from that solemn landscape they became more than court jesters; Tesco Vee’s fraternity of sophomoric pottymouths were genuine rock ‘n’ roll heroes. At the time, few bands strove to put smiles on faces–even the brilliantly ridiculous Misfits would kick you in the head upon suggestion they weren’t dead serious. The Meatmen proved that punk need not be joyless.
Vee (Robert Vermuellen) was a Lansing, Michigan rock fan and Michigan State English student who eventually combined his love for loud music with his writing skills and launched a series of zines, including Touch and Go, which became a flame that attracted Midwest-scene mojo. By 1980 he had formed The Meatmen, obnoxious innovators who adapted hardcore’s sonic simplicity but rejected its non-theatricality. Tesco regularly took the the stage in leather sex garb and wielding props. After Necros bassist Corey Rusk helped Vee turn the Touch and Go zine into a record label, the Meatmen launched their ridiculous recording career and Rusk began building Touch and Go Records (now in its 26th year) into arguably one of the best indie labels in existence.
Releasing several EPs of ultra-offensive joke punk, the Meatmen (in less than an hour of material) managed to attack gays, women, the handicapped, the elderly, Rastafarians, onanists, aborted fetuses, Jack Grisham, and countless others. We’re the Meatmen and You Suck, their 1983 LP (really an expanded EP reissue), managed to render half-assed hate speech comical in part because of Tesco Vee’s transparently tenuous tightrope walk between articulate wordsmith and his inner dumbass.
The band soon dissolved and Vee relocated to Washington, DC, where the Meatmen had mysteriously made a big impression on righteous straight edgers. Reforming the band with Brian Baker and Lyle Preslar of Minor Threat, the ‘85 Meatmen proved to be the mightiest. With disciplined musicians behind him Vee expanded his comic visions, crafting songs that explored hard rock from the rawest punk to flamboyant metal, creating powerful sonic backdrops for motormouthed comedic rants. On War of the Superbikes and Rock ‘n Roll Juggernaut he skewered the fans, but also revealed himself to be one, celebrating clichés, covering favorite bands, and living a rock ‘n’ roll fantasy. Certainly the Meatmen continued to spew bile (forever telling us what sucks, be it crippled children, you, French people, you again), but Vee also found the freedom to move beyond insult comedy.
After this incarnation, the band dissolved in 1989 and Tesco briefly attempted to translate his humor to MTV. He then got back on the horse, fronting Tesco Vee’s Hate Police, then reforming the Meatmen. Though new lineups were consistently rocking, rarely did they provide as nurturing a backdrop for humor as his ’80s bands. Though several bright spots shone through, his obnoxiousness now seemed downright obnoxious. By 1997 the Meatmen were kaput.
There are many cult bands in music history whose haters are simply mistaken. If you believe that the music of Sun Ra, or X-Ray Spex, or AC/DC is not good–subjectivity be damned–you are wrong. However, the Meatmen do not fall into that category. It is completely reasonable for anyone turned off by posturings of homophobia, racism, sexism, or baby seal abuse to go ahead and hate them. Even if you’re a fan but you think their early work tries too little, their middle phase is overambitious, and their later work is ugly, I wouln’t argue. If you can’t get past Tesco’s lyrics (Trouser Press compared them to things assholes shout out of moving cars), fine. However, if you like the Meatmen, you do not suck. Tesco’s comedic stage presence, love of music (revealed by his cover songs), creative euphemisms for female genitalia (“pickle parlor,” “glorious gravy boat”), and relentless jesting make a case that his songcrafting is an act of joy, not an outlet of hate. Those who get the joke can dig the Meatmen shamelessly.
Recently Tesco reactivated the band, reissued most of the non-Touch and Go material, compiled a DVD, and took a new Meatmen on the road. Over the dozen years since the band last gave it a go plenty of things have sucked. If ever we needed an experienced “that sucks” finger-pointer the time is now–and if, as in 1982, we must learn once again that it is we that do the sucking, so be it. Welcome back Tesco!
Henry, We Hardly Knew Ye
It would be folly to try and string together a cohesive narrative of the career of musician, artist, mathematician, philosopher and North Carolina native, Henry Flynt. His life has played out much like one of his madcap art stunts. In 1989, Flynt traveled to an as yet unopened art galley in Italy to scout the space and negotiate a showing of his own art. He photographed the rooms in the gallery, returned home, and then sent the photos he had taken of the empty walls of the gallery to the gallery owners announcing that his “show” was already over, before it had taken place. And the photos proved that the show had in fact occurred, unbeknownst to those who had been in attendance–namely Flynt and the gallery owners. Then Flynt made posters announcing the “show,” but told patrons not to bother about attending because it had already happened.
All of Flynt’s accomplishments occurred as though in a virtual vacuum, but have been documented with photos and recordings that seemingly prove that it did all happen in the real world. He could just as likely have made all this stuff up a few years ago: that he left Harvard in 1961 before obtaining a degree; that he moved to New York, hung out in the Yoko Ono loft scene arguing the finer points of musical pretension with John Cage; was squeezed out of the Velvet Underground for playing his fiddle too hillbilly; recorded several albums of his own compositions with various incarnations of bands during the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s; started a movement to rid the world of formal art; produced several installations of his own art work; and wrote extensively on philosophical problems. He could have made it all up because there seems to be almost no one who was aware of Flynt while he was doing all those things.
Even if it is all an elaborate fabrication, his records are pretty damn good.
Imagine that Warren Ellis (of Dirty Three and Bad Seeds fame) and the Rev. Horton Heat had grown up attending a one-room schoolhouse together where Ornette Coleman was the only teacher, and they formed a band with drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson; they might well have sounded like Henry Flynt.
For all the yammering Flynt does about jazz, Hindustani, and classical (there’s a three hour interview from a 2004 radio broadcast, during which you can hear several of Flynt’s recordings)–and despite the fact that he has subjected himself to extensive instruction in music theory and performance (he plays at least violin and guitar, plus he tosses around technical terms like triads and fifths and interval modulations and peppers his lengthy orations with artsy, pseudo-intellectual jargon, such as referring to particular gigs as “sound environments” rather than concerts)–his music rocks. It is a very unlikely yet highly infectious mélange of jazz, Appalachia, and rock, with infusions of Eastern experimentation.
One of the more transfixing of Flynt’s recordings is the forty-four minute long “You Are My Everlovin’ ” (Recorded Records, 2001), something Flynt called New American Ethnic Music. It is comprised of semi-sophisticated, old-timey style fiddle, sawing over the top of a deep tambura drone. If you surrender your body aural to its wilting beauty, it could deliver you unto a deep woods trance state, meditated into a reincarnation of an immense anthropomorphized oak tree, like the Ents in Return of the King-before they freaked out and stormed Isengard, of course.
The recordings that Flynt produced with his fully-staffed bands, The Insurrections and Nova’Billy, are informed by many of the same influences as were say, James Blood Ulmer or Danny Gatton, or even Led Zeppelin, but managed to sidestep the trappings of a producer’s meddlesome ambition or a record label’s marketability mandate.
A single volume of Flynt’s collected writings, Blueprint for a Higher Civilization, was published in Italy in 1975 and is of course long since out of print. You can still find lengthy sections of his musings available at a fan-maintained website, www.henryflynt.org
His musical recordings had collected, in some cases, nearly forty years of dust before a barrage of Flynt sides was released, mostly by Locust Records and Recorded Records, between 2001 and 2005. Having never found an audience or even a record label during his more productive years, Flynt, after some mysterious mishap on the way to a gig in Berlin in 1984, finally lost his ambition for public performance. He has not performed in public, nor, he claims, has he played, or otherwise composed or produced any music since.
Discography:
The first two titles were recorded in the early 1960s. The other titles show the year the music was recorded, followed by the year it was released:
Back Porch Hillbilly Blues Volume 1 (Locust Music, 2002)
Back Porch Hillbilly Blues Volume 2 (Locust Music, 2002)
C Tune (Locust Music, 1980, 2001)
Raga Electric (Locust Music, 1963/71, 2002)
I Don’t Wanna (Locust Music, 1966, 2004)
Purified by the Fire (Locust Music, 1981, 2005)
Graduation And Other New Country & Blues Music (Ampersand, 1975/79, 2001)
You Are My Everlovin’/Celestial Power (Recorded, 1980/81, 2001)
Spindizzy (Recorded, 1968/83, 2002)
Hillbilly Tape Music (Recorded, 1971/78, 2002)
Sublime Frequencies
Seattle label Sublime Frequencies began in 2003, putting out musical recordings and DVD videos of artists from around the world that they had collected during extensive self-funded travels. The label is the avocation of brothers Alan and Richard Bishop, of the band Sun City Girls, along with video documentarian Hisham Mayet. Following their tremendous output of global musical vitality last year, the label was back at it last week with two new offerings from afar.
The CD Bollywood Steel Guitar exhibits 21 tracks of instrumental virtuosity and innovation performed by film studio session players recorded to score films produced in India between 1962 and 1986. There is a lot of heavy-handed drumming and intricate melodic interplay between harmoniums and pedal and lap steel guitars. For anyone charged up and blown away by the footage intercut with the opening title sequence of the 2001 movie Ghost World of the sassy-assed Shankar Jaikishan performing the song “Jan Pechechan Ho,” Bollywood Steel Guitar will bound you over the same instrumental terrain.
Also recently released, on vinyl only, was Shadow Music of Thailand–surfy instrumental guitar and farfisa organ rave-ups. It’s the sort music you expect to be blaring from speakers atop the Tiki bar at a Quentin Tarantino pool party.
The list of titles and the requisite descriptions of all of their releases to date is far too long to indulge in here, however, among my favorites are:
Thai Pop Spectacular (CD 2007)
A marvelously deft and dazzling array of power pop cuts from 19 different Thai artists, compiled by Bay Area archivist and audio innovator Mark Gergis.
Choubi Choubi: Folk and Pop Songs from Iraq (CD 2005)
A mix of modern urban rhythmic tracks and traditional melodies, layered with vocals that pass freely from old world, Middle Eastern moaning to Brooklyn-esque, girl hip hop–with some cuts culled wholesale from Detroit radio broadcasts (a technique common to other Sublime releases)
Guitars of Agadez, by Group Inerane (LP 2007)
A band tagged as part of the “Tuareg Guitar Revolution,” Inerane, from Niger, play electric-guitar desert blues. It is the infusion of their own tradition with distilled elements of the Delta blues that make them so haunting and deep. Inerane, however, eschews all the trappings of the stodgy blues song structure and instead cycle around the beat, causing your pop-radio-indoctrinated and inundated ass to have to continually re-orient yourself to the “1” in the count, which has usually relocated itself to a different spot in the progression. The tunes are topped off with beautiful trills from a backing chorus of female voices.
As with the fabulous Ethiopiques CD series, I sometimes wonder if it is as much the American funk, soul and jazz influence on the elements of music of a distant origin that makes it so appealing. But, as is also the case with Sublime’s releases, it is not merely people from other cultures and traditions playing their traditional music and tossing in American musical clichés for pragmatic measure. These artists are taking American musical forms and inverting them, looking at them through different goggles, refining the meatier components and discarding the fat. Then they spit them back at us saying, “here’s what you could be doing with your own legacy.” Although I’m sure the above statement, however unintentionally, oversimplifies the phenomenon.
I asked the well-traveled Sublime Frequencies co-proprietor Alan Bishop, via email, if his duty to finding new music to record became burdensome to the travel process or impinged upon his enjoyment of being somewhere far from home.
“Of course I don’t always carry the [recording/video] gear around…I always have my detectors on,” Bishop writes, “I find ways to make what I do meditative and relaxing.”
Bishop says Sublime Frequencies tries not to force the issue with their artists. They strive to capture, as unobtrusively as possible, performances of their artists in their most familiar and comfortable circumstances.
Says Bishop, “I think some people believe there is some method to this and that we have a formula. That’s never the case. Each situation is completely different from all the others…we never take groups to a studio or try to pull them from their normal operating procedures. That is not conducive to getting great recordings. Many others seem to think slick sound production is best, so they wheel a group into a studio and ‘produce’ them. I prefer to record them wherever they play, in their own space, where they always perform.”
Personally, I listen to Sublime Frequencies releases with an unfortunate anxiety, fighting off my dread that they will one day run out of new music to find or the energy to go out and get it.
Other recommended Sublime Frequencies titles (all CDs) that are more or less self-introductory:
-Radio Algeria
-Princess Nicotine: Folk and Pop Music of Myanmar
-Radio Palestine: Sounds of the Eastern Mediterranean
-PROIBIDÃO C.V: Forbidden Gang Funk From Rio de Janeiro
And some tasty DVDs:
Musical Brotherhood from the Trans-Saharan Highway
Sumatran Folk Cinema
Nat Pwe: Burma’s Carnival of Spirit Soul
A couple videos:
To see a band change is quite a thing. To witness the evolution of Zen Guerrilla from a tolerable gathering of friends, eager to make music together but not quite yet onto anything particularly compelling, into one of the more formidable forces of sound and presence of their time is a beautiful experience.
Likewise, after seeing some early Jon Spencer Blues Explosion gigs I walked away underwhelmed. Then six months later I was in front of a stage watching them as though I were smack in the middle of the railroad tracks peacefully anticipating the impending crush of a locomotive. But the Blues Explosion were hardly “unsung,” and so I digress. No, Zen Guerrilla is the band I first saw at Silk City in Philadelphia in about 1994. They were friends of a friend and introductions were made as someone snapped pictures of them in the lobby wearing their matching rose-pink tuxedos.
Nice enough guys I thought, and their stage show ended up being mostly unremarkable, with vague traces–in the vodka-addled slide show of my memories–of fairly standard psychedelic rock with a protracted nod to Howlin’ Wolf, Elmore James and the like, and even a Beatles cover or two. What I mostly remember being bothered by–besides their ungainly name–was that the front man could really sing and yet he ran his vocals through a series of processors, amps, compressors and what-not, like a tube-powered version of a Gibby Haynes vocal cop-out. This dude was like six-foot-seven and spent the entire set bent over double, his back to the audience, trying to hide behind parts of the drum kit.
I ran into the fellows from the band from time to time but otherwise didn’t see them around all that much. Then I heard that these four guys who had met each other as students at the University of Delaware in the late Eighties, had moved the band to San Francisco.
Now, I don’t know when the transformation took place exactly, but the next time I remember seeing them play was about 4 years later, in Seattle. Same dudes, brand new band. They were now a sonic tsunami. They were physical. They were focused. And the front man, Marcus Durant, owned the audience. He was going at the crowd, drawing them in from under a crazy bush of hair, reaching his arms out as to offer his hand in guidance through an unnerving rock-n-roll journey.
The only problem with this new outfit was that my own band had to take the stage after them.
We did all right because I had a couple of pretty good players with me, but we were in no ways up to Zen level, and the conversation in our van on the drive to Portland the next day, where we had to follow them again the next night, was a serious one. It centered on pep talking each other as to how we weren’t going to allow these out-of-control give-a-fucks to shame us again. It was, alas, to little avail, because Zen Guerrilla mopped the floor with us again.
But it never made me feel that bad. I mean what were we gonna do against that? They were on fire and they loved it like few bands I’ve seen. They lapped up the giddiness and ludicrousness of every rock performance cliché and delivered them with none of the hammy, self-conscious irony that hampers lesser men. You could suck cognac from a brick baked in the desert sun easier than you could wring a drop of pretension or condescension toward the art of rock from any of the four of them. And they never for a forgivable instant took any of it seriously. They all understood that glory is fleeting, if not impossibly illusive.
Anyone I ever hipped to Zen came away changed, and henceforth a devoted disciple. That is why it was so vexing and confounding that even after they were on Sub Pop (who, granted, were not in their glory years at this point, but still…). Zen were, near as I could tell, all but ignored by the American music press and record-buying public.
At SXSW in 2000 I walked into Emo’s with some friends who had been theretofore uninitiated to their greatness–or even their name–as Zen broke into their perception-altering cover of David Bowie’s “Moonage Daydream.” We stood there dumbfounded at these four motherfuckers who were insightful enough to have noticed the jolting power in what Bowie could only get across as a jangly, tripster ditty. It brought to mind Stevie Wonder’s funked up demolition of the Beatles’ “We Can Work It Out.”
In 2002 I had the good fortune of doing a week-long UK tour with Zen. I was solo and fortunately I was the opener this time. Rich Millman (guitar), Carl Horne (bass), Andy Duvall (drums) and Durant shredded the room every night and they ridiculed and cajoled me all the day and whatever part of the night they weren’t pummeling the musical conscience of England.
One of my favorite Zen memories is from a gig in a cavernous little club in Newport, Wales with the thinnest turnout of the tour. There was some idiotically constructed 2 1/2″ lead piping running about ten inches off the stage floor that bordered the entire edge of the stage perimeter like the top rail of a midget chain-link fence. It was exposed to the audience on three sides, and Durant was leaned over it eliciting deep guttural howls into an SM58 and shoving his face down into the face of a stupefied fan. This kid was smallish and not physically distinctive in any visible way, and as Durant was bellowing away and the band was flailing around behind him, this kid took the nearly full 1.5 liter plastic bottle he was holding and squeezed it, shooting a geyser of icy water all over Marcus’ face, the mic, and the front of his body.
Durant is huge and I prayed for the kid’s soul. Durant stood there for moment, band still wailing. If he felt any physical or psychological shock–or even mild surprise at this flood of cold water, his face betrayed none of it. He just stared at the kid. Then, with both feet balanced on the stage-girding pipe, his forearm steadying him against the low ceiling, he sprung, circus canon-like through the air, and came down on top of this hapless water-squirting lad. When Durant rose again and stretched upward, fully erect, he had the kid’s neck cradled in the craw of his elbow and pulled snug, right up against his own throat. The kid’s feet dangled below Durant’s knees, a full foot off the floor. Then Durant pulled the kids face somehow tighter still against his own, shoved the mic into his own mouth and unleashed unearthly screams that seemed to disconnect the erstwhile spectator’s consciousness from his body. He had been shouted into apoplectic shock, as though by an aboriginal witch doctor. Then Durant let the kid drop and he flopped on the floor like he’d been slapped on the forehead by a faith healer.
I believe that tour was the last time I saw Zen play. I heard they might have done another tour in Europe, maybe even the States. An old Philly friend, who lives in London now, told me he saw Zen play at a festival in Spain to tens of thousands of people sometime in 2003. My friend said they came off the stage, the immense outdoor crowd going nuts behind them, and Millman laid his guitar down and said “I’m done.” “What?” my friend said. Millman looked him square in the eye and said, “That’s it.”
And as far as I know, it was.
Images ©1999-2001 Rob Erickson
www.roberickson.com
I’m going to take a stab that for more than half of you reading this, the band Steel Pole Bath Tub was before your time. They belonged to an era where a band couldn’t share its music with a limitless number of people without leaving the house. They lived in a music scene that was documented largely by zines, college radio airplay, and crosstalk in between fans. Naturally, they are all but forgotten today except by those who were there and whoever those people talked to about it.
But anonymity can be a wonderful thing, especially when one is committed to making evil music. And Steel Pole Bath Tub was certainly all about that. It seems so unlikely that the group’s dirge-like stew of minor chord aggression, shit-eating grins, Hawaiian shirts, traumatic heaviness, and a primary reliance on TV and movie samples in their songs could find release in the current marketplace. Intellectual property being what it is today, it could cost millions to clear much of the material that was part of the Tub’s sonic foundations. Punk rock and the non-instantaneous spread of information meant that if you wanted to find these guys while they existed–roughly 1986 to 1996–you’d have to do the legwork yourself. Most copyright holders didn’t even bother, and for the longest time, the group’s work carried on unimpeded. This is how we kept it together back then, when the whole of human experience hadn’t been placed at our feet for us to gloss over. But by participating in this endeavor, none of us knew that we’d join what would amount to the last generation that would need to go about it this way.
Originally hailing from Montana, the group traveled west, settling first in Seattle, and then in San Francisco, where they spent the bulk of their career. SF and its surrounding areas have been a hotbed for weirdness in popular culture since the ‘60s, and guitarist Mike Morasky, bassist/tape operator Dale Flattum, and drummer Darren Mor-X seemed to consume as much as it spat out in that regard. True crime novel adaptations, steam whistles, ominous soundtrack music, clips from “The Brady Bunch” and “Speed Racer,” Vincent Price’s sinister laugh, the bubbling of some random elixir in a make-believe laboratory, a woman’s scream, and the ever-present burbling of a Galaga machine were just a few of the sonic artifacts that peppered their nail-biting, isolationist smears of syrupy nightmare put to punk rock’s rotten-apple core.
Their former label-mates the Melvins showed us, through deed and action, how to make music sound evil. Steel Pole Bath Tub, however, decided to show us why, and this is the reason their music endures with a small but dedicated following to this day. You don’t need to look much further than your local news broadcast to understand how a medium like television makes the most out of trying to scare you senseless. Back in the ‘70s and ‘80s, before cable and in the heyday of independently-owned TV and radio stations, it was as if the entire TV experience was designed to give you nightmares. Mr. Yuk commercials, “Chiller Theater” rebroadcasts of pulp trash, decrepit old cartoons and dramatic re-enactments of actual events. Lester Bangs even wrote about the gleeful recklessness of how these operators carried themselves, barely serving the public interest and loading us up with the subcultural wares we secretly all wanted. I think the Tub understood this better than most, and this is why their main body of work–the LPs Butterfly Love (1989), Tulip (1991), and The Miracle of Sound in Motion (1993), as well as major EPs Lurch (1990) and Some Cocktail Suggestions (1994), not to mention the dozens of 7” singles they released–have held up so well. Not only do they serve as a tent pole for the times, but also for those before it. The group’s riotous use of imagery in their cover art, posters and apparel also carry on the same traditions, lampooning and fetishizing past crazes like Tiki bar culture and attacking the mainstream in dripping handfuls (witness a sweatshirt with a gun on the front and the words “JUST DO IT” printed down each sleeve, or a T-shirt featuring Colonel Sanders with skulls in his eye sockets, artifacts to which only a less litigious society could commit).
Alas, the suburban media blitz and cultural paranoia that saturated Steel Pole Bath Tub’s fundamental ideas have changed enough to be considered passé in terms of how they affect us. Horror isn’t what it used to be. Our misfits no longer have the outlets of matinees and horror conventions to treat as their own. Now everyone’s every move is scrutinized, often at the will of the individual searching for recognition and a connection with others. Those who don’t fit in can no longer disappear. Spend some time with the music of Steel Pole Bath Tub and all of the unseen horrors and wildly sexualized afterthoughts that come with them will rush back to the fore. It’s time.
The Best Side Project Ever
Until someone saves my baby and me from the fire, my perception of a hero will remain vague at best. I won’t discount or remove myself from Jungian archetypes, but this is an age where we’re categorically asked to name our heroes as a means of self-definition (MySpace, anyone?). So our heroes are, in part, an idealized reflection of ourselves, and the last time I checked, that familiar mirror has enough cracks to throw back a hundred different faces. Then what does it mean when I say that Hot Snakes are unsung heroes to me? I think I’m the kind of person who feels that virtually all the best things in this life remain removed from the glare of ubiquity, willfully contained in a world of their own. So, strangely, I see Hot Snakes as heroes all the more for their marginal presence in the greater scope of music history. Hot Snakes were too old, too good, and too self-satisfied to care about making anyone else like them, but that’s fine. I’m happy to toot their horn for them, and here it is: Hot Snakes are a special band, and you should listen to their music.
When Hot Snakes put out their first album in 2000, that abominable wet fart of a genre called rap-rock was finally in its death throes, and mainstream hip-hop got addicted to stupid pills and started becoming, more and more, a fatuous caricature of itself. (Soulja Boy, what?) Meanwhile, The Strokes came on the scene, were hailed as saviors of rock ‘n roll, and put indie rock on the map, for better or for worse. I say this because, in the most technical sense, indie rock has become a genre, a sound, and a look as opposed to a way of creating and marketing one’s music. (History is cyclical and record labels are co-opting motherfuckers: the same thing happened to both “punk” and “alternative” rock. And get Our Band Could Be Your Life to read up on the original indie rockers.)
But I mainly bring up the dubiousness of “indie rock” to point out that, if nothing else, Hot Snakes were the definition of indie–meaning independent–rock. Lead guitarist John Reis created a label, Swami Records, for the specific purpose of putting out Hot Snakes’ first album. Singer/guitarist Rick Froberg is a gifted illustrator who did all the artwork for Hot Snakes’ albums, made their promotional posters, and designed their website. And, perhaps most importantly, it was clear from the get-go that Hot Snakes simply did not give a fuck. They wrote songs and put out albums at their own leisure (although three albums and a live EP in four years isn’t really making music “leisurely”), toured when they wanted, littered their lyrics with inscrutable in-jokes, and, to the detriment of fans, never really took themselves seriously as a band. The twin nuclei of the group were very involved with other projects: Reis with his main band Rocket From The Crypt and his new label in San Diego, Froberg with his artwork in New York. In this way, Hot Snakes are the best side project ever. And yet, at the same time, during their brief existence they captured the ethos of what real bands (ideally) should be all about. As my man Frank Costello said, they call that a paradox.
To date, Hot Snakes represents the artistic zenith of Reis and Froberg’s long but intermittent partnership. Fresh out of high school in 1986, the two formed the band Pitchfork in San Diego before guaranteeing their punk rock immortality with the influential math-rock outfit Drive Like Jehu. Hot Snakes are correctly seen as a leaner, more concise version of Jehu, a band noted for their sprawling, structurally complicated tunes. Hot Snakes’ songs are invariably beat-heavy, guitar-centric blasts of punk ‘n’ garage fury, and for the casual listener, they all might sound the same on first listen. From raw debut Automatic Midnight onwards, the band didn’t change the formula much, they just kept streamlining their aesthetic; they cut out all the fat of a song and presented only what was best. This is why Hot Snakes will never be as obviously influential as Jehu: the succinctness that defines Hot Snakes songs is evidence of an artistic maturity that can’t be imitated after a few years playing shitty punk rock. (Less is more because it’s harder to do well.)
Misguided critics marginalized Hot Snakes on the basis that they aren’t doing anything particularly new, and, for that, they claim, the band is less than relevant. But while Hot Snakes’ music was made within the context of pre-existing sounds–recalling Suicide, The Wipers, Mission of Burma, Neu!, and even Ennio Morricone–they transcended any influence with their idiosyncrasy. There’s the ingeniously inventive dueling guitar work that is neatly summed up with descriptors like frenetic, sinister, and catchy. It’s a testament to Hot Snakes’ talent that they filled their songs with indelible hooks–sometimes several within a song–without ever sounding saccharine or trite. The minimal use of distortion allows every melodic turn to be that much sharper and the rhythm section, already a lurching beast, to sound all the more explosive. Riding over it all is Froberg’s voice, an instrument that warrants more detailed description:
In the traditional sense, Rick Froberg does not have a good voice. It’s best described as a bark, a yelp, or a howl; it’s reedy, a bit adenoidal, and often sounds strangled when he reaches for those high notes. And, yet, it is captivating and ideally suited for the music; he knows how to use his voice. In short, while he does not have a good voice, per se, Froberg is a great singer, and that distinction makes all the difference because–eight-octave range my ass–if a singer doesn’t know how to use his/her voice, what’s the point? In this way, Christina Aguilera is a terrible singer (case in point: the “look-what-I-can-do!” raping of “Lady Marmalade”), and Froberg is a great one (case in point: every Hot Snakes song).
Oh right, the songs. Well, in the spirit of “less is more,” I’ll describe two:
“10th Planet” is a highlight of Hot Snakes’ debut, Automatic Midnight. The guitars play a game of one-upmanship in the opening seconds, and the tension keeps rising, suggestive of an imminent showdown. The tension finally bursts, and the band sounds like the last gang in town as they take the offensive. We’re privy to a reckless tour through a city of ghosts, propelled by a one-note death march and a pummeling back-beat. The song threatens to overwhelm the listener until the uplifting chords of the break chime in, but any elation is grounded by Froberg’s sober declaration: “It’s a dead, dead, dead town.” Froberg’s lyrics manage to be both corrosively dead pan and, at times, maddeningly elliptical. You know he’s pissed at something, at someone, but exactly who or what isn’t clear. And whether he’s being sarcastic or earnest…well, it could really be either. Or both. “10th Planet,” like many Hot Snakes songs, is beautiful in the way that Larry Clark’s early photography or Paul Bowle’s short story fiction is beautiful–a striking combination of bleak fury and detached sympathy.
Hot Snakes’ last studio album, Audit In Progress, closes with a surprise. “Plenty for All” is the poppiest song they’ve ever written, and fittingly contains the most overtly optimistic lyrics that Froberg has ever sung. Over a fist-pumping rhythm section and a ridiculously catchy clarion guitar line, Froberg berates the narcissism of this generation and implores us to look beyond ourselves: “Your patrons, your guests/Manufactured phonies hung-up on themselves/Bring ‘em all with you/It’s all for the best/We got space out here in the West.” This song sums up the lyrical tone of Hot Snakes’ songs with equal measures of caustic indignation and resigned compassion, and it’s heartening to hear them quit on a note like that. Speaking of which…
When Hot Snakes quit in the summer of 2004, it was done matter-of-factly and without any explanation beyond the fact that the band simply wanted to stop. They made a last tour of North America before Froberg posted a brief hand-written farewell note on their site that, somewhat aptly, manages to come off as both affectionate and cynical:
“Thanks for sharing this with us. We’ll miss this–and you. We made a few great friends. I hope things get better, but they probably won’t. Love you still. -Rick Froberg”
Since they called it quits, Reis and Froberg started new bands, Reis having started The Night Marchers with original Hot Snakes drummer Jason Kourkonis, and Froberg is now with Obits. Both groups played their first shows this year, and while they’re predictably good, that indefinable magic that permeates Reis and Froberg’s music–and distilled to perfection with Hot Snakes–is missed. Hot Snakes made it look easy, and if you break it down, it doesn’t look like much without modifiers: three peerless albums, two incendiary live releases, a faultless live show and–poof!–they were gone. In regards to Hot Snakes and their prerogative, John Reis summed it up back in 2001 in an interview with Punk Planet: “We’re driven by the explosive sounds of punk rock and rock ‘n’ roll music. In this day and age, where it seems like style is so much more important than actual substance, you have rock ‘n’ roll in blackface–it’s all become self-parody. You have just nauseating amounts of irony added and complete lacking of anything meaningful or anything that has that explosive quality… it’s kind of like going into an Old West town where they made westerns–you see all these buildings, but behind them is nothing. You have these big, heavy sounds, but there’s nothing of meaning or substance to anchor that to anything, so it’s just floating bullshit being shoved down your throat.”
Hot Snakes are officially “sung” heroes now. Their work is still out there, so go and get it. Pass it along if you feel so inclined. This blunt tool of language might as well be used to sing of the things that bring us happiness, and hopefully I’ve done that here. Spread the joy. Like Amiri Baraka said, “You got to be a spirit. You got to sing–don’t be no ghost.”
Frank Tovey: A Retrospective in Sound and Vision
To describe Frank Tovey, aka Fad Gadget, it’s best to start with the things the musical explorer wasn’t. Born in 1956, Tovey began his career in the late-1970s and remained active through the ’90s (passing away suddenly in 2002). Though he kicked around London during the heyday of punk and post-punk, his 10 albums–four as Fad Gadget, six as Tovey–aren’t quite angry or angular enough to fit inside those categories (not neatly, at any rate). More often, he’s presented as a synth-pop pioneer, even as he turned towards folk and trip-hop in his final years. Compared to label mates Depeche Mode and Mute founder Daniel Miller’s The Normal, Tovey is a trickier figure–a trickster, if you will. Some selections may be dark or experimental, but they’re unusually warm for such synthetic creations. They’re not quite gloomy enough for the goth crowd, and not quite slick enough for commercial radio–though signature number “Collapsing New People” deserved to conquer the airwaves. Tovey also collaborated with Non’s Boyd Rice and Wire’s Robert Gotobed and developed a reputation for highly theatrical performances.
Ultimately, his new four-disc compilation, A Retrospective in Sound and Vision, is as accessible as it is eclectic. It’s also a model retrospective in that Mute compiled the set with affection and an unprecedented degree of archival access. On the two CDs, singles mix with demos, side projects, and fan favorites, while the DVDs feature videos, a pair of concerts, and a documentary (the booklet includes liner notes from Marc Almond and photographer/filmmaker Anton Corbijn). By dodging every designation around, Fad Gadget may be difficult to describe, but Frank Tovey’s music has hardly aged a day. Highly recommended.
