LYDIA LUNCH RETROVIRUS TOUR DATES featuring Weasel Walter (guitar) Algis Kizys (bass) Bob Bert (drums)
The band will peform a brutal survey of Lydia's material from past and present, including songs from Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, 13.13, 8-Eyed Spy and Shotgun Wedding.
Nov 8 - Los Angeles - FIDM Museum Grand Hope Park Nov 9 - San Francisco - Verdi Club Nov 11 - Los Angeles - The Echo Nov 12 - Toronto - Wrongbar Nov 13 - Hamilton - This Ain't Hollywood Nov 15 - Brooklyn - Knitting Factory
Lydia Lunch: Queen of Siam photo session, circa 1980
Archival releases springing forth headily from bygone eras somehow make me infinitely more excited than anything being released from the present morass of overkill we currently endure. At the risk of sounding like a moldy fig, there are many elements missing from much of today's music in terms of what I want to hear. Punk came during the Seventies and said "Everyone can do it!" Unfortunately, everyone did it and now one has to dig even harder and longer to find contemporary jewels in this all-encompassing, instantly accessible, post-categorized modern mess.
Noh Mercy were a female duo based in San Francisco during the late Seventies. Their music is powerfully minimal, most often stripped-down to the barest elements of voice and drums, sometimes peppered with raw keyboards or guitar. Anyone familiar with this obscure group probably knew them from a pair of iconoclastic tracks appearing on the murky, elusive Earcom 3 double seven inch compilation on UK post-punk imprint Fast Product Records. The brazenly succinct assault entitled "Caucasian Guilt" from that record featured a panache and solidity which set it apart from the more atavistic musical standard of their New York No Wave counterparts; vocalist Esmerelda's vitriol showed impressive subtlety and range matching the kinetic, precise drum tattoos of co-conspirator Tony Hotel. This was a band as truly talented as they were weird.
The 2012 archival Noh Mercy release on Superior Viaduct begins with "Caucasian Guilt" and includes the other Earcom comp track ("Revolutionary Spy"), eight never-before-heard tracks from the same July 1979 session as well as four stunning live cuts from an August 1979 concert. The studio tracks were recorded in a basement, but they are appealingly transparent and unadorned, revealing the naked focus of the duo's performances. These ten tracks are based on raw invention, not production. Modern bands should take heed of this: ideas before technology. This is why the old shit sounds so good, folks.
After four tracks of the expected drum/vocal duets (including an amusing deconstruction of the Lennon/McCartney chestnut "Girl"), the throbbing "Lines" arrives as a refreshing contrast with Esmerelda essaying coldly over outbursts of percussive slide guitar racket and sour synthesizer. The following "Bloodhound Blues" is built on a foundation of jazzy tom-tom drum figures and squishy, phased keyboard chords. It is formally traditional in many ways, allowing the passionate vocals to run rampant. Unlike many New Wave poseurs of the time, Esmerelda could really belt out a tune with serious confidence. The melodramatic vocals are impossible to miss and her performances here are intense and colorful. "Cross The Line" and "The Meek Shall Inherit The Mess" continue in the fuller sounding, keyboard drenched mode, while "The Meek . . ." incorporates odd rhythmic meters and tempo changes that reveal musical ambition pushing beyond the other tracks in the "studio" set.
Anyone buying the vinyl version will miss out hard by not getting the four killer live tracks included only on the CD version. The other day I heard a clerk at a record store tell somebody wryly that "vinyl is back." Really? What I see is mindless clones paying 30 bucks for lame back-catalog bullshit that used to be in the dollar bin for decades before this dubious "revival" began. I can't believe how much money people are payign for this shit because they've been told "vinyl is back." Whatever. Congratulations, record industry. You have found a new wave of materialistic lemmings to wallet-rape. I guess, you know, records are, uh, "bigger" or whatever, so, go for it. All I know is I get to savor the frigidly perfect CD audio with the bonus tracks in my lonely little dungeon, sans all the pops and clicks and "warmth" some of you will inflict on yourselves in the dubious name of analog purity.
"Furious" kicks off the quartet of live tracks in a deranged, stop-start construction of barely-contained lyrical outrage and keyboard noise. The oddly idealistic anti-bouncer screed "Storm The Stage" ("...And those dudes with the flashlights/Yelling 'Stay in your seat'/Knock 'em out of your way/Kick 'em with your feet/'Cuz you'll be on that stage!") bubbles along amusingly without drums, Hotel manning an aquatically phased guitar in addition to vocals and keyboards. "Wicked Sister" and "Ode To Frances Farmer" operate vaguely within the same repetitive/motorik realm as beloved period L.A. synth-punks TheScreamers, but once again Esmerelda's impressive pipes outclass the competition on the former while the vividly catchy dissonance of the latter instrumental is compositionally distinctive on its own terms.
Noh Mercy hit the skids and went their separate ways by 1980 without releasing a proper album. This great release expands the group's reputation quite ably with careful audio mastering/restoration of the old master tapes and a beautiful layout featuring great photos, liner notes and lyrics. Anyone interested in the top tier of so-called "post-punk" bands needs to run to this release post-haste.
Tony Hotel, and Esmerelda, in male and female drag, respectively.
I guess I'm primarily known as a drummer at this point. I do play them. I like to play them really fast most of the time. That's just what I do. It's what I like and what I want to hear. But I also play guitar. It was my first instrument. Don't hold it against me. I know the guitar has lost a lot of respect as an instrument over the course of the last few decades, but bear with me for a moment . . . the tool is generally not the problem, but rather, what one does with it.
I started playing guitar when I was about 9 years old. I had a plastic KISS guitar at one point and I remember being in my room with it, trying to figure out some way to notate licks. This was pretty cute since I had no concept of tuning, melody, rhythm, notation or anything else useful in actually accomplishing this task. It's hazy, but for all I know, I just drew some weird, random dots on a blank page and thought somehow this might help me play the same thing again some day. I desired musical form, but obviously it didn't really work out at the time.
Soon after, my parents gave me a crappy little acoustic guitar as a Christmas present. I started taking a few lessons (in a group setting with a ton of other kids) which focused on learning the most basic chord forms possible. You know, like the kinds of dumb major chords generic folkies play at coffeehouses? Chords like "G", "C" and "D" which utilize most or all of the strings on the guitar. These chords basically enable you to play shitty songs like "Louie Louie" or "Wild Thing". I knew something wasn't right with this method and quickly blew off the klutzy kiddie khord klatch, winging it on my own. I didn't like stupid-ass songs like "Big Rock Candy Mountain" and "On Top of Old Smokey" anyhow.
By age 11, I was beginning to branch out into punk rock and other stuff that didn't get played on the radio. A friend of mine had one of those older brothers who listened to weird stuff like the Ramones, New York Dolls, Patti Smith, Warren Zevon and Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen. As a result, I was into "Love Stinks" by the J. Geils Band WAAAY before "The Wedding Singer" busted it open to all the poseurs. It was obvious that my tastes were beginning to head towards pure idiosyncrasy. My discoveries were governed by my gut, divorced from social conventions and peer approval. If it sounded good, I was into it. I was starting to become very opinionated about what was "good" and "bad" musically. For some reason I wanted my music increasingly weirder in quality and I didn't care who agreed. This attitude would never change.
Like many of my generation, I was mesmerized by the genesis of MTV. In those awesome early rock videos, something seemed preternaturally cool about bass players. Maybe it was the low, gutteral sound of the instrument or maybe it was how cool John Taylor from Duran Duran looked in the "Planet Earth" video. I decided I wanted to play bass. My parents came to me with an ultimatum: if I took lessons and actually learned the thing, they would get me a bass guitar. We cut the deal, and they bought me some cheap, short-scale bass small enough for my tiny kiddie paws.
At my first lesson, the teacher handed me a pick, a suggestion met with dismay from me. Part of the appeal was that stupid way the MTV bass players draped their hands over the thing and plucked the strings with their fingers. She said, "Well, if you're going to learn the bass my way, you will play with a pick." At the time I couldn't see the cause and effect, but I'm glad I did learn picking. I now possess a demonically fast right hand I certainly wouldn't have had otherwise. Initially I struggled with the concept of reading music. The pitches and rhythms just didn't make sense to me. I got so frustrated early on, that I started crying and threatening to give up. Luckily my parents forced me to continue. I kept grinding away at my studies.
That year I acquired a tacky little electronic pickup which I slapped on my old acoustic guitar. I quickly discovered feedback and the pleasures of free improvisation. Now, I had no clue that improvisation was an idiom or that anybody else in the world did this stuff professionally or otherwise, but I would spend a lot of time in my room feeding the guitar back through my small-wattage Sears tube amp. I loved the distortion and the density of the surging sound. I was basically becoming addicted to noise(making). I began fashioning crudely overdubbed recordings by building up successive tracks, bouncing from one tape recorder to another, resulting in the lowest fidelity possible.
After a couple of years, I had gained a bit of skill playing and I branched out to jamming with some drummer friend of a friend. We were basically free improvising; what we did had very little form. Essentially I would start with some little riff I codged from whatever music I was working on in my lessons and then we would just branch off from there and make a lot of racket. I remember being plugged directly into this kid's parents' stereo, which was pushed far past the edge of pure fuzz. It's probably sounded like an extremely remedial version of Ruins or something! We didn't know what the hell we were doing, but we knew we wanted to play fast, loud and crazy. Hell, we may have only jammed once, but I was inspired to name the group "Blue Flame" and I even drew a crude logo. We never played together again but this band thing was something I definitely wanted to pursue.
Chernobyl Chyldren, 1986. Left to right: Bob Belt, Alex Hamilton, Erik Byrne, Vince Bucci, Weasel Walter and a little pal.
I joined my first "real" band in 1986, towards the end of the first wave of U.S. Hardcore. During that era my sense of individuality and contrariness had come full bloom and I was more than ready to express my alienation from the status quo, loudly and defiantly. Era-appropriate, the group was tagged Chernobyl Chyldren and we played grinding punk trash. My dad made me a goofy looking bass I designed - sort of like a Gibson Thunderbird but more lopsided - out of spare parts. I ran the thing through a DeArmond Square Wave Generator distortion pedal into my trusty Sears tube amp. We played short songs made of two or three chords and sang about the kind of stuff rebellious, cynical teenagers might sing about in the mid-Eighties: you know - suicide, masturbation, zombies. The good stuff.
By Spring 1987, Chernobyl Chyldren had dissipated, and a scaled-down trio version called Javelin Bats emerged from the ruins. We were influenced pretty heavily by No Wave and did some covers of Contortions, 8-Eyed Spy, Bad Brains and Flipper tunes in addition to our own noisy, cacophonous originals. At this point in time I was playing a crappy Fender Stratocaster copy in addition to my homemade bass. The three of us traded instruments on every song and that was the beginning of my career as a drummer, despite the fact that my rhythm sucked and everyone told me so as often as they could.
By 1988, I had saved enough money from my part-time job as a library page to buy a Tascam Porta One four-track cassette recorder and blew off trying to play in bands, opting to spend time creating my own little mini-symphonies through overdubbing. I was into Free Jazz and improvisation, No Wave and all kinds of weird stuff nobody else around seemed to get, so, I would just cook up my own hermetically sealed music down in the basement for my own pleasure and comfort. I would a lot of spend time emulating my favorite guitarists: Arto Lindsay, Greg Ginn, Sonny Sharrock, Lydia Lunch, Bern Nix, Derek Bailey, Pete Cosey, Henry Kaiser. Ultimately the distillation of these players' disparate approaches, tempered by my crude lack of technique, added up to a personal sound that I've never really been able to shrug off. I'm no virtuoso, but I definitely sound like me. Some of the finer moments from my adolescent solo recording experiments can be heard on the Savage Land Records CD "Early Recordings 1988-1991". Oddly, I believe most of it stands up pretty well. It's all very raw, but the core ideals of my body of work were fully there from the beginning.
In 1990, I moved to Chicago, ostensibly to go to college. The first ugEXPLODE Records release was tracked on New Year's Eve 1990/1991 featuring an overdubbed duet with myself on guitar and drums. I sold dozens of cassettes of that cacophonous tape in the day, but never really thought to reissue it. By late 1991, The Flying Luttenbachers had formed, with myself on drums. Drumming would continue to be my main instrumental focus for years by default - it seemed drummers with my sensibilities were hard to find, so I always had opportunities to focus on that role. By 1993, in addition to the Luttenbachers and various ad hoc improvisational meetings, I was playing bass in a Motley Crue tribute band called 2 Fast 4 Love, whose repertoire consisted solely of that group's debut album played in order, plus an encore of "Shout At The Devil" and "Looks That Kill". 2F4L also included then-Luttenbachers guitarist Dylan Posa. The four of us were equally obsessed and committed to replicating the spazzy, coked-out vibe of early Crue to the fullest. I learned those basslines note for note and copied Nikki Sixx's outfit from the "Live Wire" video on a shoestring budget. A funny clip of us improvising an interview appeared in the 2000 tribute band documentary "Tributary" by auteur Russ Forster. I saw no contradiction bewteen playing glam metal and doing modernist improvised music at the same time. I still don't.
In 1994, I briefly joined the band Cornelius Gomez on bass guitar. The group, who had a 7" single out on the mythic Bulb Records label, originally hailed from Michigan and was led by the highly contrary guitarist Ricky Sutton. When Ricky came to town, he recruited me on bass (an '80s Japanese Fender Squire P-bass with the frets ripped out) and Math multi-instrumentalist Jodie Mecanic on drums to back him up for a spell before the two of them would peel off without me and form Duotron. The three of us also appeared once in the original full-band lineup of Quintron, before the fourth member would adopt that name for his own persona and go solo. A videotape of this debut Quintron gig with an opening set by Cornelius Gomez exists in my archives.
Bobby Conn band on tour 1998. left to right: Monica BouBou, Bobby Conn, Cho-Yun Li, Weasel Walter (bass), Coldman Walker.
During the summer of '94, I was also slinging my axe in several highly camp units, namely Vanilla and Vagiant. Vanilla was an extrapolation of the band Strawberry, a Wicker Park-based unit centered around three creative geniuses known as Cho-Yun Li, Eugene "XXX" Pomeroy and Jesus Maria. The first time I laid eyes on the miracle of Strawberry was Halloween 1993. They looked insane and sounded even crazier, a squalid melange of glam/punk/noise comprised of shambolically inept singing and playing over hyperactive backing/rhythm tracks. It was love at first sight. I immediately became the band's "roadie" and confidante, shoehorning myself into the complex, surreal mythos the whole band ate and breathed. In June '94 I made my first appearance with them under the pseudonym "Johnny Holocaust", ripping scathing leads from my dayglo painted '65 Fender Mustang. We would play many loud, chaotic gigs over the next few years to very few people. We were extremely self-satisfied in our efforts and would inevitably return home after a gig to stay up all night watching the videotape of the performance repeatedly.
Vagiant was formed in the same period. Initially it was a concept band vaguely based off of the legendary synth-punk combo Nervous Gender with a twist: we were death metal influenced aliens coming to earth to destroy the human race with rock and roll. The first gig by the band in April '94 featured myself on Casio SK-1, issuing distorted quasi-riffs over drum machine backing while lead singer A. Fukkir (a.k.a. Nondor Nevai) declared genocidal mottos over the top. It was a mess, but a funny one. By our second gig, I had ditched the synth for a wall of guitar fuzz, looking for a more visceral personal reward. Nondor would have preferred to keep the keyboard, but my rockist tendancies won out. It's pretty tough to wail on a Casio. We played four gigs total (including one in Madison that was a hilarious disaster) and recorded some basic tracks for an album, but eventually fizzled out. Two videos of the group existed: a tape of the first gig is currently buried in the archives of the late former Luttenbacher Bill Pisarri; and the other one, documenting the second gig, is lost. I finished the rough mixes in 2000 and released the Vagiant album in an extremely limited capacity.
Vanilla eked on through the fall of 1995. I really liked what we were doing, but it just didn't click with anybody but us. We were into wearing the most outrageous, disgusting outfits we could individually scare up, including stuff off the ground. We were extremely loud and tasteless, the entire frontline trading off harrowing vocals at the absolute edge of our lung capacities. We did a lot of private photo sessions and made gigantic fliers out of the images which we would paste up all over the neighborhood, back when you could actually get away with postering still. We tracked a full-length album in March 1995, from which an extremely limited 7" single of two songs barely emerged. I don't remember exactly why we packed it in, but the arson of our rehearsal space sure didn't help matters. Vanilla died as we lived - in a blaze of unhinged insanity and chaos. Almost every gig by the band was videotaped, but these tapes are currently presumed missing. I have a few grainy VHS dubs of what I consider some of the lesser performances.
After I ditched the original lineup of the Flying Luttenbachers in fall 1994, I did a string of solo shows under the band name, featuring myself playing guitar and saxophone over overdubbed backing tracks. It was scrappy, but reflected the more metal/noise influenced direction I intended to move the project towards. Another full band line-up came together in mid-1995 which eventually recorded the pivotal "Revenge" and "Gods of Chaos" albums.
Not long before the last Vanilla show in October 1995, I had formed Lake Of Dracula with Marlon Magas from Couch and Heather M. of the Scissor Girls. My guitar stylings in this group were in a more no-wave vein than most of the previous units. I strictly avoided bar chord cliches and went for simplistic, angular modernism. We had a good two year run and made a classic full-length LP as well as playing a bunch of wild, memorable shows and touring the West Coast in 1997 before we broke up.
Lake Of Dracula, Fireside Bowl, Chicago. September 24, 1996.
A joke band I played guitar with starting in late '95 was a unit called The Cowboys, featuring Devil Bell Hippies genius Martin Billheimer on vocals. Our modus operandi was to appear to be the most inept classic rock cover band of all time. Our rhythm track was a metronome, feebily mic'd through the house p.a. system. I played the songs as poorly and as mock-nervously as I could, executing the exact same lame beginner blues-scale guitar solo in the middle of every tune. Martin barely knew the words to most of the songs, so he would stumble along until the choruses kicked in. It was laughably pathetic and we tried our hardest to sell it as sincere. Our second and last gig was done under a true "preaching to the unconverted" situation: on a bill with four macho rockabilly bands. Ha ha ha. They hated us (predictably) and wanted to KILL us. Martin actually got scared and bailed, so I started crying on stage, which made the greasers actually pity us! It was all an act and I remember the acute pain of holding in my laughter when we played those sets.
In 1996, I started playing some guitar in Bobby Conn's band. I had already done time in his ranks on drums and bass, so I guess this instrument was next! The first time, I was playing wiry, atonal "funk" guitar during the set we had devised. We got bored of that and briefly transformed into a fake "hardcore" band called Tha'bortions, another excursion into jokey method-acting. Essentially we came up with a bunch of titles and two chord songs, which Bobby would improvise agitprop gibberish over before the whole thing came to a grinding halt. It was a biting parody of the generic "political" punk bands of the time and it was well-received by the crowd. I played guitar on the tracks "United Nations" and "White Bread" on Bobby's second album "Rise Up" and toured the U.S. and Europe with him on bass guitar during 1998.
In 1997, Dylan Posa, Scott Gibbons (a.k.a. Eugene from Strawberry) and I embarked on a two-year-long "reinactment" of classic UK New Wave group Adam and the Ants' chronology. What this entailed was replicating the setlists, personnel changes and recording sessions of the original band twenty years to the date as long as we could stand to do it. We looked to scummy bootlegs for our source material, learning lots of tunes which never made it to official Ants releases. For a while I was the guitarist in this project, but after a spell, it became clear the role of drummer was on me, since I was the only person who cared enough to be detail-oriented in the transcription of killer Ants drummer Dave Barbarossa's creative fills. We wound up issuing two faux "Peel Sessions" on the correct dates as well as re-recording and reissuing the band's first single in the proper time frame. As it dragged on, the joke became time-consuming and less and less well-attended, so I finally called it quits after a few dozen gigs. Most people wouldn't have even recognized much of the material we played in the band because our obscure setlists predated almost all of the songs that made up their first album! Every show we played was video taped.
In 1998, I played a live gig on bass with Nondor's black metal band Aborted Christ Childe. I also laid down some tracks on a 2001 ACC recording session which resulted in a hitherto unissued single.
In June 1998, my joke-rock guitar jones came roaring back when I founded the illustrious full-band atonal karaoke disaster known as The Chicago Sound with U.S. Maple guitarist Todd Rittmann and some of the guys in and around the long-running "comedy grind" combo 7000 Dying Rats. The idea was that we would get really wasted and revel in our FM radio roots by playing no-tuning-allowed "covers" of classic rock songs while listening to the originals, blasting almost incoherently through the stage monitors. Everybody in the band just ate it up and over the years our ranks grew to the point where we had numerous lead singers as well as two entire drum kits on stage. There's something inherently hilarious about hearing familiar music slaughtered so heinously which resonates with people. I made a shambolic solo cover of Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" for a 2001 compilation album on Three One G Records and that track was wildly popular. I think the Chicago Sound (as well as the later franchises The San FranciscoSound and The Pittsburgh Sound) predated the St. Sanders "shred" video Youtube trend in a healthy way. The Chicago Sound did a gig just a few years ago and I'd love to start a New York chapter, but it's a little tough to get a decent gig here where we can really fuck people up . . .
The Chicago Sound, Fireside Bowl, Chicago, January 15, 2003.
I made brief re-appearances with both 2 Fast 4 Love and Strawberry on bass and guitar in mid-1999. That era was pretty tough for me personally and musically. I was really flailing around and nothing was seeming to work out too well in my life. I tried to start a harsh no wave band called 20,000,000 Volts in October 1999, but it didn't work out. Even though I had stalwarts Bobby Conn on guitar and erstwhile local avant percussionist Michael Zerang manning the drums, it just didn't pan out. Later that month I got in the van with the iconoclastic "Free Glam" lineup of To Live and Shave in L.A. featuring Tom Smith, Rat Bastard, Nondor Nevai and Misty Martinez, and the five of us steadily decimated a string of Midwest and East Coast cities. On that tour, my look had coalesced into a sort of Richie Stotts/DeNiro "Taxi Driver" blue mohican with a Doc Savage jodphurs/ripped shirt combo, resulting in maximum apocalypse stylishness. I mutilated my cheap 12-string electric and fretless bass on the tour as well as honking through a C-Melody sax and operating the smoke machine. The band was a cabal of pure uncontrolled mayhem. We got on stage each night and just tore it up. The final night of the jaunt at the Cooler in NYC was particularly torrid, and the various cognoscenti who were there left with an indelible impression. In bizarre twist of fate, the same unit, minus singer Tom Smith, toured the East Coast in August 2000 under the intentionally misleading nomer To Live and Shave in L.A. 2, causing prickly outrage in certain subterranean circles. Eventually a CD under the name of the rebel group featuring recordings from both the 1999 and 2000 tours emerged, radically re-shaped/re-channelled/re-edited by myself.
To Live and Shave in L.A., 6 ODUM, Chicago, October 22, 1999.
Due to extenuating circumstances, I wound up on the road alone as The Flying Luttenbachers during October 2002. Essentially I was performing the most recent live set solo on bass guitar, saxophone and electronics over backing tracks. This one-man Luttenbachers phase resulted in the rigorous, hypercomplex 2003 album "Systems Emerge From Complete Disorder". At the time, I was practicing my parts about four hours a day to prepare for the shows. It was probably the most sustained, intense practicing I had ever done in my life. I'm glad I did it. I remember playing a Troubleman Unlimited CMJ bill at North Six in Brooklyn and looking down to see Glenn Branca headbanging in the front row. I was going nuts, triggering the smoke machine and jumping around like a madman while playing some of the most technically involved music I have ever attempted like it was good old rock and roll. Sometimes practice does make perfect.
The Flying Luttenbachers: "kkringg number one", Fireside Bowl, Chicago, November 8, 2002
I was busy as ever when I made the transition from Chicago to the Bay Area in 2003. I focused on XBXRX and The Flying Luttenbachers as well as stints with Curse of the Birthmark, Murder Murder, Total Shutdown, Errase Errata and others. My public guitar playing took a backseat for a long time at that point. I did formulate the 2004 Luttenbachers album "The Void" on guitar in my office before handing the demos off to Ed Rodriguez and Mike Green to essentially learn the material note-for-note. In 2006, I founded Cellular Chaos as a sort of "guitar fantasy" band. I had recently started playing drums in free improvised settings again, but the guitar bug eventually bit me and I envisioned the group as a freaky backup unit for my angular, disjointed wailings. We did a few gigs, but the band didn't really gel, so I put it to rest until I moved to New York in December 2009. The rest of the story is in progress as we speak. Cellular Chaos circa 2012 is fairly orderly and song-oriented at this point. I now use my guitar chops for structural purposes as opposed to entropy in the band now. Before I hit the Big Apple, I also skronked around with Mark E. Miller under the Toy Killers tag a handful of times and played some guitar on a William Hooker live album.
Rat Bastard Experience at the Stone, NYC - August 12, 2011. "Sonic Youth Afterparty"
When I got to New York, I wound up intermittently adding some 6-string accents to Talibam!'s live sets. It seems like if I merely show up to one of their gigs, they pretty much force me to come on stage and play. Celluar Chaos version 2 was up and running in embryonic mode by January 2010. At one point I stopped playing drums in the Marc Edwards/Weasel Walter Group and took up the bass chair, which I remain in to this day. Every now and then I perform on guitar with Rat Bastard when he's in town and I recently started an improv/prog unit with a couple of guys called Mangulator, which I play gnarly 6-string fretless bass in.
So there you have it. The next time you hear that I play guitar, don't act so surprised. Yes, I play the drums a lot, but now you know my tedious labyrinthine, hyperactive history as a primo axe slinger.
Vintage Bush Tetras: Pat Place, Dee Pop, Cynthia Sley, Laura Kennedy (RIP)
Tonight I found myself in the cheesy bowels of Bowery Electric in Manhattan, in the front row watching Bush Tetras sprint through an inspired set of their classic material in tribute to their recently departed original bassist Laura Kennedy. It was a loose, heartfelt performance and it provoked my thoughts. The act of being in a band is an extremely tribal one and an event like the one I witnessed tonight reinforced my notion that when the dust settles, the band itself remains at the core of the ritual when all the hangers-on recede into the woodwork. The crowd was small, but did it really need to be bigger? No.
I first heard Bush Tetras in 1987. I remember saving my kiddie allowance to get a copy of their excellent ROIR live cassette release "Wild Things" at my local record store. The band were the direct offspring of the original New York no wave scene, with guitarist Pat Place having done time in the classic lineup of James Chance's Contortions. The group were somewhat more dancefloor friendly than the archetypal no wave bands, but maintained a challenging mesh of dissonant, bracing guitar over a bouncy foundation of rock-solid drumming. One of the first things that hit me about Bush Tetras' sound was the unique vocals of Cynthia Sley: her lascivious, off-key yawp is definitely a love-it-or-hate-it proposition and it definitely took time to grow on me. The ROIR tape was full of evocative monosyllabic titles like "Damned", "Voodoo", "Jaws", "Rituals", "Enemies" and "Stare". This was dark, squalid fare. I was hooked.
After their auspicious live debut in February 1980, Bush Tetras quickly rose to the top of the NYC club scene hot on the heels of their debut 7" on 99 Records featuring the hauntingly minimalistic, Billboard-charting hit "Too Many Creeps". Within a year of forming, the foursome toured Europe and the US extensively. The walloping "Punch Drunk", taken from a live Februrary 1981 UK performance included on the obscure compilation album "Still Swimming" (Stiff Records US), showcased a new-found muscularity and confidence in their sound. Their sketchy, unfinished-sounding 1981 studio EP "Rituals" (Fetish/Stiff Records) was even "produced" by then-Clash drummer Topper Headon. They seemed destined for some degree of stardom, but things started to fizzle out (as sometimes happens to the best of them) around 1983 when the original rhythm section departed. Bush Tetras never made a full-length album in their prime, but luckily numerous compilations of various live and studio tracks exist, including the excellent compendium of rare tracks, "Tetrafied" (Thirsty Ear).
Laura Kennedy. Photo by Joe Stevens
The band reformed in the mid-90s, cutting a grunge-tinged record for Tim/Kerr Records. Soon after, Laura Kennedy was permanently replaced by fledgling four-stringer Julia Murphy and the group continued to re-emerge sporadically, with a significantly higher profile during the last half decade or so. Unfortunately Kennedy fought for a long time against health issues stemming from Hepatitis C, so many of the BT's recent performances took on a benefit-themed air. She passed away on November 14, 2011 in Minneapolis.
One major thing I noticed about Bush Tetras tonight was their inextricable link as friends. They hilariously argued on stage about the set order like brothers and sisters fighting at the dinner table, shooting volleys of eye-rolls and snickers instead of mashed potatoes and peas. In performance, each member of the band operates in their own private microcosm: on either end of the stage, Pat Place wrenched obtuse clusters from her guitar while wandering around impatiently while Julia Murphy headbanged relentlessly, coaxing out angular ostinatos in careful controlled gestures. At the rear position, Dee Pop smashed his drums with barely controlled fury and frontperson Cynthia Sley intoned her macabre lyrics, swaying autonomously with eyes closed or laying down colorful accents on various percussion. The short, but excellent set included "Cowboys In Africa", "Making A Mistake", "Boom", "Too Many Creeps", "Can't Be Funky", "Voodoo" and "(You Taste Like) The Tropics". The music was very driving and loud. Luckily, Dee Pop never forgot that drums exist to be punished and when one does so, rock and roll tends to come roaring out of them a lot easier!
The audience mostly consisted of friends of the band. It was a definite tribute event for Laura and not a routine "gig". I felt lucky to be there. The band's music and legacy are important to me and I was glad I could pay some respects, as meager as that might be (incidentally, I did donate to Kennedy's medical costs a few years ago). After the set, I mostly sat there alone and pondered quietly, despite the fact that it might have been an excellent chance for me to hob-knob with various luminaries and cognoscenti. Ultimately, I don't really try to force myself on people. I'm fine being alone. I'm used to being on the outside looking in. I don't want to insert myself in other people's scenes unless they want me there, and if they want me there, they'll let me know. I'm fine being a bystander in certain situations like this. I too operate in my own weird little microcosm, but sometimes it intersects with others.
A free stream/download of an edited version of the concert Bhob Rainey and I played together recently in New Orleans. Following are Bhob's notes:
"Weasel and I probably would have met, anyway, but the person who introduced us was our mutual friend, Bill Pisarri (RIP). In fact, the only time we played together prior to this outing was in 1999 with Bill and Greg Kelley (Greg and I drove 36 hours straight from a gig in San Francisco to make that show on time. It was at Myopic Books in Chicago. Total fee: $0. It was worth it. We also recorded two short tracks in Bill's apartment immediately upon our arrival, both of which appeared on our first Intransitive release, the title of which is too long to repeat here).
Anyway, Rob Cambre set up this show for Weasel and I at the Mudlark Public Theatre in New Orleans. Probably two of the ten people who heard about it thought, "That's an odd pairing," and by virtue of having that thought, they sucked for a short period of time. I mean, in 1999, there were plenty of people who thought that I was the quietest saxophone player ever, while an equal amount of people thought that Weasel was an enormous asshole (=not quiet, intelligent, musical, etc.). Chalk it up to those people being naive, but it's 2011 for Xmas's sake. Is there no intellectual progress in this civilization?
Anyway, this is what we did at the Mudlark. We like it. It's got a nice structure. We'd do it again. I hope you enjoy it, and Weasel probably hopes so, too."
released 20 December 2011 - Bhob Rainey - soprano saxophone/Weasel Walter - drums with Cree McCree - inciting and critique
In my teenage years during the late '80s, I was in a unique historical position to gain knowledge about real alternative music. I was in the right place, at the right time. Before the dawn of the internet, most of the tips I had on strange culture came from solitary research, primarily through various books and magazines. I was glued to reference tomes like the concisely crititcal "Trouser Press Guide to New Wave Records" and a bunch of other telephone-book thickness, dry-as-toast books whose titles now escape me. Compendiums of writing by people like Robert Christgau and Lester Bangs also contained big hints and clues as did magazines from the obscure (Forced Exposure, Chemical Imbalance, Butt Rag), middle ground (Option, Alternative Press) and newsstand (SPIN, Rolling Stone). I would spend hours at the public library looking for references to weird bands. If I came up with anything interesting, I immediately jotted it down for future use. I still have several notebooks I started around the age 11 which are devoted exclusively to lists of personnel and their discographies. From this obsessive research I was able to quickly discern a trajectory of development running through many genres of modern music. Instinctually, I was interested in dissonance. I wanted to hear "the wrong notes". I was equally interested in modern classical cacophony, wild free jazz, atonal no wave and anything else that sounded like a total mess. It all made sense to me and I craved hearing as much this stuff as I could find. Most other people were happy with whatever mainstream crap was foisted on them I but I always needed more than that. Luckily I took the initiative to look for it all.
By 1985, I was financially able to start buying a few of my own records here and there. The radio wasn't really cutting it for me anymore. I was too curious about the big universe of the underground scene out there. Luckily my podunk Illinois town had not one, but THREE killer record stores. One of the greatest aspects of record stores during the '80s was the phenomenon of the cut-out bin. Most records have always had a point where they just don't sell anymore, so the label would eventually be stuck with a lot of bulky stock that would never go anywhere. So, the labels would dump their overstock for pennies on the dollar to a cut-out dealer, just to get rid of it all. What this meant was, you could go to any record store - underground or mainstream - and find all these cool, weird sealed LPs for a few bucks that nobody wanted. Nobody, except for me, of course. I remember going into a totally square, corporate chain store in 1989, and buying a Dils live record for a dollar, for example. Hilarious. They didn't know what it was, and certainly didn't care. It was junk that just came in the box from the cut-out distributor as far as the store was concerned. Those were the days!
Trouser Press Guide: MEMORIZED
The 229-CLUB doubled as a very cutting edge place to buy punk records in addition to being a teeny-bopper new wave juice bar. My friends and I would meet there and play SST singles on their jukebox, taking frequent breaks to make fun of the goth wussies dancing to early Ministry or Yaz. Around 1985, I saw the epic 1981 new wave performance film "Urgh! A Music War" and I was blown away by the diversity and uniqueness of all the bands featured in the movie. Even the shitty ones were great! Something about the rawness of the music being performed totally live - watching all these musicians break an actual sweat - connected strongly with me. The highpoint for me was a totally crazed performance by the Cramps. Seeing their battle-scarred, monstrous looking singer Lux Interior lose his mind in front of a frothing crowd of drooling cretins was unlike anything I had ever seen. I immediately went out and bought their first album "Songs The Lord Taught Us" (IRS Records) and devoured it whole. I also spent a lot of time waiting for a specially-ordered copy of the "Urgh!" soundtrack to come in. For a while, 229-CLUB was a dependable source for locating records of bands I saw during those seedy, weary hours of late night cable TV. For example, I paid a paltry $2.99 for a copy of The Residents' twisted "Third Reich and Roll" LP (Ralph Records) after seeing the pioneering video from the album. Nobody else was interested: I just walked into the store and there it was, waiting for me! My first James Chance, Chrome, Eno, Kid Creole and the Coconuts, Magazine and Gun Club LPs came from that same lowly, neglected bin. The store also stocked many of the great early ROIR cassette releases by The Contortions, 8-Eyed Spy, Television,Bush Tetras, Glenn BrancaRichard Hell, Einsturzende Neubauten and the like. I believe I still have receipts for some of these purchases laying around in the archives. The mere acquisition of some of those records became serious landmarks for me at the time. One year, my grandmother asked me what I wanted for Christmas and sent her with a laundry list: The Birthday Party"Junk Yard", Sonic Youth"Bad Moon Rising" and Lydia Lunch"In Limbo". She did a pretty good job. They didn't have a copy of "Junk Yard", so the clerk recommended "Prayers On Fire" instead. Fair enough. By early 1987 or so, 229-CLUB shut its doors. I remember the last time I went there, after it had downscaled to another smaller location, and I bought a Chrome/Bauhaus videotape from them for a few bucks. It was a bittersweet moment, but luckily there were other places around to suss out.
Another store in my hometown featuring a wider scope of genres was the venerable Appletree Records. One might buy prog, jazz or mainstream rock records there in addition to the punk/new wave stuff. After the decline of 229-CLUB, I quickly installed myself at Appletree as the resident "young kid who knows too much about music". At one point I had typed up a flier featuring a list of records I was dying to hear which politely asked anyone who saw it to make me copies (featuring stuff like John Coltrane's "Ascension", 1/2 Japanese's "1/2 Gentlemen/Not Beasts", the Mars EP and other crazy shit I had read about). This sheet went straight up on the wall of Appletree Records, however I got no response. Ha ha ha. I was pretty desperate. There were a lot of records you would hear about and just couldn't find, no matter how hard you tried. Those were different times. My first Albert Ayler record (.99 cents!) came from that store as well as slabs by Material, Art Bears, Killing Joke, Lounge Lizards, Dead Kennedys, James Blood Ulmer, Flipper, Last Exit, Blurt, Shockabilly, Johnny Thunders, Pussy Galore and more. I would occasionally special order vinyl there, like the Antilles label stuff (Slits, "No New York", Ronald Shannon Jackson and the Decoding Society). I remember how psyched I would get when some crazy record I was looking for wound up there by chance. I recall barely containing my excitement when a sealed copy of Ornette Coleman's "Body Meta" surfaced in their bins for $3.99. I was buying all kinds of straight retail stuff there too like Stooges and Captain Beefheart records, early Frank Zappa remaster cassettes on Rykodisc and not-so-hot contemporary releases on the Shimmy Disc and Caroline labels. Give me a break, okay? Back in 1988, you had to buy the new Live Skull record! There was not much else coming out that didn't suck! The store had a lot of weird imports and I now kick myself for not snatching up some of the choice items. I remember finding Essential Logic singles and stuff like that in there for a few bucks a piece, but you couldn't buy it all, especially not on my meager budget. At one point I blew a chance to work there because I was a bit too naive and honest when it came to the "morals and integrity" section of their application. Adolescent note to self: instead of telling the truth, tell your employer what they want to hear when you want to get the job. Check.
The third cornerstone was a bizarre local institution tagged Toad Hall, which was a three-level affair in a house run by a couple of old weirdos, one of which was long rumored to have had a sex-change operation. They sold comics, movie posters, books, porn mags, old board games, video tapes, records - any kind of superfluous collector garbage you wanted/needed. I originally started going there around '84 or so, looking for cheap copies of '60 Jack Kirby Marvel Comics, but eventually realized they had some cool records there also. When I was young, my parents were reticent to let me go in the place alone. It was a bit creepy. I would head there on Saturday afternoons by myself and scour their basement for jems, emptying unlabeled and unpriced boxes of vinyl and spinning whatever I found on their crappy listening station turntables. In '87, I was absolutely dying to hear more James Chance and one afternoon I just waltzed in there, and used copies of the first Contortions and James White and the Blacks records were just sitting there for four bucks each! The musty used record shelves at Toad Hall were where I got some serious back history research done. I was digging out battered old Roxy Music, Hawkwind, Hampton Grease Band, Black Pearl, Last Poets, MC5, Funkadelic, Godz, Blue Cheer,Pere Ubu, Massacre and Material records - you name it. Lester Bangs would have been proud. My serious 8-track collection started there too after finding some '65 Coltrane, King Crimson, Yoko Ono, Beefheart, Mothers of Invention and other cool stuff like that. The real motherlode came in 1988 when I was on the prowl for free jazz. One day a ton of new boxes sat on the front table of the shop. Like a magnet to steel, I was drawn towards them. The jerk who hung around the store acting like he worked there (you know the type), told me to move along and that there would be nothing interesting to me there. I said, "how do you know?" He just smirked. I began to dig through the crates and my eyeballs just about popped out of my skull. Here were hundreds of classic free jazz records, and I had the first dibs! I frantically grabbed a bunch of the gems and sheepishly went to the counter to ask how much I was going to get wallet-raped for them. The guy at the counter, looked them over, shrugged his shoulders and said "four bucks each". I almost passed out from relief. I walked out of there with a clean copy of Sonny Sharrock's BYG record "Monkey Pockie Boo", a sealed copy of Ornette's "Science Fiction", Don Cherry/Ed Blackwell's "Mu Part One" and Archie Shepp's "Fire Music" for less than 20 bucks. I would be back in that place week after week for years, plunking my chump change on the counter and stocking up on Pharoah Sanders, Anthony Braxton, Paul Bley, Sun Ra, Roswell Rudd, Art Ensemble of Chicago, Jazz Composers Orchestra and that sort of thing. At the time, their normal jazz stacks were full of '70s Miles Davis records too, so I was buying funky used copies of "On The Corner", "Get Up With It" and "Agharta" for a few bucks each. Back then, you couldn't even give those records away. Toad Hall was continually getting in some extremely obscure used items. I don't know how they got there, or who the hell from my town might have bought them the first time around! Two complete mystery records were L. Voag's "The Way Out" and "No Cowboys" by Prag-Vec. I bought both of these because they sounded interesting, but it would take years and years to figure out what they actually were and who they were by. There was very little access to this kind of information back then. Imagine liking a record a lot and not knowing who it was by! That used to actually happen. For years after I left town for college, I would continue to return sporadically to Toad Hall and root through every last nook and cranny looking for one last hidden nugget.
My 1989 NMDS want list. None of these were in stock. EVER.
Another surefire source for underground releases back in the era was mail order. Essentially, one might spy a provocative ad and then send a few bucks or a self-addressed stamped envelope to get some kind of catalog back. I was ordering direct from labels like ROIR (the hallowed cassette-only label), Subterranean Records (home of Flipper and other West Coast noisemakers) and Ralph Records (The Residents, et al.). A lot of the weirder, more non-idiomatic music I was looking for came from tuned-in independent music hubs like Systematic and NMDS. Their catalogs were like bibles to me. I would absorb the descriptions of the groups and their releases, chewing it all up and carefully determining what to send away for with my paltry allowance. You always had to send a big list of alternates to these places and hope you got what you wanted because generally most items went in and out of stock at random. It was always a big kick to get that box of LPs in the mail, opening it and digging through to see what came. Sometimes the distros would even throw in free stuff for kicks. I was ordering early Elliott Sharp records from Systematic for cheap as well as various unknown noise rock stuff. NMDS, founded by Carla Bley and located in New York City, sent me a massive catalog with a Keith Haring cover one year, supplying me with a direct line to bizarre slabs by Ornette Coleman, DNA, Borbetomagus, Kip Hanrahan, Ronald Shannon Jackson, Jayne Cortez, Sedition Ensemble and more. I think the place was bankrupt by '89 or '90, but browsing through their catalog these days, is like scanning a rare records list. Oh, if I had only bought those Arthur Doyle and Milford Graves records when they were only 8 bucks each!
I am glad I came to age in an era which didn't offer instant gratification. I learned how to seriously search for things and also how to truly savor them once they were found. In terms of recorded music in the Western world, these are bygone concepts. Culture is suffering from cracked-out short-attention deficit and it's hard to say if things will ever come back around. It is difficult to convey to younger people the feeling of what it was like to have to be so vigilant and intrepid to locate the music you really wanted to hear . . . the process isn't necessarily superior to how things work now, but it's what I know.
Left: The original Pop Group lineup: Gareth Sager, Mark Stewart, Bruce Smith, John Waddington, Simon Underwood
The Pop Group sprung frothing with iconoclasm from dreary Bristol, England in 1978. Typifying the embryonic "post punk" ethos, the band extended the range of DIY outrage past the narrow limitations of rock and roll through Situationist-inspired chaos as well as heavy jazz, funk and dub influences. Comprised of five idealistic, reputedly arrogant teenaged boys, the group quickly made a splash in the UK press, landing high-profile tours with Patti Smith and Pere Ubu.
Despite the fact that their band name would eventually ring totally ironic, the early sound of The Pop Group was indeed still related to pop music forms - a briskly executed blend of melodic, jangling rock over a busy, syncopated rhythm section topped by singer Mark Stewart's delirious howl. The subject matter during their early period tended towards vague, philosophical matters of individualism and injustice in society - i.e. a concerns of intelligent adolescents looking for something greater than what their own surroundings might readily offer. They laid down their first John Peel session in July 1978. The recording engineer at the session, Bill Aitken recalls:
"The Pop Group were the most obnoxious bunch of prats I ever had the misfortune to record. Their instruments sounded bad, they couldn’t play in tune or in time, their act (I refuse to use the word songs) was crap, and like many acts of the punk / new wave era, they were arrogant beyond belief. I remember working hard to get the backing tracks to sound respectable – and when the band came in for a playback the reaction was to inform me by means of a high volume harangue that “You make a shit sound!” The drummer then went on to insist that I make him sound “like David Bowie’s drummer”. I didn’t even bother debating the issue with them. Because they were so bad, they overran the double session. We only just got the backing tracks down by the early hours of the morning, and had to arrange another session for remix. I was pleased, because I was dreading the mix, and hoped that they would not have the time to turn up for the second session. On the remix session, just as I was about to lay down the first track on 1/4″, the band turned up. They asked if they could hear the track before I laid it. The reaction was predictable (“the sound is a load of shit!…. etc). Anyway, as I played the track through again, trying to decode from the bullshit around me anything valid that might help get the recording more to their liking, the vocalist leaned over, pulled up the “lead vocal” fader to levels that were technically overloaded and artistically crass and said – “I want more vocal”. For a joke, I grabbed the fader and said “oh … you mean like this!” – and I proceeded to wank the fader up and down furiously in time with the music. I fully expected to savour the satisfaction of insulting them all, but to my amazement, the reaction was “hey …. that’s great!!!!” Stung into action, I compounded the lunacy of the situation, and so I started doing the same alternately with the bass and drums and – not content with screwing around with the levels – I started to put the most ridiculous eq on everything, and to feed-back the delay lines and reverbs to each other – almost to the point of oscillation. Looking back, I suppose the band had a point. If I hadn’t done something ridiculous to distract the listener, the Great British public would have been that much more aware that what they were witnessing really was a load of crap. Anyway, to add insult to injury, the following week the Melody Maker referred to the “amazing John Peel tapes” in reviewing the Pop Group – and I was told that on the strength of my tapes, the band had managed to get themselves on the Patti Smith tour. This was the only time I remember a BBC session getting a positive review in a music mag! What a travesty! It was about this time that I started thinking about making a move to earn a living outside studios. The whole punk thing was a joke for me, and I became very disillusioned with some of my colleagues at Radio 1, who seemed to be succumbing to the “king’s new suit of clothes” syndrome. I think the passing of time has sorted out the wheat from the chaff. Who remembers the Pop Group? For that matter who remembers Patti Smith?"
Who remembers Patti Smith or The Pop Group? Well, who remembers Bill Aitken? Who remembers ANYTHING at this point? Recently the Pitchfork-friendly alt-pop act St. Vincent a.k.a. singer Annie Clark has been performing a faithful cover of The Pop Group's first single "She Is Beyond Good and Evil" live, having even played the song on a recent broadcast of the Jimmy Fallon Show. In a Youtube video from a Texas gig, Clark asks the audience "Who has heard of The Pop Group?" Two or three people cheer (sounding like sycophants, ready to salute anything coming of Clark's mouth) and the rest of the crowd is dead silent. After the song is finished, the audience, as predicted, applauds ecstatically for it, no differently than the songs preceding and following it. Is it a surprise that a large audience of pop-culture addicted sheep haven't dug back very deep into the history of music? No. Of course not. Clark herself was only born two years after the group disbanded, and a fuck of a lot has happened since. It is perfectly evident that a minor, defunct band like The Pop Group might be quickly relinquished to the annals of music trivia. It is conceivable that Annie Clark herself only heard of the group after one of their recent reunion performances at various All Tommorow's Party festival functions. Will the people leaving the St. Vincent show wake up the next day and go listen to a Pop Group record? Who fucking cares! The history of great art is not the history of mass popularity and it was clear that the ultimate destiny of The Pop Group was one of extreme artistic non-compromise.
Obviously the band was ready to overturn the musical establishment and the above sort of heated reaction to their fiery modus operandi was proof positive. The three songs from the July '78 Peel Session ("We Are Time", "Words Disobey Me" and "Kiss The Book") are tightly played and highly musical, especially for such young musicians. The mixing style of the session is indeed a few shades more extreme than the sort of slick, straight-ahead balance a typical BBC session might consist of, but the group would soon push the concept of recording-studio-as-instrument much, much further. Signed to American Warner Brothers subsidiary Radar Records, the first official releases by the band appeared during Spring 1979 including the full-length album "Y" and a single featuring "She Is Beyond Good and Evil" backed with the John Cage inspired noise/dub track "3:38". Produced by renowned Reggae icon Dennis Bovell, "Y" strikes a very tentative chord. In a recent interview with Pop Group multi-instrumentalist Gareth Sager, he intimates that Bovell took the job just to make money and that neither he or the band really knew where the other party was coming from. The end result is definitely a bit of a reverb-drenched, muddy mess, albeit an endearing one. Bovell's experimental, dub-tempered production style adds an alien, disembodied air to the band's more straight-ahead numbers and pushes their experimental soundscapes like "Blood Money" and "Savage Sea" straight into outer space. There's something a bit soft and sentimental both sonically and lyrically about the music on "Y" - perhaps the lads were still feeling a bit positive about their world and its potential?
By November 1979, any residual sweetness or reticence left was extinguished by the excoriating "We Are All Prositutes" single, released on burgeoning independent UK label Rough Trade. Bassist Simon Underwood - who would go on to found the more mainstream white-funk unit Pigbag - had been replaced by the more agitprop-minded Dan Catsis, who also played in the punk/funk/experimental band Glaxo Babies. "We Are All Prostitutes" begins in a jumble of vocal muttering from guest artist Tristan Honsinger, before the band slices into a caustic, angular funk groove wound tightly around thin guitar cacophony, synthesized hand claps and Stewart's irate, distortion-clad vocal sloganeering. Chaotic outbursts of saxophone, organ and cello appear at random moments and fight the other instruments for space in the dense mix. The Pop Group are now truly playing as if their lives depend on it and this sound is exhilarating. The b-side "Amnesty International Report on British Army Torture of Irish Prisoners" is a fascinating instrumental track beginning with a colorful, Beefheartian tattoo from drummer Bruce Smith and ending in a free improvised threnody over which Stewart morbidly intones a brief, atrocious vignette of political dehumanization. The piece is absolutely dense with detail and dread. This is the sound of a band ready to burn everything to the ground.
The Pop Group's second album "For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder?" appeared in March 1980 on Rough Trade. For some reason this insane, iconoclastic dervish seems consistently overshadowed by the (barely) more "accessible" debut. The first album is tentative, lazy and unfocused, whereas the second is a sharply edged shank of desperation, lashing out wildly in a uniform frenzy of rabid idealism. A gauntlet is immediately thrown down by the haunting black and white cover art featuring two naked children sharing an innocent kiss in the scorched earth of the Third World. Perhaps this is the greatest, most romantic metaphor for the mission of The Pop Group: young and doomed children trapped in a world they didn't make, trying to find a single glimmer of hope in the darkest situation possible. Contained in the original issue of the LP was a series of large newsprint posters chalked full of more bleak agitprop collage, emblazoned with the irate lyrics of the songs contained. Mark Stewart's focus on "For How Much Longer" encompasses nightmarish images of anguished Cambodia, human rights violations, stealing from the rich, police brutality, pop culture as an accessory to genocide and social indoctrination. The Pop Group were clearly no longer about "fun". They were willing to make polarized, simplistic manifestos about the human condition and that is exactly what makes this music so utterly powerful. It is morose, astringent and relentless on every level, drunken with anger and impulsive incoherence. "For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder?" is the sound of a band that didn't care if their message "dated", but sought to live each day as its last on the brink of possible nuclear armageddon.
Poster insert from "For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder?", 1980.
"For How Much Longer . . ." opens with a slice of audio verite of what sounds like Indonesian monkey-chant, or kecak, which starts slow in iteration and builds into a frenzied constellation of voices from which the volcanic rhythm section of Catsis and Smith explode into "Forces Of Oppression". During the blistering funk assault of "Forces", Sager manically switches between abrasive guitar and wah-wah-injected reeds, interjecting skronk and squeal at odd, disruptive intervals. Taped snatches of a TV news report play at one point. There is an amphetamine-fueled thinness to the production here, which contrasts greatly to the soothing lushness of "Y" - it's fair to assume The Pop Group lorded over producer Dave Anderson in order to achieve this strained, unique sonic result. One of the most defining features of the sound is Bruce Smith's piercing, penetrating drumset tone, particularly the acid slashing of his high-hat accents.
"Feed the Hungry" follows at a slower tempo, bolstered by persistent tom-tom rumble, envelope filtered wah-bass and jags of reverbed feedback and guitar noise. Subtle layers of piano arpeggios bubble behind the track. The band is operating from a premise of RHYTHM AND NOISE: the symmetry of their flinty, forceful grooves are constantly rendered lopsided by the various aural violations from Sager and tandem guitarist John Waddington. Over the top, Stewart continues to essay on the vast discrepancies between classes. "One Out Of Many" is an experimental track largely built upon noisy free improvisation laid over the stunning 1972 proto-rap recording "E Pluribus Unum" by The Last Poets. The band is so disinterested in the limitations of their format that they have gone so far as to feature someone else's recording as their own! Obviously this is out of total reverence, as The Last Poets' wrathful decree mirrors the same kind of outspoken radicalism The Pop Group aspired to. "Blind Faith" continues the sort of speedy hate-funk as the opening track, featuring cacophonous organ clusters, more lashings of intense guitar skronk and a thrilling tempo change in the middle section before suddenly crossfading into a chiming, seemingly unrelated coda of guitar harmonics.
The title track is a sinister funk workout which wouldn't seem out of place on a '73-'75 era Miles Davis record if it weren't for Mark Stewart's impassioned bellowing, rising and falling in unruly shifts of volume over the top. The piece is more spacious than any of the previous ones on the record, all of the instruments taking turns dropping out to reveal haunting spaces of electronic ambience before horrific plagues of noisemaking blast the listener once again. At the end of the track a burbling synthesizer strolls through the stereo field as Stewart succumbs into a defeated whisper, trailing off into a tomb of final silence. "Justice" follows in a relatively bouncy mode as Stewart demands, "Who guards the guards? Who polices the police?" He demands political justice for the use of excessive force by the men who control the Western world on a local and international level and posits that someday they might come knocking on our doors if we don't act out. Mark Stewart, then in his teens, was obviously trying the best he could to utilize the music as a platform for social consciousness, as confused and pretentious as it can seem. This extreme idealism could only come from a youth and it is potent and unguarded in its effect.
"There Are No Spectators" is a downtempo, reggae-like construct, washed in delay and reverb, with scraping violin touches and some pained falsetto from Stewart. Bruce Smith leads the track with the kind of ticky-tacky African-influenced percussion colors he would also use when doing double-duty in the ranks of the seminal punk-cum-world band The Slits. Ultimately, Smith was the musical linchpin around which the Pop Group's music revolved. His endless theme-and-variation approach to rhythmic pulse is hyperactively ingenious, making everything he recorded early on into a sort of garrulous drum concerto. His manic fills and offbeat accents are a constant source of surprise on the Pop Group recordings and helped transform what might have been rote post-punk into something truly special. Stewart proclaims "Escapism is not Freedom!" He's right. Whereas the band may have begun as a trojan horse, trying to infect the pop scene with their revolutionary virus, eventually they became so radical on every level it pushed them out of the mainstream straight into the fringes. People use entertainment as a salve, but at this point The Pop Group are preaching to the converted, a gaping sore on the face of complacency.
"Communicate" is a wild slice of harmolodic improvisation probably influenced directly by Ornette Coleman's 1976 recording "Dancing In Your Head" (Horizon Records). It has the same sort of tumbling melodic bass, repeated melodic fragments and quarter-note stomp factor as the original, but the obnoxious saxophone squealing, found tape inserts, synth
The Pop Group circa 1979: Waddington, Catsis, Sager, Stewart, Smith
accents and bizarre mix pushes the piece into new territory. The album closes with the deceptively jolly "Rob A Bank", featuring some perky trumpet by an unnamed guest. Extolling the strategy of good old Robin Hood, The Pop Group call for a redistribution of wealth. The song ends unexpectedly with a sudden tape edit.
The Pop Group did not gain a wider audience through "For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder?" How could it have? It was completely uncompromising, brutal, dissonant and frenzied. This is rarely what the average person wants from their "entertainment". What they succeeded in was creating great art, unlike anything before or after it. The band went on to issue a split single with The Slits as well as an excellent compendium of live, demo and outtake recordings called "We Are Time" (Y Records, 1980). "Where There Is A Will There's A Way" (from the split) and "Amnesty Report" (from "We Are Time") both sound like they came from the same sessions as "For How Much Longer . . .", as a bookend to this particular saga.
During 1980, the group continued to tour Europe as well as playing a show in New York. The swansong of the band came in late October 1980 at a huge outdoor show protesting cruise missiles at Trafalgar Square in London with Killing Joke headlining. Stewart split off from the group to pursue his political interests for a while before re-emerging a few years later with his more electronic/production based group Mark Stewart and the Maffia. Sager and Smith focused more on the purely musical end with their long-running free-jazz tinged group Rip Rig and Panic (which later morphed into Float Up CP) which featured a rotating cast of characters including Neneh Cherry. Waddington and Catsis went on to form the mild punk/funk combo Maximum Joy.
The band (minus John Waddington) has played numerous gigs in the last few years and is threatening a new album one of these days. Of course the reincarnated Pop Group could never match the fully-adrenalized, hormonal eruptions of their prime, but it should be interesting to see how relevant they can be in the midst of this modern milieu. Hopefully they have some new insight or outrage to add to these decrepit new end times. Youth is not everything.
For one year between 2004 and 2005, I created a little mix-cd club. Here is edition number Three from the series. Thanks to Phil Plencner for re-posting it:
WEIRD '70S: 1. Sir Lord Baltimore - “Hellhound” (1970)
From the s/t debut album by this HEAVY new york group. Pretty much all of the songs on the album are about how mean women have been to the screaming, pcp-inflamed drummer. Their second album sucks, so beware.
2. Carmen - “Bullfight” (1973)
The archetypal glam/flamenco/prog group. Make that the only one. From their debut "Fandangos in Space" (". . . and wearing an outfit of lace!"), this incredibly ambitious, warped group weaves an epic tale of loss and redemption through man vs. beast ritual. The band made two other records before going financially (and creatively) bankrupt and the bass player leaving to join Tull and taking the sexy girl keyboardist with him. They had contact mics on the stage floor so their "footwork" was amplified . . .
Gatefold of Carmen's excellent glam/prog/flamenco epic "Fandangos In Space"
3. Amon Duul 2 - “Ladies Mimikry” (1973)
From the progressive group's "glam" album "Viva La Trance". Sort of a weird precursor to the Contortions white-ampheta-funk stylings with kermit the frog on vocals. This band is better known for its psychedelic jamming, but I love this album the best, with its strange, succinct "pop" vibe! (well, at least for them it's pop.)
4. Streak - “Bang Bang Bullet” (1973)
An english glam obscurity featuring two guys that went on to the equally unknown (to us) Arrows and another guy who played in the early punk band the Vibrators. It's impossible not to like this bouncy little tune. Naturally, the lyrics are replete with some not-so-subtle innuendo.
5. Goblin - “Witch” (1977)OK, this is kind of a late year, but this fucked noise-rock comes from the "Suspiria" soundtrack. These guys are italian.
6. Mirrors - “Another Nail In The Coffin” (1975)
Masters of disaster: The Swee
One group from the mythic Cleveland pre-punk axis featuring Jamie Klimek and Paul Marrotta (also of the Styrenes and Electric Eels). Fine Velvet Underground influenced guitar skronk, this track surfaced on a CLE magazine comp CD that came out about a decade ago and is difficult to find these days. This song might have popped up later on something, but I'm not aware of it. (This track was actually recorded in the mid-80s, but let's pretend it was made in 1975, just for kicks.)
7. Sparks - “Lost and Found” (1974)
Killer B-Side to "Amateur Hour", this is one of my favorite Sparks songs, period.
8. Le Orme - “Contrappunti” (1974)
Some wonderfully angular Emerson, Lake and Palmer inspired italian prog from "Beyond L'eng", a comp of middle period trax by these guys who started out psych and went total Little River Band after the mid-'70s. Basically "Beyond" seems to have all of their great trax, so skip the rest.
9. Dictators - “Two Tub Man” (1975)
Hamburger-rock off the debut album "Go Girl Crazy". What more can I say. Including Ross the Boss of later Manowar infamy. Not-on-this-album Dictators bassist Mark "The Animal" Mendoza went on to play in Twisted "fucking" Sister. The only other good song on this record is "Master Race Rock", trust me. It's not about Nazis.
10. Sweet - “Burning/Someone Else Will” (1973)
Fucking blistering live track from the Sweet's new year's '72/'73 show. The beginning of their laughable misogyny-rock outbursts (which usually come off sounding more pathetic and desperate than oppressive), this song features the haunting chorus "if we don't fuck you, then someone else wiiiilllll!" You won't believe your ears.
11. Simply Saucer - “Electro Rock” (1974)These Canuck rockers successfully melded Hawkwind heaviness with Eno's bleeps and bloops as well as a late Velvets pop sensibility before it was in vogue to do so. From their posthumous album "Cyborgs Revisited".
12. Dust - “Suicide” (1972)
More new york heavy from their second album "Hard Attack". The lyrics say it all. Drummer Marky Bell went on to both Ramones-hood and Richard Hell's Voidoids (before landing on the Vegas circuit with the all-new "Misfits" punk nostalgia review) and bassist Kenny Aaronoff (he of the bass solo!) went on to, uh, do a lot of lame session work. There are only two other good songs on this album ("Ivory" and "Ready to Die"), so don't pay more than a dollar for it, unless if you're really into Boris Vallejo.
13. Magma - “Mekanik Machine” (1974)
A wikked single-only track from the French prog masters featuring prime bassist Jannick Top (who achieved his ballsy bass sound partially by tuning his strings like a cello) and master drummer/svengali Christian Vander. This is a bit disco-y for the band, but in a good way. Not in a bad way like their sucky 1980 album "Merci" though!
14. Debris - “One Way Spit” (1975)
'Debris' killer proto-punk album "Static Disposal
Oklahoman proto-punk rage from their mythic "Static Disposal" album. Just listen. There's nothing more to talk about. The whole album is like this!
15. Jet - “Nothing To Do With Us” (1975)
A dubious "glam supergroup" (members of Milk 'n' Cookies, various Sparks back-up guys, the original Roxy Music guitarist, and dudes from John's Children) is clearly just totally ripping off Sparks. Since they did it so chillingly accurately, we'll let them live.
16. Residents - “B*by S*x” (1971)
Material from one of the four early pre-"Meet The Residents" album/tapes that never really got released. One can definitely hear the primitive bizarreness of the group budding. Don't ask where I got this. The b*by s*x track "Kamikaze lady" wound up on "Residue" and the band also did a fairly straight-ahead version of Zappa's "King Kong" for the record.
17. Hollywood Brats - “Sick On You” (1973)
An obscure british rip-off of the New York Dolls that actually improves on the formula. Very trashy and ass-kicking. Fuck guns and roses and their McCartney-covering asses. Keith Moon dubbed them "his favorite band in the world" to little avail.
18. Funeral of Art - “Zivoid is Cuming” (1972)
Early Italian-american acid-rocking by the legendary Von Lmo (drums, vocals) with Sal Maida (Roxy Music, Milk 'N' Cookies) on guitar. A basement demo that appeared credited as a Von track on the out-of-print Spanish double lp reissued of his "Future Language" jam.
19. Electric Eels - “Flapping Jets” 1975
Wrapping it up is another stunning track from the aforementioned CLE Mag comp by these seminal noise-punks. A slightly aberrant, long track for the band replete with totally scathing guitar yowling and hypnotic chanting. I used to live a few blocks away from their rhythm guitarist Brian McMahon. He was pretty cool.
