October 23, 2005

Floating in Formaldehyde

When I was 19 or 20 I moved back to the DC area, after a disastrous attempt to escape to New York by leeching off my girlfriend Nadine’s life savings. I lived in the basement of a group house on North Glebe Road in Arlington, Va with Bruce Merkle, XoXoX (who was dating Bruce’s sister Leslie), Leslie and her kid and many others who came and went. Bruce formed the band Color Anxiety which later morphed into 9353.

Specimen Fred were comprised of RICK (guitar, synth, vocals), XoXoX (synth) and TOM (bass, vocals).

Specimen Fred only ever played two shows. One was an multi-act art terrorism event at DC Space called the FBC Horror Circus, and another time Rick & XoXoX did a dual-synth act opening for 9353.

Penis Surgery at the FBC show (MP3 – 96 seconds)

Rick Rodine was the de facto architect of the band, the promoter (to the extent they ever wanted one) and the person who hand-crafted the individually decorated cassettes that are pretty much Fred’s only physical legacy. I remember visiting Rick in his basement room, getting stoned and listening to the tapes he’d made of himself on guitar, which he’d multi-tracked by playing along with previous recordings, one boombox to another. Rick was very influential among his friends, inventing a strange idiom based on comedy and alienation. He and I collaborated on Fat Bleed Comics and other shit-disturbing flyers and stickers that got distributed by hand to the business-suit class in Arlington, Rosslyn and Northwest DC. (Doing my “research,” I discovered a huge cache of periodicals and flyers by our various friends in my closet. I have no idea to what use to put them.) This carried over into a campaign of cryptic stenciled graffiti messages spraypainted on downtown office buildings. Those perpetrators shall remain nameless. We also used to sneak into abandoned or unguarded sites and climb up tall fire escapes to dilapidated rooftops, among other crimes. Ah, those were the nights.

Most tunes were recorded at FredQuarters, the bright-green-and-dark-purple-painted basement room of Tom’s peculiar mom’s house in ArVa. Though Rick was the prime motivator in the band, it was a real collaboration. Sometimes only two sides of the trio would record (and there were also millions of one-off jams with members of our extended clique).

Often XoXoX (a prodigy who shared my enthusiasm for certain substances) might establish an off-putting, almost non-musical theme on rhythm synthesizer while Tom Crawford (an anti-scenester, very focused guy who mostly liked heavy metal and Killing Joke) laid down an intimate line of precision bass. But there really was no format; the approach may have been technically strict but the product was incredibly varied and largely instrumental. Lack of a drummer forced the band to play it tight. For all I know, Specimen Fred may sound “quaint” to moderner ears, but as an art-damaged young man with a love of Devo, the Residents, Eraserhead and SPK, it all went straight down my piehole without mastication.

Rick is a visual artist living in NYC and Tom has fallen completely off my radar – last I heard he was still married, in Northern Virginia.

After drugs, girls and circumstance conspired to break up Specimen Fred, Rick Rodine joined with Rick Hall, Mike Horsley and Bill Kamens to form the band Rick ‘n’ Mike ‘n’ Bill. There’s lots more history, but I know you’re probably getting bored.

I’ve always dreamed of putting a collection of Specimen Fred material out on vinyl or possibly a limited-run CD, just for the sake of posterity. As you can see, I don’t even know the names of some songs. The members of the group are notoriously averse to promotion – that’s why if you google “Specimen Fred,” this page might be the only relevant result. That’s just a goddamn shame. After you download, post a comment and let me know if you think there’s an audience for this stuff, and then I’ll see what the band’s big-ticket demands are.

Specimen Fred – “Specimen Comes Home”
Specimen Fred – “When You Die”
Specimen Fred – “Yo Pablo”
Specimen Fred – “Another Realization”
Specimen Fred – “Floating in Formaldehyde II”
Specimen Fred – (no title) #23
Specimen Fred – (no title) #37
Specimen Fred – (no title) #35
Specimen Fred – (no title) #25
Specimen Fred – “Those Kids”

Rick at 11:09 pm

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October 5, 2005

You Too Will Die

When I look upon Daniel Johnston’s work, I am filled with a sadness that, I confess, is born of envy. How can one lonely man excel in the fields of music, filmmaking, painting and drawing and still have the energy to indulge in fundie Christianity and long, torturous bouts of manic depression?

Thus it has been for young Daniel, through a series of brilliant cassette tapes he recorded, according to the bio, “on a $59.00 Sanyo mono boom box” in 1983-84, to his so-called discovery in the mid-decade as some sort of street-cred mascot for various lame rock bands and subsequent coronation as the Godfather of Indie Rock (well, it could be worse) complete with obsessive-fan sites and a soon-to-be-released documentary that looks really fucking good.

Anyway… the songs. Here are three of them: stark, funny, chilling, personal and painful. I love this guy.

Daniel Johnston – “Hey Joe” (from Hi, How Are You cassette; reissued on Homestead Records)
Daniel Johnston – “Walking the Cow” (from Hi, How Are You)
Daniel Johnston – “Funeral Home” (live) (from 1990; Shimmy-Disc Records)

Shout-out to Markus from Zurich.

Rick at 10:40 pm

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September 20, 2005

Of Fishes Great and Fishes Small

New blog. New post. This is all new to me. Please bear with me while I learn how to do simple, basic things like wrap text and get a goddamn digital photo of a vinyl record. (They’re really difficult to take in focus without glare.)

I first became an Al Kizys fan when I saw his band the Bag People play at the 9:30 Club in Washington, DC in the early ‘80s. All anybody knew about them was that they were from NYC - which at that age was all I needed to know. Couldn’t tell you who they were opening for (the first or the second time they played) but I remember feeling real cool hanging “backstage” with the band. There’s a blurb I wrote in the Live section of an issue of WDC Period that I can’t seem to find anymore. I don’t know who broke the dressing room mirror. The Bag People were a fun band, sort of in the noise/hard rock vein – which was an unusual combo at the time, not a massive collection of subgenres like it is today. If I’m not mistaken, they did a Deep Purple cover.

A few years later, I was in NYC myself. Like most of my memories of that time, it’s obscured by a heroin haze, but amid all the lifestyle bands that formed my music worldview, Of Cabbages and Kings held a special place behind my eardrums. Their first self-titled 4-song 12” on Purge/Sound League Records (home to Missing Foundation and other L.E.S. noise hooligans) is a grand hymn to rock’s intellectual majesty, with Algis doing a knuckle-shredding Lemmy-esque bass strum over a subterranean bellow of pain. “The Veil Thins” is magnificent, the lyrics an apocalyptic seaman’s poem credited to David Stowell.

Check out the classic ugly photo-booth mug shots, the kind that practically every noise band of the era used on their album art to evoke a sense of pseudo-anonymity and criminal menace.

Face, the 1988 followup LP, has its moments, too, but for me nothing beats the debut number. Both of the first two records were recorded at Fun City studios by Wharton Tiers. Until doing the research for this post (not really my strong suit, as will become clear), I didn’t even know that the Cabbages had put out four releases. Tracks from the last two albums are available for download here.

  
An Italian webpage about them is located over here.

DISCOGRAPHY
Of Cabbages and Kings (Purge/Sound League) 1987
Face (Purge/Sound League) 1988
Basic Pain, Basic Pleasure (Triple X) 1990
Hunter’s Moon (Triple X) 1992
...also, Mesomorph Enduros comp (Big Cat) 1992

The rhythm section of this band could do no wrong. Al and Ted joined the motherfucking Swans for a time while Ted helped found Prong and later joined Godflesh and Jesu. Al and Carolyn both played with Glenn Branca’s Guitar Ensemble along with Miriam McDonough, who used to do my taxes.

Enjoy the spell.

Of Cabbages and Kings – “The Veil Thins”

Rick at 12:20 am

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