#byron coley

[sweetdreamsjeff]

Jeff Buckley: Grace (Columbia)

Byron Coley, Spin, October 1994

ONE OF MY favourite sorts of music has no real generic handle by which it can be carried into the marketplace. Informed by jazz, rock, and folk traditions, it is not specifically aligned with any of them, vibrating in the air like a mahogany hen's egg held in the grip of unseen forces.

Performers capable of producing this stuff include Fred Neil, Tim Buckley, Michael Chapman, Karen Dalton, Roy Harper, Tommy Flanders, Cassandra Wilson, Tim Hardin, Bob Brown and others. One new name to add to this list is Jeff Buckley.

Jeff is the son of the late master singer Tim Buckley, and one assumes (from the fact that his bio doesn't mention his father) that theirs was not a close relationship. On his debut, Live at Sin-é, whenever Jeff's singing became too similar to his dad's, he'd head off into that quivery direction that Robert Plant used to, singing about things like "Silver and golden carrots/Fighting for a dead dog's love." This is an incredibly annoying tendency, but it's one that Buckley seems to be utilizing less and less.

As evidenced by Grace (and a great promo EP called Peyote Radio Theatre), Buckley is feeling a bit more self-confident these days. Some of this may come from the grounding his material has been given by the extraordinary guitarist Gary Lucas, with whom he works on some tunes here. Another layer of luxuriously creative loam is put down by the arrangements of Karl Berger (best known as an avant-garde vibraphonist), and Buckley seems to flourish in this particular garden.

The songs on Grace range from the perverted pop moves of 'So Real' (a composition that could have been lifted from Big Star's Third), to a pigeon-wide cover of Leonard Cohen's 'Hallelujah', to the exquisite tongue-pressure of 'Dream Brother' (a masterpiece of pseudo East-meets-West formalism). Throughout, Buckley's voice is lovely. Obnoxious tendrils of Plantism surface here and there, but Buckley follows his natural vocal inclinations more often than he tries to subvert them.

If Buckley continues to evolve in the direction that Grace indicates, only good things can result. Perhaps he can find a worthy musical doppelganger (as his father did, in Lee Underwood) and convince Karl Berger to actually play vibes on his next album. If he can do these two things, it won't be too long before he's ushered into the halls of greatness. Perhaps then he and his father can make peace.

© Byron Coley, 1994

[daggerzine]

An Ideal For Living: A Celebration of the EP- Extended Play (by Corey DuBrowa and Friends, Hozac Books, 202 pages)

Ok, first the full disclosure part is that Corey DuBrowa, the book's compiler, is my old friend, and I contributed to this terrific book.

As the title says, it's a bunch of reviews/recollections/remembrances of some favorite EPs over the years. If you know Corey's taste, then you know the guy is a textbook of knowledge of stuff from the punk and indie era. But this book goes back way before that as DuBrowa and his crew begin this journey in the 1950's and move forward from there. Everything from rock to jazz to doo-wop to folk to those previously mentioned genres are included. It goes through the decades and then beyond. It ends up with the greatest EPs of all time (I forgot to mention the book starts with a meandering of just what the heck an EP is). 

He brings along talented, word salad maniacs like Byron Coley,  Annie Zaleski Joseph Kyle, Al Quint, Molly Neuman, Tim Stegall, Pat Thomas, Steve Michener, and many, many others (Ok, so I go a little crazy over EPs by Minor Threat and Mudhoney). 

It's a marvelous book, perfectly bound, and I dig that cover artwork. Any self-respecting music fan needs this one in their collection. And you'll need to buy two copies as your first one will get completely dog-eared, trust me. Another winner from Hozac!

www.hozacrecords.com

[cruel-nature-records]

OUT NOW: Avi C. Engel ‘Too Many Souls’

Available from:

Cruel Nature (cassette):

https://cruelnaturerecordings.bandcamp.com/album/too-many-souls

Somnimage (CD + art edition):

https://somnimage.bandcamp.com/album/too-many-souls

Direct from Avi:

https://aviengel.bandcamp.com/album/too-many-souls

Genre-agnostic, handmade music that is playful, sorrowful, and ecstatic. Plucked and bowed stringed instruments and organic ramshackle wooden percussion build sensory worlds that coalesce with Engel’s sung-poetry.

In the words of Byron Coley: “There’s a very dark centre to the music, recalling the gothier moves of 4AD artists, but the clarity of Engel’s vision creates something far less commercial sounding than that infers. Deep woods, gloam, mists...these are all elements evoked by Engel’s music. Hard to believe they’ve been doing music this good for that long without more notice.” (@thewiremagazine )

“Avi C. Engel operates at the edge of darkness, the underlying warmth of their creations radiating light and hope from within. Too Many Souls serves as a wonderful introduction to this rarest of talents.” (@fran_carlyon , Heavy Metal Kids)

[nedcollette]

New album OUR OTHER HISTORY

LP out September 6 via Sophomore Lounge Records CD/Cassette via ever/never records

Pre-orders available now.

LP Europe/UK: NC bandcamp OZ/NZ: Poison City US/AMERICA: Sophomore Lounge bandcamp CD/Cassette ever/never bandcamp

Featuring Leah Senior, Steve Heather, Mick Turner, Elisabeth Fuchsia, Mike Majkowski, Joe Talia, Eamon McNelis, Judith Hamann, Jim White, Fredrik Kinbom, & Chris Abrahams.

Insightful words from beautiful people below...

'Our Other History' is a wonderful new LP by this wandering Berlin-based Melbourne expat. Ned's last album, 'Afternoon—Dusk' was an avant instrumental trio outing with James Rushford and Joe Talia, but 'Our Other History' is a return to delicate, sophisticated song craft of his 2018 masterpiece, 'Old Chestnut.' 

Ned's approach to lyrics, vocals and music shares a melancholic beauty that is both haunted and haunting. His words are often more impressionistic than overt in their storytelling, but his vocals carry hints that recall those of the legendary Roy Harper. But where Harper's attack was often Dionysian, Collette's approach is Apollonian, and the tracks often have a compositional feel with a distinct taste of Canterbury. 

The players this time include old hands, like drummer Steve Heather and pianist Chris Abrahams (of The Necks), but there are a bunch of new players on hand, including Melbourne mates, Jim White and Mick Turner (of Dirty 3 fame) and the folksinger, Leah Senior. All these elements (and more) are fitted together with elegance and allowed space to breathe. 

Collette's music is hard to classify. It exists inside a dynamic flux made up of equal parts post-rock, folk, jazz and avant prog, but it manages to remain plain-spoken and uncluttered regardless of how complex its structure can be when you start parsing it. But why bother? With a record as throughly lovely as 'Our Other History', the best idea is to just relax and let the music flow. Beautifully. 

– Byron Coley 2024 

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

I don’t really know Ned Collette. That’s about to change, and I am energized with anticipation. Last summer, I saw Ned in performance here in my hometown of Louisville, KY, accompanied by Elisabeth Fuchsia who had recently become a hero-friend. And it was ‘magical’, ‘alchemical’, engaging and illuminating and inspiring; I witnessed Ned’s and Fuchsia’s almost overpowering fluency with music and with music’s ability to act simultaneously as the medium for communication between performers and with audience. 

I’m bouncing back and forth with how I refer to Ned Collette in this writing. If I always called him “Collette” it might disguise the fact that, should I wish to, I could reach him now, easily, on the telephone or over email, and that our acquaintance continues to grow and just about resembles something I’ve learned can be called friendship. If I only referred to him as “Ned”, though, it would belie the fact that I am humbled by his ability. 

These are songs. They are also sound-pieces, artful constructions of dynamic arrangement. 'Our Other History' is a dreamworld unto itself and, where each song stands on its own, this is one of those increasingly rare beasts: a full-length record to to experience and behold and live in for a while as a whole thing. The contributors’ voices (including the human voice in the cases of Leah Senior and Judith Hamann) bring such significant impact that it is beyond what we think of as musical parameters, getting deeper into the drama and tone of each piece. I would call it “Lyric Music” because the lyric carries much of the weight (not to say burden) of what is communicated. The word dominates, and here the word rewards. When Mick Turner’s guitar enters the scene, I am overwhelmed with joy; and Jim White’s drum playing has never felt more natural and powerful and appropriately modifying than it does here. And then I begin to notice Steve Heather’s drumming everywhere else and am floored by its dusty elegance. But isn’t fair to single out players; I’m being fully subjective, and my perspective changes with each listen. The record as a whole is directed in ways that we understand a movie director oversees the identity of her or his film. 

Ryan Davis and I were driving around the United States not long ago and he played this record in the van. I couldn’t believe that something so fine was also new. But it could only be new; it wears its modernity subtly and surely and is as rewarding a listening experience as I’ve come across in recent times. 

– Will Oldham 2024 

[simonesecci]

A tribute to Steve Albini

"Like the music he adored and devoted his life to – punk and experimental action, suspect and resistant to any semblance of exploitation – Steve Albini was a person of passion and contradiction. He seemed to have a bemused realization of his own staunch judgement towards factionalism, us versus them, the capitalist colonization agenda of the recording industry coexisting with the socialist minded independent music world. He could articulate, from a surprisingly young age, with intelligent and intellectual passion, reasons not to set foot in the manipulative cogs of “major” label indignity. While wholly serious in his analysis he also seemed to be able to write it all off at the end of the day as being alive in an absurd universe. Alongside his set-in-stone scowl was always a genuinely soulful smile. I remember meeting Steve when Big Black first came to NYC in the early 80s. Byron Coley and Jimmy Johnson from Forced Exposure had driven down for the gig and we all gathered in whatever the Danceteria dressing room hovel was. Byron and Jimmy had recently. sat down with Sonic Youth to interview us for their zine around that time and I had just gotten to know those two, connecting to their wide open, record collecting mania, their exuberance of attitude in critiquing the nascent explosions of post-punk and post-no wave and post -hard core, introducing avant-garde jazz and other musics to so many green and hungry minds, mine included. I recognized immediately their fascination with this voice from Chicago – Steve Albini – who immediately proved himself to be as vociferous and cutting and acerbic and hilarious as they were. Big Black made sonic manifest the tenor of this crossfire. That zine-conscious gathering sparked off a life-long camaraderie between us goons, along with so many other self-made wildly-opinionated minds – Gerard Cosloy, Lydia Lunch et al – regardless of whatever personal ups-and-downs would occur throughout the subsequent decades. Steve began writing for FE with Big Black and SY sharing stages and kipping on apartment floors together while crisscrossing the planet.

(hats off to Carlos van Hifjte in Eindhoven.) He would become utterly disenchanted at SY for signing on with Geffen in 1990 considering it an abandonment of principle. Of course, we’d argue this; the transparent accounting and health care offered by a corporate label versus the artistic freedom of an independent label where day-to-day operations could, many times, be a mystery. His analogies of a recording engineer not being any more important than a plumber came across as certainly endearing. But Steve was not a plumber. Button pushing moves by naming his band the worse name imaginable or album and song titles intended to trash whatever nihilist energy they claimed to own were obviously the audacious actions of a provocateur. Publicly chastising his contemporaries alongside the dinosaurs of high-profile culture was an invitation to discourse (if not outright humiliation). He was always ready to throw down. His music, his guitar style, his amp settings, they were all primal attacks, and they were all with a huge heart of love behind the machine, well-oiled and assured. Steve seriously listened, studied, watched. No matter what level of intimacy one would have with him through the years (we hardly connected much after the mid 90s or so – only crossing paths on various festival shows, saying hey, knowing each other well enough like cousins through the years) there’d always be some propensity for an enlightened exchange whether it be in regards to the values of variable genres of music and nature, or the distinct vagaries between the myriad options of Chicago taquerias, Steve had answers and he had pronouncements. He was always right, even when he was wrong.

He was an artist, a musician, a recording engineer, a high functioning decoder allowing for a plethora of poker winnings and pool table mastery. He loved the clean, solid, stylish simplicity of a classic Zippo lighter. Steve, like the many other inspired people he admired, was drawn to, and would find himself working with – be it Whitehouse or Nirvana – was an authentic visionary, a person alive with the delight of creative impulse. And no matter how many times he'd sign off his written and oral missives with a middle finger raised high in the air he seemed to absolutely love the world and its people. While his recent self-analysis on social media would express regret for youthful insolence it never proffered apology; his writing, as such, was always humanist, knowing that our lives are in a constant state of flux and learning. If any ideology could be seen as essential to Steve I always saw it to be communitarianism. Fighting the good fight. At least that’s the sense I got from knowing him back in the old days."

Thurston Moore on Steve Albini

[mojackpod]

Episode 264 Flesh Eaters "Prehistoric Fits Vol. 2" w/ Byron Coley is up now wherever you get your podcasts.

https://on.soundcloud.com/uYpFc

[thedepartmentofdiscoveries]

This “fashion calendar” featuring Lydia Lunch, queen of New York’s no wave movement of the late 1970s, was executed by Julia Gorton for a class at Parsons School of Design in 1978. This was the same year that the seminal No New York compilation was released, including key contributions from Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, of which Lunch was the frontperson.

Gorton, who today is a professor at Parsons, also designed flyers for Teenage Jesus and the Jerks.

This calendar appears in No Wave: Post-Punk. Underground. New York. 1976-1980. by Thurston Moore and Byron Coley. The caption refers to it as “a 1978 Lydia Lunch fashion calendar, assembled by Julia Gorton for a design class at Parsons.” No other information is given.

March and June and October aren’t present—either they were never made or they have been lost to the sands of time; I suspect the former. In any case, the 9 months that are there do not include the days of the week, so you can print them out and use them in any year. If it’s a leap year, hold your nose and stay at home all day on February 29th.

[shrinnirs]

December 17, 2010 interview for the Shrinnirs "Early Singles" collection Josh Burkett put together and released on his Mystra record label in collaboration with the Father Yod record label.

Byron = Byron Coley   

Josh = Joshua Burkett  

Joe = Joe Malinowski

Byron: What’s on this LP?

Josh: The first three singles, plus some unreleased stuff from around then.

Joe: Some of it’s from a 10” that never came out.

Byron: Who was doing the 10”?

Joe: Charlie Krich. He had a label in the early ‘90s, Vandal Children Records. Our !Me da Una Rabia! 7" from 1992 was released jointly by Tulpa and Vandal Children.

Byron: The Bimbo Shrineheads more or less mutated out of Eclectic Bitch?

Joe: Yeah. Well at that time Eclectic Bitch was a name that dawn liked for herself. I just wanted to call the band the dawn cook band or dawn cook, but she said if we were going to do that, her pseudonym would have to be Eclectic Bitch.

Byron: The earliest stuff was done as a duo?

Joe: It started out as a duo, then we went through a bunch of bass players in a real short time. None of them recorded with us. We had one guitar player -- William Stuart – for a while, then after he left, Josh joined on bass and sax for a couple of years.

Byron: Did you already know Wayne & Kate by that point?

Joe: We met them at WHUS radio, sometime around then. When Josh was with us we opened for the Laughing Hyenas and Crystalized Movements at the Populous Pudding. That was a great show.

Byron: What was Josh’s hair like when he was in the band? Did he have that big Euro he had in Vernonster?

Josh: That was the biggest hair I ever had.

Byron: It was like John Sinclair’s. How much sax did you play with the band?

Josh: It was just occasionally.

Joe: He preferred bass, but dawn and I were always trying to get him to play more sax.

Byron: Did you jam much at live shows?

Joe: We mostly played songs. There was a lot of visual stuff. dawn had put together a slide show. dawn and I jammed when on our own recording the type of stuff that appeared on the Liminal Switch LPs, but usually stuck to the songs when working with Josh or other people.

Byron: What was dawn's stage presence like then, and what was her most outrageous costuming?

Joe: dawn brought some of her artwork with her like a car windshield she had smashed up and painted. She was in to rummaging through junked out autos for raw art material. In retrospect, I guess we were an on stage car wreck of a band. dawn would wear a lot of make-up applied asymmetrically, the left side of her skull was shaved and painted in a checkerboard pattern, and she had skirts made of duct tape and used to add tin foil here and there. A lot of her clothes were held together with staples or duct tape or occasionally nuts & bolts for heavier fabrics. She wore men's boxers for shorts during the summer. The first show I have a photo of has dawn playing guitar in front of a Knights of Columbus bingo display board, wearing a mesh Boston Bruins jersey and ripped up long-johns for pants which she had decorated with several crayon drawings. None of it seemed all that outrageous to me, since she wore the same type of stuff off stage. She had a TV set with the picture tube removed. She sometime wore that on her head on stage. I remember her wearing it at the El'n'Gee Club in New London, near the submarine base, while she played Tuli Kupferberg's "Go Fuck Yourself With Your Atom Bomb" on accordion. She also used to play "I'm Going to Kill Myself Over Your Dead Body If You Fuck Anyone But Me". She loved Tuli. During our first few years of playing out, dawn would usually start the set solo on acoustic guitar, or just acapella, and occasionally on accordion. She only played accordion in public a few times because she didn't feel very confident on it. She used it more like a harmonium. dawn also used to bring onstage artwork Colette Butterick had left behind in the Populous Pudding, lifesized standup figures of Caspar Weinberger, Oliver North and other Iran-Contra characters prettied up in frilly pink ballet tutus. Colette was an intriguing presence in Willimantic. During the early 1980s her son played drums in the White Pigs and the Separates. Colette put out the Separates 7" single and turned her basement in to a punk rock show space with a tiny stage. I didn't know Colette well, but appreciated her rare appearances at the Pop Pudding, particularly the night she strung herself like a tree in Christmas lights and plugged herself in to an electrical wall socket for a poetry reading.

Byron: Seems like you guys got a lot of good opening slots.

Joe: Well I was working at Platter Connection Record Store. It’s where I first met you and Jimmy Johnson. You stopped in while on a visit to Ziesing Bros book shop. It wasn't all that great of a record store, but I met a lot of bands there, and as music director at a college radio station, and by booking shows in Willimantic. It was just fellow bands helping each other out.

Byron: When Willimantic was a hotspot still. Before Ziesing moved.

Joe: Yeah, I spent one depressing birthday helping Mark Ziesing move his bookstore, hauling boxes of books down flights of stairs to the 18-wheeler. A sad day for Willimantic.

Byron: Lili still has her shirt from there – Radical Lesbian Feminists from Outer Space.

Joe: Our friend Joey Zone did the art for that.

Byron: It was a weirdly happening nexus. I was never there when the anarchist Ziesing brother was still around...

Joe: Yeah, he moved to Thailand. That store was where I found my first record by the Ex in 1982. Mike Ziesing used to have punk bands there on occasion during the early to mid 1980s. The store was divided in to separate sections. Mark Ziesing used most of his for sci-fi stuff and other lit, Allison Meyers owned the feminist and poetry section, and Mike Ziesing sold records along with 'zines and anarchist books. Plus, Wayne Woodward’s comics section. After the Ziesing Bros. closed up, Allison opened Everyday Books, first in her house and later as a cafe in downtown Willimantic. Allison published Mary Ellen Meikle's poetry. dawn used Mary Ellen's words on a couple of songs. One of them is on this record.

Byron: Did you guys have a lot more songs than you recorded?

Joe: We just have live tapes of them. That’s why we reissued the Live at Charlie’s cassette from 1992 on CD-R a few years ago. There are lots of songs dawn wrote that we never properly recorded.

Byron: It’s interesting. It seems like the band’s basic sound has stayed relatively stable throughout decades of activity and inactivity.

Joe: Well, ever since we first started playing together we were just making it up as we went along.

Byron: dawn’s basic sound had been folk before that?

Joe: Yeah. She was very briefly in a group called Bruce Bayne and the Dawn of the Living Dead Band. Otherwise, her background was in performing folk music at coffee houses, street protests, and fund raising potluck dinners.

Byron: How did she decide she wanted to go freak?

Joe: We were listening to early Sonic Youth and the Ex. We both dug the heck out of the Minutemen. Eventually Dawn really got in to the few ESP albums I had. I remember Patty Waters made a big impact on her. She also liked Frank Lowe's Black Beings album. Most frequently I'd find her listening to my old Nonesuch Explorer and Folkways ethnomusicology LPs when she was home alone with my records. But what stands out in my memory is how she enjoyed God & The State, that Ruins album with the Urinals drummer. She was crazy about that record. She still sings those songs in the car.

Byron: So you were the bad svengali record scum guy. Well every band story needs one.

Joe: We met at a college radio station in 1985 about a year before we first started playing music together. Dawn hosted a show that concentrated on articles she would share from underground newspapers and 'zines, along with interviews with fellow activists. She would mix in anti- authoritarian songs here and there. Whatever she could find, from Victor Jara to Gil Scott- Heron. The packaging on a Maximum Rock'n'Roll comp caught her eye and she grew a little curious about punk rock as a vehicle for expressing her political views. I just offered suggestions like, "if you're in to Gil Scott-Heron, maybe you would like the Last Poets," or "if you're into political punk, you might appreciate Crass and KUKL." Then from there, "since you like that stuff, you should definitely check out The Ex."

Byron: You later got to play some shows with the Ex. How were they to deal with in those days?

Joe: They were great. They stayed with us for a few days on their first U.S. tour in 1989. We opened for them in Storrs along with 76% Uncertain and Azaila Snail. The Ex didn’t have many shows outside of New York. They made a trip to Montreal and came back to Willimantic. They’d bought a beat up old station wagon for their tour. It kept breaking down. So they were stuck with us.

Byron: And you got to feed them for a week.

Joe: Actually, they fed us. Their sound guys even fixed dawn’s car for her. They were amazing. Just really nice people. We didn't even blame them when our beloved indoor cat was run over after the band talked us out of imprisoning him inside.

Byron: Did you play out of town much?

Josh: They did a U.S. tour.

Joe: We played New York and DC for Riot Grrrl shows even though we were much older than most of the people there. We played Providence a lot, Albany once, North Hampton, and another show in NYC at ABC No Rio. And we did tour across the States a couple of times, but that was mostly camping out with shows that were a thousand miles apart. We had a few on the West Coast between Los Angeles and Portland. We played Minneapolis and Buffalo. And we opened for the Orthotonics in Richmond, VA after a show in Chicago. There was a huge crowd that kind of hated us, particularly a really angry German dude who after the gig let Dawn know how exactly brutally offended he was by "Rape Poem." At least we got to play Richmond, stay with Michael Hurley for a couple of days, and have a great time in an amazing swimming hole with Rebby Sharp.

Byron: Where did the Bimbo Shrineheads name come from?

Joe: It was something our late friend Rob McDonald blurted out while we were watching the tv news. Around that time George HW Bush picked Dan Quayle as his running mate, and Rob said, “He’s a Bimbo Shrinehead, just like Vanna White.”

Byron: So you’re named after Dan Quayle?

Joe: Yeah, or Vanna White. But I have no problem with Vanna White. I just really didn’t like the name Eclectic Bitch, so we compromised and settled on the Bimbo Shrineheads. Eclectic Bitch grew out of a regrettable joke I made when dawn and I were first hanging out and she was hoping to find people to start a band. dawn was describing how her dream band combined feminism and political revolution with poetry, theater and a wide variety of music; everything from jazz to folk to rap to reggae to heavy punk rock mixed with Segovia. I teased her that she should call her band Eclectic Bitch, sarcastically suggesting she reclaim the word "bitch" as an act of empowerment. She should have punched me in the face, but instead took a liking to it. I would have preferred getting punched.

Byron: Why did the name keep mutating?

Joe: We never really liked any of our names, including Bimbo Shrineheads and Shrinnirs. We figured we didn’t have any kind of following so it wouldn't matter. We've been kicking around the idea of changing it again, but with all the time and money Josh has put into this singles collection, we should probably stick with Shrinnirs for now.

Byron: Did the band start up before the Tulpa label?

Joe: The band came first.

Byron: How many releases did you end doing on Tulpa?

Joe: Not many,

Byron: Must have been about 15.

Joe: Yeah. The Flaherty/Colbourne stuff was about the end of it. There was a Footprints 4 comp that never came out. That had Sun City Girls, Galloping Coroners, Snake River and Brian Johnson. Snake River were from Michigan. They had submitted music to Tulpa. Brian Johnson ran an art gallery in Hartford. He played percussion for Vernon Fraser. dawn modeled for the cover of Vernon’s album Sex Queen of the Berlin Turnpike. I think the Sun City Girls and Coroners stuff eventually came out on other labels. I’m going to put out a Colbourne/Flaherty recording with Mike Roberson on guitar soon on my Withdrawn Records label. We released a live Shrin 7” in 1997 with artwork stolen from an Alan Lomax Columbia World Music LP. The covers were hand stamped "Withdrawn" to look like the deacquisitioned records we bought from library sales. Since I still had the stamp, I used it a few years later when I gave out cd-r mixes of some of my 78s to a few friends, and when I put out Randy Colbourne's Clarinet Works recording.

Byron: What was Tulpa named after?

Joe: The name grew out of a discussion with Joey Zone, a graphic artist from Willimantic. It wasn’t named after the Magazine song.

Josh: What does it mean?

Joe: Joey Zone described it as being like a doppelganger, an evil spirit twin who does your dirty work for you. A year or so after the first Tulpa record release Joey gave me a tulpa themed Detective Comic and a Tulpa logo he put together. I've since learned a tulpa is quite a bit different than my understanding of a doppelganger, but at the time my knowledge of Tibetan mysticism was largely limited to what I picked up from UNESCO LPs and Batman comic books.

Josh: How did you get together with Flaherty?

Joe: It was through Rob McDonald. I'm not sure how Rob came in to contact with Flaherty. Paul may have mailed a Flaherty/Colbourne record to the Populous Pudding. It was right around the time of their first Cadence LP. Rob thought I would be into what Paul and Randy were doing, and he was right. They had no gigs. They either played under bridges in Hartford or they would sneak in to the UCONN Art building. When security would come in, Paul would claim he was an art instructor. He completely played the part. I remember an art student pretentiously critiquing the music and offering the advice, “Sometimes less is more.” And Paul said, “No. More is more.” Bimbo Shrineheads had a song with lyrics from a book of words and drawings Paul Flaherty self-published about 20 years ago. dawn pulled the lyrics to the song "Corporate Prostitute" out of there. I think the title of the book was The Corporate Bored. I loaned out my copy and never saw it again. Flaherty claims to be out of stock, but maybe he could dig one up for you. He wrote it while working at one of the Hartford insurance companies before he started painting houses.

Byron: The records you did with those guys put them on the map in a whole new way. For a lot of people that was some of the first free jazz they’d ever heard.

Joe: Aside from the Tulpa comp, Kevin Kraynick helped spread the word, when he featured Flaherty/Colbourne in Damp Magazine. Rob McDonald and I booked Paul and Randy at the Populous Pudding whenever we could. It didn't matter what the other bands on the bill were like. The Pudding was an arts and music collective located in an old fur locker, basically a loud cement box with a single entrance/exit, large bank vault type door. It was a dangerous violation of fire codes, and the perfect setting for Flaherty/Colbourne. They were stunning. Every gig transcendent. Unbelievable.

Byron: What was dawn’s stuff like when she was a folkie?

Joe: She had just started writing originals shortly before we began playing together. It seemed like she was listening to that Silly Sisters album whenever I went over her house, just a huge Maddy Prior fan, but she mostly performed Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Ralph McTell and Buffy Sainte Marie covers. She had the Wobbly songbook. She also had learned a lot of Irish traditionals from singing with her friend Gordon MacDonald. She also covered a lot of Joan Baez. Once we started playing the Populous Pudding, Charlie Krich saw her and Charlie would give her sheet music and order her to learn other Buffy Saint Marie songs: "Here, play Cod'ine next show."

Josh: She could read music?

Joe: Yeah, a little bit, just enough to struggle through working out the chords.

Josh: I remember she was into that first Ricky Lee Jones album.

Joe: The first time I played with her, she used to play coffeehouses all the time, and this was a coffeehouse type setting. She came in with her untuneable electric guitar and I had an industrial oil barrel like Neubauten or something. And we played "I Will Die in Willimantic", "Slabs of Stone", and Dylan's "Masters of War". It was funny to witness the reaction. It was not what people wanted to hear. Actually I'd rather hear dawn solo on acoustic guitar, too. Whether playing folk standards or her own songs, everything sounds better when she slows things down and plays and sings solo. She knocks me out at times. I've always felt lucky that she puts up with me.

Byron: How did your Swedish release come about?

Joe: A Swedish band mailed a tape and wanted Tulpa to put out a record. I think they’d read about us in Maximum Rock & Roll. We decided to do a split. I’ve never met them, I don’t think they’ve ever been to the States. It was a co-release with Fetvadd in Sweden. But 16 B.U.H. sent the material hoping one of the bands on the first Footprints comp would want to do a split.

Josh: Did they have other releases?

Joe: Yeah, they have a few albums out.

Byron: What happened to the proposed Twisted Village LP?

Joe: It was mostly live to cassette recordings from various basements. On some of the songs dawn had home made contact microphones taped onto her bouzouki and balalaika and it sounds like it’s really noise genre stuff, but it’s just her pulling the mic off and retaping it. I was never sure if Wayne & Kate, from Twisted Village, were just being nice because we were friends or what, so I never pushed them on getting the record out. I put together the tape and I couldn’t tell if they were genuinely enthusiastic or not. After a while it just fell by the wayside.

Byron: Some of that’s what got recycled on Limnal Switch?

Joe: Yeah.

Josh: What about that Twisted Village compilation on Shock?

Joe: Wayne put that together when we were talking about releasing an album on Twisted Village. He used a song from one of our old 7" eps. His mix is better than the original. Stefan, from Shock, hates that track. He was pissed our song ending up on his label. He just doesn’t like that kind of music.

Josh: But for a lot of people, that’s how they first heard about the band.

Byron: You were in Wormdoom also.

Joe: Yeah, that was around ’95.

Byron: How many gigs did Wormdoom play?

Joe: Two. Twisted Village had just opened as a store and we did one there to celebrate and one out here at the Amherst Unitarian Church with Flaherty/Colbourne.

Byron: Were there plans for more shows?

Joe: I would have liked to play more, but Wayne & Kate were busy with Magic Hour and the new store.

Josh: I played on the Wormdoom album, too. It was just basement jam stuff.

Byron: Did they credit you?

Josh: There were no credits. It’s the same with that B.O.R.B In Orbit CD. There were no credits on that either.

Byron: Are you on any of this stuff, Joe?

Joe: I’m on some of the Vermonster stuff.

Josh: You might be on that B.O.R.B. CD, too. That was just basement jams too.

Joe: I don't think I'm any of the B.O.R.B. stuff, but the band did make nice use of my Radio Shack Moog. Josh and I played on some of the last Crystalized Movements gigs. We played CBGB.

Josh: That was the only time I ever played there.

Joe: And Providence and...I think there were three shows.

Byron: That must have been when they were more together. Their early shows featured a lot of tuning.

Joe: Bimbo Shrineheads did a lot of that too. We got tired of it and started doing entire sets with no breaks at all. Saving up to buy Dawn guitars that would hold a tuning was the key.

Byron: Were you still doing songs?

Joe: We’d have five short songs in a row, but we would leave spots open to improvise if we felt inclined, then we’d play some more songs. We were back to the duo line-up by then. Sometimes Josh would join us at the end when we played in Cambridge. He would play sax and dawn would sing in to an mbira plugged in to the distortion pedals on her guitar amp. She often used an old throat mic built for airplane pilots and ran that through her amp, too. It looked like a beat up leather choker around her neck. That was probably '93 to '95.

Byron: What was the worst band you ever played with?

Josh: Maybe the Reverb Motherfuckers. That show was not a very good. They played for like two hours.

Byron: What was your best gig?

Josh: I remember a really good one at the Middle East.

Joe: I think Fire in the Kitchen headlined the show you are thinking of. Steve Erickson, from Cut 'Zine, put that bill together with Billy Ruane.

Josh: That was great that night. Fire in the Kitchen were a much better live band than their records ever let on.

Byron: What was the horrible show in Worcester I’ve heard you refer to?

Joe: That was with Eugene Chadbourne at the Worcester Artists Group in ‘91, but we had plenty of other horrible shows. Chadbourne was great. We were terrible. We spent too much time creating our most elaborate props ever for performance pieces. dawn worked very hard on set design and stagecraft for that gig. We suffered technical problems throughout. It stifled the music. After that show we cut way back on props and slide shows. That freed us to just go up and play with room for improvisation when we felt like it. dawn still did things like occasionally shave off chunks of her hair on stage, but we left the slide shows and most of the props at home. It was also disappointing because we had just started playing with Jeff LeDoux on guitar and vocals. He fit in perfectly from the very first practice. That one bad show with Chadbourne was Jeff's only show with us. A few days after, he broke the news that he was following his girlfriend to Minneapolis.

Byron: What happened to the scene in Willimantic? Everyone just move away?

Joe: Pretty much, but not entirely. There was punk rock music in Willimantic long before the Populous Pudding, and today there are still dedicated people putting on art and music shows in empty Main Street store fronts. After the Populous Pudding closed, Charlie Krich started doing shows in his basement. Charlie had initially gotten involved in the Pudding as an outlet for his poetry. He didn't seem to have had much contact with punk rock prior to the Pudding, but maybe I'm wrong in assuming that. The enthusiasm and DIY spirit of the touring bands impressed him. He’s a human rights lawyer with a beautiful old Victorian home which he opened up to a young crowd of hardcore bands and underground music fans. After a while there were too many noise complaints, so he worked with Jay Forklift and a few of the other kids to open the Willimantic Arts Collective. That space didn't last long. They had better luck with the landlord and police in Studio 158, which they founded soon after. It a was great place for shows. Charlie is an extremely generous and humble guy who truly deserved the Saint Chuck and SuperChuck nicknames the kids gave him. A lot of younger folks were shaped by Charlie’s shows – throughout the early ‘90s he was booking hardcore punk and all that. He had Green Day at the Norwich VFW. We played there with Spitboy. We opened an Econochrist show Charlie helped a kid put together in a condominium complex in Manchester. At Studio 158 we played with Bikini Kill, Universal Order of Armageddon, Avail, Devoid of Faith and a bunch of other touring bands, as well as local friends like Mi6.

Byron: How did it go over when you played with punk bands.

Joe: Usually confusion.

Josh: But I’ve also heard over the years that there were people who really got changed by seeing you. It was beyond their comprehension at the time, but it made them realize there was something else possible.

Joe: But a lot of the young guys were really intimidated by dawn too. They didn’t know what to make of her face paint or whatever. She could sometimes lose herself and unknowingly glare intensely at people while she played. She scared some of the boys. Overall, it seemed like we were tolerated. There was a difference between our earliest shows in the 1980s and the shows say '92 to '95. In the 80s a faceless male voice from deep in the crowd would often heckle. After about 1992, we didn't get much of a reaction. For the most part, people sat on the floor, politely clapped, and waited for our set to end. I know dawn is always surprised when women tell her things like how they were effected by seeing her chop up her hair or when people speak about certain songs and shows from years ago.

Josh: On one of the songs she’d just scream for like ten minutes. It was her anti-child abuse song, “Mother Goose and Mr. Hyde". Even severe hardcore bands were not that severe.

Joe: We did it one time on WRIU radio and it was just psychodrama. I don’t know what the kids at the radio station thought. Listening to the tape, I can hear why Josh left the live version off this collection. The words and visceral screaming can be a stomach sickening bum out to hear, and musically it is a mess since my drum kit actually fell apart, but I thought the live radio recording was one of the most accurate documents of what we were doing.

Byron: Where was the gig you were supposed to open for Suckdog & Costes?

Joe: That was at UCONN. Lisa called the promoter to say they were delayed. Costes had jumped out of their car and runaway. The promoter kept coming up on stage and whispering, “Play more.” I think that was my least favorite show along with the time in Chicago when I cracked my head on a low hanging monitor and later puked between songs. My favorite show was the one in New Haven where we got kicked off before we even finished the first tune.

Josh: We played at this diner, opening for St. Johnny.

Joe: Who didn’t even play. The owner said, “If you’re like them, here’s $25, just go away.”

Josh: We played one song and they turned the mics off and turned the jukebox on really loud. There was no one there anyway.

Byron: And then you left Willimantic, rendering your best known song more or less untrue.

Joe: We’ll see.

Byron: You went to Boston.

Joe: Yeah, for 14 years and then New Haven. Boston got too expensive so I moved. And dawn went to Worcester to go to school. Now she’s in Manchester, CT.

Byron: Do you guys have any plans to play more?

Joe: Well, if people ask us we’ll play. dawn loves playing out. I prefer jamming in her art studio. We haven't played music together much over the last few years. I'll play out if that is what it takes to get her motivated.

Byron: Can they pick the line-up that plays?

Joe: Maybe.

Byron: Has dawn done any musical stuff subsequently?

Joe: Not much.

Josh: She paints.

Byron: But she didn’t go back to her folk roots?

Joe: No.

Byron: You kind of ruined that forever.

Joe: I hope so.

[savage-kult-of-gorthaur]

ALL THE MUTANT ROCK YOU CAN HANDLE ON ONE CD -- 23 ROCKIN', STOMPIN' CLASSIC CUTS IN ALL.

PIC(S) INFO: Spotlight on the "Skinny Elvis" CD compilation by Austin, Texas punk rock/art punk/hardcore/punk funk band, the BIG BOYS, collecting all of their 1980-'81 recorded output, and released for the first time ever on the CD media format by the Touch and Go label in 1993.

"In 1992, with the remastering and assembling help of Tim Kerr and longtime producer Spot, Touch and Go thankfully reissued the entire Big Boys oeuvre on two discs, preserving what by then had become a terribly out-of-print or hard-to-find back catalog scattered across several labels.

As the title implies -- also making a joke on the then current decision between a slender or portly Presley for a stamp -- "Skinny Elvis" collects the releases from the first part of the Boys' life in 1980 and 1981. Including the hyper-rare debut single "Frat Cars" was a good move to start with, while adding the Boys' half of the "Recorded Live at Raul's Club" split album and "Where's My Towel" resulted in a killer hour of BIG BOYS brilliance.

The sound is faultless, letting the Boys jump out of the speakers like never before. Complete release notes are a bonus, as are reproductions of the original sleeves. The real fun in the packaging, however, comes from the tons of archival photos and testimonials from other musicians: Henry Rollins, Thurston Moore, Ian Mackaye, and Gary Floyd, among others, offer up some amazing stories -- the recollections of the live shows make even the outrageous concert snapshots look tame -- and Byron Coley gives a nice precis of the band's history.

The funniest bit has to be the rejection note from Columbia Records in 1980, wherein a perhaps well-meaning but still clueless executive tries to give "honest advice," only to inadvertently expose himself as an out-of-touch old fart. As for those photos, seeing Turner in a wig, makeup, and some sort of sequined or lame top with a baby-doll leopard-skin semi-mermaid duct-taped to his wrist is just one highlight of many."

-- ALLMUSIC, BIG BOYS "The Skinny Elvis" CD compilation review by Ned Raggett

Rock in Peace, Randy "Biscuit" Turner (1949-2005) and Glenn "SPOT" Lockett (1951-2023), more legends lost.

Source: https://timebomb.co.jp/en/products/big-boys-%E3%83%93%E3%83%83%E3%82%B0-%E3%83%9C%E3%83%BC%E3%82%A4%E3%82%BA-the-skinny-elvis-us-limited-cd-new.

[doomandgloomfromthetomb]

Myriam Gendron - Quarantunes Session, May 8, 2020

Very good news — at long last, there's a new Myriam Gendron album on the way: Songs of Love, Lost & Found, out this fall . A double LP, no less! I've been lucky enough to hear it, and it does not disappoint! Gendron's previous effort, Not So Deep As A Well from 2014, is one of the best records of the past decade if you haven't checked it out yet. If you're already familiar, then why not check out this Feeding Tube Records' Quarantunes sesh from last year, featuring Myriam playing a few tunes, plus Byron Coley and Benoît Chaput.

Photo: Constance Mensh

[cruel-nature-records]

Thank you to Byron Coley for sharing the brilliance of Dragged Up’s “Hex Domestic” in the latest issue of the Wire magazine

https://www.thewire.co.uk/issues/479/480

[bandcampsnoop]

1/29/21.

Thunder. Broom. Let Watt help sweep out the dirt. We posted about Mike Baggetta’s solo debut, Wall of Flowers, a couple years ago. Main Steam Stop Valve continues the instrumental fun, though now under the bandname mssv and with a couple songs featuring vocals. Jim Keltner doesn’t play drums on this album, but his replacement, Stephen Hodges, has had a similarly illustrious career, working with Tom Waits, Mavis Staples, and David Lynch.

Mike Bagetta’s compositions bring to mind a whiff of Pell Mell, maybe a little Steve Gunn at times too. Listen to Old Crow...there is something enjoyably loopy, perhaps even Ventures-like, going on here.

Liner notes by Byron Coley. This is out on Big Ego Records.

[musicmakesyousmart]

Byron Coley - Dating Tips for Touring Bands

Hot Cars Warp Records

2013

[bestreasonstowriterecordreviews]

“This combines the formal songist-technique of recent recs w/ the instrumental bluster of earlier ones and the effect is flattening.” 

SONIC YOUTH review by BYRON COLEY

FORCED EXPOSURE #12 page 85 Summer 1987 JIMMY JOHNSON, Editor

SONIC YOUTH

In 2019, BYRON COLEY tweets here

Forced Exposure

[dustedmagazine]

F.U.K.—“Road Kill” b/w “I Got a Head” (HoZac)

Detroit 1977 by F.U.K. (Fucked Up Kids)

A lot has been written about how culture’s shift into digital connectivity has irrevocably changed how we find and listen to music. Much of that writing strikes skeptical stances, expressing a longing for the sustained experience of waiting for a record to come out, then having to leave the house to go buy the thing, and then sitting in front of a turntable to play the whole thing through, song by song, and so on. Now, it seems, we just click and click and click, often anxiously clicking midway through a track, hopeful that the next one will be more urgent or present or pleasurable. And the next click can take you to Indonesian crust as easily as it can to Palestinian hip hop. (Go ahead. Click.) Maybe that’s not such a bad thing. It can make the world feel bigger and smaller, at the same time.  

A decided benefit of the proliferation of digitally mediated music venues and sites of exchange is the greater ease of circulation for sounds that used to be relegated to subcultural margins, and of sounds that had seemingly been lost. That’s the story with this single from F.U.K. — the Fucked Up Kids — originally released in 1977 and reissued by the folks at HoZac, with an assist from Byron Coley’s inexhaustible archival erudition. It’s the only record the band put out, and it’s alleged that they played only one gig. The fleeting nature of their musical presence begs the question: Who cares? Certainly listeners of Mission of Burma and Birdsongs of the Mesozoic should prick up their ears. F.U.K. is some of Roger Miller’s earliest musical output — a bit later than the goofy psych rock he made in Detroit in the late 1960s with his younger brothers as Sproton Layer, and certainly a lot more punk.

 In early 1977, Miller’s brothers Larry and Ben were recruited into Destroy All Monsters, which Jim Shaw and Mike Kelley (yes, that Jim Shaw and that Mike Kelley) had recently left, bound for art school. Chatter around the campfire suggests that the acronym F.U.K. was a joshing—and more stridently obscene—response to that other band’s D.A.M. moniker. But there’s more than brotherly one-ups-manship between the bands. D.A.M. were still working an artsy, avant garde angle in 1977; “I Got a Head,” the B-side of the F.U.K. single, is sloppy and raw, but longtime listeners of Mission of Burma will hear Miller working out the melody and vocal cadence that he would later employ on “Max Ernst,” the B-side of Burma’s first single, “Academy Fight Song.” Miller’s later song name-checks the dada artist, but “I Got a Head” is a dada song. Check out those kazoos.  

“Road Kill” is a more together tune, an energetic punk riff that erupts into flaring fuzz not once, but twice. The song features snotty vocals by Miller’s bandmate, Sue Rynski, a fixture in Detroit’s prolific punk and hard rock scene through the 1970s (check out her excellent photographic documentation of those days of ferment). She caterwauls, “Nothing tastes better than fresh road kill,” which is a heck of an application of Detroit’s principal industrial product. Cars, blood, meat, sex. What could be a more essential summary of American appetites? In 1977, or now?  

So, is the internet to thank for these six minutes of punk kicks? HoZac is marketing the tunes as a 7” record, once the key commodity form through which punk penetrated culture and the market for rock music. Vinyl is a solid thing, a presence in the world. A vinyl record acquires a history—dust and pocks, scratches and warps—that marks that specific version of that recording. Nothing else will ever sound precisely like it. But it’s likely that most purchasers of this record by F.U.K. will find and buy it online, in a whirl of pixels and digitized credit. Good, bad, it’s where we find ourselves. At least we can play these songs. You can click right now.  

Jonathan Shaw