Ragman Records Archives

Early on in my time with Joe & Co. I got together with most of Symphon-E (or whatever they were called at the time — possibly The Bludy Boys) and recorded these noise/tardcore jams on two microphones and a karaoke machine in the upstairs sunroom off of Elfboy’s bedroom in the McAdams home where Symphon-E practiced. I tried seeing if Steveggs might add it as a distro item in the Egg Scab Radio catalog once (after all, we covered “Dude Man”) but he said the sound quality was too shitty. Pretty good for laughs, and this project eventually, in my mind at least, evolved into Bwang!

For anyone wondering, the cover picture is from the instruction booklet for a product called the What-A-Saw, which was then renamed the Tri-A-Saw. I got it from a temp job I had for a couple days at the Home Shopping Network, in which the work consisted of opening the boxes of all the What-A-Saws and replacing the instruction booklet with the new Tri-A-Saw version.

Reversible_Hyena-Louder_Sloppier_Stupider_More.zip (80.4 Mb)

Around the same time as Reversible Hyena — I was living on Olive Street near College Hill with my girlfriend. I somehow ended up meeting a guy who lived just across the street named Jeff Gebauer who had a bit of a practice room/studio in his apartment. I came over a few times and we recorded some jams on his minidisc — first as a two-piece I called “Left” (my variation on Wrong), but most of it with John Courtney on drums. Another time it was us, Mark Wilson, and Aaron Curtis — the only time I actually got to make some music with Aaron Curtis.

Olive_Street_Incident-Stinks_Like_Heaven.zip (128.1 Mb)

Here’s the early Casio-tinged demos I referred to in the previous post about Spectacle.

The_Spectacle_Of_Klumpffnhauser_and_Louisons_Amusements_and_Oddities-The_Birth_of_the_Spectacle.zip (33.2 Mb)

I’ve mentioned The Showgirls in earlier posts about Heroic Nonsense, The Halfway Situation, and No Consensus, and not the same The Showgirls that played the show with Page 5 Girl documented on House Of Fat Ladies, The Showgirls were the pop-punk duo of Jon Grim and Derek DeVries. Here’s the tape they put out:

The_Showgirls-The_Showgirls.zip (37.5 Mb)

Not long before this came out, The Showgirls were responsible for organizing a very important event in the early Ragman scene history, the National Crapper Day party show held January 27, 1996 in the basement of the DeVries house in a room adjacent to Derek’s bedroom in commemoration of Sir Thomas Crapper. Invitation/flyers were distributed which featured a computer paint program drawing of a stick figure standing next to a toilet and saying “Poop.” The show featured The Showgirls, Symphon-E, myself doing a 2-song solo set, Booker & Slappy’s Skateboard Band, Neils’s Junkyard Band Featuring The Smooth Operators, an early incarnation of Switchstance called Plastic Spectrum, and an early incarnation of Angry Cops called Anti-, in which Derek DeVries played drums but only knew half the songs; Ben and Mike planned to play the remaining songs without drums but I jumped in and improvised, which led to my being asked to join the band later. And I recorded a lot of it on my handy-dandy handheld cassette recorder. Here’s a recording of The Showgirls’ set at Crapper Day:

The_Showgirls-Live_At_Crapper_Day.zip (53.6 Mb)

I lived in Ames from the start of my first attempt at college in August 1993 until around the same time the following year, after I dropped out and made a somewhat poor attempt to get myself set-up and independent in Ames. I liked Ames for a number of college-towny reasons that Cedar Falls didn’t quite do for me. But I didn’t care for my music courses at ISU and wanted to experiment more, and realized I could experiment more in the punk/indie rock scene than I could in the more academic circles that I had originally associated with the avant-garde. After the school year was over I rented a spare bedroom from a guy but I lost my dishwashing job and couldn’t pay rent, and we didn’t really get along anyway. So I moved out and into my ’79 Bonneville, parked in a lot near campustown, figuring I could get along with that arrangement while the weather was still good and hopefully in that time put together a new job and place. It was during that period that I spent an afternoon hanging out with Seth and recording Gee… Okay. Same lame dorky humor, but way more stonery. It manages a couple times to get surprising psychedelic-sounding for just a guitar though a little amp and a cheezy Yamaha keyboard. For a while that summer the only music I had to listen to on my Walkman as I trekked around Ames on foot, broke, pretty much homeless, trying to scramble my shit together, was the tape that we recorded it on, the other side of which had a copy of Godz The Third Testament. You can only imagine what that did to my frame of mind.

Gok-Gee_Okay.zip (68.7 Mb)

After moving back to Waterloo, I put some copies of some Gok tapes up on consignment at Co-Op Records. Joe had bought one, maybe more, and written me a letter which he forgot to send — but we ended up meeting anyway. So it’s two years later and I’ve been hanging with Joe and the Ragman scene. Joe was a bit of a fan of Gok I guess. I arranged to go visit my old buddy Seth in Ames again to hang out and catch up, and Joe requested we record a new Gok tape. This was the last thing Seth and I ever recorded together. I think we hung out maybe twice more.

Gok-Luther_Drive_Blues_aka_Luther_Driver_Overcliffe.zip (67.0 Mb)

In the latter Ragman days, Jeff Moravec and Matt McGuire put together a very interesting group that most people referred to as simply “The Circus.” They wrote circus-music-style instrumentals influenced by some kind of Turkish folk music, built around Jeff’s keyboards and Matt’s accordion, performed with a shifting cast of other instrumentalists and performers, many pulling double-duty between an instrument and playing a role in dramatic vignettes, with costumes and things. Among the regular contributors was Julie Lamendola (now of Ching Chong Song) on singing saw. The whole thing was based on a concept of the history of a fictional traveling circus. The shows were pretty impressive affairs. This is a recording of the only live performance I ever did with them, playing trumpet and melodica, at the Vibe Cafe. I recall also being involved in some recording sessions being laid down on ADAT but so far I’ve heard of nothing coming of them, though it was said that they were planning to release a combination album/storybook and there were even talks of buying an old school bus and doing a tour. I also have what appear to be some early 4-track demos I could post. If there are song titles, I don’t know them; I remember each piece being referred to simply by a number.

The_Spectacle_of_Klumpffnhauser_and_Louisons_Amusements_and_Oddities-The_Death_Of_Louison.zip (111.5 Mb)

During much of the time Leah and I lived on Kingsley, I was kind of floundering around for a coherent band or music project. This would have been between The Cactus Rats and Radio Dramamine I suppose. Anyway one thing I tried was putting something together with Shawn and Jason Nelson. I had Tyler Vincent’s drums and he didn’t seem interested in playing them so I thought it might be fun to have a go at being a drummer again. The three of us got together a few times at the Dental Studios basement (the Nelsons’ practice space for many years, in the basement of where they work) and started jamming and seeing if we could turn these drowsy post-rock jams into loose compositions with a lot of room for on-the-spot reinterpretation. We came up with the name Sindu, had a few songs, I made these rough recordings on a portable recorder, but we never quite made it to the point of playing shows. Don’t really know why. It was fun, though.

Sindu.zip (85.4 Mb)

Tyler Crew and Bret “Poopy Pants Jenkins” Philp were looking to form a new band and needed a bassist. Not sure how I found out about that, but I’d known these guys for years. I came down to Tyler’s mom’s place, they showed me a couple of songs, and I was in. From there I sort of ended up taking over the band, as I also became the lead singer and wrote a lot of stuff. I started using a very guitar-like style of bass playing. We played shows, mostly at the usual Reverb, but also at this place in Oelwein called The Dancing Lion a couple times, through the good graces of the folks in Grave Corps and Dylan Shiv and the Shanks. We had a really cool sci-fi goth-punk thing going that I used to describe, elevator-pitch-style, as “Philip K. Dick talks Sebadoh into raiding Joy Division’s medicine cabinet,” and I think we were well received, but Tyler’s tendency to get excessively drunk and play sloppily, then cheeze out on helping us load-out, started to grate on Poopy and me, so after probably not even a whole year Radio Dramamine kind of petered out. Poopy and I started working on doing my songs as a two-piece, and ended up recording stuff together that became most of The Small Slate-Colored Thing, then I ended up having to move to Des Moines. Here’s our self-produced/self-released EP and a couple shows.

Radio_Dramamine-The_Mind_Is_A_Terrible_Waste.zip (18.4 Mb)

Radio_Dramamine-Live_1-19-08.zip (52.3 Mb)

Radio_Dramamine-Live_5-10-08.zip (65.8 Mb)

So here’s where it all starts for me, making music and doing the tape label thing. My old high school buddy Seth Thomson and I used to goof around recording funny made-up radio shows and songs and things, some we’d record together and others we’d record separately and trade copies of with each other. During high school we recorded quite a bit of music, a mix of songs we’d write and on-the-spot improvised jams, recorded on boombox or portable cassette recorders, all incorporating the warped sense of humor we were always developing between us. After Seth graduated a year ahead of me and went off to college at Iowa State, I took up the bass guitar, and my family moved to a different house where I had most of the finished basement as my room; Seth came over with his acoustic 12-string while he was back in town for Thanksgiving break, and I had borrowed a really sweet cassette deck and a couple microphones from the school and set it up in a little “extra room” behind the furnace, and we went in there and recorded a bunch more shit. It was all just something we did for our own enjoyment, and originally I don’t think we ever considered making it available to anyone else.

I graduated and went off to my first unsuccessful attempt at college, also at Iowa State, after Seth dropped out and stuck around Ames. We hung out quite a bit and he had formed a duo with a flute player named Bola King called The Blues Miracle and were playing at various hippie-ish bars and the like. I played bass with them for a short while, co-wrote a really depressing pseudo-political song with them, but it didn’t really work out. But I also got wind of the whole lo-fi tape label movement that was going on, both the indie-folk and loony noisecore parts of it, and I thought hey, these guys are putting out this stuff, maybe some folks will like the stuff Seth and I had recorded. So I named our band Gok (an acronym for “Gee, Okay”), compiled three 45-minute albums from our various jam session tapes, made up inserts for them, and started up TapeSNotRecords.

The Gok story, and the story of my year in Ames, are far from over there, but I think it’s best if I continue it later. The short version of it is that I eventually dropped out of ISU and went back home, did a zine for a while, then ended up in No Consensus and Ragman. Seth ended up moving to Nevada (the town in Iowa, not the state) and working various IT gigs in Des Moines. We kept in touch for a number of years, and I probably annoyed the hell out him multiple times. Eventually I lost track of him. A couple times I’ve found his phone number and tried calling him. Both times I left a message on some machine, and never heard back. Since moving to Des Moines I’ve wondered about him a few times, but I get the feeling he doesn’t want to be found.

Gok-Explosion.zip (59.7 Mb)

Gok-Stop_That.zip (67.2 Mb)

Gok-Fish_On_Fire.zip (62.6 Mb)

Here’s the first E.D.I.T.H. show, which I mentioned on an earlier post of E.D.I.T.H. and Exit Drills stuff. You’ll note there is material here that was mercifully killed off later.

E.D.I.T.H.-05-26-99.zip (65.8 Mb)