Ragman Records ArchivesOne of the last, if not the last, real No Consensus shows, captured live. Includes songs heard nowhere else, including one written by Jon whose title I no longer remember. Yes, this is the infamous show with the mid-set guest appearance by The Creek Brothers, and yes, The Creek Brothers are on here. Make of that what you will.
No_Consensus-What_Stupid_Does.zip (90.7 Mb)
In a way, it’s kind of a shame that this Ragman classic didn’t get posted here earlier, but then again it would have been equally a shame to have used up all the good material early on and be coasting on oddities and goof-offs now. This is where things really started to get pseudo-serious. An extensive full-color insert, printed front and back, custom-made stick-on labels on the cassettes, lots of copies home-dubbed up front.
Some No Consensus fans still consider this our best album; it’s hard to say for sure since it’s hard to even compare one No Consensus album with another, and here in particular, the songs are all over the map — genre goofs are still a big part of the mix, whether it’s punk rock (“Society Sux, “Bunk”), power ballads (“Johnny”), or goth (“Ben’s Touch”), but there are a number of interesting, more sincerely undertaken stylistic diversions of our own — simple folky tales (“Eric”) to Sonic Youth-esque noise freakouts (“Pretty, She Said”) and so many interesting points in between that you almost have to hear it to believe it. This was a young band going through a sudden creative explosion, and less than fully concerned with whether anyone was taking notice because we seriously felt like it would never end. Arguably, it never did, right up to the band’s demise, but after the uncertain first steps of Telepathic Etiquette, this was the initial burst. And in this case, two previously unreleased extra tracks.
By the way, the sooner someone loans me a copy of the (amazing) cover-insert from Sun Shines Like Tomorrow, the sooner that excellent follow-up (and a ton of sweet bonus tracks besides) gets posted here. So if you have one, comment here and give me you email address.
Depending on your point of view, this is either the final No Consensus show, or something else completely. Among the odd gentleman’s agreements hatched among the members of No Consensus, one of the last was that Joe Riehle was to henceforth own and control the name and identity of the band. He booked a gig at The Reverb without consulting the band’s normal members, and wouldn’t you know it, I refused to do the show because it was on my wife’s birthday. So instead, Joe assembled a cast that included some of the traditional No Consensus members in conjunction with James “Rock’s Chosen Warrior” Mackey, Jeff Moravec, and a few others, and put on a show that combined individual and group songs, dramatic skits, poems, and percussion improvisations, taking place not only on the stage but throughout the bar. The Reverb’s proprietors were not too pleased, believing they had been hoodwinked somehow, but it was just the sort of thing No Consensus fans would like, and did an even better job of confusing those unacquainted with the band than No Consensus usually managed to.
No_Consensus-Not_Quite_All_She_Wrote.zip (51.3 Mb)
In the latter days of No Consensus, when people were moving away, we figured the band was breaking up, so we put together a 90-minute tape compilation to be titled “All She Wrote,” made up mostly of unreleased No Consensus stuff plus tracks from a couple other Ragman projects, and a few weird alternate versions recorded specifically for the occasion. It was given to Stacy Peck to make copies of and never heard from again. Here are some of the tracks that would have been on it. Sorry for the version of “Upward and West” (a parody/tribute of Yellow 5′s “Into the Dawn”) included here, it’s from the only copy I could find and the CD-R it was on was heavily scratched up.
No_Consensus-The_Whimpering_Wood_War_and_More.zip (61.3 Mb)
Joe supposedly has this huge music/art conceptual piece in the works regarding the Whimpering Wood War, but personally I like this version. It’s really just several tracks of off-the-cuff instrumental improv done by No Consensus, and Joe came up with the titles and story concept later; some related poems appeared in his book 39 Horses My Mom Loved. The remaining tracks are the rough in-progress demos that No Consensus was working on when we called it quits.
No_Consensus-The_Moving_Version_1.0b.zip (83.8 Mb)
As Mike Hays’s impending move to California closed in on us, we decided we should make one more album with him, of the songs we’d been playing lately. Steve had picked up some pretty good recording skills over the past couple years, so we decided we didn’t need to go into a studio this time. Instead, Steve arranged for us to use the auditorium and band room of Price Lab School for a couple days during the summer. We brought our gear down, lots of long cables, headphones, and an ADAT machine and went to it, with Matt McGuire and Tom Vanderwall helping out on occasional button-pushing.
The new, radically different version of “Space Is Not Enough” that the album ends with arose from Joe wandering around the auditorium with his accordion singing it between takes. It was one of those cool, unplanned off-the-cuff creative things that’s really fun to have while recording, especially when we got the idea to throw in additional percussion from the school band room. The unlisted 9th track was an experiment in which each band member recorded something independently and then we overdub-collaged it all together. And we reused a few of the better tracks from Going to My Cousins. We were trying to make the ultimate No Consensus album. We mixed down at Bob’s Guitars after business hours, and Jon’s dad hooked us up with a sweet deal on printing the covers and help to get the design together in Photoshop.
No_Consensus-Telepathic-Ettiquette.zip (61.2 Mb)
The first recording by the full band lineup that had recently become known as No Consensus, naturally shows the band in an embryonic stage. Musically we were still drawing on pretty simple song structures and chords, noisy fuzz-guitar, and goofy humor and genre-parodies, and Mike was playing the dumpster-dived half drum kit with no kick. Pretty fun listening.
Recording methods for this are of interest: we used a 6-channel PA head that had been contributed to Ruth’s house by Rob Jenson, who was playing bass in Angry Cops at that time. The main and monitor outputs were run into tracks 1 and 2 of Joe’s 4-track, and the different instruments and the drum mics (two $6 tape-recorder mics from Radio Shack) were given higher or lower levels in each to get the effect of panning. We recorded basically live to stereo in this fashion, but ended up “doubling” Joe’s vocals on several songs afterwards because we didn’t think they were loud enough in the mix. Joe was also still playing his broken harmonica on “Modem” in those days. The title came out of a speculative conversation Joe and I had about what kind of rules of etiquette might exist if people were all naturally telepathic.
I’m not sure if we ever “released” this, but I made a cover, and no doubt we made at least a few copies for certain people. This file includes bonus songs from the same recording sessions that were left off those original copies. The “hidden track” we included after a long pause on the cassette begins with one of Leah’s first recorded appearances.
Here are some live recordings of No Consensus circa 1996-7:
No_Consensus-Live_at_Porkys.zip (78.4 Mb)
Whenever a new venue started having live music it was exciting to hear about. Most of us were too young to be allowed in Stebs and The Boat House was only available to rent during the warm weather months. So we had to get creative about figuring out places to play. I’d noticed on a couple flyers around the Hill that there had been a couple shows at Porky’s Red Carpet in Waterloo, which is this restaurant/golf course thing, formerly a country club and/or “supper club,” supposedly. I don’t know how we finangled it, but we got them to give us two consecutive nights and I rounded up some bands, three on each night. No Consensus, Cowlick, Angry Cops, Spork, Lost Cause, and one other band I don’t remember right now, might have been Heroic Nonsense.
I think the Porky’s management was hoping to get some patrons in the door that would buy beer, but instead what they got was mostly a bunch of underage kids who stood around out front smoking cigarettes between sets. I don’t think they were too pleased with this result. Some sort of altercation occurred between someone from the staff or management and J.D. from Cowlick at the end of the second night. Performance-wise though, I think the shows were great.
No Consensus played a really long set, probably like an hour, because we didn’t know any better. Having never played the club scene, it didn’t occur to us that bands are ordinarily given a certain amount of time, we just figured you played until you ran out of songs. Ruth videotaped us and this audio comes from the VHS tape. So it sounds pretty bad. Also, she started trying to save space part way through by stopping the camera between songs, so a lot of good stage banter was probably lost, along with the first few seconds (often more) of several songs. You’ve been warned.
No_Consensus-Live_at_the_Malek_Theater.zip (62.3 Mb)
Steve Potter somehow got the owners of an unused movie theater in Independence to let us have a show there. Steve and some volunteers even had to remove the first few rows of seats beforehand. Heroic Nonsense, Angry Cops, and Page 5 Girl also played at this thing. Despite the show being in Independence, the turnout was mainly the usual Cedar Falls kids. Our set was plagued by equipment problems, but I remember feeling like “Har” went exceptionally well.
No_Consensus-Live_x2.zip (99.2 Mb)
Two pretty good shows in one file/album, one from the F.O.E. Hall in Waterloo (previously put out on cassette all by itself), and the other from the first of two shows that Tony Seyffer threw in a garage on his grandparents’ farm west of Hudson.
No_Consensus-Going_to_My_Cousins.zip (62.5 Mb)
No Consensus was going strong in 1998. Jon Grim had joined, our writing and playing was super tight, we were starting to make friends in other towns, and the band members were getting old enough that their parents would let us head out of town for gigs. It was the perfect time to do some recording in a “real” studio, and graduate from the cassette medium to CD. Or CD-R at least — CD burners were still a bit of an expensive rarity at that time.
M-C Audio, owned and operated by Micheal Cutsforth, was at that time located on West 4th Street in downtown Waterloo. I think we spent two days recording, and another day mixing while the My Waterloo Days parade was very audibly going on out front. We had him make us 50 copies on his CD burner and put stick-on labels on them. I think the whole thing cost us somewhere around six or seven hundred bucks. I’m still not even sure where we got the money, since I for one was probably as broke as ever. “Theory,” probably our most complex song of all time, took like a million takes; “Psycho E Got Married,” on the other hand, was specifically planned to only get one take — if it didn’t turn out, we were going to scrap it. The cover photo of Neils was intended to parody/reference the cover art of the What Stupid Does tape. For the back cover, we had so many photos we were thinking of using and couldn’t narrow them down, that we decided to just scatter all of them out on a table and take a picture of that. We photocopied our own CD inserts, and even got friends from the Garage to fake “autograph” them with our names. They sold pretty fast at our next few shows, leaving it out of print for a couple years until CD burners became more of a commodity.
1995-’96 was kind of a blur. As this period started, I was living in my parents’ basement, having moved back in in the Fall of ’94 after dropping out of ISU. I was trying basically anything I could come up with to keep myself busy that wasn’t actually a job. This mainly included putting out the Clipper Gore/Bad Karma zine, and my tape label TapeSNotRecords, on which I recorded and “released” various kinds of punk- and industrial-influenced noise and things. I was corresponding with a lot of noisecore artists around the world, trading tapes. This was also when the Ragman Records thing pretty much starts.
It begins, I guess, with my meeting Joe Riehle and us recording tapes as Bloody Nose, then later, when Joe got a 4-track, Bludy Noz. But I really wanted to get out and play shows too, so I kept pressing Joe that we needed to put together a full band. Originally it was to be called Bludy Noz Duhlux, but it would later grow into its own beast entirely, and be the “flagship” band of the Ragman Records scene for a number of years.
First Joe brought in Steve Wilson to play bass. I think Steve was about 12 at the time. He was a natural choice since he had also walked in on the first Bludy Noz recording session (it was, after all, in his living room) with a bass and an and amp and just started playing. That session yielded the first Bludy Noz song, “Modem,” a song that described the process of logging in to a dialup BBS, a topic relevant to how Joe and I met. So “Modem” was again a natural choice for the first song for the new band to put together. It also worked pretty well since it was mainly the same three chords over and over, with some rhythm changes, and because it was generally in the neighborhood of ten minutes long, so we felt like we already accomplished a lot when we could play together for that long at one time.
Our first couple practices were done with a Casio keyboard plugged into an amp standing in for a drummer. Then Joe invited Mike Hays in. He wasn’t much older than Steve, but he had certain important qualification: he was co-owner of the dumpster-dived drum “set” used by Angry Cops, in which he sang and I played drums and which was forming at around the same time; he played tympani in the school band; and he had a green mohawk. He got the hang of it pretty quickly.
We started out doing Bludy Noz tunes and other related material, but pretty soon the four of us were writing new stuff and it became apparent that we needed a new band name. We tossed around and argued about names for an entire afternoon before Joe started repeating, “It looks like we have no consensus here.” This was his way of hinting that he wanted to call the band No Consensus, though finally he had to just come out and say it. I thought the name sounded too much like a hardcore band, but I had to agree that it was funny to have a name that was derived from our inability to agree on a name. It stuck, and became symbolic of other aspects of the band such as the kitchen-sink collaborative creative process that slowly emerged out of our general inability to settle on just any one member’s ideas for anything.
Early on our songs sort of lampooned music genres — we had a couple of songs taking off on punk rock, one on lounge music, one on goth, a little rap-rock, and some bits where Joe would try to imitate Jon Bon Jovi. We started getting shows and we would borrow “real” drum sets from friends so we wouldn’t look stupid. Eventually we even started practicing at the Wagners’ so we could use Cory’s sister’s set, which we later bought from them, and this was how Mike learned to use the kick drum. We put out the What Stupid Does tape, followed by Sun Shines Like Tomorrow where our our sound started to take on even more of its own identity, as opposed to genre-mashing.
It’s hard to talk about No Consensus’s history without also talking about that of Ragman Records overall, since the two were very much intertwined. The Ragman Records thing was going on at this time too — Joe had got a 4-track for Christmas and was recording projects with anybody and everybody, and since I was always hanging around, I was too. Pretty much everybody in No Consensus was, so it was like we had a million side projects, and that was what Ragman Records basically consisted of. We had various bands, recording projects, and one-off jams going on in Joe’s mom Ruth’s house all the time, practicing and recording and just hanging out. The name “Ragman Records” was inspired by the movie Trick Or Treat — for a while, Joe would answer his teen-line phone with “Ragman’s Rock Line, what’s your rock and roll request?” One time when I called him I responded with “I wanna hear some Pantera duuuude!” and he actually put “Fucking Hostile” on the boombox and played it into the phone at me.
Steve Potter of Page 5 Girl had a party one night and we were all there. I’d had a couple beers, and news reached us that Heroic Nonsense had broken up. I half-jokingly suggested asking Jon Grim to join No Consensus, and before I knew it, he was in. His steady, chunky rhythm guitar added considerable muscle to the sound, so it was overall a good idea, even if it did add one more voice the cacophonous overload of ideas we were always working with. I think this was where I started to creatively back off a little and let the other guys handle most of the songwriting while I focused on my little piece of the arrangements. Joe had started playing some guitar by this time, so pretty soon we were a three-guitar monster.
We started playing outside of town, and went into a studio and came out with Going To My Cousins. We were putting all kinds of one-off performance-art bits, dramatic routines, and costumes into our shows. We would bring along friends to act as interpretive dancers. We seemed determined never to do the same crazy idea twice, even if we were playing for a completely new crowd. The infamous “alcohol and pills/hostile band takeovers” routine around which we built our set the first time we played in Ottumwa was literally thought up and planned in the van on the drive there, including stopping at a Hy-Vee to buy additional props.
One such performance carried over off the stage when we played some kind of “battle of bands” thing at The Cattle Congress. We stayed in our costumey getups for hours and ran around the grounds in character hassling people and supposedly hunting vampires. We even commandeered a vinyl siding vendor’s booth in Estel Hall when the guy running it, who appeared drunk, left it for a while. We shouted completely unrealistic claims about vinyl siding at passers-by until he returned.
No Consensus and Ragman Records was about to lose its headquarters/hangout/studio/practice space when Ruth moved out of Olive Street and in with her third husband; band members were starting to graduate high school, go to college, move into apartments, get jobs, even leave Iowa; Stebs closed and the Cedar Valley music scene was left without a stable venue for a couple years. This was all going on around 1999 – 2000.
We recorded The Moving Version 1.0b in the auditorium and band room of Price Lab School before Mike left for school in California, after which we kept No Consensus going for a time as a four-piece, rotating between instruments since by this time we had all become multi-instrumentalists, with an open invitation for Mike to join in during summers and other school breaks when he was in town. We did the closest thing No Consensus ever did to a tour, three shows in a row with Circle Of Willis: The Boat House in Cedar Falls, NickFest in Mankato, and 7th Street Entry in Minneapolis. And we got coverage in the local paper after somehow dragging a writer to one of our practices and annoying the hell out of him for a couple hours; he ended up writing of us, “This is a band composed of nearly-grown-up annoying little brothers who may be geniuses, but who also may be in need of institutional assistance… Listening to the music one gets the impression their entire oeuvre represents a massive, long-term inside joke.”
We stuck things out long enough to be able to play at The Reverb a couple times after it opened up in downtown C.F., playing a lot of new material that never managed to get a good recording. Then in June 2002 we had a show booked there that I think Joe had set up, but that I refused to make it to because it was on Leah’s birthday. Somehow by this time things had deteriorated a bit and we had, in a typically No Consensus move, given Joe all rights to the band name to do with as he saw fit. So instead of a “proper” No Consensus performance, Joe assembled a motley cast of performers from the Ragman scene and put on a performance combining poetry, improvised percussion jams, solo songs by different artists, and performance bits staged in different areas of the club. The Reverb proprietors weren’t pleased with this, but it was right up the alley of most No Consensus fans.
By some accounts I quit No Consensus, but I felt like it just crumbled apart spontaneously, and I was increasingly disengaged from it anyway. I was doing Exit Drills by this time, and everybody else in the band eventually moved away to the four corners of the country. But that’s pretty much the story.
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