Ragman Records Archives

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)

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)

The_Cactus_Rats-The_Band_Isnt_Helping_expanded.zip (100 Mb)

The Cactus Rats were the band I started with Tyler Vincent after we met at the Wal-Mart he worked at, I invited him to my birthday party, he actually showed up, and mentioned to me that he played drums. For a couple years in the mid-’00s we did a kind of indie garage rock thing wherein we played about 50% covers, which was intended, at least on my part, as kind of experiment in being at least partially a cover band, yet totally not your traditional cover band — mostly I wanted to be able to play house parties and provide a whole night’s worth of music that would include a few not-too-obvious crowd-pleasers. Former Green Party Jedis/Police Cops member Blake Badker ended up joining up after I ran into him at Bob’s Guitars, then later on one of our post-practice drink sessions we met saxophonist Jason Lippard, who we asked to join as well. Then-future Thee Almighty Handclaps guy Joe Derderian somehow found his way to us as bassist but soon found the drive up from Iowa City to be a problem; we went bass-less for a time, then Blake brought in his old bandmate Jay Johnson. It was a demanding project, and we learned a metric shit-ton of songs besides the ones we were writing and worked on them tirelessly. We had marathon practices weekly at Blake’s parents’ house in the middle of nowhere outside New Hartford, which usually involved a fair amount of alcohol, which interfered with Blake’s schizophrenia meds, but strangely enough, most of the weird disasters and psychological upheavals that seemed to be always befalling the band at practices and shows had little or nothing to do with that. Eventually the band broke up because I got sick of Blake’s shit, as he concentrated more on dancing around like an idiot at our shows than on playing his guitar, and would thus play like total shit. The Cactus Rats were doomed from the start, you might say, and the title and art of our second CD-R release The Band Isn’t Helping reflected the way we felt we were spiraling out of control, scared as hell yet kind of reveling in it. This file also includes all of the first CD-R EP Kicked Out Of The Scene plus a few live and practice takes of some of the covers we did.

Wagner_Quartet_Its_A_Family_Thing.zip (86.7 Mb)

The Wagner Quartet, one of the most iconic Ragman projects, is nonetheless difficult to explain. I first became aware of it when Joe told me he was doing a band at school with a kid named Wagner and related to me excitedly that this Wagner had absolutely no pre-existing musical ability whatsoever, knowing that a lack of prior music-making experience was a quality I sought out in collaborators for many of my own projects.

As I understand it now, Joe, Mike, Judd Saul, Ben Echeverria and Wagner were classmates in “Industrial Technology” or whatever “shop class” had turned into by that time in high schools, and were assigned to build a shelf. However, they somehow had convinced the teacher to let them record music instead, in exchange for shelf-building credit. Calling themselves The Shelfbuilders, they recorded the song “Drill You To Hell” using an electric drill as the primary instrument, and Judd left the project, presumably to build an actual shelf, thus inspiring the song “Saul Dust.” Other songs with references to shelves were written, but the project soon switched gears and moved its base of operations to either of Joe’s parents’ houses and was renamed The Wagner Quartet, centered around a persona based on Wagner himself.

Wagner was kind of a shy kid in those days, and I think that the recording sessions that resulted in It’s A Family Thing were intended as a kind of weird ritual to bring him out of his shell and initiate him into the Garage gang. Mike and Joe would write ridiculous and often perverted lyrics and then badger Wagner into reading them over their sloppy, distorted noise compositions, often against his protestations. In at least one song on It’s A Family Thing you can hear Joe and Mike shouting out lines to Wagner in the background, and Wagner muttering “fuck you” into the microphone between lines so that they would only hear it later when playing back the track.

The results of all this, however, turned out to be brilliant. Besides bringing Wagner into the fold, who turned out to be a very creative and fun individual in his own right, the songs on It’s A Family Thing are hilarious and probably totally unlike anything else you’ve ever heard. Following the cassette release, the cover design was printed on sticker paper and cut into shapes designed to fit on light switch covers, with the switch sticking out as the nipple-end of the pacifier, and these stickers found their way into gas station bathrooms throughout Cedar Falls.

The Wagner Quartet, in varying lineups, continued to record for a few more years and even played at least one show.

My_Mentor_Al-Carpet_and_Other_Ways_to_Die.zip (77.9 Mb)

Somewhere between Page 5 Girl and E.D.I.T.H., Stacy, Matt McGuire, and I decided to start a band called My Mentor Al. There wasn’t a clear direction we wanted to go with it, exactly. Eventually Steve Wilson and Joe ended up joining in, and we started recording stuff. Stylistically, it was a intriguing compromise between the more experimental 4-track recording projects and the more rock guitar-based live performing bands, but we only ended up doing one gig, and it was an annual local band tribute to John Lennon that Stebs used to do. We practiced our three songs for it like crazy: a hip-hop/funk mutation of “Instant Karma,” a sneery punk version of “Paperback Writer,” and a relatively straightforward, somewhat revved-up version of “Ticket to Ride” in which I ended up accidentally ad-libbing “I think that living with me is bringing me down/’Cause I can never be free when I am around.” Somehow the high standards demanded by the original core group drove Joe and Steve away from the project, I guess they never figured it was actually a serious band; we ended up discovering Josh Schneiderman and forming E.D.I.T.H. Matt McGuire now resides in Olympia, WA and plays accordion in the folk-punk (or is it punk-folk?) band The Pasties (not to be confused with the NYC power-pop band of the same name).

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.