Ragman Records Archives

Villianova-Goodnight_Little_Wrangler.zip (23.2 Mb)

Either late in or following Page 5 Girl, Steve Potter went back to the old karaoke machine and started writing and recording solo again, a sort of return to the original form of Page 5 Girl, and came up with this quite excellent cassette EP.

Stephen_Oulmans_Tot_Lot_Band-I_Love_Everything_Else.zip (96.1 Mb)

An early, sort of pre-Ragman project, Stephen Oulman’s Tot Lot Band was formed by Steve Wilson improvising songs with Stephen Oulman, a 7-year-old kid who lived next door. Mike and Ben Wilson and Joe Riehle ended up getting involved, along with Chris Vanderwall from the next house over. They had already put out a few short cassette albums before Joe and I ever met, but at one point Joe, wrote a letter to me after getting my address from one of the TapeSNotRecords tapes I had put out, to ask if I would be interested in helping with production of their next tape, but never got around to sending it. This collection brings together the group’s entire pre-Ragman output, in chronological order: Defective, Wood], Enjoy Life…, and Ramp Jump, along with a smattering of previously unreleased stuff and Defector, a song-by-song parody of Defective recorded by the one-off band X-Factor, made up of various SOTLB and Symphon-E members.

Stucco_Induced_Hallucinations-Master_Copier.zip (40.1 Mb)

A one-off improv piece by Ben Echeverria, (Cory) Wagner, and inimitable Eric Dowe. Ben told me about this project and gave me a copy of this tape, saying it was coming out on his “E-Nonymous” label. Eric Dowe’s claim to fame is having taught himself to play drums on a kit he built out of a kick pedal, a cymbal, a metal trash can, and various chunks of metal he welded together. He would later join up with Steve Wilson and, I think it may have been Noah Johnson, in the short-lived instrumental prog-rock band Dr. Wick’s Glam-Rock Pirates, and a few other projects at the periphery of Ragman (Kruger could probably provide a lot of details about that branch of the scene).

Stephen_Oulmans_Tot_Lot_Band-Stephen_Oulman_Man-Child.zip (85.3 Mb)

Once SOTLB got hold of a 4-track and brought me in to help out (which mainly consisted of me operating the 4-track initially until some of the others figured out how, and playing some bass), the group got started working on their masterpiece, originally to be titled Polyester, but by the time of its Ragman cassette release renamed Stephen Oulman, Man-Child. It’s ambitious for an SOTLB project, noisy, distorted, sloppy in a Shaggsy sort of way, but frequently catchy and/or funny, and a key piece of the early Ragman picture, when we were all very much still learning.

Stephen_Oulmans_Tot_Lot_Band-Ghosty_Is_Alive.zip (86.0 Mb)

The recording sessions for Polyester/Stephen Oulman: Man-Child were prolific. Early on there were unofficial versions of the album with different selections of tracks, and later there were different collections of the supposed outtakes. Found here is everything that didn’t end up on Man-Child.

Panasonic_Youth-Question_Mark.zip (112.7 Mb)

The second major Panasonic Youth piece to be recorded, ?, is a side-long jam in similar vein to !, and was originally found on cassette backed with a hilarious Mystery Science Theater-styled piece consisting of Fruits lead singer “Uncle Jeremy” Spaulding talking over a recording of an episode of Captain Kangaroo. All that and more can be found here.

Pythias_Braswell-Pythias_Braswell.zip (57.5 Mb)

First summer after Mike went away to college, he was back in Cedar Falls for the season and called me up about helping him record some stuff. He came by my trailer a few days, we did some mixdown and post-production on some stuff he had on 4-track and made some new recordings, including bringing Joe over for a much-deserved remake of “The Rolling Song.” The result was this CD-R debut of Pythias Braswell. To my knowledge, Mike still performs and records under this moniker, so I’m hopeful that he’s cool with me posting this. If you liked Are You There, God? It’s Me, Michael, this will be right up your alley, and vice-versa. Closes with the stunning “Song For Leaving,” first performed in Mike Hays’s farewell Cedar Falls performance of Hard Boiled Hell before his departure for the West Coast, a song that deserves to be featured at your next going-away party.

Panasonic_Youth-Exclamation_1.zip (111 Mb)

Panasonic_Youth-Exclamation_2.zip (109.9 Mb)

Just when you thought I was all out of lengthy noise improv junk. Panasonic Youth is understandably a kind of outgrowth of Bwang! in the sense that the material was improvised on the spot by whomever was around; but where Bwang! tended to focus, sonically, on guitars and drums, Panasonic Youth was invented to encompass less “rock” approaches, built around electronics, keyboards, effects, found-text, sound collage, monologues, and the like. The cassette ! originally, for the most part, comprised one 90-minute psycho feedback-and-casio jam recorded by myself, Joe, and Steve. These collections, designed for CD-sized consumption, each combine one 45-minute side of the cassette with other things of interest.

Wagner_Quartet-Lonely.zip (101.0 Mb)

So, as I pointed out in the post of It’s A Family Thing, The Wagner Quartet continued to record after releasing that tape. It took awhile but eventually these scattered recordings were collected and released on CD-R as Lonely. It feels like a bit of an odds-and-end collection, padded out with “guest” appearances by other Ragman players and also a sub-bootleg-quality capture of The BassTurd improvising “Wagner Is A Robot” live at a basement party in Iowa City, but there are still some classic Wagner moments like “Shipping Society” and of course “Pigs” (chorus: “You fucking fucking fucking fucking fucking fucking fucking pigs”).

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.