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)
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)
