DATAPANIK Records, Ubu Dance Party, A Tribute to Pere Ubu (CD, 1997)

Not all Dayton bands on this one, but there are several represented.  And the rest are still from Ohio.

I think this is our first CD offering on this blog.  It is undoubtedly the biggest so far.  I have shied away from posting CDs unless I know for a fact that it's out of print and there are no plans to revive it.  In the case of Ubu Dance Party, I can't say for sure, but every search I've done to find some distributor still selling it has turned up empty.  And even though I played on this record, I never got a copy and so bought one used for a dollar through some Amazon seller.  Now I can't even find second hand copies listed anywhere.  So I think we're safe, but if somebody comes out of the woodwork with the rights to this thing and wants it taken down, I'll comply.

That's doubtful though.  If I remember correctly, our contribution to this record was sort of a "right of first publication only" kind of license.  Assuming everybody else had a similar deal, then the rights to this one are controlled by at least 38 different people.

But enough legal speculation.  About this comp in general, I can't say much.  But Chad Van Wagner, who spent at least three years of his life putting it together, can and does have something to say in the liner notes:

Another tribute?  Yes, I know, but there's a bit more to it than that.  The problem with tributes is they too often lapse into straight covers, "maybe we can have a hit with this" remakes, and little else.  When I set out to start this thing (oh so long ago) I was determined to do what I could to do Pere Ubu, one of the few truly creative and original bands of the past couple decades, justice.  This meant, of course, altering their catalog in the most severe way imaginable: "Cloud 149," in the hands of One Riot One Ranger, goes from bubblegum meandering to a sinister dustbowl tale.  "Petrified" goes from a paranoid babble to Brainiac's nuclear meltdown.  Also, keeping in the spirit with the Ubu catalog, where the importance of studio polish ran a poor second to performance strength (as it SHOULD, dagnabbit) the tracks on this here CD go from the lushness of Cage's "Goodnight Irene" to the RC Mob's boombox-in-a-corner "My Dark Ages."  Beyond these two guidelines, I kept my hands off the creative process, letting the bands do what they will.  Ubu is about (at least to me) stealing pieces of your memory and giving them back in an almost unrecognizable package, one that blew your mind and caught your ear at the same time.  We tried to do the same with these tracks.  Hope you like 'em.

Obviously, this compilation was a labor of love for Chad, and I suspect the same was true for most of the bands.  I don't mean to say everyone who contributed to this was a big PERE UBU fan.  I, in fact, have never owned a single one of their albums (although I did see them at the Newport in the early '90s, and it was a pretty good show).  But there were certainly UBU fans involved, and the fact that Chad went out of his way to make sure only Ohio bands appeared on it made having a track on it kind of special.

I remember being pretty happy when this finally came out (three years after OXYMORONS broke up) to find that our cover of "Honeymoon" was chosen as the very first track.  I'm about 90% that song was one of three or four songs we recorded the very last time we were in the studio together.  And I remember being especially pleased with how we reworked the original song.  Everyone sort of did their part.  The processed voice saying "Honeymoon" at the beginning is Ben speaking through some kind of plastic, toy megaphone he got at the dollar store.  He, Nick, and Grog basically figured out the whole arrangement and dynamics.  I added the squealy riff at the beginning and end by tripling up the guitar part.  I remember Ben and I particularly liking that effect, and I was looking forward to using it more on other OXYMORONS stuff in the future.  But that never happened, of course.  We had gone into the studio knowing our days were numbered as a band, but I don't remember thinking of this as the last time we would ever record anything -- not at the time.

In addition to being a pretty good comp, this is also a pretty good slice of the statewide indie rawk scene in the '90s.  Not every good band is represented, but a lot of them are.  Other Dayton bands (that I recognize) on this are CAGE and BRAINIAC.  There might be others that I don't recognize.  Notable Columbus bands represented here are SCRAWL, NEW BOMB TURKS (of course!), and PET UFO (who have actually made 4 songs from their 1994 album available for listening on PET UFO's Myspace page).  You'll also find the rare, late '90s appearance of RC MOB on this one.  And then there's ASS PONYS who enjoyed some moderate (and deserved) success in the '90s representing Cincinnati.

Not much else to say.  Overall, yeah it's spotty in parts, like most compilations.  But there are some really great tracks.  It's been my pleasure to share the plastic on these discs with every one of these bands.

Track listing, Disc 1:

• 1. sample - the original songs... (0:08)
• 2. The Oxymorons - Honeymoon (2:22)
• 3. Gary Lou Pico - We Have The Technology (2:52)
• 4. Puff Tube - I Will Wait (2:06)
• 5. The Revellers - Heaven (4:39)
• 6. Blue - 30 Seconds Over Tokyo (4:37)
• 7. Cobra Verde - Chinese Radiation (3:25)
• 8. The Haynes Boys - Kathleen (3:34)
• 9. Syrup - On The Surface (3:11)
• 10. Code-X - Vivians (5:28)
• 11. Clay - George Had A Hat (3:45)
• 12. Muzzle - Bus Called Happiness (3:05)
• 13. Campfire Walkers - Modern Dance (3:02)
• 14. Steamshovel - Caligari's Mirror (4:44)
• 15. Sosumi - Humor Me (3:53)
• 16. Flaming Telepaths - Non-Alignment Pact (4:20)
• 17. Laughing - Dock Ellis (5:28)
• 18. Jones - Supie T (3:25)
• 19. Lord Burger - Final Solution (Slight Return) (0:15)

Track listing, Disc 2:

• 1. Cage - Goodnight Irene (3:56)
• 2. Wax Tadpole - Turpentine (2:36)
• 3. Scrawl - Go (3:41)
• 4. Rainy Day Saints - Heart Of Darkness (4:23)
• 5. Brainiac - Petrified (2:23)
• 6. Skullbank - Streetwaves (3:52)
• 7. Quazimodo - Non-Alignment Pact (1:48)
• 8. New Bomb Turks - Life Stinks (3:36)
• 9. G Spot Tornado - Come Home (5:01)
• 10. Kaj Mi Nuka - New Broom (3:54)
• 11. Creature - Heaven (2:33)
• 12. Satellites - Real World (4:29)
• 13. Ass Ponys - Not Happy (3:25)
• 14. RC Mob - My Dark Ages (4:37)
• 15. Pet UFO - Race The Sun (2:33)
• 16. One Riot Ranger - Cloud 149 (3:35)
• 17. Girly Machine - Misery Goats (3:20)
• 18. Honk, Wail And Moan - Thoughts Go By Steam (5:33)
• 19. Gem - Blow Daddy-O (6:05)
• 20. Gaunt - "..." (1:53)

Download it!  (205 MB)

take care,

---Jones()

Off-site: COLAVISION at One-Sided War blog and OXYMORONS (et al.) at Sub-Mission Records

Okay, the first link here is just me tootin' me own horn. It's a link to a nice review, cover scan, and download of COLAVISION's Joan of Arcwelding EP over at the One-Sided War blog. Check out the main blog itself: lots of great 1990s stuff there from Dayton and parts beyond.

Next link is to a download for THE OXYMORONS' appearance on the 1994 Piledriver compilation from... from... well... it was from Sub-Mission Records which was... uhm... somewhere in... Minnesota? Uh, yeah... Minnesota.

No, I REALLY AM sure it was Minnesota. How do you forget the "land o' Minnesota... here come dah Purple Yoda..." (no foolin': that's a line from Prince's latest album -- it's true -- look it up!).

Anyway, I was planning to (and am still planning to) post the Piledriver EP here on this blog at some point. And I'll still do my own rip and post accordingly, but if it's available somewhere else, I'm more than happy to point the reader toward it.

And you can find the address for the main Sub-Mission Records site right here.

That's it for now. But check back in a few days, when we'll be proudly posting the FIRST EVER release from Dayton's legendary CAGE!

take care

---Jones()

Off-site: THE OXYMORONS on Take No Prisoners TV (1994)

A video of my old band playing a show in Flint, Michigan, where we used to play quite often with a Flint band called THE WILL (more on them in a future post when I upload their cassette). This show was recorded and later broadcast on Flint public access television. A couple of years ago, that show turned up on the internet.

Take No Prisoners TV actually did a number of shows featuring punk rock bands from the late '80s and early '90s from Michigan and parts beyond. You can find those shows and more (including performances by SCREECHING WEASEL, THE QUEERS, and RATS OF UNUSUAL SIZE) at the Flint Underground Music Archive.

Please pay no attention to what I'm wearing in this video: baseball cap and long sleeve turtleneck? Not sure what I was thinking. Flint, I guess, is just one of those places where you do things that are best ignored.

take care

---Jones()

UPDATE: as of 3-31-2011, this video seems to no longer be available, nor do any other videos previously offered under the "Take No Prisoners" TV masthead. Don't know what to tell you. Such is the transient nature of the web.

Off-site: FRANKENSTEIN'S KIND and OXYMORONS (sort of!) at YouTube!

Mite Mutant deserves all the credit for digging up these amazing videos.

First, we have this long lost example of mid-'80s creativity from FRANKENSTEIN'S KIND (a band that has, quite UNdeservedly, slipped into Dayton obscurity):



And now, just when you thought things couldn't get any more surreal, here's a video of a drummer playing along with Nick Atkinson's part in THE OXYMORONS' "Day of Reckoning":



If you've never played an instrument, then you might not be familiar with the (common) practice of base imitation to develop one's skill.

If you've ever been involved with any creative art other than music, then you might eschew the practice of imitation as a means to develop creativity. To put it in terms that TINY creative minds might understand, you might think that imitation is for suckers.

However, nothing can be further from the truth. Imitation has been a standard part of creative development for centuries (Benjamin Franklin, in fact, wrote an instructive essay in which he admits that he learned to write well by copying passages from his favorite writers many times over and changing them just a bit each time). The 20th Century witnessed a revolution in pretty much every form of art and invented several new ones. Yet the great disservice that 20th-century thinking did to artists lies in its over-emphasis on complete originality. Certainly, originality is an important element in any finished work of art, but the development of creativity must certainly include the practice of unabashed imitation of previous works of art by which one has been inspired. Seriously, could Jack Kerouac have developed the creativity to write On the Road without first directly imitating his hero Thomas Wolfe in Kerouac's first novel, The Town and the City? Could the ROLLING STONES have recorded Exile on Main Street without first covering the old blues standard "Come On, Come On!"?

And to develop my own (marginal) creative skill, I myself spent hours playing Joey Santiago solos and Bob Mould rhythms note-for-note on my guitar before I ever ventured to record anything I would call "original" (and whatever decency there was in any music I ever made owes a heavy debt to those hours of imitation). With that in mind, I salute both the (unfortunately anonymous) drummer playing in this video AND Nick Atkinson, whose original playing on this track inspired the imitation.

take care

---Jones()

¡THE OXYMORONS!, Bash On, Regardless, cassette (1990)

...and, we're back. Fuck... where did the time go? Seems I spent most of it drinking screwdriver, proofing law review articles, and feeling like a piece of shit. Still do. God, I hate summer...

(oh shit, I just lit another cigarette, and as I was lighting it, I saw that I already had one lit and sitting in the ashtray. Fuck...)

Long post today. Just skip to the download if you'd like -- or hit another site -- I don't know.

Anyway, here we are again. Let's do it:

For me today's download is the definitive OXYMORONS offering. I mean, it's not that I think the first tape or the CD suck or anything like that. In fact, the CD (Dancing on Billy's Grave, which I will post at some point) is the one that we put the most effort into. I also think the CD is where Ben's songwriting is at its best, and the CD also contains "Unearthing Your Grave," which I have always thought of as our best recording ever. As for the first tape, well tracks like "Born So Blessed," "Cheep Beer," and "Let Go" still rawk my soul. I've got no complaints.

But this one... this one... this is the one, in my opinion. From the juvenile stupidity of "Psycho Girl" and "Jocks With Mohawks" to the maudlin enigma of "Wreckage," this is the one that hits home with me. This just is THE OXYMORONS. We had little idea what we were doing, but we did it. And it was fun. This is the one that got people actually coming up to us, referring to certain songs by name, and asking us to play them -- not just in Dayton (although that would've been good enough for me) but even in parts beyond. I don't know how to describe the feeling you get when that happens. It's intoxicating, but it's more than that.

We once played a show in Madison, Wisconsin, and I specifically remember the day after that show meeting some blonde chick who had been there the night before (we were still in town because we had a day off). We just met randomly on the street, and she said she had loved it when we played "Wreckage." She referred to the song by its title and said she had gone to the show specifically to hear it. She also said she loved the guitar on that song. To this day, I remember her eyes as she talked about it. Maybe you are cooler than I am, but for my part, that conversation changed my life. If, when I die, I find out that there really is a heaven, and if I get to go there, I think I'll just have that conversation with that nameless girl forever.

I remember Ben once telling me that he had been talking to some girl to whom he had been trying to explain why the band was so important to him -- and she just didn't get it. He had told her about how he would wake up in the middle of the night because he was worried that some part he had put into a song just wasn't working out. He had told her how he had spent hours in that basement working out parts and trying to come up with lyrics and trying to turn it all into a song and how the whole process simply dominated his brain. He had told her all about this, and she just didn't get it. Honestly, I'm not sure I got it either. But it was good to know that all that paid off for at least some listeners.

Now as you might've guessed by now, no one is a bigger OXYMORONS fan than I (except maybe Gail). I'm immensely proud of everything we ever did. I'm proud of these recordings. I'm proud of the shitty shows. I'm proud to have had the privilege to know and play in a band with such talented and off-beat personalities as Ben Schelker, Pat Hennigan, Greg Simerlink, and Nick Atkinson. I'm proud of it all. I am both proud and humbled by the entire experience of playing in a half-decent punk rock band that never made it. I'm proud and humbled in ways that even I have difficulty expressing. I'm not sure if that's good or just really pathetic. And even though, as I just said, we never "made it," I can't think of a single thing I would change about the whole thing. Not one goddam thing.

And that goes double for Bash On, Regardless. All the flubs, all the mistakes, all the screw-ups... you'll definitely hear 'em! And for years, there were so many things about this that I wanted to go back and fix. I imagine we all did. But listening to it now, I wouldn't want it to be any other way.

There is quite a bit more I could say about this cassette, but I'll just leave it all in the track notes.

Here are some notes on the cassette itself and the cover insert (scanned and included in the download pack):

• Those are sticky labels on the cassette. I don't know how many copies of this we sold (a few hundred, at least), but Grog deserves some thanks for printing, cutting, and sticking each and every one of those fucking labels onto the cassette itself. He also deserves some thanks for recording each and every one of the production copies on his home stereo. I can't even imagine doing that.
• "Psycho Side" is Side 1.
• Mark Wood drew the cover picture. He was... he was... well, he was sort of an odd character who has really faded in my memory. I don't know what else to say about him -- except that I hope he's still drawing something, somewhere.
• The title "Bash On, Regardless" we got from this guy named Angus, who came to Dayton for some reason from the UK. Angus was a really cool guy. He was studying to be a veterinarian in the UK. I don't remember how he came to give us the phrase "Bash On, Regardless," but I do remember that he is the first person in my memory to actually enunciate the concert t-shirt rule. You know: "You NEVER go to a show and wear the t-shirt of the band that's playing!" He was right. Angus and I went to many shows at Bogart's, and I always bought a t-shirt of the band, but I never wore it at the show. Still, because I would always buy the t-shirt, Angus was kind enough to tell me once, "Patrick, you are a t-shirt groupie!" Again, he was absolutely right. If you ever meet Angus, just assume that everything he says is absolutely right -- even though he makes his living "sticking my hand up cows' bums!" (as he told me once).
• My suggestion for the title of this cassette was "Love You With A Knife!" (a line from "Psycho Girl") but I got out-voted.

Here are some notes on the songs:

• "Psycho Girl" - That's Gail Dafler doing the scream at the beginning and during the break. Ben got her to scream like that by pinching her arm really (really) hard. I was standing right next to them in the booth. Her performance merited her the nickname "Psycho Gail" in perpetuity. QUICK UPDATE: I just got off the phone with Gail and described this entry to her. According to her, she was known as "Psycho Gail" even before she recorded this scream for us. Apparently, that appellation actually came from an evening she spent at Canal Street Tavern involving a bottle of Boone's Farm and a completely different song called "Psycho Girl" recorded by another Dayton band, THE KILLJOYS.
• "I Think Like Toast" - This song is about Ben working late at Friendly's. The rock-n-roll Friendly's at the intersection of Dayton-Xenia Rd. and Linden in Beavercreek really deserves a blog entry of its own. For now I'll just say that Ben worked there in the late '80s and early '90s, as did Nick Atkinson (OXYMORONS drummer), Joel Lensch (CANDYASS), Jen Cook (COLAVISION), Keith Conly (who was one of Ben's best friends and probably came to every OXYMORONS show in Dayton), John Poe (still an enigma to this day), Andrea Donato (the future ex-Mrs. Jones), and any number of others whose names I can't remember right now. Many of Ben's songs were inspired by his experiences and the people he met working at this Friendly's. The last time I drove by that area (about a year ago), this Friendly's still existed, though it has been remodelled extensively since Ben worked there. My best Friendly's memory comes from when I was working at Orange-Frazer Press (which was just down the road) and used to go get my lunch from there. One afternoon, I was sitting at the counter and made sort of this cockroach-like monster out of a pickle with toothpicks for legs (and antennae). I then said, "No Godzilla! Please don't eat me!" and then roared and bit the thing in half as Ben watched. He laughed his ass off, and so did Andrea. I was quite proud of myself. To this day, I try to work that routine into every first date I have (that is, if I care about the girl). If she likes it, I know she's at least in the ballpark of being a keeper.
• "I Wanna Be A Shaman" - I really don't know where this song came from except for a dim memory that Ben had picked up some bits of eastern aesthetics from this girl he went out with for a few weeks in 1989. For a period of maybe three months in 1990, this was our most requested song at shows. Then people stopped asking for it, we started hating it, and we just stopped playing it. Strange how that happens sometimes.
• "New Beginning/Bottom Line" - I really don't know what this song is about. But I remember that there's a floor-tom fill in "New Beginning" that seemed very important to Nick that we get right. We spent quite a bit of studio time overdubbing it and then bringing that overdub up in the final mix so that it wasn't too loud or too soft. By the time we were done, I just didn't give a shit anymore, but to Nick it was almost like life or death. Do him a favor and try to listen for it.
• "Wreckage" - This one actually has a very interesting story behind it. It's about Joe, a very talented friend of Ben's who was an artist and student at the University of Cincinnati. Apparently, this friend once gave Ben a quickly drawn comic strip about a man who died, went to Hell, and was immediately confronted by The Devil, who threw things at the dead man and forced him to juggle them. The Devil would say things like, "Here's some insecurity! Here's your creative outlet! Here's your witty tongue!" and then throw things at the man to juggle. Sadly, this friend of Ben's committed suicide not too long after he gave Ben this comic. I saw it once, and I'd give almost anything to be able to post it here now. But I don't know what happened to it.
• "Pleasant Distraction" - This is about a long-term girlfriend that Ben had, for whom he admitted that he had no real love, yet he felt a real bond with her. If I remember correctly, Ben wrote another song ("Life Goes On," which ended up on the Piledriver compilation in Wisconsin) about this same girl. That song once prompted this girl to comment that, "You should never go out with a guy in a band because he'll just end up writing songs about you!" She was absolutely right. This is actually the first song we recorded in these sessions and was never intended to go on the cassette -- as evidenced by the totally throwaway lead I put in. But Ben liked it, so it was in.
• "Running" - This is the last song on the first side of the original cassette. I don't really know what it's about, but I do know that it's Nick Atkinson's favorite song on this release -- witness his amazing Neil Peart-inspired drum fills.
• "Jocks with Mohawks" - This was my first songwriting effort for this band, and I think it was only my third songwriting effort ever (I've written a number of songs over the years, but I honestly never thought of myself as a "songwriter"). I wrote the music, which was largely inspired by various hardcore songs on BAD BRAINS' first cassette. Ben wrote the words. Obviously, it was about the then-emerging trend of high school jock assholes trying to distinguish themselves by listening to hardcore punk. Funny how today you can't be cool at all in high school unless you listen to some kind of indie rock -- makes one want to buy as many FRANK SINATRA records as you can get your hands on... Anyway, this became one of those songs that we always played at every show. How can you go wrong when the chorus is, "You're just a bunch of jocks with mohawks!"?
• "If" - I'm pretty sure this is Kattie Dougherty's (REAL LULU) favorite OXYMORONS song ever. The night we all learned of Ben's death, she and Dennis came over to my house and we listened to this one many times (and it's a good thing she came over too, because I had no idea where my copy of it was at the time). I remember I fucked up the end to this one. At the very end, I tried to turn off my distortion pedal so that I could play the final riff cleanly, but for some reason, I messed up and the final riff came out distorted. It's always bothered me, but nobody else seemed to care.
• "Wasting My Time" - Ben wrote most of the lyrics for this on a cocktail napkin at Canal Street Tavern, where he often went to waste time. Grog tried to record some backup vocals for this on the chorus, and it was only as he was recording them that we realized that Grog couldn't sing a bloody note. After coming in from the soundbooth, he listened to the results and admitted the fact. Ben re-recorded the backing vocals himself.
• "Stinky Hippy/Gingerbread Man" - "Stink Hippy" was the one song on the cassette that Ben had written before Grog and I joined the band (I don't know why we didn't put it on the first cassette). He got the opening chord (A-minor-7th) from Denny Wilson (TOOBA BLOOZE). For some reason, Ben was always fascinated by the A-minor-7th. He put it in this song, and he used to use it in a stupid, jazzy version of "Iron Man" that he would dick around with at practice sometimes (I have a recording of that somewhere). "Gingerbread Man" is just sort of a fantastical tale about a gingerbread man who comes to life after being cooked in the oven and runs around the kitchen trying to escape being eaten. Maybe Ben had been doing acid with THE KILLJOYS, or maybe it came from his own stupid imagination.
• "Love Buzz" - I really, really, really don't know how this ended up on the final release of the cassette or why we even recorded it in the first place. Ben and the rest of us always hated this song. If you listen, you'll notice that my leads are entirely phoned in (no doubt I was thinking about something else as I played them) AND that we didn't even care enough about it to make up a proper ending! This may have even been the last time we ever played it (among all the live show recordings I have, I don't think "Love Buzz" appears anywhere).
• "Televise My Nervous Breakdown" - I'm pretty sure this one was my first lyrics-writing effort. Ben wrote the music -- it was kind of his attempt at a BLACK FLAG sort of tune. It's supposed to be about how people like Oprah and Barbara Walters seemed to intentionally get people to cry and generally break down in order to increase ratings. The reference to "Pringles Light Potato Chips" was Ben's idea. I was finishing up the lyrics maybe two minutes before I did the vocal track and just asked him to name a product, any product. That's what he gave me. For some reason, this song became a total joke to us. At shows, I would often sing the first line as "Spoon into my walrus!" and Ben would sing the second as "Watch me eat a can of peas!"
• "Folsom Prison Blues" - Okay, we recorded this one at these sessions, but Grog didn't put it on this cassette. Instead, he added it as a bonus track to the first cassette -- likely so that people could get a sample of Nick Atkinson's drumming (because Pat Hennigan had played drums on the first cassette). Still, because I've been listening to my studio mix of these songs all these years, I associate it with Bash On, Regardless. And when I posted the first cassette, I didn't include this one, so here it is now. Please remember, however, that although Johnny Cash covers are kind of trite and cliched now, it was actually kind of daring to do one in 1990. Even that wonderful 'Til Things Are Brighter compilation had only been released a few months earlier when we recorded this. I don't know why I feel the need to point that out, but I do.
• "Walking Backwards" - As the liner notes in the booklet say, we recorded this live at Apollo's in Columbus on August 1, 1990 (which means that as of this day, this recording is legally able to buy cigarettes in the State of Ohio -- RAWK!). I do have the rest of this show on tape and will rip and post it some time this fall. We played with LIQUID DRAINO that night, and I've got their set on tape also. "Walking Backward" was always one of our favorites -- so much so that we did a cleaner, nicer, studio version for the CD. I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that the "Jenny" mentioned in the first line is actually "Janey," who was a manager that Ben worked with at Friendly's.

Here are some notes on the booklet:

• The idea for even doing a little booklet to insert into the cassette case was inspired by a similarly-sized booklet inserted into the second album by JANE'S ADDICTION, Ritual de lo Habitual, which was released about the same time we were recording this. Our friends in LIQUID DRAINO inserted a booklet like this into their second cassette release.
• p. 1 - Hey, check it out! Keith Conly (who worked with Ben at Friendly's) did backup stuff on three songs! I had totally fogotten that!
• p. 2 (inside front cover) - "Joe Boob" is, of course, Joe Buben. As I've mentioned in previous entries, he was the owner and main recording engineer at Cro-Magnon studios for many years. He had a hat with fake dogshit glued to the brim that said "Shithead." That's the kind of guy he was -- and a great engineer too.
• pp. 6 & 7 - These are mini-reproductions of flyers we distributed for shows at places that had closed by the time we released this tape. That happened a lot back then (and probably still does now): a place would open, and some shows would happen, and then suddenly it would either close its doors or they'd book different types of bands. Grog always did our booking, and so he became kind of attached to these places. I designed both of these flyers. There's a lot I could say about them, but this entry is long enough already, so I'll save it for when I post these flyers.
• p. 9 - On "Gingerbread Man," the "Ode to D. Boon" part. Yeah, this one was kind of inspired by THE MINUTEMEN (as if that weren't apparent just from listening to it). For those who don't know, old D. Boon was killed in a van accident while on tour. Seems that whenever we'd be on tour and whoever was driving the van would have some kind of mishap (which seemed to happen most when I was driving), the others would say something like, "Don't give us the D. Boon treatment here!"
• p. 9 - On "Love Buzz," where it says "Howl Right Along." See? We didn't even care enough to write the stupid lyrics down!
• p. 11 - "REJECT" Filling up the final page with this graphic was my idea, but I don't remember where I got the graphic from.
• p. 12 (back cover) - This is a reproduction of the first OXYMORONS sticker we ever made. I drew it and added the caption. Let me say here that in general I have always turned out to be very good at pretty much anything I really wanted to do. The one exception to that has been drawing. Since I was a kid, I always wished I could draw, but I really can't. Still, for some reason, I would take every opportunity I could to draw something. So I drew this sticker, and it always pleased me to no end that Grog liked it -- hope you do too.

Now about the rip itself:

• The scans of the cover and insert come to you courtesy of The Gail Dafler Collection (because I never had a production copy of this cassette).
• Rips of all studio tracks are from a first-generation cassette I made of the recordings on the same day we made them (which is why "Folsom Prison Blues" is in there). My memory fails me at this point, but it is possible that the cassette I ripped from was not the final mix. It's possible that it's a rough mix. I'd have ripped Gail's production copy, but after eighteen years it was just too muddy, and the one I had sounded far more clear. But even if my cassette is just a rough mix, it's pretty damn close to the final. I listened to both, and even I can't tell the difference.
• The rip of "Walking Backwards" is from the original cassette onto which it was recorded on a "piece-of-shit boombox" (which was my boombox!) on August 1, 1990. So the song may start and cut off in different places than it did on the original. But once again, it's a better-sounding recording.

Track List:

1. Psycho Girl
2. I Think Like Toast
3. I Wanna Be A Shaman
4. Bottom Line
5. Wreckage
6. Pleasant Distraction
7. Running
8. Jocks With Mohawks
9. If
10. Wasting My Time
11. Stinky Hippie/Gingerbread Man
12. Love Buzz
13. Televise My Nervous Breakdown
14. Folsom Prison Blues
15. Walking Backwards

Download it! (link re-upped on 6-4-2014)

Enjoy! And as always, feel free to copy and share as you see fit. It's all free here! No license, no... whatever. Just don't try to sell it to anybody, or I'll hunt you down in my Ford!

Anyway, "You keep eatin' your hand, you ain't gonna be hungry for lunch..."

("I've seen you before, y'know...")

take care

---Jones()

ps. We'll be back in a few days with some DEMENTIA PRECOX!

OXYMORONS video, fixed

Mite fixed the sound on THE OXYMORONS video:

take care

---Jones()

A flyer with a big cock on it...

Here we go then: the infamous penis flyer!

I haven't seen this damn thing in at least seventeen years, and it looks just as stupid now as it did when Gail and I put it together.

I had known Gail for just a couple of months at the time. I don't remember exactly how or where I first met her, but it was most likely at WWSU's Alternative Tuesday some time in the summer of 1989 -- perhaps through our friend in common*, Laura Albrecht, whom I knew because she was a student in the English Department at Wright State and whom Gail had known since elementary school.

At some point, I'm going to compose a nice, long blog entry on Gail and her relationship to Dayton music in general and THE OXYMORONS in particular, but for now I'll just say that she was the co-mastermind behind this flyer, which proved to be one of the most memorable and boneheaded manuvers I would ever make in my life -- but one of the few boneheaded manuvers I would ever make for which I would suffer no consequences.

Gail and I made this flyer in the library at WSU. I found the picture in a book of woodcuts by 19th century illustrator Aubrey Beardsley -- who may be best known for his ornately rendered version of Le Morte D'Arthur (I have a facsimile -- it's quite beautiful), but who also produced illustrations for any number of other works under the William Morris imprint, including absurdist, semi-pornographic romances, of which the illustration here is typical.

What twenty-year-old mind could resist slapping this stupid illustration on a flyer and adding the equally stupid dialogue balloon over it? Certainly not mine, nor Gail's. This one writes itself, no?

I swear to god, none of us ever questioned it. We just put 'em up. In fact, I remember this particular flyering adventure as one of the very few times that we all went flyering together: with a hundred of these things, plus a brush, a big can of glue, and a lot of Wild Irish Rose. We put 'em up in a number of places, but we hit the Oregon District the hardest. We put these big green pieces of paper with a big cock on them all over bulletin boards, the sides of buildings, benches, and one or two NO PARKING signs.

And we really thought nothing of it. I was actually surprised when Ben called me a few days later and told me how a City of Dayton police officer had come knocking at his parents' front door on a Sunday afternoon. Seems this same officer had also come storming into Canal Street Tavern earlier that day bellowing that he was going to arrest someone if they didn't give him the location of someone in THE OXYMORONS. Mick gave Ben up, but we couldn't really blame him -- now or then.

It seems initial complaints had come from business owners throughout the Oregon District and officials at Sinclair Community College (where we had also put quite a few of these up). The cops got involved from there. This particular cop must've either gotten his ass chewed off by Chief Inspector Todd or he was bucking for promotion because he put Ben in the back of that car, drove him all over Dayton, and made him take down every flyer that we had glued to NO PARKING signs.

Okay, now that I'm typing this, I'm getting the impression that I might be confusing this flyering incident with a different one, but in any case, all of this stuff happened. It's just that some of the events might've happened on a different occasion.

In any case, Ben took the hit for all of us, and I'll thank him once again for that. He took down every one of these things the cop told him to, and he never gave him my name or Nick's or Grog's. By the time I even heard of police involvement, it was all done.

Yeah, I'm thinking more about it now, and I'm pretty sure that this flyer just got Canal Street Tavern a bunch of angry phone calls. It was another flyer that got Ben shanghaied into Dayton urban renewal.

Thanks to Grog for digging this up, scanning, and sending it along.

take care

---Jones()

* I use the phrase "friend in common" rather than "mutual friend" because even though the latter was good enough for Charles Dickens (the finest man of English letters after Shakespeare and William Blake) it contains an improper use of the word "mutual."

Smokey the Bear, Jeffrey Dahmer, GREEN DAY, THE OXYMORONS, and me...

Grog dug up some flyers the other day -- among them, this one for a punkfest that THE OXYMORONS played with GREEN DAY in 1992 (or thereabouts).

GREEN DAY and THE OXYMORONS were supposed to be the big draws, so GREEN DAY was slated to play last and we were to play right before them. We sat there in some park outside of Milwaukee pretty much all day drinking, listening to one band after another, and talking to people as they came by the van. It was fun for the first few hours, but by 10:00 p.m. or so, I was ready to play and get the hell out of there. We had a six-hour drive to St. Louis in the morning.

This park had a gigantic hot air balloon figure of Smokey the Bear sitting maybe thirty feet from the covered area where the bands were playing. At some point after sundown, somebody slashed it. The police showed up, saw that big expensive bear sagging, and kicked everybody out. So the show got moved to an apartment in Milwaukee occupied by a friend of the kid who had put the festival together.

The apartment was pretty huge and situated on the third floor of a three-story building. The lower two floors, strangely enough, were occupied by an abortion clinic. The building itself was located just a couple of blocks from Jeffrey Dahmer's old apartment building, which was still standing at the time. Dahmer had been arrested just the previous summer, so we all drove by the building and marvelled.

There were a lot of people on hand at the apartment. We decided to go say "hey" to GREEN DAY and offer a handshake to old Billie Joe. No response. Same from the other two members. Then GREEN DAY decided that they MUST go on first so that they could go to bed, even though they were staying in Milwaukee and we and the other band had to be in St. Louis the next day. We explained this and the fact that the crowd would greatly diminish after they played. Their only response was that if they didn't play right then, they were leaving. So we let them go on and, as we expected, when they were done, half the room was gone.

We recognized most of the people who had stayed, so we knew that if we played next, no one would see the last band. So we let them go (they were very cool but I can't remember their name) and ended up starting a six-hour drive to St. Louis at 4 a.m.

GREEN DAY begged and pleaded the owner of the apartment to let them stay there. She said "okay." Somebody put a GRATEFUL DEAD tape in the stereo. GREEN DAY's drummer threw it out the window, and they got kicked out. So they were outside singing "Trucking" and acting like it was no big deal. Then the bass player started sidling over, looking at us like he wanted to give us the privilege of allowing GREEN DAY to sleep in our van. We waved "bye-bye" and high tailed it on to St. Louis.

I heard later that the guy who had organized the show let them stay at his house. This guy lived with his parents. GREEN DAY showed up at 6 a.m. and promptly set about dying their hair in the guy's bathroom, getting hair dye everywhere (including the ceiling) and leaving a big turd behind the toilet. Wow. Punk rock, I guess. Anyway, that's the story.

So basically, they were assholes. But, what the hell? Kerplunk, Dookie, and American Idiot are really good records. I guess I just wish I'd never met them.

take care

---Jones()

ps. Grog also sent me the infamous penis flyer. I'll post that in a few days.

Off-Site: ¡THE OXYMORONS! on YouTube...

Another great upload over at Mite Mutant's YouTube site: it's a video of THE OXYMORONS playing "Unearthing Your Grave" at Canal Street Tavern. I'm not entirely sure of the year, but the song plus the length and color of my hair lead me to place this in 1992.

This one actually brought a tear to my eye. I've seen very little OXYMORONS video over the past fifteen years and almost none since Ben died -- strange to see him on stage again playing this song.

My only problem with this video is that the sound is very, very low, but Mite tells me he's working on fixing that and will upload more when he does so.

I don't know why I'm doing the hippie dance in this one. Pretty goofy.

take care

---Jones()

Off-Site: Dayton bands at the AllMusic guide...

So I was dicking around over at the AllMusic site and just started typing in names of bands and people from Dayton indie rock. Most returned some kind of result, but only a few included a write-up. I've listed those that returned such a result below (along with corrections where I know AllMusic got it wrong):

TROY CAMPBELL - Troy Campbell was basically the creative force behind THE HIGHWAYMEN. I have a couple of recordings by them that I'll post at some point, but I never met or played with any of these guys. They had relocated to Austin before I really knew who they were. Still, I saw them play once at Canal Street Tavern about a year after they left -- great live show. The only thing I would venture on this article is that I always thought THE HIGHWAYMEN left Dayton in 1988, but the bio puts it in 1989.

BRAINIAC - One correction:

• Tim wasn't driving home from the studio when he was killed. He was driving home from the closing night party of 1470 West, which was both a gay club and a modern rock dance club, depending on which night of the week you went there (there tended to be a lot of crossover, and everybody knew it, so if you were straight and you got hit on by a homosexual, you just had to politely decline -- and no, Tim was not gay). The club was moving to a new location downtown. There's been a lot of unfounded speculation about what caused the accident, and although I don't usually mind reporting rumors, it seems crass to do so in this case. I really didn't know Tim that well, except to say "hello" on occasion.

THE OXYMORONS - Okay, this was the strangest result of all. Not only is there a very complimentary biography (thank you Uncle Dave Lewis), but I actually learned something about my own band that I never knew before. Apparently, we appeared on some kind of indie rock compilation on Shredder Records in 1997 (three years after we broke up). The cover of our first seven-inch record is even reproduced on the cover of the compilation, and our song ("Unearthing Your Grave," which I've always thought was the best thing we ever recorded) is the first track. I had no idea...Again, I think the bio is great (my head is expanding as I type), but I do have a couple of corrections (no offense at all to Uncle Dave):

• Although D.O.A. certainly played in Dayton and hung out with TOXIC REASONS frequently enough to convince the casual observer that they were from this town, they weren't. They were, of course, from Vancouver.
• When Ben's dad found his body (through what must be one of the cruelest coincidences of all time -- Dumb Dayton Luck strikes again...), he wasn't taking him back to Dayton for a family outing. The two of them were going to drive to New York (where Ben had lived the previous couple of years) to pick up his stuff and bring it back home.
• Dancing on Billy's Grave was a regular CD release (our third full-length if you count the first two cassettes), not a compilation of our stuff.

Anyway, other than that, the bio is spot on. Thanks again, Uncle Dave.

THE MULCHMEN - The MULCHMEN were a surf rock combo in the '90s featuring Nick Kizirnis (guitar, theremin), Gregg Spence (drums, and Brian Hogarth (bass). I've got their 7" (All the News That's Fit to Surf). No corrections on this one.

JOHN SHOUGH - Nothing to add except that John is probably the best engineer I ever recorded with.

LAB PARTNERS - Good band still currently playing around Dayton. They're great, but I won't be posting anything by them (though you can hear their stuff at the LAB PARTNERS myspace page).

REAL LULU - One correction:

• The bio seems to imply that Jim Macpherson played drums on We Love Nick, but that's only 1/7 true. Gregg Spence is listed as the official drummer. He played on 7 of the fourteen tracks. Jim and Steve Johnson each played on two tracks. Drummers on the remaining three tracks were Ben, Matt Espy, and Tim Taylor.

take care

---Jones

ROCK WOLF, s/t (unofficial, cassette, 1992(?))

Today's download comes to us from the Grog Collection.

The excellent MP3 blog on the WFMU site has a recurring feature called "Cassette Culture Revisited." Each entry spotlights something from cassettes that are either one-of-a-kind "found" items (like audio letters, recordings of conversations, speeches, poetry, rants, etc.) or very small run music releases--usually of the experimental or just plain odd variety and almost always with homemade covers and inserts. Today's entry would, I think, fit nicely under the "Cassette Culture" banner.

Rick (aka "Rock") Wolf was this guy who used to come to OXYMORONS shows, stand next to the stage, jump up and down, and do air guitar while we played. He was a big guy. I believe he was in some branch of the service. He had a Marine-style buzz cut. To this day, whenever I think of OXYMORONS playing at Canal Street Tavern, I think of Rick standing about three feet to my right--air-guitaring his ass off.

Rick had band equipment and a 4-track in his home, where he recorded this tape all by himself. He gave us a copy, but I don't think he circulated it as a release. As far as I know, we're the only ones except him who ever heard it.

And that's really too bad because this thing is amazing. Rick's music is a perfect reflection of himself: loud, awkward, and totally cool. The obvious hit single is "Aliens from Mars," but "The Dog and the Fish" and "Shitting Hits" are damn good as well. Of special interest to Daytonians would be "Cargill Stench," a monster broadside slam against the rendering plant on Needmore that's still stinking up this town fifteen years later. Even if you listen to the first few cuts and decide you don't like it, listen to "Cargill Stench" at least once before sending this to the recycler.

The only weak tracks here are the OXYMORON covers (tracks 2-4). It's not that I don't like those songs or that Rick doesn't do them justice. I just think his originals are so much better suited to his talents. I'd compare Rick to WESLEY WILLIS, except that Rick is more coherent and can actually carry a tune. The whole thing's got something of a latter-day HASIL ADKINS aesthetic but with homemade grunge rather than homemade psychobilly.

But comparisons mean little here. Rick is a Dayton original: perhaps the ultimate expression of "Dayton’s strange, violent, creative energy . . . [that] climbs out of the Miami river valley, riding on clouds of industrial soot, and infects the minds and spirits of young unsuspecting children."

So after fifteen years of obscurity, this heretofore untold chapter in Dayton music history comes to you through the magic of the internet. Listen, enjoy, copy, share. And if you have any idea what Rick Wolf is doing these days, let me know.

Track List:

1. Aliens from Mars
2. Pleasant Distraction*
3. Cheep Beer*
4. Wasting My Time*
5. Rock and Roll Road to Success
6. Cargill Stench
7. The Dog and the Fish
8. Oh Yeah
9. 2 Many Times
10. Stay the Same
11. Shitting Hits
12. Falling

All instruments and vocals by Rick Wolf.

All words and music by Rick Wolf, * except tracks 2-4 by Ben Shelcker and The Oxymorons.

I'm placing this in 1992 because it seems to me Rick Gave this to us after a show we did at Canal Street on the night before we left for a tour that I'm sure took place in 1992. But as usual, I could be wrong on that. If so, correct me. As always, any comments are welcome.

Download it! (38 MB) (link re-upped on 2-1-2013)

take care

---Jones

¡THE OXYMORONS!, s/t cassette (1989)

Long post today. If you don't wanna bother, just scroll to the end, and you'll find the download link.

It's hard to describe one's own work without sounding like a dick, so here's some reviews:

• "One energetic song after another...These guys deserve more attention than they're getting" - MOR, Madison, WI
  
• "Energetic Rock 'n' Roll from Dayton, OH..." - Under the Volcano, Nessconset, NY
  
• "Couch slamming, sing along, drink cheap beer, pop punk. Very melodic." - Slug and Lettuce, New York, NY

My recollection is that we recorded this in July or August of 1989 (it was sweltering out, and that usually means July or August in Dayton). We did it all in about eight hours at the old Cro-Magnon studios in Dayton -- by "old" I mean back when it was still 8-tracks and the studio was housed on the opposite end (from where it moved a few years later) of the second floor of the Front Street Warehouse. Any number of Dayton bands recorded at that studio at that time, and much of it came out with a distinctive Cro-Magnon sound: lots of reverb and very chunky-sounding. Sorry I can't think of a better adjective than "chunky-sounding," but if you listen to this and some of the other stuff I'll be posting, you'll get the picture.

I'm pretty sure everything is a "live" recording -- meaning, we set up and recorded all at once, including the vocals, with no overdubs except for one extra guitar I added on "Another Lonely Day." For some reason, Grog played bass directly into the board. Ben hated the resulting sound and made fun of it for years afterward, dubbing it "underwater bass." Actually, I think we all hated it, including Grog. It's just that Ben was the only one who made up a name for it. But aside from the bass, this is probably the only Oxymorons' release that I can actually say I like the sound of. I think it's pretty well-mixed, tight, balanced, even.

Random observations about the songs:

• My personal favorite cut is "Born So Blessed," the only song on this cassette that we never got tired of playing.
  
• "Disco Beginning" was just one of a half-dozen lead-ins we had for "Idiot Box" (my favorite was "Barney Miller" beginning -- why didn't we record that one?).
  
• Ben told me once that he played "Tell Me" solo at some kind of family reunion thing and everyone just sort of stared at him -- and these were his relatives for fuck's sake.
  
• When Ben asks "is the tape on?" at the beginning of "Cheep Beer" and "Let Go," he's being sincere. I feel the need to point that out because someone once accused him of "feigned roughness." Believe it or not, that bothered him for weeks -- and if you think it's petty to obsess over a thoughtless comment by some listener whose name you don't even know, then you've obviously never been in a band.
  
• "Pain" later appeared on Bob Moore's Breathe On The Living compilation of poetry and music recordings (some of which I'll be sharing later on).
  
• But by far the most requested song was "Cheep Beer." I don't think we ever played a show where somebody didn't request it -- probably because it somehow found its way onto a dozen compilations released in various parts of the country and was still appearing on compilations as late as 1997.
  
• The "John" mentioned in "Cheep Beer" is John Solimini, the same guy Ben was talking to on the phone when he fell to his untimely death in 1997.
  
• Ben wrote all the words and music, except for "Poetry." For that one, he adapted some of the lyrics from a poem by me and added some of his own. That poem had been published by Bob Moore in Nexus (Wright State's literary magazine), and I remember I once ran into a girl at some odd festival in Huber Heights who gushed over it so much that I felt like Jack Kerouac for the rest of the summer.

This was ripped from a first generation copy taken straight off the mixed reel-to-reel. The songs on that tape are in the order we recorded them, and that's the order I left them in for this (that's why the order doesn't match with the cover scan).

Also, when we recorded our second cassette (Bash On Regardless), we had a different drummer (Nick Atkinson, who replaced Pat Hennigan), and Grog thought we should have something with Nick playing on the first cassette. So he added "Folsom Prison Blues." That's why the picture of the cover here includes that song, but the archive for download doesn't (I don't own any production copies of either cassette, so I had to get the scan here from the Mutant Renegade Records site). However, "Folsom Prison Blues" will be included when I post the songs from the second tape.

In addition to the songs, I also threw in an excerpt from a radio interview that Grog and I did on WWSU-FM here in Dayton (recorded 1-10-90, the DJ is Roni Wilson-Vinson). In this portion, I get to tell the story of a flyer we put up all over Dayton that got us angry phone calls from business owners and other very moral people around town (by the way, The Skid Row comment at the end had something to do with some flap at the time about Skid Row's lead singer throwing a bottle in some kid's face because he believed the kid had thrown the bottle at him).

Four days after this interview, a Dayton City Police officer showed up on Ben's doorstep threatening to arrest him for defacing public property. Apparently, we had put flyers (which had a big cock on them) over several NO PARKING signs in the Oregon District. Let that be a lesson to all you impressionable young kids out there: never go flyering with a big tub of glue and two gallons of vodka.

I'd post an image of the flyer, but I no longer have a copy -- don't know what happened to it.

Track list:

• 1. Cheep Beer
• 2. SHC
• 3. Pain
• 4. Born So Blessed
• 5. Let Go
• 6. Tell Me
• 7. Poetry
• 8/9. Disco Beginning/Idiot Box
• 10. Another Lonely Day
• 11. Quit
• Interview

Download It! (29 MB) (link re-upped on 2-1-2013, but no interview in this one)

Visit the Mutant Renegades Record page for the band if you want to know more about The Oxymorons.

take care

---Jones

NEXT EPISODE: THE UNDERDOGS!

Hey, it's me...

Found this on the Mutant Renegade Records website. It's THE OXYMORONS playing at Canal Street Tavern (that's me (right) and Ben (left)). Must be 1989 or thereabouts...