THE CAPTAIN WOODYCRAFTER, Fantastic Planet (cassette, 199?)

Once again we have a little real world business to take care of before diving into Dayton's musical past. As you certainly know, today is primary day! That is, one of two days that come only once every four years during which anyone in either of the two major parties gives a shit about Ohio. And I, for one, think that's already two days too fucking many!

(ADDENDUM: Vote for Jane Mitakides for the Ohio-3 in November. Just thought I'd mention that).

Anyway, I'm a Hillary man myself, but if you want to get out there and vote for Mr. Obama, you should do it. And now that that's out of the way, let's get to something of far greater import:

Another curiosity today -- found this one in the dark recesses of a box of tapes Grog lent me. There are no song titles. The cassette insert is photocopied and hand cut (nice art, by the way). The cassette is a JVC GI-90 with a label stuck on one side bearing the legend "CAPTAIN WOODY CRAFTER" in dot matrix printing. The dot matrix and my vague recollection of when I heard this band's name around town lead me to place it some time around 1993-1995, but I've no way to know for sure.

For some reason, I find myself associating Chris Wright with this band somehow.

The artwork on the insert gives a fair indication of the musical direction within: half psychedelic, half grunge, half proto-metal... so that's 150% RAWK for those keeping score at home.

About the band's name, the label prints it as three separate words, but the flap on the insert prints "WOODYCRAFTER" as one word. I've found various entries on the web that add the definite article "THE" to the band name. Sometimes "CAPTAIN" is abbreviated as "CAP'T." (which is odd considering there are no letters between the "p" and the "t" in "captain") or just "CAPT." but it's spelled out on the label and insert here. Because the web sources adding "THE" seem to pop up among listings of people who used to be in this band, I'll go ahead and add it here even though it's not on the cassette material. So we'll tentatively give the band the official title of "THE CAPTAIN WOODYCRAFTER."

Researching obscure local bands on the web is a little easier where the artists were good enough to choose a name comprised of a unique string of characters like "Woodycrafter" (try typing "MOM" or "KEY-NOTE SPEAKER" into Google some time and see the shit that turns up). Still, I've been able to uncover only a few fragments of information:

• Singer Kevion Kelley "unexpectedly passed away" at some point, but it's hard to tell exactly when or how. It seems his death came some time between the MYSTERY ADDICTS last show at the 1999 Monster Hop and their reformation in 2000 or 2001. Here's the source excerpt from the article in the May 24, 2001 edition of the Impact Weekly (click on the link and then do a search on "woodycrafter" to find the relevant portion). You figure it out.
• THE CAPTAIN WOODYCRAFTER seems to have put out a self-titled CD at some point (unless there was another CAPTAIN WOODYCRAFTER I don't know about). It has turned up on various 1-cent listings around the web.
• Some former members of this band were later in the now semi-defunct Dayton experimental combo YARDBOY.
• The bass player now does a solo industrial thing called HarSH.
• One or more members were later in ALL ELECTRIC KITCHEN CARNIVAL.
• The band appears among a list of bands that MY LATEX BRAIN has played with over at their site.
• This half-complete band page for ACCIDENTALLY ON PURPOSE lists the bass player of that band as having played in THE CAPTAIN WOODYCRAFTER.

This bizarre YouTube video has the tag "WoodyCrafter" appearing among the label list. It was reportedly filmed in Dayton and has sort of a ROB ZOMBIE/DOCTOR CREEP aesthetic going (face paint, macabre imagery in domestic circumstances, characters in a trance like state -- you get the picture). It uses one of the songs presented for download here in the soundtrack (it's about 4 minutes in), but I don't know how else it might be related to the band (maybe some of the band members are in it? You tell me). The main character is called "Wil" at the beginning but "Woody" later on in the film. A "Kevin Kelly" is listed among the creators, but I don't know whether that's the same person as the "Kevion Kelley" referenced in the source I mentioned above.

The opening text places the events portrayed in 1990 and it's copyrighted in that year. Since it uses a song on this tape, that might place the recording somewhere in 1990 or earlier. But I don't recollect hearing anything about THE CAPTAIN WOODY CRAFTER before the mid-'90s, and the video could've been cut and edited much later. So who knows for sure? (If you know, correct me in the comments section).


That's all the information I've been able to gather. If you know more, let's hear it. In the meantime, enjoy the two songs presented here. Good rawk!

Track List:

1. Hollywood
2. The Pain

Download It! (12 MB) (link re-upped on 2-1-2013)


As I mentioned above, the insert shows no song titles, so I just broke up the title given on the cassette insert.

UPDATE 2-6-2013: Helpful commenters have provided the correct song titles.  This has been corrected in the download.

So once again I Remember Dayton... serves up another recording that presents more questions than answers. But what would Dayton (or life itself) be without a little twisted mystery?

take care

---Jones()

Off-Site: MONDOLUX video at YouTube

Here's a nice professionally produced video of MONDOLUX playing at El Diablo Lounge here in Dayton.


It's from 2002, which kind of puts it out of the range of this blog. I try to limit the things posted here to stuff that's at least 10 years old (figuring The Buddha Den has the recent stuff pretty well covered). But since the last post was Erik's old band X-TREME-UNCTION, I figure this one hits.

For those who don't know, Erik was the singer/guitar player in MONDOLUX. That's him featured most prominently in the video. Dig.

Erik's current band is LUXURY PUSHERS, who are one of my favorite Dayton bands right now (the others being 8-BIT REVIVAL, THE NIGHTBEAST, and the unstoppable JUNKPILE!).

All the links in the previous paragraph lead to Myspace pages, each with at least one downloadable song (wouldn't post 'em if they didn't). However, I should add here that Myspace is probably the most technologically inept site I have ever seen: frequent errors, unpredictable blackouts on services, and recurring inexplicable foul-ups. So if you can't download or if a page doesn't load, or if you accidentally contract hepatitis while viewing a page, it's not the band's fault ('cept maybe if you get hepatitis from the LUXURY PUSHERS page -- that might be their fault). Enjoy!

UPDATE: 4 hours after posting this I try to log on to Myspace and what do you know? The whole site is failing to respond. Can I call this shit or what? Myspace, hats off on fulfilling all my worst expectations! You're nothing if not predictably undependable! That is to say, you suck!

take care

---Jones()

Off-Site: BIG BROWN HOUSE in The Antioch Adventure, Part 2 (video clip)

Mite posted this over at his YouTube site. It's a clip from the 1988 Antioch film The Antioch Adventure, Part 2, filmed on location in Yellow Springs, home of BIG BROWN HOUSE and THE GITS at the time. The music of BIG BROWN HOUSE is featured in this clip (and maybe some of the band members too, but I don't know what they look like, so I can't be sure -- Gail?).

When I posted BIG BROWN HOUSE's Scrappy James a couple of days ago, I wrongly reported that the Antioch Adventure movies were documentaries. But as I said in the comments, I looked into it a little further, and it appears that these are actually scripted stories with plot and characters and such.

If you go to Mite's YouTube site, you will also find the clip from Antioch Adventure, Part 2 that features THE GITS. Although that clip features less music than the BIG BROWN HOUSE clip, you will get to see Mia Zapata in what I assume is her first (perhaps only?) film acting gig (CORRECTION: after contacting the director of this film, Mite has determined that the girl in the clip is NOT Mia Zapata as he, I, and several other viewers first thought). A couple things about that clip:

• The woman in the glasses on the left side of the third newspaper shown in the newspaper montage appears to be Daytonian academy award nominee Julia Reichert, who has taught in the film school at Wright State University since 1986. In 2003 she and Steve Bognar were nominated for an emmy for their documentary A Lion in the House. Her many film credits include, among others, Emma & Elvis (1992) (in which Scott Childress apparently had a brief speaking part) and the highly regarded documentary Seeing Red: Stories of American Communists (1983).
• This doesn't have anything to do with the clip, but I thought I'd point out that although fucking Wikipedia contains entries under "Seeing Red" as the title of the debut album by a generic girlie pop-punk band and another as the title of an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, there's no mention at all on Wikipedia of Julia Reichert's documentary -- which received a fucking academy award nomination for Christ's sake. And my students wonder why I tell them NOT to cite Wikipedia in a research paper. Fuck... Anyway, back to the clip...
• On the very last shot of the newspaper montage (right before the clip ends), you might notice the name
  "Derwood Raintree." If you read the clipping (which isn't easy -- you have to pause it at just the right place to get a clear enough image), the article says Derwood Raintree was an actor in the first Antioch Adventure (1967), but IMDB lists Derwood Raintree as a character in that film played by actor John Draper.
• People might disagree with me, but in my opinion, the Antioch campus hasn't changed one damn bit since 1988.

By the way, who's with me in pestering The Neon until they get The Gits Movie?

take care

---Jones()

Off-Site: THE GITS Movie, trailer

Here's a trailer for The Gits Movie, which appears to be complete and currently making visits to various film and music festivals around North America. The same YouTube site has other trailers and GITS live footage too.

As I mentioned in a comment to the BIG BROWN HOUSE post, it appears there may at least be some footage from Canal Street Tavern in the film somewhere. I would imagine there's other footage from THE GITS' time in Yellow Springs and Dayton as well.

I called both The Neon Movies and The Little Art to see if either of them had plans to get the movie at some point. Neither one answered the phone, and I don't leave messages with businesses who can't answer their own damn phones. I'll try again some other time. But the movie isn't mentioned on either web site, so they at least won't be getting it in the immediate future. This area has a pretty solid history of overlooking its own culture, so I guess we shouldn't be surprised.

take care

---Jones()

Off-Site: Dayton Punkhouse Documentary (1987)

One great thing about doing this blog is that through it I've discovered that I'm not the only person infected with the obsession to catalog the history of this town's bizarre musical subcultures. Witness:



Found this through Buckwheat's blog over at MySpace. For those who don't know (and I didn't until a couple of weeks ago), Mister Wheat (and 10,000 potato points to anyone who gets the "Mister Wheat" allusion) was a regular Dayton music hanger-outer type in the late '80s. In that time he took a lot of photos and has been posting many on his MySpace and Flickr sites -- great stuff if you're at all interested in what was going on in Dayton twenty years ago.

I'm pretty sure the house featured in this footage is the old punkhouse next door to the building lounge on third street. The guy mainly featured is Scott Childress (apologies if I spelled his name wrong). I'm sure I met him a few times, but I can't say I knew him well -- same goes for most of the other people in the video. This is just slightly before my time. I recognize faces, but for most, I don't remember names. The only one I was closely associated with was Jason Himes. If you recognize any of these people, please add your observations to the comments section.

Anyway, the video has degraded quite a bit, but it nonetheless remains a great document of what the hardcore crusties were up to back in '87. I find it especially interesting because, although I would sometimes go hang out among this little subculture (I have a vivid recollection of watching the first episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation in this very house on the same night I also went next door and saw THE MEMBRANES), I was never close to being a part of it. It's kind of fun to see now what I missed then (even if it's on 20 year old, degraded VHS). All in all, this sort of has a Decline of Western Civilization flavor -- but it's decidedly Dayton.

take care

---Jones()

Off-Site: REAL LULU, "Chief" video at YouTube

Mike Kilbourne (a.k.a. "Mite" -- who used to work at WWSU and later co-edited MUTANT RENEGADE ZINE with Grog) put this video for the REAL LULU song "Chief" up over at YouTube. As of this writing, it's the only video up there, but by the time you read this, there may be more. If not, Mite has informed me that there's more coming soon (UPDATE: looks there's a MORELLA'S FOREST video there too now).

The video features the talents of Kattie Dougherty (voice, guitar), Sharon Gavlick (voice, bass), and Jim MacPherson (drums). Most of you probably already know that Jim played in THE BREEDERS during the Last Splash era. He also drummed with THE KILLJOYS (a.k.a. THE RAGING MANTRAS) from approximately 1988-1992. In addition to REAL LULU, I'm sure he played with some other Dayton bands in the late '90s, but I don't know specifics on that.

As I remember, Kattie did some brief guitar service in THE BREEDERS. She was also the original singer for THE PURE PLASTIC TREE, and she and I did a handful of acoustic shows together at Canal Street's Musician's Co-op oh so long ago.

I don't know what other bands Sharon might have been in, but having been married to Andy Valeri for a while, it wouldn't surprise me to learn she did a lot of work down at Miami Valley Cable Council.

The video was directed by Steve Bognar, of whom I have only the vaguest impression. I'm sure I met him at some point or other and saw more than one of his films at the many indie film events at the Neon Movies I used to go to. To be sure, Dayton's contributions to indie film and video deserve a decent blog or other chronicle of their own somewhere, but my involvement with all that extends no further than a ten-week intro-to-film course at Wright State University back in '92 -- and I'm pretty sure I didn't even pass. Anyway, Steve's been involved with a number of film projects around here and elsewhere. No doubt you can find out more with a Google search if you want to.

Anyway, it's good to know someone's finally getting around to posting some Dayton indie rock video over at YouTube. Once again, however, I will urge Grog, Andy Valeri, and that bastard TOM FUCKING CARTER to get their asses in gear and follow Mite's example.

take care

---Jones

Off-Site: Drexel Dave's Videos & Photos from the Real Streets of Dayton

Well, I guess I kind of gave away everything in the title, but when did that ever stop me from talking...

Found this over at Melissa's blog, TwoFortyPlusGood, which itself provides some amusing insights from one of Dayton's own originals.

Anyway, I'm pointing you toward Dave Drexel's blog featuring photographs and videos about stuff in Dayton that Dave finds interesting. If you click on the videos there, you'll go to Dave's YouTube site and find more of the same.

Dave Drexel is an artist and musician and all-around goofy school bus driver who, I think, understands even better than I do the mystical but decidedly perverse nature of this funny little cesspool we call the Greater Dayton and Miami Valley region.

If you ever get a chance to see his band DREXEL, don't pass it up. In the meantime, enjoy the photos and videos over at his blog if you too would like to see something of the depressing absurdity that seeps into everything that goes on in this town. The photos are kind of strange, and the videos only stranger. But just like Tim Taylor and Jonathan Winters and Gordon Jump, Dave's an engaging personality with a really fucked up head on his shoulders. Where does this town get 'em? And why do they stay?

Dave Drexel's Photos and Videos from the Real Streets of Dayton isn't updated nearly as often as it should be, but there's enough there at this point to keep you occupied for a bit.

NOTE: Melissa fucked up the link to Dave's blog in her links section, so it won't go properly if you try to do it from there. I, of course, will assume the proper air of smirking superiority when I inform her of it, but until she fixes it, the link in the previous paragraph works just fine. (UPDATE: it works now)

take care

---Jones

Off-Site: TOXIC REASONS, "Ghost Town" video, et al., at YouTube...

There are a lot of other TOXICs videos there too.

And here's a link to a write-up on the "Ghost Town" 7" that includes the story of how TOXIC REASONS got together by none other than Ed Pittman himself.

By the way, by request, I recently re-upped the download links for FRANKENSTEIN'S KIND and the WWSU 4-PLAY.

take care

---Jones