Gary Bear

Gary Bear as Kelvin 296 & the Beat Hip demo cass. 1997

The first time I remember seeing Gary Bear was at the DPC when it had just opened (’90 or ’91?) and a great band from England, Thatcher On Acid, played. They were like a better, poppy version of the earlier English anarco-punk bands (Crass, Conflict et al.) and I listen to their records regularly to this day. In the middle of one of their songs they did this break down thing where the music got quiet and they invited anybody from the audience to come up and take the mic for a while. The stage was on the east side of the venue and for a short time had steps directly in front of it so there was easy access. The crowd was thin, but five or six people got up there and did their thing. Some sang along (with real passion, and the band reacted accordingly) others just said stupid shit. Then Gary Bear gets up and recites a poem that I don’t remember verbatim, but the basic idea behind it was that if you drink and you become an asshole when you drink, then you have no right to use alcohol in public. That simple wisdom, put so elegantly in poem form, with the great Thatcher On Acid backing him up, stuck with me over the years and occasionally pops into my head when I see drunk assholes in public. This made his face stick with me and I would recognize him performing as a solo act from then until now. Every time I’ve seen him perform live I’ve found it very annoying. It seemed like he got lost on the way to the Renaissance fair and somehow landed a spot in between two good bands I really wanted to see. This three song demo reflects that kind of freak-folk-pop stuff he does live, but here it’s not annoying. The songs are actually good. They’re still weird as fuck and very Renaissance-y as if he was scoring a very weird Willy Wonka directed by Jodorowosky set in Italy in 1525, but with love song lyrics. Listening to this makes me think about Gary Bear as that type of artist that works best in the recorded medium.

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Lenguas Largas

Live on 602 Radio 2009

Here’s a live radio set by an early incarnation of the live version of Lenguas Largas. They play songs that have all ended up on their records, but here they’re slow as hell and super dreamy and hazy. The drugged out desert rock tag always gets stuck on these guys, but none of them really even do drugs. Here you wouldn’t know it because it feels like their high as hell, like they each took a hand full of Quaaludes and tried to walk through knee-deep mud, only with noisy psych punk music. Add some booze, Mark Beef and Ricky Shimo and you got a pretty winning formula. Drummer on this recording, Chris Kohler (Sexy) was replaced by Levi Reyes (Swing Ding Amigos) who was recently replaced by Brian Bollt (Sabertooth Snatch, Line of Fire). Brian’s drum style is more crystal meth than Quaaludes so the latest incarnation should be interesting. Another great live set from 602 Radio in Phoenix.

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the Fells

Fun Date 7” circa 1994

This is my favorite Fells 7”. The A side is exactly what you’d expect from the Fells—a noisy amped up garage punk party stomp with some weird Melt Banana-esque noise being made by the guitars and too-cool-to-be-bothered-to-actually-sing monotone vocals. However the B side, “Easy Rider”, is like no other Fells song I ever remember hearing. It’s still pretty raw, but there is a kind of psychedelic melodic feel that never entered their mostly 50s influenced sound. They’re actually playing chords rather than just pounding power-chords. Vocals are still monotone, but somehow smoother. The whole song feels smooth and that’s a term I wouldn’t normally associate with this band. This had to be one of Heath’s songs because I don’t think Jeff had enough soul to write a song this good.

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John Polle

4 songs solo live at the Red Room 2011

The work of Idaho to Tucson transplant John Polle, reminds me of his fellow Idahoan, Doug Martsch. He’s the guy that actually replaced Martsch when he left the Treepeople before their last and worst, but not as bad as some people make it out to be album, Actual Reenactment. Since then, like Martsch with Built to Spill and Halo Benders, Polle has been refining his own unique brand of American indie-pop/rock with his bands the Solace Bros., Lenguas Largas and Discos. I think he might have played in the post-Treepeople band Stuntman too. Also like Martsch he does the occasional acoustic solo set. His guitar picking skills are really evident here and the songwriting is great. On these songs he sounds less like Martsch and more like The Tallest Man On Earth playing stoned. These four songs are taken from the “Live at the Red Room” CD series vol.2 (available at the bar). I think he has a two song 7” of him playing solo like this too. New records by Lenguas Largas and Discos have also just come out. John’s a busy man. Sorry no song titles, but the first song is a version of Discos’ “Up in the Air.”

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the Resonars

Lunar Kit LP 2002

On Matt Rendon’s releases as The Resonars he goes to the trouble to present the Resonars as a band with four real members who share the instrumentation and four part vocal harmonies, but everything is performed by Matt. It wasn’t always that way. They functioned as a real band that played live shows in the early years, but Matt, like all great musicians, probably came to the conclusion that he could get more done quicker by doing it himself. Plus it’s probably impossible to find good players that have as deep an understanding and love of 60s psych rock and pop music as he does. Sure you can find guys that wanna cover Hendrix and the Beatles at any shitty bar in any town, but Matt’s dipping into a much deeper well of 60s rock for inspiration. He can reproduce it so original and authentic sounding that when Dirty Steve, who also has a great knowledge of 60s music, first heard this album he thought it was some obscure gem from the 60s that flew under his radar. He has recorded a lot of my bands and the man can work studio magic with 60s technology. Title track refers to Keith Moon’s drum kit, the same model and set up that was used to record this record. He’s recorded at least two other full lengths since this record, all worth hunting down.

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Mike Pearson

untitled solo work, circa mid 2000s

For a long time I only thought of Mike Pearson as a blues/punk player because I had only seen him play with the Blacks and Ultra Maroon, but sometime in the early/mid-2000s he moved to France with his French wife, Cecil, and he started sending me CDs. They were mysterious and cryptic regarding their content. There was no letter that said something like “here is some music I recorded.” Listening to it I could immediately recognize a number of songs as his, but then there were some songs that had completely different sounds and came from such a different place that I thought they had to be performed by some local French musicians that he met. Turns out it was all Mike and his musical knowledge and talents stretch far beyond raw American blues punk (which he does best) and into French Cabaret sounds, Tom Waits style swank and film music. Jazz references (and sounds) show up with song titles like “Better Git Hit In Yer Hed” and an almost unrecognizable cover of Ornette Coleman’s “Lonely Woman.” I doubt more than a dozen people have heard his solo stuff, but this stuff is so good that if the right Hollywood douche bag heard this stuff he could get every wanna-be Quentin Tarantino director lined up to suck Mike’s dick to score his next film.

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Marty Dog Kubiak

acoustic demo cass. 1997

Ugstad played drums in Hobart, but the real creative force behind that project was Marty Dog. He would be an immense creative force on me during those eight years and by proxy everybody I’ve played with since. After Hobart had been together for a while Marty started to play some solo acoustic shows, usually with DJ Buttafly, opening for Waffle Butt at the Airport Lounge. Those shows were always great, but listening to this in retrospect Marty Dog’s mellow, somber songs seem like a strange contrast to Waffle Butt’s ass shaking party funk. Nevertheless these songs are great. Marty used two boom boxes that had recording capabilities to make a two track recording. The latencies and the way the melodies are layered give it a haunted feeling. These songs are very heartfelt and really sad in the most genuine way, because they were recorded during really tough times for Marty Dog. Two of these were Hobart songs, two were originals and one was an Evergreen cover. I think this release was limited to about fifteen copies.

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Mr. Chatterbox

The next grip of posts will be solo recordings by Tucson musicians whose bands I’ve already written about here, some of whom I’ve had the opportunity to play with.

filmworks circa early 2000s

Mr. Chatterbox is the solo work of Brandon Ugstad. He was commissioned to do this music by San Francisco filmmaker Edward Rosenblum for some of his short films. Like all good film music it is sometimes quite, moody and sparse. Other times it’s loud and heavy (in a Spill Blanket way). Other times it’s neither of those. A huge array of instruments and electronics were used. I know he loves David Lynch and John Zorn and those influences show up sometimes. I’ve been seeing his bands since the late 80s, so to me it sounds like he took all the best elements and experience of those bands and projected them in a calculated manner to make great film soundscapes. He really shines without somebody like me fucking up his riffs. We’ve been in a bunch of bands together and he’s been in a bunch more w/o me (Rhythm Squids, Spill Blanket, Absinthe, Hobart, Birds Ate My Face, Chick Cashman and the Countrypolitans, Jane Doe and the Decomposers, Staircase Wit, Found Dead On The Phone, the F.A.N.S.S, Mascaron, Kamikaze Autopilot plus me and him just started a new project with Pathos/El Creepy/Mascaron drummer, Andy Bell and I’m sure there are some I’m forgetting* or don’t know about). He has been one of my favorite persons to play music with for the last 15 yrs. because his skill and taste are impeccable and he has the patience of a saint. Somehow he squeezes all this musical output between a wife, two kids and a more than full time job. Sorry no song titles and I had to dump the last song, a beautiful piano and cello piece, because of skips.

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*he even did some studio bass work on a Machine of Loving Grace album!

Run-On Sunshine

Memory Game cass. 2011

If you’ve been to a show in downtown Tucson in the last 10 years and there wasn’t a short skinny guy with a funny hair cut named Mullarkey dancing right in front of the band it’s because there was a better show going on that night and Mullarkey was at that show. For many years at shows he was mostly a spectator, but he has recently had an explosion of creativity that first manifested in his karaoke displays, then the band Monster Pussy, then Run-On Sunshine and now every time I run into him he tells me about some new really unconventional project he has in the works. Run-On Sunshine is extremely unconventional consisting mostly of Mullarkey singing. There is sparse instrumentation consisting solely of acoustic children’s instruments provided by Autumn Bree (Kamikaze Autopilot), a fine singer in her own right, who actually has a much larger range than Mullarkey’s mostly monotone approach, but she doesn’t sing here. This is pretty strange music that is not for the causal listener, but there are some catchy melodies and Mullarkey’s love of Calvin Johnson is evident. The lyrics are as intimate as the delivery and are mostly autobiographical and very heart-on-sleeve, with moments of brilliant insight, like when he is reminiscing about his recollection of the old days and thinks “…these memories could be altered to fool myself” which is a thought that has entered my head many times since I started this blog. 

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Young Hunter

two song demo cass. 2011

Here is a newer Tucson band I recently saw that is made up of members of other Tucson bands that I haven’t heard and only scarcely heard of. Some of their sound is heavy and really full (two drummers!) and other times it’s real quiet and sparse, but it flows smoothly between the contrasting sounds. It’s a fairly dark take on indie rock and sounds like a bunch of Brooklyn or Portland hipsters were pumped on the Canadian indie bands (Wolf Parade, Sunset Rubdown, Frog Eyes etc.) and tried to interrupt the sound in the desert setting with a desert vibe, like they smoke a lot of shitty pot and don’t leave home when the sun is out. Lo fi approach works pretty well for demo cass., but I hope they can keep it together long enough for a proper studio release which would allow the many layers to shine through.

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Doo Rag

Hussy Bowler 7” 1993

Working in a blues bar has renewed my hatred for the blues*. Really, how many people playing the blues do it in an exciting original manner? That’s not a rhetorical question. The answer is somewhere around four or five and at the top of that list would be Bob Log III. The legendary Doo Rag finds him between Mondo Guano and his solo mayhem and is some of his most fun music. The first time I remember seeing them play was unannounced in the bathroom at the DPC. When they blew up and were reaching bigger audiences I couldn’t help but wonder how they could have a large appeal, but now I can’t help but wonder why they weren’t bigger. A drunken rant by Lou Barlow at a recent Sebedoh show at Club Congress may explain why. He said they toured with Doo Rag back in the 90’s and after a few shows in Doo Rag just started wandering off, blowing off shows and ditching Sebedoh because, according to Barlow, they were “too cool” to tour with Sebedoh. It’s true, Doo Rag were too cool.  

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*have you ever seen middle aged white people dance to the blues!?!? Holy shit it’s the funniest thing I’ve witnessed in a working situation. I’ve had to train myself not to look directly at them because I burst out in loud laughter sometimes.

Swing Ding Amigos

First demo circa 1999

The Swing Ding Amigos were originally from Nogales, but spent most of their existence in Tucson after brothers, Isaac and Levi Reyes, along with El Jimmy moved up here. This early recording finds them still a little wet behind the ears and still really pumped on Scared of Chaka, their most obvious influence at this point. They would eventually evolve a sound of their own that was faster and tighter than Scared of Chaka and just as catchy. I think the most interesting song here is the last one “About Today” which was a hidden track and doesn’t sound like any of the other songs on here. Some people might know this as the Ramen demo, because other versions have a Top Ramen cover, but I think I got one from a batch of one-of-a kind hand made CD-Rs probably thrown together for some out of town shows. Or I could be wrong and that might be a whole different demo. I got to spend a lot of time on the road with these guys when they would travel with the Blacks. They are extremely fun guys to hang out with. Currently Isaac is kicking ass with Lenguas Largas who Levi was also playing with until about a month ago when he moved to Phoenix. Brandon Ugstad and I are supposed to make a record with El Jimmy, doing a bunch of songs he wrote, and we were hoping to do that this summer, but we’ve been so busy with other projects we haven’t had a chance to even meet up yet. This is the first of many great recordings by this band that I will eventually post.

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the Pork Torta

 

Sparky Welding cass. circa 1994

I was offended when the Okmoniks were playing around Tucson and calling themselves “Tucson’s best party band” or something like that. Everybody knows that the best party band in Tucson was, is and always shall be the Pork Torta. Sure the Okmoniks might make you wanna shake your head and throw some beer at the band, but the Pork Torta make you feel like you walked onto the set of a David Lynch film set in a dark bar in the middle of the desert with some wild, emotionally dissident yet highly rhythmic band pounding away as people grind on each other while strobe lights almost make you blackout and the rhythm makes you go crazy. There is nothing normal about this release. It’s their first and it finds the madness unrefined with more of an anything goes attitude than they've had on more recent releases. Different versions of some of these songs appear on later CDs, but here they’re laced with bad acid and lo-fi charm. Guest appearances by Bob Log and Johnny Balls, who is now their bass player. Everything they produce should promptly be purchased by you, now, here

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Dover Trench

Exhibition of Speed CD 1991--Demo 1990(?)

I found out about Dover Trench because me and my friends used to buy our skateboards from singer Eli’s  shop, Itchy Foot Moes, back when we were in high school. We’d go see them play all ages shows at Mudbugs opening for bands like Atrophy, Sacred Reich and Testament. They were as good as, if not better than any of those bands and they mixed with the Tucson and Cochise County hardcore/punk scene more than any other metal band at the time (drummer Matt Pimple’s brother would help record the Malignus Youth records). Here is their full length CD and what I think is an incomplete version of their demo. My all time favorite song of theirs, the way lowbrow Tight as a Vice, which I remember being on the demo, is not with my files. There is a hilarious video for that song here. It was filmed at the same place where, many years later, we did the photo shoot for the Blacks Hate You Like Gold LP, out by Gates Pass. The video's just as stupid and awesome as that photo shoot was. Drummer Matt is currently playing in Flying Donkey Punch.

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Absinthe

7" 1996

This is the same Absinthe 7” that has shown up on a couple other blogs. The cover for my copy was a small run limited edition they threw together to play some out of town shows, but the music is the same. This is their second and last release and I like it better than their 10” but only slightly. It’s just as crushing, but there is more of an urgent angst filled madness to these songs. This is the result of a bunch of good bands breaking up (Slag, Groundwork, Spill Blanket and Teeth) whose members took the best qualities of those bands and formed a great band. They were short lived, but were influential to a lot of bands that could never quite reach this level of greatness. There’s You Tube footage of them here in Goleta with Jeff Ugstad on guitar after he replaced Gabe. There has been long talk of a reissue of this record on King of the Monsters or singer Brendon’s Protagonist Records, but nothing has surfaced yet.

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Hobart

1995 demo cass.

After Slag split up, Marty and Nathan called me up and asked me if I would play in their new project, Hobart, and I jumped at the chance. They were still hyped on the aggressive ugly nature of Slag, but we started to incorporate influences from bands like Unwound, Drive Like Jehu and the Treepeople. At least those were the bands we were listening to the time. This doesn’t really sound like any of them, but I think they’re apt reference points. Playing with Marty and Nathan was a rude awakening to how terrible a musician I was. They were years ahead of me and I had to get good and/or fake it real quick like just to keep up. Not too long after we recorded this Nathan would move to the Bay Area and we would nab Absinthe drummer Brandon Ugstad and continue the project for a total of eight years, the longest running band I’ve been in. Each cassette had a unique cover made of random photos brought home by my then roommate, Dan (photographer, above) who worked in a 24 hr. photo place. We made only about 20 of these and gave them away to friends. I took the name for this blog from a line in the song No Man’s Land.

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Slag

feed 7" 1993

In the Scathe post I mentioned what I consider the first wave of heavy hardcore bands in Tucson in the early 90s, (as compared to the fast hardcore bands like Malignus Youth, American Deathtrip, Ice 9 etc.) but I forgot to mention Slag and they were the heaviest. They were really more metal than hardcore and they couldn’t get their records reviewed in Maximum Rock N’ Roll because they were “too metal.” This record is ugly and hate filled with tortured vocals supplied by the whole band, but there are occasional guitar breaks that are kind of melodic, then the rest of the band comes in and crushes all that. Kind of like slower Buzzoven songs with a second guitar player doing occasional melodic riffs. They even play mid-tempo and grind-core fast at times. Guitar player Jerid had played in Groundwork prior to this band. When Slag split up Jerid and bass player Brian would form Absinthe and drummer Nathan and guitarist Marty would form Hobart. Recorded by Iscariot drummer Mark Wyner and released on Ryan Butler’s (Landmine Marathon, Unruh, Wellington, Arcane Recording Studio) Fetus Records.

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Cancer Brides

like fairy tales of modern times CD 2007

Almost 20 years after the unreleased FUCT demo, John and Obie would release this beast. Cancer Brides had Obie playing drums, rather than just singing, and I was told that he wrote most of the music. John stayed on guitar and other Tucson music vets Psychic Mike (Opinion Zero, Schism), Abel (Cosmic Jackhammer), Joey (ZTTF) and Jeff Ghoul (Backstab Gospel) filled out the line up. The music is progressive like FUCT was in their later years, but in a different way. Instead of bar rock jams they go for a more metal sound. Epic metal like Iron Maiden, but with nods to Feel the Darkness era Poison Idea. And yet a song like The Wrong Kill could be a straight up pop song if it wasn’t for Abel’s manic singing style. Other songs like 5X8 are sludgy, heavy and noisy. The guitars on this are huge and add a lot of melody that is juxtaposed nicely with the crazy vocals. I don’t think any of these guys have current active projects, which is a shame. Great artwork by Obie’s wife Paula.

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FUCT

FUCT "the gob demo" unreleased demo circa 1988

Plenty could be written about FUCT because of their longevity, which saw them out-live many of their early contemporaries (UPS, Blood Spasm, Opinion Zero, Civil Order etc.), but also because they went through a sonic transformation from a hardcore-punk band to a band that took a hardcore-punk influence and mixed it with more progressive influences like Jimi Hendrix and Nomeansno. They also maintained the same line up for over a decade, minus their brief existence with Leo as 2nd guitarist, which is rare. This recording finds them in their early years when they were more juiced on RKL and Raw Power (who they toured with) then the straighter rock sounds they would eventually incorporate. This recording has its own interesting history. It was recorded (I believe) by one of the members of What Went Wrong who died after the session. Seven or eight years later me and my friend Dan (who took the above photo) were hanging out in Toxic Ranch when John (gtr player) worked there. He told us that somebody had recently gone through the sound engineer’s stuff and found this recording and gave him a copy. He then taped it for us and I’ve been listening to it ever since. I think I like this era of FUCT their best, when they were playing fast and young and taking drugs and drinking a lot. The recording and playing is a little rough, but it does a good job of capturing the punk-hardcore sound of Tucson in the late 80s. 

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Scathe

7" 1998

Speaking of awesome bands Ryan Doten was in, here is the Scathe 7”. I don’t think Ryan was their original drummer and the guys in the band probably considered this Jeremy Tally’s (Bury Me Standing, the Bled) project, but Ryan’s the only guy I really knew from this band, so I mostly associate it with him. I consider them one of the first wave of Skrappys bands and the link between the older dudes playing heavy hardcore (Groundwork, Absinthe) and the younger dudes playing heavy hardcore (Bury Me Standing, the Bled) in Tucson. I got this from Ryan and he told me it was his only copy when he gave it to me. At the time Ryan was into drugs, and that might have factored into him giving this to me. Oddly enough they might have identified themselves as a straight edge band at the time. Even odder Ryan’s probably the only one of these guys that is straight today. Again I don’t really know the rest of these guys, so I may be wrong, but I do know that one of their singers “lost his edge” in a big way. This was the second release for Ronnie’s Code of Ethics Records who was always reliable for good hardcore and screamo records with great packaging.

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