OK. So to date my January, February and March contribution to this challenge have documented my exciting and painful emergence and sort of progress as a musically limited teenage musician.
This is a short detour. And I’ll get the link to the music out of the way first, as I guess in the end this is what this is all about. Also, you need to prioritise listening to this as it will (hopefully) expand your brain in ways that are good (or maybe not).
I’d half mentioned last month my side quest dive into late 80s weird pre-grunge noise experimentation. Which didn’t really impact hugely on the music I created, but it did definitely shift my understanding as a naive young music hungry kid as to the boundaries of what music could and couldn’t be.
A lot of the drive to dive down that rabbit hole came from endless listening to John Peel in the late evening. A necessity for musically adventurous youth from the 1970s to the 2000s. And a strange communal activity of the sort that doesnt happen any more in the artistic space. Kids these days don’t start the day enthusing to a friend “did you hear that track on John Peel last night” like we did. And its a massive, massive loss.
One of the wilder avenues John Peel ventured down in the mid-80s was the output of Shimmy-Disc, the borderline deranged outsider label founded by professional weirdo muso Kramer in 1987 as an outlet for some of the strangest music out there at the time. Over ten or so years, Shimmy Disc released over 100 albums, many of them deeply strange, launched the careers of Kramer’s own band Bongwater, as well as King Missile, early Daniel Johnston vinyl, Ween and even Gwar. And helped open my mind even further as to what music could be.
What made the Shimmy Disc thing work was Kramer’s ability to identify and recruit artists who operated outside any reasonable boundary. If what came out was often nonsensical or disastrous, it also kind of acknowledged that it knew what it was doing when creating those disasters. It was half a joke. But only half.
Some of what Kramer’s eclectic and unhinged approach produced was genuinely astonishing. Including this ridiculous coming together of Screaming jay Hawkins, Bob Weir from the Grateful Dead and Bongwater playing a Roky Erikson cover that defies description…
But the Tinklers were who I loved most. Ludicrous and stupid, even by Shimmy-Disc standards, Charles Brohawn and Chris Mason were an approaching middle aged duo from Baltimore who made music on rubber-band guitars, bits of string, old boxes, spoons, cans full of stones, whatever else came to hand. Whilst moaning semi-out-of-tune lyrics in a manner that suggested half remembered folk tunes dragged out of the defective memories of the cognitively damaged or seriously drugged.
What was astonishing about listening to their initial album, Casserole, my pick for this month, was the way they just wholesale rejected any sort of musical skill as an underpinning of their records. Maybe that’s why it struck a chord. The idea (much explored in my other contributions to this challenge) that you could get away with being genuinely terrible if you did it with absolute commitment. Something I was definitely utterly, totally aligned with. Also making music that it was hard to imagine anyone else liking, and obviously not giving a shit.
The record was 33 tracks long. Mostly super short shots of derangement. And all of them were either strange or disturbing in some way. John Peel played a lot of them on his show. I suspect he was as amazed as I was at this…thing. I bought the album and played it to death, to the annoyance and frustration of almost everyone I came into contact with. When later I got a student radio station show, I was able to spread its strangeness even further. Assuming anyone listened to my shows. But the truth was - for the same reasons the Tinklers did what they did - it didnt really matter.
“Saplings”, their next album on Shimmy Disc was moderately more normal but still enjoyable. But more silly than wild it even had (for all its primitive instrumentation and production) had a bit of a concept to it. Mostly sort of ecological. “The Dodo Bird & The Calvaria Tree” was all about the death of ecosystems; “Dinosaurs Are Getting Better” was kind of fun take on evolution and development. “Trees Like To Rot In The Forest” was probably the highpoint. But though it was weird by most standards, it wasnt nearly as off-the-scale as Casserole.
The Tinklers released one more album on Shimmy-Disc a year later - “Crash” - but by then I was bored of it all and onto the next musical thing. And when Shimmy-Disc itself fell apart a few years later with legal fights over contracts, and an acrimonious split with Ann Magnuson, left Bongwater disbanded and Kramer broke I don’t think I even noticed. Because all of the real action from them was in the first 2-3 years of madness. The label seems to have been rebooted recently, with a few Daniel Johnson re-issues, but it’s not the same as its heyday.
And the truth is, in a world of infinite music, YouTube everything, John Peel long gone, and intense, ridiculous musical secrets no longer existing, the impact on me (or anyone) of something like Casserole coming out now would be non-existent. There is terrible music everywhere. But in the 80s it was great and it was different and it was shocking and it opened all sorts of possibilities. Terrible, weird, transgressive don’t-give-a-shit music on actual vinyl and being played on the radio as well. That was special. And Casserole was the acme and apex of that. Better or worse times? I don’t know. Old folk need to be careful of nostalgia. Especially for stuff like this…