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August 14, 2008
* The Great Lost Mixtape
A friend posted to a message-board this week about an Austin band from the late-'80s that I hadn't thought about in a long time, but still remembered quite well. They were called Shoulders and were sometimes described as "carnival music" -- which was sorta true, inasmuch as lead singer Michael Slattery is credited in the liner notes of their early-'90s CD Trashman Shoes as playing (among other things) "parade drum" and "midget accordion."
But they had some pretty memorable songs, too, some of which have remained in my brain two decades later. I was somewhat surprised, listening to the Trashman Shoes version of the track "On Sunday", that I had vivid recollections of an earlier version of the tune in which singer Kris McKay had a cameo verse that really stood out. There was a beauty-and-the-beast quality to the contrast between McKay's high-and-sweet lilt and Slattery's rather Tom Waits-ian gruff growl.
It got me to thinking about songs from those days that somehow got lost, yet haven't been forgotten, at least by me. The late '80s were a tricky era for upstart bands; if you didn't make it to at least the indie-label ranks and were limited to self-release options, it was still a little early for CDs to be widely available, and LPs were a fair leap of expense. As a result, a lot of local and regional releases came out only on cassette -- including some stuff that was in fact really good, well worth higher-quality documentation.
There are a couple boxes in my closet with tapes that contain some of those gems -- ones I haven't been able to part with even after all these years, because it's the only place a lot of those songs exist. Once in a blue moon, someone takes the initiative to dig out the masters and reissue one of those old tapes on CD, as with Two-Headed Dog, the Lisa Mednick/Alison Young duo project from late-'80s New Orleans. So many, though, remain sheltered from the world. If I were to make a CD-reissue of such a mixtape from back then, here's what might be on it:
* Grains Of Faith, "These Wheels Of Mine" -- An Austin folk-pop band that featured frontman Joe McDermott (now a fairly successful children's-music entertainer) and violinist Susan Voelz (a fixture with Poi Dog Pondering and Alejandro Escovedo over the past couple of decades). If just one Austin band with cassette-only releases of that era deserved more, this was it. A couple of the band's other songs are posted to McDermott's MySpace page.
* Twang Twang Shock-A-Boom, "Always Give Your Love Away" -- David Garza moved on to plenty of success as a solo artist, if never quite getting the big-time pop breakthrough that has always seemed potentially within his grasp. Nothing will ever be as carefree as the music he made with this trio in his early college days playing on the west mall at the University of Texas, though. This one can be found as a streamed track on the internet, but not on disc anywhere, to date.
* Hundredth Monkey, "Better Way" -- The aforementioned Kris McKay ended up with a one-LP tenure on Arista, and had a mid-'90s disc on Shanachie, both of which had their moments...but what I hear in my head when I think of her voice is this track in which she harmonized beautifully with rhythm guitarist Patrice Sullivan. I always felt like the Indigo Girls really needed to cover this song, and I still do.
* Hub Moore, "Lucky" -- Moore was sort of a protege of McKay's, someone she had found and championed during a visit to New York City; she'd sing harmony with him when he made the occasional visit to Austin. He had a cassette release that included this one simple but spot-on-perfect song, so good I had to learn how to play and sing it myself. Moore recorded a much different rendition of it many years later for a disc he released in the late-'90s, but it didn't have the straightfoward charm of the original.
* Butch Hancock, "Split & Slide II" -- Live versions of this marathon track ended up a on a couple of cassettes, most notably Hancock's 14-volume No 2 Alike series documenting a weeklong Cactus Cafe residency in early 1990. It's about 25 minutes long, and there's a one-line cameo from Townes Van Zandt near the end. This is far too significant an artifact of classic Texas songwriting to exist only on cassette.
* Last Straw, "Bed Of Roses" -- Here's the proof of how well I remembered this song: A few years back, Last Straw leader Larry Seaman came through North Carolina on a low-key solo jaunt and performed at a small bar in downtown Raleigh. When he started playing "Bed Of Roses", I almost instinctively got onstage and started singing the harmonies with him. And I hadn't heard the song in at least ten years.
* Barnburners, "Crescent City" -- Everyone in this short-lived trio went on to bigger and better things: Banjo player Danny Barnes fronted the Bad Livers, guitarist Rich Brotherton joined Robert Earl Keen's band, and bassist J.D. Foster became a prolific producer. For a brief period, they joined forces in the Austin clubs and made a tape that included a terrific Lucinda Williams cover well before seemingly everyone started covering Lucinda's songs.
* Beaver Nelson, "Don't Bend Just Break" -- Speaking of Lucinda, she sang backup on this track from Nelson's 1991 cassette-only release, many years before he finally managed to get into the CD racks after an aborted major-label deal. He did eventually end up releasing a newer recording of the song on one of his discs, but it's the version with Williams' voice that still haunts my memory.
* Electric Third Rail, "Lovers And Other Strangers" -- For a couple years this band was a next-big-thing in Boulder, Colorado; it never quite panned out, and so there is a cassette called Heroine And Heartbreak but little else to document their days. This song from that tape probably got played more than any other single tune in my car stereo during 1987.
* Ramadillo, "Life Of Sin" -- The cassette release West Of Here came out in early December 1991, and by February 1992 the band had split. Yet the recording remains one of the best works of frontman Pete Droge, who went on to release many CDs under his own name on American Recordings and then his own label. This was proto-alt-country several years before the mid-'90s peak (and with one of the Boquist brothers on drums, even).
I could go on -- and perhaps I will, in a later entry -- but there's a good ten to fill up one side of an old XLII. Ironically enough, the most prolific cassette-only Austin artist of that era, Daniel Johnston, ended up becoming far better-known than even most of his compatriots who graduated to LP and CD format. Nowadays, a great many of the dozen or so collections Johnston issued on cheap low-bias cassettes are readily available on CD, rescued from oblivion by various folks who understood what the music was worth. Maybe, someday, that kind fate will await some of these songs above.
adios,
peter
Posted by Peter at 2:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)