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| November 5, 2002 | |||||
| It's
like that: Jam Master Jay Let's
talk about sex Rolling (the 20-sided die) with
Lil' Pocketknife Return
to a Savage Republic Chapter
two Uneasy
listening Punctum Correct
Techniques
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Uneasy listening Steel Pole Bath Tub took a fall but got back up again for Beyond the Pale. By Deborah GiattinaEVERY TIME A great idea gets squashed or someone's hopes are dashed, a bell should ring in mourning. That way everyone would know they were missing out. Mike Morasky, guitarist, vocalist, and tape manipulator of the long-absent San Francisco band Steel Pole Bath Tub, once hoped to rerecord the Cars' first album and release it as a follow-up to 1995's Scars from Falling Down, their sixth album and their major-label debut on Slash/London. But the record never materialized, and Steel Pole Bath Tub "sort of just stopped," as Morasky put it the night we met at a Mission District café to discuss his band's recent reemergence. During the past six years I've been keeping an eye out for the trio, which included bassist-vocalist Dale Flattum and drummer-guitarist Darren Mor-X. I kept expecting to come across one of those jagged cutout flyers Flattum used to make announcing they were playing a show with Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 or Neurosis. Both of those Bay Area bands were suitable billmates for Steel Pole Bath Tub, whose music was as renowned for its expertly constructed sampling experiments as it was for being way fucking heavy. Their inclusion in the second Beyond the Pale festival, running this month at the DNA Lounge, intrigued me. What happened to them? In my own paranoid vision of things, the same evil forces that made my favorite noise rock group disappear also closed the Chameleon – SPBT's onetime practice space, drinking post, and favorite venue, which is now Amnesia – and replaced the vintage, metal-framed "17 Reasons" sign that until very recently sat atop Thrift Town with that beer ad atrocity. A few clues suggested that members were allowed to continue under alternate identities. In 1997, Morasky and Flattum, as Agent Nova and Bumblebee, won an art grant from the French government, moved to a Marseilles villa, and started recording a revolving door of musicians – from Corsican folk singers to an African drum orchestra – exquisite-corpse style. The two, who have been playing with tape together since high school, seamlessly assembled a startling array of sounds and released the result under the name Milk Cult in 2000 on their Zero to One label. Once I get all these details from Morasky, I'm convinced that there was never a conspiracy behind their absence, just standard major-label operating procedure. After signing Steel Pole Bath Tub, Slash decided to change host bodies, moving from distributor Warner Bros. to a more lucrative deal, its acquisition by London Records. At the same time, the band submitted recordings of the first three songs on the Cars' 1978 classic along with blueprints for some original material. Tragically, the record company people didn't go for the tribute album idea. "It was the typical, 'We don't hear a hit,' " Morasky says. Or as Mor-X wryly puts it in the liner notes to the band's new, seventh CD, its first release in six years, "I had a sinking feeling that I was in bed with the enemy (which can be sexy in a kind of 'Ilsa: Queen of the SS' type of way), but this enemy just didn't get my jokes." It wasn't until Morasky returned from his special effects gig in New Zealand, where he was working on a modest project called the Lord of the Rings trilogy, that he found the time to release the record. The group decided put it out on Zero to One and title it with the word Slash once used for it, "unlistenable." Trust me, the results are anything but. If you liked what SPBT did to Black Sabbath's "Paranoid" on their 1990 Lurch/Butterfly Love EP with Berkeley label Boner Records, then you really need to hear what they've done to "Just What I Needed." The drums sound like they were recorded in a canyon, and the guitar parts transmit enough voltage to electrocute everyone on the top three floors of Capitol Records. As for their snubbed originals, it's wild stuff unlike anything the band have done before, and it proves the band are as relevant as ever. Perhaps that's because SPBT were one of the few bands of the flannel era that tried to do something besides emulate Black Sabbath. "Re-juvenilated" sounds like Erase Errata invading a Wolf Eyes practice. It's got high-pitched guitar parts to crack your skull, corrosive beats, and the band's patented tape loops running around the whole thing. Morasky continues to pour tales into my eager ears of the days he spent in the Mission environs with his friends, and I realize their disappearing act had more to do with needing to get away from that coterie and try new things. Flattum now lives in North Carolina, Mor-X in Chicago. Certainly there were enough good times to supersede any residual bitterness from the record company disappointment. So Beyond the Pale organizer and Neurosis member Noah Landis didn't have to twist the trio's arms too hard to get them to play the festival, and after that, the band promises to put out an eighth full-length of truly new material. As we wrap things up and finish our last beer, Morasky looks at me mischievously and says, "When you're given your big shot, you have some choices. Either you try to succeed doing something you don't want to do, which could lead to a double failure, or you don't second-guess yourself and you succeed on your own terms, which equals double success. But if you fail, well, everyone else is just fucking wrong." Thanks to that attitude, Unlistenable was finally heard.
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| Design by Rhatia Carr |