Tag Archives: louisville

Long Live the Experimental Pollen

Jon Cook ca. 1994.

Back in 1996, fans of lo-fi music, Crain, and Louisville’s particular brand of homegrown rock might’ve been following Experimental Pollen, a short-lived Jon Cook project.  As it looked like Crain was about to split up, that small community might’ve paid particular attention to what a possible Crain follow-up would be. Experimental Pollen had a pretty mighty presence that summer, with a crack rhythm section composed of Troy Cox (Evergreen) and Will Hancock (Four Fifty Six), but the very few released recordings never really measured up to that lineup, and the band folded as Jon got more interested in noise music and his decline began to inexorably take hold.

However, before all that, he managed to release a 7″ EP on the one-off Gene Rick label (sporting a St. Cloud, Minnesota P.O. box for reasons that remain obscure to me). Essentially a split with New England indie rocker Mike Flood (also obscure), I got my hands on a copy of it recently and am pleased to post the two best solid songs from it, both recorded in “that electrifying spring and summer of ’94.”  I’ll second the electricity.

To cop from the liner notes, “long live the Experimental Pollen!  Happy!!!!”

***UPDATE: I’ve added a couple more Experimental Pollen songs to the playlist so readers/listeners don’t have to jump around the links in the last sentence of the first paragraph.

Evergreen – On Another Dimension in Indiana

Sean McLoughlin as rendered by Caleb

Several years ago, I wrote about an Evergreen show at the 1995 St. Francis Battle of the Bands at the Grand Theater in New Albany in which drummer Britt Walford (Slint, many others) was lifted off the throne, practically still playing. I was thrilled to see that Vice’s Party Legends features an episode with Dave Pajo that re-tells that story with animation. Sandwiched between segments talking about wild and decadent L.A. parties, once again, little Louisville punches several classes above its weight. Pajo’s description of Walford also gives the episode its title — Britt was, in those days, as so many of us were, “clearly on another dimension.” Pajo’s portion starts at 11:15.

I remember the cops pulling Britt off the kit. Pajo remembers that it was band members Sean McLoughlin and Tim Ruth. His version makes a bit more sense, because I clearly remember everybody meeting up later at the “Dixie House” — the ramshackle two-bedroom house on the outskirts of Louisville where Sean lived with Richard and Joe from Wino. Had it been the cops, then Britt likely would have been in a cell. [Update: one of the “hardcore partiers in town” who was there wrote to say that he clearly remembered that it was the cops who pulled Walford off the kit. They then just stared at him, and he took off. This jibes with my recollections as well. I’m trying to imagine that happening in today’s world of police-civilian interactions.] I also remember taking some alternate route away from the Grand to the Sherman Minton Bridge. Today’s kids will take solace in the fact that they’ll have far more bridges to choose from when running from Indiana’s finest — which I hope they’ll have occasion to do.

Pajo does conflate a bit the straightedge bands and the scene. (I don’t blame him.) The band that played and that he is talking about is Metroschifter, but there were far worst offenders in onstage preaching — I can’t not mention Endpoint’s Rob Pennington and Guilt’s Duncan Barlow. But Metroschifter frontman Scott Ritcher was the one to make a couple of bids for entry into local politics, first as mayor in 1998 and then as state senator ten years later.  The animation is a good composite of the blather endemic to straightedge sub-scene at that time. Post-high school, for me, anyway, the sanctimoniousness of Minor Threat-inspired hardcore had started to wear thin. Although a lot of girls were certainly into it, its puritan ethos seemed to contradict the whole rock ‘n’ roll spirit.

Britt by Caleb

I don’t know much about animator Caleb, but he did a great job capturing details like the wild look in Sean’s eyes, Britt’s lack of facial expression and determined drumming, the pompousness of the preachy straightedge bands, and in general the vibe of a show in the middle of nowhere over two decades ago. Kudos to Caleb. The music is also well done, with strains of what sounds like live or practice versions of Evergreen’s “Klark Kent” and “Petting the Beast” running over Pajo’s re-telling.

Hat-tip to Richard for hipping me to this episode. I’m a bit out of the loop about such things.

Happy (belated) birthday, Hunter Thompson

Hunter S. Thompson, who was from Louisville, would have turned 79 this week. With the Republican National Convention in full swing and on the cusp of a truly ludicrous election, we need him now more than ever. The Paris Review’s lengthy interview from 2000 is worth re-reading, and quotes the following from 1988’s Generation of Swine:

. . . I have stolen more quotes and thoughts and purely elegant little starbursts of writing from the Book of Revelation than from anything else in the English Language—and it is not because I am a biblical scholar, or because of any religious faith, but because I love the wild power of the language and the purity of the madness that governs it and makes it music.

This week, the New Yorker ran a satirical bit that started as such:

The 2016 Republican National Convention became embroiled in another controversy on Tuesday, as Biblical experts accused Republicans of plagiarizing the entire Convention scenario from the Book of Revelation.

So HST’s ghost still walks with us.  I wish he had stuck around for another decade or so. There will be much unfinished business to come, it seems, in the matter of the “autopsy of the American dream,” a job at which he excelled.

Dry Heat

Ali, accompanied by Jimmy Ellis, runs along Regent Street; London 1966
Ali, accompanied by Jimmy Ellis, runs along Regent Street; London 1966

When I heard Muhammad Ali, the Champ, died Friday, I thought I would go for a three mile run. I figured that it would be a small thing to do for someone who had done so many big things. There had recently been a shooting at my gym so I thought I would go outside.

***

The Champ made it ok to be from Louisville, Kentucky. When traveling, it is much better to be able to talk about the Champ rather than fried chicken chains or whiskey or the other things that people talk about if they think about Kentucky. 

The Champ helped my brother out in Serbia. We were at a music festival in Novi Sad in 2004, and although it was a festival designed to promote peace, Americans still had to be careful and respectful. Even though the NATO bombing was five years past — an eternity in cable news cycle damaged American minds — it was like yesterday in Serbia. In case anyone might’ve forgotten, the bridge connecting the island where the festival was to Novi Sad was a temporary pontoon bridge, the original having been struck by NATO bombs. My brother had crossed the bridge and was held up at security by Serbian police officers intent on searching all he had. But when they looked in his bag and found the The Fight by Norman Mailer, with Ali’s picture on the cover, one said in the manner of being let in on some tremendous and wonderful secret, “ah, the Champ,” and then they let him pass. 

The Champ helped me out in Italy, too. Wandering the industrial zone around Lodi TBB station which was the only place my magazine could afford an office, where I watched whores trick on the tracks and Gypsies shoot up in the thin tree lines along the track, I found a coffee place tended by a lone and gaunt Italian. The bar, like many things in Italy, seemed from a different era. He had a photo of the Champ on the wall.  I said, “è il mio paesano,” as I waited on my coffee and the gaunt barista came over and started talking to me. We talked for awhile. I went to that coffee place for the rest of the time we had our offices there.

And when some neighborhood bullies acted like they were going to steal my bike one day when I was 11 or 12, my father taught me a few moves in my room and then I overheard him saying to my mother that he was going to send me to his friend Joe Martin’s gym if this went on. My mother groaned. It didn’t go on, so I never went.

Of course all these things could have happened had the Champ not been alive, but here are some that couldn’t have.

In the mid-1990s, my father met the Champ in the lobby of the Starks Building in Louisville, where he had his office. He was working late, as he often did, but it was a Friday and his secretary made him leave before it got too late. As they went towards the catwalk that led to the parking garage, they saw a gaggle of people surrounding the Champ. My dad slid through them and stuck out his hand. “Hello, Champ,” he said. The Champ already had Parkinson’s but smiled and took my father’s hand in his and made a little time for him. When my father caught up with his secretary, who walked faster than he did, she said, “I can’t believe you did that. That was Muhammed Ali.” He said, “I know.”

But that wasn’t the first time he saw him. He saw him walking down Walnut Street by himself in the late summer of 1960, right after he’d won the gold medal in Rome, the one they say he threw in the Ohio River later. My father said he was walking down Walnut Street by himself like he owned the place. He didn’t then, but he would.

There was no coffeeshop or restaurant or bar in Louisville that would have served him then and in the next year’s mayoral race, Louisville’s Fourth Street Democratic organization would run segregationist candidate William S. Milburn, president of the Board of Aldermen, against republican William O. Cowger.  Milburn lost overwhelmingly. By 1978, the Board of Aldermen had changed the name of Walnut Street to Muhammad Ali Boulevard.

***

Where I live, it was 117 degrees today. By the time the sun went down, it was only 107. I made it to four miles.  It’s a dry heat.

Goodbye, Jason Noble

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaQtK74sF5Q

I knew Jason Noble was sick about two years ago, and I knew it was a nasty cancer, and I knew he’d beaten it for the moment. I didn’t know he was sick again so I was surprised this morning when a fellow refugee from Louisville told me that he’d passed. Jason, along with his musical cohorts at the Rocket House and at ear X-tacy made being a teen in a city where open-mindedness did not come easily a lot more palatable.

It’s rare in the narcissistic, instant gratification-fueled world of 21st-century communications that a person with a public persona passes and is genuinely mourned. To a geeky, bored, often angry kid seeking any kind of interaction beyond teachers and churches, Jason was a kind, gentle and open soul. His art — from post-rock epics to simple sketches — made perfect sense to those who grew up in the same fishbowl. He clarified the distortions and gave voice to the frustrations.

RIP, Jason Noble. As a writer greater than this scribbler once said, his spirit shines through him.

il Kentucky

We’re often curious as to how others see us. To that end, today’s offering is composed of translations from an Italian guidebook to the USA on my home state and city. Factually, it’s largely accurate, with a couple of exceptions (the Louisville Falls Fountain was scrapped 13 years ago), but the amusement for Louisvillians and Kentuckians should come from the nuance. Largely, the Italians give the Commonwealth high marks for natural beauty and traditional culture. Coming from Italy, that’s a high compliment.

**UPDATE**

Upon closer inspection, the book is actually the Italian translation of a UK-published volume, DK Publishing’s USA Eyewitness Travel Guide. Well, although not Italian, it is still foreign, so the basic premise remains, but it’s less fun.

Civil War Cannons

Kentucky

With its passages through the Appalachians and hilly pastures where horses run through acres of bluegrass, Kentucky is one of the most picturesque states in the country. The land in the west is mountainous, and was at one time inhabited by Indians who forcefully resisted settlements of the white colonists. Today Kentucky is known all over the world for its horses and in the area around Lexington you can find many thoroughbred farms. One of racing’s most prestigious events, the Kentucky Derby, takes place in Louisville. The state is also famous for its traditional style of country music. Highway 23 along the eastern border of the state is nicknamed Country Music Highway.

Louisville Sluggers

 

Louisville

Founded near the falls of the Ohio River in 1788, in Louisville (pronounced “Luuavol”) you’ll find one of the most famous horse races in the world, the Kentucky Derby. The Derby is to Louisville what Mardi Gras is to New Orleans or what the Masters is forAugusta: the event around which the whole calendar turns. Since the first Derby in 1975, countless three-year-old horses have run down the track at Churchill Downs on the first Saturday in May. Kentucky’s high society turns out in spring dress for the event, with hats and striped cotton suits. The unofficial drink of the day is the mint julep, a mix of bourbon ice, sugar and fresh mint typical of the south. The song “My Old Kentucky Home” is sung as the horses are led to the track for a race that lasts less than two minutes. The winner brings home the coveted trophy, adorned with a silver horseshoe in the form of a “U” — “so that the good luck can’t escape.”

La mia vecchia casa del Kentucky

The nearby Kentucky Derby Museum shows off the history of horse racing and offers a tour of the racetrack Churchill Downs. A couple of blocks from the old downtown by the riverfront, the Louisville Slugger Museum produces the noted baseball bat in a factory marked by a 36-meter-high bat.

The J.B. Speed Art Museum on South 3rd Street offers a grand collection of paintings and Renaissance sculpture. At Riverfront Plaza on the banks of the Ohio River, between Main and Fourth Streets, there are many paddlewheel boats that offer a tour of the area, and a fountain that sprays water 115 meters in the air. The old warehouses that surround the old downtown have been changed into cafes, galleries and stores.

Three kilometers to the northeast of downtown is Cave Hill Cemetery, one of the biggest cemeteries in the United States. Many Louisvillians come just to feed the ducks or to wander on the well-kept lawns. Fifty kilometers southwest of Louisville you can see the federal gold deposit at Fort Knox.

Country Music and Bluegrass

Poa pratensis, field fodder

Like the Mississippi Delta is for the blues, the strip of eastern Kentucky(along with West Virginia) has one of the biggest concentrations of country music artists in America. English, Irish and Scottish immigrants brought with them their ballads, rhythms and Elizabethan instruments, which they used to create a typically American style now called “country,” characterized by rapidly-played violins, an occasional yodel and lyrics about the hard life in the southeastern United States. Highway 23, which goes from Ashland to Pikeville along the eastern border of the state, is nicknamed the “Country Music Highway” to commemorate the number of musicians born along it. The road passes though the birthplaces of Billy Ray Cyrus, Loretta Lynn, Patty Loveless and Dwight Yoakam. The great fields of Kentucky bluegrass inspired a particular kind of country music that bears the same name, which comes from a kind of music played at the end of the ’40s by Bill Monroe and his Bluegrass Boys. The name bluegrass stuck and this style of acoustic folk music is quite popular in the region. The traditional bluegrass instruments are the guitar, mandolin, five-string banjo, bass and Dobro.

If you outlaw whiskey, then only outlaws...

Use and Consumption of Alcohol

Compared to the rest of the country, inhabitants of the south are predominantly teetotalers. Many are Baptists, a religion that disapproves of the consumption of alcohol. In some rural regions, one can find counties, mainly in the mountains, where alcohol cannot be sold or served to the public legally. But the exceptions to this tradition are legendary: producers of “moonshine”, a homemade whisky made from corn, earned their fame as outlaws in the days of Prohibition by hiding from federal agents in the depths of the woods and using their stills only at night – thus the name “moonshine.” Drinking a mint julep on Derby Day in Louisville is local tradition so beloved that local girls begin collecting the traditional silver cups starting at age 12.

 

Evergreen

Pants off… again. Hate it how that happens.

Note: Those interested in any of the demo files, feel free to leave a comment and I’ll try to respond. It’s hard for me to keep up with WordPress’s changing architecture, but I’m happy to share what I have. 

Evergreen’s self-titled, and only, record finally got its due with a reissue in 2005 on Temporary Residence. That release appended two tracks from a low-fi single on Hi-Ball released in 1994, which along with a bunch of tape compilations documented Louisville’s wild mid-nineties house party scene, which launched, among others, Will Oldham’s Palace Brothers. The record proper, released in 1996, was recorded by James Murphy, more in print recently for selling out Madison Square Gardens with LCD Soundsystem.

What little writing that is out there on the band focuses on the fact that frontman Sean McLoughlin was a party animal, which is true, but he was also a bit of a poet in his own right, an avid reader of Bukowski, Nietzsche and Burroughs who introduced a bunch of Louisvillians to Fellini via repeated screenings of Satyricon at his rented house out Seventh Street Road near Dixie Highway, his Ford Fairlane parked in the driveway.

The band went through several line-up and name changes, made more confusing by a recent reunion of an early and lesser line-up. They started as a metal band called Revenant, morphed into a popular all-ages funk-hardcore act and ended up as one of guitarist Tim Ruth’s musique concrète projects. (NB: The all-ages act released a retrospective in 2009, Wholeness of the Soul, which lately has sounded pretty good to these ears, and which honestly might be getting more airtime at Premesso in the 2020s that Britt’s Evergreen.)  But none of those are the band that made this record.

“Towing image by contact: e”

From about 1994 to 1998, the band was doing something unique, trying to merge roots punk ‘n’ roll à la Stooges with post-rock à la Krautrock. They’d play, à la Can, all night in the woods. Flyers advised the audience to bring a sleeping bag. Britt Walford melded Jaki Liebezeit-like endurance with southern punk rock defiance: at a 1995 Battle of the Bands in Southern Indiana, the power was cut, but Walford kept on playing until two cops picked him up by his armpits and hauled him off, his legs and arms still twitching like some kind of metronymic insect.

But just like McLoughlin was more than a wild man, Walford was more than the drummer. He was responsible for taking the band in a different direction and developing their later sound. All the good bands in those days, up to Nirvana, wanted to record with Steve Albini or his rapidly-budding protégé, Bob Weston, especially Louisville bands (Crain, Rodan), but I’m not sure if Evergreen benefited from their signature stripped-down sound. They had already recorded a lot of four- and eight-track demos, usually with local engineer and musician Steve Good, who knew their sound well. Their summer 1995 Bob Weston sessions don’t sound that different than their Steve Good eight-track sessions. If anything Evergreen gives stronger performances on the Steve Good sessions.

Steve Good, from the ‘zine Hard Times

Walford understood this. The rumor was (corroborated on some long-dead web-page of Murphy’s) that Atlantic Records, on Murphy’s tip-off, had paid for the Weston demos and wasn’t releasing them since the band wasn’t signing. But a listen to the band’s 1996 record suggests otherwise. Instead of Weston’s bare-bones engineering, it evokes early disco more than early punk, with a bouncy low end propelled by Walford’s drumming and bassist Troy Cox’s subtle, funk-informed lines. McLoughlin, far from being a punk screamer, occasionally even hits a melody that disappears into a miasma of sound, such as in the last 40 seconds or so of “Solar Song.”

The Weston version of the same song doesn’t even come close, which isn’t to impugn Weston, who recorded some of the best rock records from this period. To compare:

The band was a formidable force that summer. They played house parties and no-name Kentucky clubs with raucous locals like the Auditory Clang and the Quiz. But seeing the band perform at Chicago’s Lounge Ax after they’d been mixing at Albini’s, which was then spread across three floors of the engineer’s house, in summer 1995 was electrifying.

He felt responsible

Like contemporaries the Jesus Lizard, the band was a controlled contrast to frontman McLoughlin’s wild antics.  Ruth played a Travis Bean borrowed from Albini and the harmonics on “Glass Highway” sparkled over the tight and syncopated rhythm laid down by Walford and Cox, clad in a qiana shirt. Steve Good’s recording best captures the dynamic control the band laid down that night. Listen as McLoughlin’s delivery of cryptically bleak lyrics steadily becomes more insistent, resolving in a repeated, one-syllable shout. Audio defects in the original.

For show-closer “Pants Off” one of the Louisville contingent stormed the stage and, true to the song’s name, took off his pants and jumped on McLoughlin, who whipped him with the mic chord. The two ended up in a homoerotic tangle, the singer still grunting “roly-poly roly poly! Pants off again! roller coaster roller coaster eyeball head!” as the band bashed on. [Thanks to JDD, who was there, for the lyrical correction.]

Evergreen had a rock and roll spirit forged in the conservative and Baptist city of their birth that was hard to imitate. Later bands on the dance-punk bandwagon would find it impossible to measure up to the intensity and originality of their live show and sound. This is a band that not only wouldn’t, but can’t, do a reunion-album-tour. They weren’t actors playing out a recital. They existed at a particular moment in time that not everyone made it out of all right, and for better or worse, it’s gone.

What’s left is the record. Listen to it. They made it because they knew they wouldn’t last forever.

Live at the Cherokee Blues Club, 1995