membra disjecta/lost tracks 2006-2011

….all tracks uploaded from a CD found at the bottom of a shoebox. 
The artillery has fallen silent. This is all that’s left… 
My hat is off to the young men who played on these tracks, wherever they are and whoever they might be...

Yours, the raw, unmodulated Bill Whitten

Scenes from the Class Struggle/2006

From the Groover Comp Jeans & Summer 2005? 2006?
inchoate musings on class from hall, oates
Il faut payer - you must pay!

...Listen to the final album, 2010's Clandestine Songs, in its entirety

Grand Mal - Clandestine Songs by Groover Recordings

one can buy it here

Year of the Pig

The Ecstasies of St. Johnny

ST. JOHNNY PEEL SESSION

Here are two of four tracks from a Peel Session recorded during the summer of grunge, 1993.

The group’s first attempt in those hallowed BBC studios was a recording of the Birthday Party's Mr. Clarinet. A favorite of the band, occasionally performed live (when they were up to the task) it allowed them to mimic a sound that was very close to their own - distressed, unhinged and bristling with self-loathing.

****

The second song from the session was Fields and Fields of People.

The track was impressively and incredibly obscure - recorded first by Floridians Terry Brooks and the Strange in 1974 - although it has to be pointed out, it sounded exactly like the Flaming Lips...

Was this a case of Plagiarism by Anticipation on the part of Terry Brooks? Plagiarism by Anticipation was a concept invented by early Christian theologians as a way to disparage rituals and beliefs that pre-dated the birth of Jesus Christ.

Tarred by the brush of plagiarism by anticipation were, among others, the Zoroastrians, the ancient Greeks and the Roman adherents of Mithraism.

They must have been bummed out.

****

But St. Johnny recorded the song anyway, obliquely aware that covering a tune that sounded like the F.Lips would do them no favors in terms of countering their reputation as epigones, counterfeiters-disguised-as-drunks and so on and so forth...

From JPeel's record library

****

Just as Walter Benjamin feared that men might outlive culture, would a band toiling in the '90's foresee that rock musicians might outlive rock music? 
Could they have imagined, looming over the horizon, the likes of the Strokes and Vampire Weekend? Bands that were constituted from the social layer known as the haute bourgeoisie? And could they ever guess that these same young people, instead of making careers in Law, Medicine or working for some evil neoliberal NGO, would choose to play rock music?  Almost, it could be said, as an act of, well...noblesse oblige? 
How disgusting!

LINEUP:
Bill Whitten / Vox rhythm guitar
Tom Leonard/ Lead guitar
Jim Elliot/ Bass, Moog
Wayne Letitia/ Drums
Tom Stamos/phlebotomy, diplopia management, white hot rage, glacial detachment, car crashes...

Ingeborg Bachmann

..."Today" is a word which only suicides should be allowed to use.

IB, Malina

Small, Destroyed World
Is it frightening to accept such good fortune? - Johanna Ferrour, axe in hand standing over a cowering nobleman....

A list-maker, I created an inventory of things I admired about Candy:

1. A sulfurous reputation

2. Her face was a mask bought on sale

3. It hid a youthful obsession with suicide, violent mood swings and a lack of any clear sense of self.

---

After the third drink she asked:

“Will my father come to NYC to solve my murder?”

After the fourth, her head bowed forward, blonde hair flowing across the bar like a cataract:  
“I cut the German loose without so much as a thank you…”

I nodded my head and thought for a moment.
I was a scholar, a man of letters, a microhistorian of her naked body.

“In rehab my nickname was Malvu…” 

She was not impressed.

“In prison my nickname was Gavanes and I worked in the bakery. The yeast I used was smuggled in by Mexican cartels and the leavening of my bread became so potent that it was….it was…an agent of emancipation! My fucking bread exploded from the ovens and ruptured the prison walls. Imagine stepping into starlight covered in flour, white as ghosts. We were never captured, Candy.”

She lifted her head, looked from side to side: “Someone must have a fucking twin brother around here”.

The bartender, unwelcome, my enemy, appeared and regarded us with his claret eyes: 

“You're talking about the Cercopes brothers, Candy...Twin demons. Bad news”. 

She tsk-tsked the man with the 1000 year old bar-rag and the 750 year old shoes: 
“It is more difficult to lie to yourself than it is to lie to me, sir.”

He opened his shirt, dragged a ragged fingernail across his sternum.
“It’s easier than you make it sound, Candy.”

Her head was half an inch above the surface of the bar, her mouth pointed at the floor. 
“Who is this person who has so little pride that he desires to speak with me?”

Then it was back to my list:

4. In Tower Records I once had a panic attack

5. Brought on by a sudden inability to experience disgust

6. My teenage years were an illness, an affliction, a manifestation of familial dysautonomia

7.How could love reach me if I couldn’t feel pain?

8. And then I met Candy, misery incarnate, and she hurt me, hurt me like no other. 

9. Now I can love.

Phantom Limb

(A Memoir of My Youth)

Black bear on the loose;

Smashed kitchen cupboard, empty beer cans, shit smeared walls -

The addict’s calling card.

My grandfather, Chevy, closer to mors than most

Knew exactly what was afoot:

The queen was pregnant

And the child was to be suckled

By wild beasts.

Benny Lee; 
Disfigured, ashamed, tired of killing.

Drinking beer as he watched the news on television.

A comedian hanged himself

in a motel room in Phoenix.

“Why is that news?” he wondered.

Leg torn off by motorcycle

Sex with Ma to heal it

Birth of prosthetic-brother-son

To conceal it.

‘I will erect a gallows in the backyard!’

Chevy threatened from his wheelchair,

“The issue of her womb will swing from a rope.”

The queen was pregnant

And the child was to be suckled

By wild beasts.

Benny Lee: “And just why is the image on the screen

always of a man with a gun?

Is it hero-worship or zero-worship?”

The wheeled Chevy, asleep at the foot of the porch stairs

A folded newspaper, cigarette ashes, blueprints for a gibbet in his lap

This is the story of an addicted bear

finding work in suburbia;

(A bear’s brutality being preferable to a mother’s.)

The queen was pregnant

And the child was to be suckled

By wild beasts.

I Know What You Were

Little is known for certain of Pistoletta’s early life

other than she demonstrated a yearning for a return to a mythical age
As for me I often resort to vulgar gesture when cornered.

(how could I have been the one that I was?)

Her stock answer to my romantic overtures was always the same:

Falling in love is like death.

Pistoletta in the bathroom, the walls painted with red orbiculate leaves

and if one chose to look, one found a cosmogony in the mirror

(it was something to avoid)

Calling to me in the kitchen as I poured a drink:

“Slashes across the face

make for an elegant disguise”.

My hand froze somewhere between the bottle and my mouth.

“Pistoletta don’t be a melodramatic bitch just this once,

don’t make this night into an opera involving the shrieking of sirens,
the mutterings of indifferent professionals,
and your inevitable confinement to the fluorescent labyrinth of Woodhull.”

I heard her dropping things into the sink; bobby pins, make-up bottles, tweezers...

“Remember how the last time the ambulance driver stole your wallet

and the patrolman grabbed your cunt through your nightgown.

Don’t forget that shit before you do something….

That will…that will...
Set us aflame”

I drank and I drank and started to believe that it was true, it was just as she said;

Falling in love is like death.

To the Hateful Light

I am no longer dead; I am in love -  A.B. Casares
I’ve begun as a raven and will end as my father;

exactly like everyone else.
This is obvious...
but, wait!
To weep over mere nastiness: 

a mistake?

A leakage of emotion?

(stroking my chin as I stroll)

Love as archeology. Love as reenactment. 

(I nod my head and think: my powers are not so vast)

Love as multitude. Love as disease. 

Love as remainder.

(note to self: add images of dismemberment)

On the way back from the coffee shop

A mouth in the gutter 
calls to me, hails me:

“I am your correspondent.”

I turn to face the voice 

(the mouth belongs to a man with blonde hair and a red mustache)

“Spare some change for a hot meal.”
(neither an order nor a request)

and further

“Living on the street is not unlike being in a coma;
they share the same texture of unorganized experience”.

He rises from the pavement.

“I’ve undergone both.”

I hand him a crumpled bill.

He bows: “The raw, unmodulated Billy Sundown 

at your service”.

And promptly disappears from among men.

I am allergic to this planet.

abyss of the neighbor

slipped under my door after i complained about noise and the smell of reefer wafting into my apartment.
The only good neighbor is a dead neighbor!

Dedoublement

We drop stars on NYC
then complain of fatigue after 5 minutes…
(camouflaged wounds dictate our movements)
Yet the sun forms in the space between the wall and the bed
as the earth-shaker comes to life in the basement
He who was once responsible for epilepsy, for the sacred disease
now takes his board to the Rockaways
and commands the waves in an obsidian wetsuit
(P. is the last guy i want to think about)
Hands upon her hips
I am a series of explosions in a rock quarry
I am William Lewis Herndon as my boat goes over the waterfall.
We argued about temporality and capitalism, witchcraft and capitalism.
Soon followed our dedoublement
(and to think we’d been fatbooting it down the avenue only a week earlier).
At the cafe a rapprochement seemed inevitable:
‘Your taste in music may be execrable
and your innocence indestructible,
yet I’d like to feel the stubble
Of your leghair against my face as I lick your calves.”
Eventually I departed,
in my immense Borsalino,
leaving behind a note:
‘I am at your service,
I am, etc.
Robert Awe’.

superstars

When I hear the word 'authenticity' I reach for my Glock....

Children of Light

Fragment on Rock #2

...Woe to the rock musician who fails to cultivate his megalomania. He will soon discover that one does not become abnormal with impunity...

I detest audiences...Audiences are forces of evil.

"I hated the audience, at times, for things they made you do. They're cunts. Why did they come to see me?"                                                                                                                                             -Ig, Rolling Stone 1979

Applause was an early form of voting in Sparta that was denounced by Aristotle as ‘childish.’

Applause; the flapping of wings. 

1. Wild female swamp gorillas have been observed clapping their hands in a set routine that appears to hold meaning for other gorillas. There is a growing body of evidence that hand clapping originated with the common ancestor of humans and other primates. It also suggests hand clapping may often serve as a form of communication in great apes.  "Our observations of female gorillas clapping was always inner palm to inner palm, just as humans would clap… the gorillas would do this after stretching their arms in front of their bodies”. 

2. St. Thomas Aquinas from his earliest childhood, felt the greatest hatred of applause....
3. "He calls us castrated eunuchs!" We have already spoken of Toscanini's hatred of applause and his reluctance to come forward and take curtain calls....
Applause as contagion
4. Customs of the theatre (claques – paid applauders, the distribution of handkerchiefs to wave) were incorporated into the liturgy by early Christians. Eusebius says that the vainglorious Paul of Samosata encouraged the congregation to applaud his preaching. By the 4th and 5th centuries clapping for popular preachers had become an established custom. However, applause in church eventually fell out of fashion…

From The Genealogy of Applause by Robert Awe.

St*Johnny >> I wanna burn like a martyr in my Chevrolet

 St*Johnny - "Go To Sleep"

(Ajax Records, 1992 / Caroline Records [U.S.], 1993; Rough Trade Records [U.K.], 1993)

This song was released as a 7" by cool indie Ajax in '92, and then appeared on the band's High As A Kite singles compilation the next year.  (The U.S. version on Caroline, which I own, has 11 tracks, while the U.K. version on Rough Trade has only 8.)  This type of song is a perfect example of why I started this site: An obscure indie band releases a universe-destroyingly great anthem; no one hears it back in the day; the band breaks up; the song languishes in cool ppl's mix tapes / closets / iTunes for years or decades until the song decides to break free and assert itself much like when the robots rose in T2: Judgment Day.  The only unfortunate thing about this song is its name, which does not exactly generate much excitement, especially when the mundane band name is factored in.  Note: They sometimes spelled their name St. Johnny (in the early days), st. johnny, or St Johnny, and the asterisked (DGC-era) version of their name is technically spelled st✮johnny.

Reviews and zines from the early to mid '90s always pointed out how St*Johnny were protegés of Sonic Youth, though I think they were more aligned with fellow New Yorkers Mercury Rev.  (The Rev's Grasshopper guested on at least three of their songs: "Velocity," "My Father's Father," "Matador.")  Either way, this kind of thing is always a double-edged sword.  The band was allegedly scoffed at relentlessly, at least by the hipsters and tastemakers of the era, which seems really sad to me.  This song obviously has a ton of S.Y.-esque characteristics and charisma, down to the Thurston-y vocals, but it is definitely its own beast.  To describe how awesome this song is would take me a while, but I don't think most people need a roadmap to its bounty.  That one killer guitar riff immediately grabs the attention, and melds perfectly with the vocals, which are delivered in a desperate way, and with interesting post-Lou Reed / Tom Verlaine enunciation.  It's a really amazing vocal performance overall.  He says "I know that we're in trouble now, and I know that we're in deep" and "You're cursed and I'm a liar" without explaining the conflict in question.  More cool lyrics: "If we live long enough we'll see the other side of everything," "The stars are out and they're comin' down on my head," and of course "I wanna burn like a martyr in my Chevrolet."  (Note: I had thought for the last decade that it was "I wanna burn like the motor in my Chevrolet.")  The somewhat detuned, violin-esque guitar anti-solo at the 2:29 mark is the perfect bridge between arena dino-rock and the noisy indie rock of the '90s.  And I love when any instrumental break is preceded by a frenzied volley of drumming.  Another cool touch is that the song's title is only uttered right before the guitar solo and as the final words of the song.  I mean, check this out, they should build a whole museum dedicated to this song, if only so that lame, putzy, non-rocking rock bands like Wilco, Arcade Fire, Spoon, etc. can make pilgrimages to it in order to learn how to rock like motherfuckers.

The band's proper debut album in '94 had the great title Speed Is Dreaming.  But, aside from the killer "A Car Or A Boy?" (featuring some backing vocals from Mercury Rev's head weirdo David Baker), sucked.  I owned that CD but actually threw it away years ago; wish I had it back to check it out again, though.  Being signed to DGC (Nirvana, Sonic Youth, Beck, Posies, Sundays) apparently didn't land them in the Buzz Bin, and they faded into obscurity in the mid-'90s.  Singer Bill Whitten reemerged with the band Grand Mal (named after a St*Johnny song, which was named after a type of seizure) soon afterwards, but I don't think I've ever heard them.

http://blowtorchbaby.blogspot.com/2012/09/stjohnny-i-wanna-burn-like-martyr-in-my.html

vids from Italy

speed is dreaming

                                       

Every Day

War is no longer declared,
only continued. The monstrous
has become everyday. The hero
stays away from battle. The weak
have gone to the front.
The uniform of the day is patience,
its medal the pitiful star of hope above the heart.

The medal is awarded
when nothing more happens,
when the artillery falls silent,
when the enemy has grown invisible
and the shadow of eternal armament
covers the sky.

It is awarded
for desertion of the flag,
for bravery in the face of friends,
for the betrayal of unworthy secrets
and the disregard
of every command. 

Ingeborg Bachmann

 

....although the God of monotheism may have taken a few knocks - if not actually died - in the 19th century European story of ‘disenchantment of the world’, the gods and other agents inhabiting practices of so-called superstition have never died anywhere...

"If on a friend’s bookshelf

You cannot find Joyce or Sterne
Cervantes, Rabelais, or Burton,
You are in danger, face the fact,
So kick him first or punch him hard
And from him hide behind a curtain.” 

-Alexander Theroux

ST. JOHNNY ON THE SPOT

November 27, 2012 · by redchuck · in Music

My third eye watches TV…

Saturday nights we stay up and watch SNL on TV. We usually make it to the Weekend Update with Seth Meyers. Which means we usually see the music acts that precede the news. Passion Pit on Oct 13 and FUN on Nov 3. “What is this crap?” Katherine asked during both performances.

I am immune/to falling rocks/and catchy tunes…

Remember when the Replacements played on SNL? Paul Westerberg bowed to the audience in drunken, mock allegiance.

What a mess – Video Dailymotion.

Now that’s the spirit. Unsafe, unruly, unkempt, unscripted, undeniable. Banned fron SNL after that.

You could have had a future but you had a fit!

So what happened to alternative music? If the music industry is dead, how come Bruno Mars is on SNL and not The Obits?

I’m feeling a bit of nostalgia for alternative music of the 80s and 90s. Let’s call it alternostalgia. Back then it was a steady diet of Fugazi, Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr, Hüsker Dü, the Replacements, the Minutemen, the Meat Puppets, fIREHOSE, Pond, the Jesus Lizard, Pavement, Sebadoh, Guided by Voices, Chavez, St Johnny…

This coffee is cold, this highway is black…

One of my favorite alternostalgia records has got to be “Speed is Dreaming” by St Johnny. I bought this on cassette at the Great Escape in Nashville around 1996 and I am surprised that it didn’t fuse itself to the cassette player in my car. It has everything I loved about alternative music back then, both a wall of dissonant, overdriven guitars and a deadpan vocalist.

I still know very little about this band. I think they were signed to DGC by Thurston Moore. But who knows. I used to wonder if singer Bill Whitten was in some way a part of the Twisted Village family.(NO he is not!)  But Whitten is from Connecticut and the Twisted Village records family was more of a Harvard/Northhampton thing. 

What I do know is that I still find joy in listening to this album. The I-could-give-a-fuck vocals undersell some fucking brilliant lyrics.

Someone uploaded it all to youtube, of course, if you’re tape deck ain’t working: