Ladyfinger

Forgive me if I get a little repetitious here.  I know there's often a story arc on this blog that consists of the following: (1) Boy hears band for the first time and doesn't like it. (2) Years go by and/or circumstances change. (3) Man discovers in hindsight that said band just might have been on to something.  So, you can save yourself some time and skip to the link below to listen, or just go read a better music blog like  Awesome Tapes From Africa.
In the late winter/early spring of either 1994 or 1995, I was at a party on either Main or Cary Street in Richmond.  Some band called Ladyfinger was playing.  Their guitarist looked like a white Urkel and bore the countenance of someone that would rather slowly watch you drown at sea rather than throw you a life raft.  The bassist looked like the kind of girl in High School that was both out of your league and had a better record collection than you.  The drummer supposedly had a childhood accident that made it impossible for him to ever wear a shirt, ever.  They played math rock, but a lot of people did back then.
A year or so later, I got a job at Christie's Cafe and Bakery in Carytown.  It was basically an excuse to hang out with friends and see what we could get away with without getting fired (Once I got my boss to eat a concoction consisting of blended bacon, mayonnaise, and Triple Sec).  I worked in the kitchen sometimes with my friend Chris Wade, and we'd listen to Samhain and such.  He would also put on a Ladyfinger tape sometimes, and I didn't really get into it.

Years and years later, Chunklet magazine posted a long article about Pen Rollings which included the Ladyfinger demo that I heard at Christie's and several songs that I hadn't heard yet that were way better.  Part of it might have been that the ones I hadn't heard had better vocals on them and were catchier.  Unfortunately, they weren't as well recorded as the later material.  Regardless, I still prefer it.  The earlier songs sounded like a punk rock band/metal band whose ideas grew beyond standard 4/4 riffs and had a singer that had an intuitive feel for the music; while the later stuff sounded more complicated for the sake of being complicated with a guy choking into a delay pedal over top.  Not that it was bad at all, just not as... charming.
Oh, I forgot to mention the names of the people in the band.  Ron Dimmick (I've seen his name spelled 4 different ways) played guitar in this band and also was in Sliang Laos - possibly one of the greatest bands of all time (see June's entry on them).  Elisa played bass and is my facebook friend but will probably never read this.  Pen Rollings (drums) was the guitarist in Breadwinner and is in a band called Loincloth.  I bet you $5 he isn't wearing a shirt right now.  Sean Harris (vocals) was in Butterglove and Human Thurma and The Rams.  He is alive and well and tortures various Telecasters in Seattle.
Complete Discography
Lyrics!
And a couple videos:
One Trick Pony
Juan Dominico
Chet

False Sacrament

Hard to believe I'm almost halfway done with this blog!  There are still some issues to be sorted out with file hosting... I like the fact that with fileden, you can click on the songs and they play immediately.  I suppose I could eventually move the songs to a site like bandcamp or even youtube.  I'll worry about that later.
I'm on vacation right now, so this week's band is going to be one I know pretty much nothing about: False Sacrament!  I know that they were around in either the late 80's or the early 90's and they were from out east - Virginia Beach or Norfolk or somewhere.  They also played some incredibly sick jams that sound just as fresh over 20 years later.

Side A
Side B

Nine Years Gone - Ian Kruske (Part Two)

started getting strange.  Ian started keeping odd ours - it wouldn't be uncommon for him to just casually drop by at 3 in the morning.  I guess he was doing a fair amount of LSD - a drug I wouldn't really recommend for everyone.  He'd go through Amusement-Park-Pirate-Ship sized mood swings, and often nobody would know where he was for days at a time.  He seemed to exist on a plane of existence that was oblique to normal people, with their "jobs" and "sleep schedules".  His vocabulary also started expanding in the same mercurial fashion as his consciousness was.  To this day, I have a framed piece of paper he gave me, calling me "the prestidigitational proficient."
Ian was briefly the drummer for the band Sistersound (more on them earlier), but his erratic behavior ended up cutting his stint in that band short.  Eve (their guitarist) said that at band practice, he would sometimes just sit behind his drumset and not even play.  This must have been some time in 1995.  He wrote this essay about his time in that band here.
Later that year, the unthinkable happened: Ian joined the Army.  How someone who would record themselves reciting passages from Buddhist texts and walk the streets of Richmond at night in a psilocybin dream-state could suddenly join the armed forces was way beyond my understanding.  Oddly enough, I thought it might be good for him - maybe he needed a little structure in his life.
Ian's military career did not last very long, but it did seem to have something of a positive impact on him.  He seemed a little more serious.  We didn't talk too much about what happened there, but he did say something about how it was his job to type latitudes and longitudes into computers for bombing targets.  I'm still not sure if he went AWOL.
In the late 90's, Ian lived at the Henry Street Gallery - a converted warehouse with 2 or 3 "bedrooms", a makeshift kitchen and something in the corner that functioned as a bathroom.  It was also a venue for bands to play at.  I had many happy memories watching bands like The Plumbers and Sparky and El Presidente with Ian there.  For some reason, I feel like he didn't live there for too long before moving back to his mom's house in Newport News.  We kind of lost touch, and I moved to Austin. 
My contact with Ian was scarce in the earlier part of the 2000's.  I had heard that he was going to school again and doing really well.  What I didn't hear was that he was feeling more and more suicidal.  If I had known, I would have gotten in my barely-working 1983 Honda Civic and driven up to get him.  Or would I have?  I had just gotten married and had a baby daughter.
I don't remember who told me that Ian had died in February of 2003.  Matt Gross maybe?  John Swart?  It was only a few weeks after my sister died of brain cancer.  I felt like I lost 2 siblings that month.  If you've ever seen that Jimi Hendrix documentary from the early 70's, one of the Ghetto Fighters described Hendrix as a "short fuse" - a description that unfortunately fit Ian also.  Prank calling people with his brother and beat-boxing/rapping "My Adidas" by Run DMC.  Driving from Virginia to Minnesota to meet a girl he only knew online, stealing gas the whole way up.  Writing amazing amazon.com reviews about Qabalism. Working at Busch Gardens and getting caught stealing from the cash register, but somehow getting asked to return the next summer.  And of course, my favorite memory of Ian.  At Burger King, a 15-16 year old Ian asked for "an order of fucking onion rings".  The cashier became enraged, and told him he had to leave.  On the way out, Ian asked for a job application.  Now, apparently by law, Burger King had to give a job application to anyone that asked, so they gave him a job application.  What kind of person knows about laws like that?
5 months before Ian died, he got together with Neale Shaffer and recorded some informal jams.

Ian Plays Piano #1

The next two tracks also feature Jason Strickland on bass.
Rainy Delay Pedal Jam
Yea... is that recording?

Ian Plays Piano #2
Your Angel
Ian Rocks the House

Nine Years Gone - Ian Kruske (Part One) and Placebo

There weren't a lot of misfits in my High School in Williamsburg, VA back in the late 80's/early 90's.  We all had to kind of stick together.  Often, the only things we had in common were what we weren't - we weren't jocks or preps or hippies or stoners.  You could say we were punk rockers, but even that seems like a confining term by today's standards.  If there was the established clique of punk rockers, we probably wouldn't have fit in with them either.
Ian and Steve Kruske were skaters, two grades or so younger than most of my friends and I.  Like most skaters at that time, they had a disdain for authority.  Of the two, Steve was a little more straight-laced, and Ian was a little more out there.  Ian and I had more similar taste in music, so we would hang out more.  It wouldn't be an uncommon thing for the two of us to be just hanging out in my room listening to Smashing Pumpkins or Jane's Addiction or Bad Brains or Primus (this being a time before Nirvana saved/ruined everything).
When I moved to Richmond in 1992, Ian still had 2 more years of High School.  That first year, we didn't see each other often, but in the fall of 1993, Ian and Steve started coming up from Williamsburg on the weekends.  It must have been around this time that Ian started playing drums more.  He got to be proficient quickly, and was in a band called Placebo (pre-dating that other band by at least a few years - to my knowledge anyway).  Also in this band was Neale Shaeffer (more on him later) and Erik Sugg (more on him later, too).  In the spring of 1994, my band got to play with them.  They also made a demo tape:

01 Here
02 Greed Seed
03 Damocles
04 Dig
05 Royal Rumble
06 The Player
07 95%
08 Someday

To my knowledge, they only played a handful of shows.  Some time in the mid 1990's, Ian moved to Richmond.  That's when things

Wad o' Funk - special guest column by Ben Snakepit!

Hey gang!  I'm calling in sick this week.  Take it away, Ben.

When I started art school in 1992, there was a guy in a bunch of my classes named Derrick. Derrick had his own style. He was into hip-hop, but he was no gangster. Derrick was old-school, and "down with P-Funk". He would show up to class in red overalls, airbushed with cryptic phrases like "It's the Wad" and "Sir Nose". Sometimes he would wear a compact disc on a chain around his neck. He was a nice enough guy, and after a few weeks we became friends.
One day, he came into class with a boom box and played me his demo tape. He played "She Dropped That Bomb on Me", lip-synching along with a complete choreographed dance routine to go with it. He told me all about his group, Wad-O-Funk. He was "The Wad" (his Name was Derrick A. Walker, his initials backwards spelled "wad') and supposedly had three other members to his group: G-Snap, MC Database, and Sir Funk-A-Nose. Later I learned that they were all just Derrick. He had paid $1000 to have this three-song demo tape made in a recording studio. I asked him for a copy of the tape and he said no. After bugging him for weeks, he finally dubbed me a copy, which I immediately copied for all of my friends, and within a month everyone in Johnson Hall (our dorm) was reciting the lyrics to "Milk It". I asked Derrick if he'd like to play a show with my band, but he had bigger plans. "Naw man, I don't wanna do my first concert in no small place like the Metro, I wanna start off at the Coliseum." The Metro was a 300-capacity venue where punk bands played. The Coliseum was a huge event center where I saw Kiss and Ted Nugent play. Derrick also told me of his plan to achieve stardom. First he had to wait for his cousin to return from Korea with some "sound equipment", which was apparently much cheaper over there. Next, he was going to watch the then-upcoming film CB4, to get some tips on how to make it big in the industry. This would give him the advantages he needed to become a big star, he believed.
Derrick never had any idea how many people liked his tape. He also had no idea that we didn't really like his tape for the reasons he wanted people to like it. Derrick was oblivious to a lot of things. On the first day of our Women's Studies class (Derrick and I were the only two men there), he told the professor that he was taking the class "to figure out why y'all womens is so crazy." Not everyone was a fan of his demo, though. Some of his critics called the beats "cheesier than a Casio", and others referred to him as a "sucka MC". This may be true, but to this day I can still recite every word to every song by heart. I lost touch with Derrick after college. He never got to play the Collisseum, or even the Metro. I don't know if he ever wrote or recorded any music besides these two and a half songs. Honestly, I don't care. This demo is enough. So get prepared, sit back and relax; as we depart from the inner city... Venus, that is.

 01 Introduction
 02 She Dropped That Bomb on Me
03 Milk It

Bad Guy Reaction

The first time I saw Bad Guy Reaction might have been in the attic of 1208-A West Franklin, and I didn't get it.  There was a lot of buzz around them, people were way into them, and they got to be fairly popular in a short period of time.  Looking back, my "not getting them" may have had something to do with my lack of understanding about punk rock, and good ol' fashioned jealousy.
My opinions about each of the members of the band when they were starting out was varied.
KC Byrnes - I remember being at the VCU cafeteria (Hibbs) and there was a fratboy with pink hair being loud and insulting people.  I didn't really know if he was in a fraternity or just hung out with those types, but it wasn't my scene.
Greg Benedetti - Didn't know him at all, but was jealous of his height and his extremely cute girlfriend (I think her name was Amy?).
Dave Garrett - A good friend of mine from Williamsburg.
Marty Key - No idea who this person was.
One thing that was so nice about being young and having all the time in the world is that you could give things multiple chances.  Trial and error.  Nowadays, we click on a youtube of a band and if it doesn't grab you by the balls immediately, you can hit the little red X in the corner.  The Richmond music scene in the early/mid-90's was relatively small, so if there was a halfway good or interesting show, you'd go see it.  That was the entertainment back then - it wasn't about sitting on your couch clacking away on your keyboard (don't say it.).
I ended up seeing Bad Guy Reaction several times over the next few months, and while they didn't connect with me in the same way some other bands did, I grew to respect them and ended up... getting it.  Punk rock is about breaking down the barrier between the band and the audience.  Ideally, anyway.  In the crowd, you're supposed to look on that stage and say to yourself, "That could be me up there."  There was an element of chaos at Bad Guy Reaction shows.  Was a guitar string or a drum stick about to break?  Was an amp going to blow up?  Was a guitar or bass going to get unplugged (the answer to this one was usually yes)?  That's what made it exciting, though.  That, and the fact that after a few listens, the songs were solid.
My opinions on each of the band members changed too as I got to know them.  KC supposedly had an encyclopaedic knowledge of punk rock and legend has it that his record collection stops cold at the year 1983.  Greg actually turned out to be pretty cool, and I later came to wonder if that girl Amy had better taste in dudes than I gave her credit for.  The two of them (I think?) later went on to form the also popular band Wardance Orange.  Dave Garrett  later (and earlier, in a manner of speaking) went on to be in Williamsburg legends Thee Squids, and several others including Polish Revolver.  Marty is one of 2 people I know that have been in as many - if not more - bands than me, the difference being that one of them got to be huge: Ted Leo and the Pharmacists.
A few years ago, my friend Dan Evans mailed me his Bad Guy Reaction tape.  The actual tape inside had broken, and I spliced it back together.  See if you can find the edit (you won't be able to).
Bad Guy Reaction

The Champs

In the autumn of 1991, I was completely unaware that there was a punk rock scene on the East Coast.  I knew about bands like Bad Brains and Minor Threat, but they seemed like legends from a distant past.  For the hell of it, I went to a show at William and Mary University in my hometown of Williamsburg to see bands with strange names like Jettison Charlie (or Hassan Chop, I don't remember), the Reverend Horton Heat, and Nation of Ulysses.  The Nation was the first actual noise band I'd ever seen, and one of the things I recall most clearly was that it didn't sound like a damn thing.  Anyway, this is not their story.
Seven or so years after that, I heard that one of the NOU's guitarists moved to Santa Cruz or San Diego or somewhere and was in a band that sounded like Iron Maiden or something.  This band was scheduled to play in the upstairs of my friend's house at 1208-A West Franklin in Richmond - very close to where I lived.
The Champs were a two guitar/drums trio that played victorious-sounding metal without enormous gobs of distortion.  This was at a time when it wasn't really that cool to be into metal.  Everyone there was way into it, and the Champs became something of a flagship for a new kind of... well... I guess the term "hipster metal" is derogatory, but what else can it be called?  People that were hip and played metal.  As opposed to people that were unhip and played metal?  They immediately became one of my favorite bands.  I bought a tape:

This is not its story.

Anyway, after seeing them a few times, I developed something of an acquaintanceship with the guys in the Champs.  To be clear, it was probably more that way than them developing an acquaintanceship with me - but I digress.  At the legendary club King's in Raleigh, NC, they let me open up for the Champs by playing a guitar solo for like 20 minutes.  And I used to wonder why I never got to be famous?  My friend Mike Marunde came with me to the show with some recording equipment, and we set up a couple of microphones and recorded the Champs' set some time in early 2000?  Here it is:

Champs Youtube Playlist

Last I heard of the Champs, Josh Smith quit (I refuse to use wikipedia - that's cheating) and joined a band with the word Horse in it.  I thought this would be the end of the band because Josh was one of the original guitarist, but Tim Green and Tim Soete got a guy from Trans Am and they made another solid album or two.  Or three.