Hungry for Death, The Destroy All Monsters Archive

Opening May 30th-August 30th, 2009, the Destroy All Monsters archive with hundreds of photographs, collages, xeroxs, drawings, prints, banners, posters, booklets, buttons, magazines, letters, stickers, tee-shirts, LPs, films, blueprints, rare doodles and more....  will be featured in all their splendid eye-popping anti-glory at the Printed Matter gallery on 10th Ave in NYC.  

the Lowdown: Printed Matter will be issuing a limited edition vinyl LP of "Double Sextet" - a 35 minute DAM free rock/jazz/noise freak-out jam recorded live in 1975 in the basement of God's Oasis Drive-in Church. This two track recording has never been issued before (except for a small section on the track "Bounce" heard on the 3-CD set).  

At long last... the wait is over! A reissue of the "original primal stew" - the 3-CD Destroy All Monsters 1974-1976 set is out again - act fast -- only 1000 sets are available!

"Monster Masher" trading cards: featuring 80 images on 40 cards, 3x4" in full color on UV coated glossy 15pt cardstock. This card deck was made by Cary Loren during the past year and includes  band history, memorial cards, portraits, Revelations and secrets never revealed before. 250 complete sets were made and will be available on May 30th. Each deck is hand numberd and includes 2 postcard checklists, limited edition buttons, monster toy and 2 stickers.  Randomly inserted signed metallic photo trading cards are included just like Star Trek! 

Monster Masher Nickel Bag - 6 random cards in cellophane wrapper + sticker + random metallic insters, and 3 button packs + sticker & 2 cards - have a taste for $5
     
"It Melts in Your Mind, Not in Your Mouth" or "Shards of God's Oasis" Magik button collection. A complete set of 13 different DAM buttons + stamped metallic photo trading cards + stickers + Japanese mini-monster / hand-painted skull bead are housed inside a small clear acrylic trading card box. 150 button sets are available. A "Masonic Tongue Lodge" edition with all 17 different (and signed) metallic 2.5x3.5" trading cards are available in an edition of 15.  

Famous Monster Thrift Store Tee-shirts --a second edition is back!  Produced by Scarlet's Daughter in Detroit - these are hand-made DAM designs - each unique work features Alien Horrors! and the "Famous Monster"  blend of sloppy low design and absolute crudeness.  Less then 100 will be made.  

DAM/Printed Matter Woodcut Poster announcement by Tom Carey - only 25 will be made! Get ready to FREAKOUT!!!

All items are available at thebookbeat.com or printedmatter.org

Destroy All Monsters

Destroy All Monsters were named after a horror movie. This particular incarnation formed in Detroit in 1977 & eventually boasted not only ex-Stooge Ron Asheton amongst their ranks, but ex-MC5 bassist Michael Davis to boot. Fronted by the dangerously beautiful Niagara,& fueled by the rampantly experimental saxophones & guitars of Larry & Ben Miller respectively, Destroy All Monsters took the loosest of shapes from the depths of their rehearsal basement & welded them into the kind of robust art noise that Sonic Youth have spent the last 20 odd years trying to appropriate (mostly unsuccessfully).

'Broken Mirrors – Rehearsals & Shows 1977/78' recently surfaced on FarFetched Records (DM1) & vividly illustrates Destroy All Monsters freeform anti-rock noisenik roots.

Johnny Forgotten recently caught up with former DAM saxophonist, Ben Miller, to dig up the lowdown on those early DAM maneuvers:


trakMARX - How active were DAM 1 & who played alongside Niagara & Cary Loren in this line up?

Ben - As far as I know, like any art band of those days, Destroy All Monsters played 'in the basement' and an occasional party. Along with Cary and Niagara, Mike Kelly played drums and Jim Shaw played guitar. I saw them once at a party. It was very sparse. An odd mix of noise and songs. Occasionally Niagra would play some violin or say a few words and then leave the stage. Mike would dabble on the drums while Jim played guitar through an Echoplex. From time to time Cary seemed to try and get the set off the ground.

trakMARX - DAM 2 was basically an amalgamation of EMPOOL & DAM 1. How did this come about?

Ben - Destroy All Monsters was going through a transition late 1976 into early 1977. Of the original band only Cary and Niagara remained in Ann Arbor. At this time, Lar had a band called EMPOOL which was mostly psychedelic free improvisation (guitars, electronics, tapes, saxophone, occasionally drums) along with a number of other musicians including myself and brother Roger (the original version of Empool was just Lar and Andre Cynkin on guitars and electronics). Empool played a couple parties, but otherwise stayed 'in the basement' much like Destroy All Monsters. As far as I know, these two bands were the only weird things happening in Ann Arbor at that time. Compared to where Destroy All Monsters were coming from, though, EMPOOL was more music-related. Some of our improvisations were structured around notated compositions. Cary and Niagara would drop in unannounced at our jam sessions and request we do their stuff; two and three chord songs with lyrics -- the exact opposite of what we were doing. Perhaps by default from the fact that we were all outcasts of the music scene, the two groups eventually fused together into the second incarnation of Destroy All Monsters; a plodding garage punk sound with a lot of psychedelia hanging on the outer fringe. This was the fun version of the band where artistic intention was high. Band members were interchangeable and 'songs' were not nailed down.

trakMARX - How did Cary Loren talk Ron Asheton into joining DAM 2 (spring 77?)

Ben - I don't know. Cary can be inspiring, though I think Niagara was the lure. This was early Spring, 77. Ron had recently come back from LA. His band, The New Order, hadn't done as well as he'd of liked and I think Ron was just ready to dive into it again. The definite prospect of doing a single prompted him I'm sure.

trakMARX - How long did DAM 2 function as a 2 gtr unit?

Ben - Well, with Cary it was a 3 guitar unit. Sometimes Cary just sang and played the tambourine, but usually Cary thumped out the basic chord progressions, Ron beefed it up and added his 'rock' lead solos while Lar played a more texturous and melodic effects-driven background to it all. My alto saxophone also ran through various electronics and so this initial DAM reincarnation was quite the mess.

trakMARX - Why was Cary Loren voted out of DAM?

Ben - Niagara, Cary's long-time girl friend, hooked up with Ron. Shortly after that Cary went to New York for a short spell. When he returned he wasn't quite the same. He was having some drug-related issues and communication had disintegrated. When the band voted him out, it was very difficult for Lar and I to agree to it. We felt that Cary had a big part in the creative element of Destroy All Monsters.

trakMARX - Michael Davis' (MC5) arrival signaled the advent of a more traditional Detroit undercarriage for DAM 2. Was this change in direction a compromise?

Ben - I think it wasn't until our fourth gig that Michael had joined. Cary was still in the band, so it was an odd mix of psychedelic garage and heavy rock. With both Ron and Michael in the band, though, our rock sound was definitely becoming more traditional. Also, when Mike joined, the band's instrumentation finally became fixed and so a certain spontaneity was lost. However; a much-needed consistency in our sound had finally been achieved. It wasn't really considered a compromise, it was just the way things rolled.

trakMARX - DAM 2 played out with the likes of the Ramones, Pere Ubu & Devo (amongst others) - what were those shows like & how did you rate those groups?

Ben - The Ramones are probably the best rock n' roll band I've ever seen. Absolutely. Real nice guys too, though not a particularly talkative bunch. We opened up for the Ramones whenever they came into Ann Arbor. Pere Ubu was the most interesting band we ever played with. Artistically speaking, they were by far my favorites. We opened up for them often at The Pirates Cove in Cleveland. Their 45's are the best! We played with DEVO once in Akron. One of their guitarists (wireless, or very long curly cords?) ran out into the theater space up the aisle as fast as he could. A very fat man was slowly walking down the aisle toward the stage and they collided. Devos' guitarist then ran as fast as he could back to the stage. That was amusing. Joining D.A.M. was the first time I had played in public in a long time, so I was astounded to be on stage, opening up for these bands. As a teenager I had done some playing with Sproton Layer, but only in Ann Arbor. It was also exciting to take part in a new movement (punk) after having grown up in the tail end of the Hippie era.

trakMARX - What do you remember about the recording of "Bored"/"You're Gonna Die"?

Ben - I recall Scott Asheton warning me that in the studio it's easy to lock up and not feel comfortable. Since I had been recording for years on my home 2-track I dismissed his remark. However; I had never been in a professional recording studio before so when it came time to overdub the saxophone tracks (especially the solo on DIE), I had a real hard time. Trying to summon up the original energy of the band while everyone in the control booth listened was very awkward.

trakMARX - Rumours persist of an EP that was released on Black Hole Records out of Detroit that included early DAM material. Can you confirm this release & add any further details (are copies still around? cost? etc?)?

Ben - Yeah it was called Days of Diamonds, something Cary put out shortly after Lar and I left the band. I still have a few copies. Introduction; is a silly introduction of the band by Ron. Assassination Photograph and Destroy A.M. are rehearsals with the vocal overdubs being too loud. Dream of Me is the best one in my opinion; a rather surreal love song. The last tune, There is No End, is a solo recording by Lar that has no relation to DAM whatsoever, but for some reason Cary specifically wanted that on the record.

trakMARX - Any memories of the sessions for "Meet The Creeper"/"Nov 22nd 1963"?

Ben - I really enjoyed this session since the saxophone went down on tape along with the band. And our sound was well honed by this time. The chemistry was hot. The Engineer was far superior also. Unfortunately there are two songs we recorded that were never released; Broken Mirrors and Taken For Granite. Since Lar and I quit before the record was released, and since we wrote the songs, the remaining band members decided not to include them. Originally the record was to be an EP. David Keeps, our manager at that time, is still holding onto those two songs.

trakMARX - You quit DAM 2 along with bother Larry in Oct 1978 - what were the reasons for your departures?

Ben - Lar and I wanted to work with more varied ideas. We felt limited. Also Ron and Niagara had become a major ego factor. They were what the audience paid attention to, and they took on quite the rock star status, often coming to rehearsal hours late wondering why the rest of the band was pissed off. Even at shows the band would often be waiting for Ron and Niagara to get ready before we could hit the stage. And of course everyone was drinking and drugging. So, along with personal differences, the momentum of the band had gone down considerably since we first formed. Don't get me wrong, sometimes our shows kicked ass. We would have this huge swarming wall of sound, always on the verge of breaking apart. But, other times the set seemed to take forever to finish. Basically, it felt like a dead end to us and we needed to move on.


trakMARX - Why are the Miller brothers absent from the list of credits on Cherry Red's "Bored" DAM singles collection CD?

Ben - When Lar and I left, the sound of the band changed from slightly weird to basic punk. I assume the remaining members didn't want us mentioned in the credits 'cause they were trying to promote themselves as a quartet. It didn't really surprise us that the band would do something like that.

trakMARX - What happened to you & Larry after DAM?

Ben – Well, that's a big question. Cary approached us in January 1979 to do a recording-only project called Xanadu with DAM drummer Rob King. We put out an EP; Black Out in The City. Right after that I took off for Boston and formed a band with Martin Swope (who later joined Mission of Burma). It was an art-rock project and we recorded a few songs with brother Roger on drums. My wife-to-be at the time moved back to Ann Arbor, and I soon followed. There Lar and I played together in various avant-rock bands between 1980 and 1985; The Same Band, The Other Band, Low Income Zone, Radio Silence, GKW and Nonfiction. Nonfiction was the only band that played outside of Ann Arbor. We were marginally successful. The band was on a compilation LP and also put out an LP on cassette which included my rendition of Laurie Anderson's Oh Superman. For the remainder of the decade, I continued to perform with GKW, a minimalist noise band while Lar was in The Empty Set, a pop rock trio (their early incarnation). GKW put out several cassettes and The Empty Set released an EP and an LP. In the early 1990's, Lar formed Larynx Zillion's Novelty Shop, releasing several records, sounding much like Adam Ant meets Zappa. In 1993, we released a CD with brother Roger of Mission of Burma; an ongoing project we call M3. M3 released its second CD in 2001, Unearthing, one of the best things I've been involved with. A subconscious sort of psychedelic improvisation focusing on prepared guitars and electronics with an occasional backbeat. I moved to Chicago in 1993, joining Dirty Old Man River in 1997. I'm on their 2nd and 3rd CDs playing prepared stereo guitar. In 2001 I put out Intercom; solo prepared stereo guitar. In 2002, I formed a free-improv quartet; Regeneration. I moved to NYC in 2003 and I am currently playing with a violinist as a duet; Third Border. It's a combination of prepared stereo guitar underneath minimalist violin scores and psychedelic songwriting. I have also formed a rock band with Phantom Tollbooth's bass guitarist Gerard Smith (GBV's Robert Pollard just re-released a record by Phantom Tollboth with all new vocal tracks by Robert; Beard of Lightning. Excellent stuff). Lar presently lives in Ann Arbor, performing as Mister Laurence - a children's entertainer. He has released 4 CD's of original kid's music on his own label, pushing the envelope as a healthy alternative to "Barney" and other such frightening pop kid-icons.

trakMARX - You recently self-released a collection of recordings from your time with DAM entitled "Broken Mirrors (Rehearsals & Shows 1977-78)". We've heard ugly rumours of Amazon ripping you off - where & how is the best way for DAM fans to access this release?

Ben - Yeah, someone is selling the CD on Amazon.co.uk. We're looking into it and they're ignoring us. In the meantime, Fans can purchase 'Broken Mirrors', as well as many other releases, from my website:

www.benmiller.info

Or Lar's website:

www.laurencebondmiller.com

trakMARX - Are there any more posthumous DAM releases in the pipeline?

Ben - In the past few years there has been talk of doing a box set of various past DAM recordings, a re-release of the Xanadu recordings with an all new recording by the Xanadu band, and selected pieces of solo home recordings that Lar and I did during the '70's as well as Cary Loren and friends. But so far nothing has come to fruition other than the DAM 3 CD Box Set on Ecstatic Peace and Broken Mirrors on FarFetched Records.


trakMARX - In conclusion, how would you best sum up your time with DAM?

Ben - Hmmmm. Exhilarating, intoxicating, aggravating, boring. In that order. Or as Lar puts it - the best worst days of my life.

Johnny Forgotten – tMx 14 – 04/04

Originally in the VHS format from Lobsterland Videos,, this bizarre film makes the translation to DVD splendidly. With some material recorded between 1973 and 1977, the collage of images and exotic sounds is kind of like colorizing an original print of the movie Night of the Living Dead and putting it into a blender with Jerry Goldsmith's soundtrack to Planet of the Apes. Intentionally made to be hard to describe, there's an eight-page interview with filmmaker and Destroy All Monsters bandmember Cary Loren, and it is helpful. If ever a compilation DVD needed extensive liner notes, this is it, and MVDVisual smartly puts the instructions on the back of this musical version of a chocolate chip cookie mix. For those who felt the Mentors El Duce Vita too immature and vile, and the Chesterfield Kings' Where Is The Chesterfield King? a victim of extreme haphazard disarray, the erratic vibrations splashed under these cinematic cuts give new meaning to the term "art for art's sake." But they are much more effective than the other two aforementioned DVDs. There's lots of material to choose from, a "Hometown Horrors" slide show as well as a selection from a three-hour Destroy All Monsters performance in Seattle, WA in 2000. If it is art imitating life, then the band's embrace of Japanese horror flicks has come home to roost as some of these sounds and visions would please Mothra and Godzilla. Great stuff to play in the background at parties. --Review by Joe Viglione, All Music Guide

Cary Loren didn't just see the future of rock and roll, in many ways, he helped create it. Beginning nearly three decades ago, his first project, Destroy All Monsters, paved the way for such anti-music noisemongers as Throbbing Gristle, Test Dept., Half Japanese, and Pere Ubu. Their tales of potheaded pixies ('Pothead Speaks'), necrophilia ('I Love You But You're Dead'), sci-fi ('To Planet M2-40'), 'Vampires,' politics ('Assassination Photograph'), and other pick-me-ups about drugs ('Acid Monster') and death ('You Can't Kill Kill' and 'You're Gonna Die') were outraging audiences and clearing rooms a year before Lou Reed's "fuck you" to the industry, "Metal Machine Music" even hit the shelves, and they were one of the first bands in America to approximate the chaotic anarchy of krautrockers, Can, Amon Düül, and Faust. Fans of Suicide and Nine Inch Nails will also find much to admire in the confrontational theatrics of DAMs early stage shows. Loren and his girlfriend (and DAM vocalist), Niagara, along with bandmates, Jim Shaw and Mike Kelly were also responsible for one of the first fanzines, Destroy All Monsters magazine, which included drawings, band bios, reviews, interviews, and collages of comics, adverts, and photos from old magazines from the '40s/'50s. They produced six issues between 1974-79, a compilation of which is available (through Loren's Book Beat Gallery) as Destroy All Monsters; Geisha This.

As punk music began its ascendancy in the mid-'70s, DAM were aligned with its anarchic, political rantings and ravings, although most journalists failed to realize that DAM were no mere bandwagon-jumpers; they had, in fact, been doing this for years. Many of their early pieces remind me of the later "no wave" music of NY scenesters Gina Harlow, Lydia Lunch/Teenage Jesus & The Jerks, James Chance & The Contortions, and similar acts championed by Eno on his "No N.Y." collection and its "No L.A." West Coast counterpart. Most of the confusion seems to stem from the fact that it was a later incarnation (following a personnel change which saw ex-Stooge Ron Ashton and ex-MC5 drummer Mike Davis kick Loren out of his own band) that is familiar to most listeners.

During our extensive interview, Cary told me, "Jeff, I'm glad you've never heard DAM most people haven't and its reputation is somewhat inflated from its association with the Stooges and MC5. There is a 3xCD set of our work from 1974-1976 that would be good to score if you can find a copy - a seminal avant art/rock/noise treat." More about that in a minute. Thankfully, the original line-up (sans Niagara) recently reformed, and several live "reunion tour" releases have trickled out of Loren's End is Here homegrown label: "Grow Live Monsters," "Backyard Monster Tube," and "Silver Wedding Anniversary." They've also released their first new studio album in over 25 years, "Swamp Gas," so fans can re-discover the original band in all its glory. The curious are also advised to seek out that aforementioned 3xCD retrospective from the original line-up, "Destroy All Monsters 1974-1976," co-released by fan Thurston (Sonic Youth) Moore's Ecstatic Peace and Byron Coley's Father Yod imprints. [It should also be noted that Loren repaid Thurston's longtime support by dedicating "Confessions" (from his latest project, Monster Island's debut release, "From The Michigan Floor") to Sonic Youth.]

Following the DAM debacle, Cary hooked up with Barry Roth to form Nightcrawlerz. Finding inspiration from the cut-up techniques of Brion Gyson and William S. Burroughs, Loren and Roth retired to their basements and, with the aid of broken tape machines, cheesy keyboards, an assortment of pots and pans, and an overactive imagination, proceeded to create a pastiche of political commentary, answering machine messages, excerpts from TV shows and old films, and an occasional atonal "song" or two¾ years before Beavis and Butthead and Mystery Science Theatre 3000 hit the airwaves, or Bongwater entered a studio.

In recent years, Loren has joined forces with Warn Defevre (His Name Is Alive), Erika Hoffman (Godzuki), and Matt Smith (Outrageous Cherry) to form another Detroit supergroup, Monster Island. Combining elements of the acoustic folk/psych of Incredible String Band, the wyrdfolk of Stone Breath, the Iditarod, and Six Organs of Admittance, and the gothic, fairytale romance of Goblin Market, MI (which, nominally, incorporates both DAM and the abbreviation for their beloved home state of Michigan) add nursery-rhyme lullabies and exotic instrumentation (shakahachi, bells, violins, djembe, Gamelan gender barung (huh?), tanpura, sitar, oud, etc.) to forge yet another notch in Loren's musical bonnet.

With the simulataneous releases of DAMs "Swamp Gas," "The Third Mind" (a 2xCD Nightcrawlerz retrospective), and two MI disks ("Peyote Mind" and "Dream Tiger")¾ all on Loren's The End Is Hear imprint our very own monster, Jeff Penczak contacted Cary at his Book Beat store for the following monster mash. We begin by asking about one of the more colorful tracks on the recent 3xCD DAM retrospective…

Destroy All Monsters

'Pothead Speaks' -- a little bit of "method singing" there, getting into the appropriate character before you recorded that?

That was a bit of mise en scène recording…there's more of that "eye-witness" stuff throughout the 3xCD set. The guy on the "Pothead" track was a sort of dangerous nut¾ he lived at God's Oasis, the DAM commune, and he played Manson in the film Blood Of God¾ a pretty violent fellow…. I think he was a taxi driver that was dealing pot out of the house.

Not to sound insensitive, but if Niagara wasn't your girlfriend at the time, would she have figured in your plans when you were assembling the band? Did you always envision it as a quartet with a female as the upfront, vocal representation of the band?

To be fair, DAM probably couldn't have happened without her. I was doing film and theater happenings at the time we were living together, and she invited her classmate Mike Kelley to one of those events. (They met each other on a bus on their first day of drawing classes at U of M [University of Michigan].)

Mike brought his roommate Jim Shaw to check us out, and that was the beginning…the band sort of assembled itself when we got together - she really didn't figure into it, but she was a main catalyst for it to happen. On our first live performance she didn't get a chance to sing, they threw us out as we were warming up! It was also very hard to get her to sing, she was incredibly shy, she was really more of a visual focal point…something to look at, like a statue. People came and gawked at her in vintage wedding gowns splattered with fake blood. She did some creative outfits, early goth-style. She took tips from Morticia in The Addams Family and Edie Sedgewick, her fave superstar….

She really did almost nothing but stand there and powder her face white¾ but she had a look...beautiful, exaggerated makeup, freaky cloths and weird hair-colors¾ we all wore gross ugly outfits, really derelict. I think we were inspired by the group photo on "Trout Mask Replica" -- we loved that album.

I never thought of DAM as a traditional band: guitars and up-front singers. We cursed everything traditional…. I liked the idea that anybody could join or play in DAM, we had a sort of "open door" policy.

Sorry I asked!

No, I wasn't offended by your question. I do not like nor dislike Niagara, and sometimes wish we had never hooked up, but then DAM and other things might not have happened.

Did she join you for the reunion tour?

Yeah she played the first three gigs, the last one almost ended in a riot. She's mainly interested in doing boogie-rock. I don't think the art rock/noise approach goes down well with her and that's OK, we've always left the door open for her to participate in DAM, but we don't want to go backwards, or do old stuff, and we are not a back-up band…. It's possible things might straighten out in the future and that we could work together on some basis.

DAM preceded "punk music" by several years, although their professed raison d'être was also a reaction against the pomp and circumstance of prog rock, classic rock, the lame El Lay singer/songwriter nonsense that was going on in the early-mid '70s. Would it be fair to say that DAM also came about to be the antithesis of what was cluttering up the air waves [Destroy All Music, if you will], or was it much deeper than that?

DAM was a reaction of disgust to most popular music, and an assault on the "American Dream," but we also had things to celebrate and bring us together; we drew inspiration from psychedelic garage rock, free jazz, and the avant-garde. There's nothing easy or simple about DAM. It was (and still is) a complex art collective. Music was part of our expression, but so was painting, collage, film, theater, performance, sculpture, 'zines, etc…. Each of us brought a unique outlook and these obsessions came together in sort of a massive attack that looks like anarchy, but is really a finely tuned collage of distinct elements. It was a kind of alchemy. Early performances were pure noise-fests: feedback fuzz drones, squealing amplified toys, screaming, tape loop distortions, bashing scraps of metal and drums, etc., but things could get equally soft and quiet. We'd sometimes go into dreary acoustic goth-folk songs, and extended chord-organ tones.... We played with a lot of traditional structure but just tore it apart. It was noise deconstruction.

There was some political commentary and an ironic "black humorist" approach. Some of this grew out of our early leftist anarchist leanings and sympathies with the White Panther Party, which was already demolished by the time we came together. The WPP and Rainbow Peoples Party were important influences. Their use of multi-colored inks and papers for flyers and newsletters (Ann Arbor Sun/Fifth Estate) and the psychedelic designs of artist Gary Grimshaw were beautiful, bold inspirations. Our magazines and designs drew from that source.

Were you aware of other scenes or artists around the country that you felt a kinship with in the sense that you were all trying to overthrow the musical establishment (whether it be CBGBs in NY or The Whiskey in LA or other small venues around the country)?

I was not aware of anything happening musically like us, but there were pockets of interesting things happening at the time, such as the LAFMS in L.A., and the Spastic Nihilism Band from Canada, but we found out about them much later. We had little interest in the punk/CBGB scene. It was boring and predictable. I went to CBGBs once and it was just a brawling filthy bar. Detroit had an even crazier version called Bookies club. The Whiskey in L.A. was an awful boogie bar in the '70s, but I did see Roky Erikson there...he put on an amazing show. Punk rock was mostly uncreative drivil. It was all about fashion: saftey pins and leather. We grew up with the MC5 and the Stooges and that was the real shit.

I drifted into the mail-art movement in the '70s, passing xeroxed-art and 'zines through the mail. That was my first awareness and participation with contemporary art. It was an active scene, a distribution of art outside gallery walls, [but] it got too large, too quickly, and most people eventually dropped out. I kept a Detroit P.O. Box for Black Hole Records and did weekly mailings. The network was happening and that led to an exchange with Ray Johnson, an artist I felt a strong kinship for.

Do you believe that a band requires an audience in order to justify its existence? Is there any point to making music "for yourselves," because isn't that essentially preaching to the choir?

I think a band needs an audience to provide it with feedback. However, I think live performance and audience "feedback" is overrated. For the performer it usually comes down to being a quick ego massage, the rush of approval, and that can be OK for most musicians. There are many reasons I don't enjoy live performance, but the main problem is, as a mode of communication, it seems unnecessary. It's a social need that's fits inside a tribal or ritualistic setting but doesn't hold my interest. I want the music to hold its meaning beyond its social status.

Contemporary band performance embodies social skills I don't care too much about. I don't mean that we should all work in a total vacuum and never perform live. Duchamp once said "the audience completes the painting" and this is also true with music, but with recordings made easily available, the need for a sound artist to perform live puts him in competition with popular "entertainment" and that just becomes the need or obligation to sell a product. When the artist/musician produces mainly for the audience he's negating himself, he's putting food on the table and is selling the music as a commercial. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, its just not a primary interest.

Audience response is gratifying, but at the same time it's a superficial reason for making art. There should be just the necessity of making it. Music is a language that's always in the now, and being in the moment of doing it, in producing this "creative act" is really about engaging the imagination. Few live music performances outside of jazz contain that element of immediate creation. It's mostly dead air being regurgatated. Most imaginative thinking can be done in one's head. The mind makes it real. There are probably millions of unseen, unheard masterpieces…this doesn't mean they don't exist, and maybe in time they'll be brought into light.

One problem with popular music, is that the sound is always secondary to sales. Rock concerts are basically adolescent mating rituals. They serve the same purpose as pickup bars, and beach party weenie roasts. It pools the youth together, socializes the audience, and breeds good consumers. Most music tends to feed into that system, it becomes one big commercial to sell the audience on themselves; feeling good, sexy, or fashionable. It lacks any spiritual space or thoughtful dimension. The chewy nugget center is missing.

It used to take years before a work of art filtered down through society and became accepted. Now it takes five minutes. Music is consumed like soda pop, and there's an audience for everything. Good art or music shouldn't have any social purpose. It needs to engage the mind, to open it up.

Then who was the intended audience for DAMs musical outpourings?

We played first for ourselves. Our early audiences were very small and did nothing but encourage us to stop playing. We would often play "guerrilla style" and just show up at a party and say we were the band we were always shut down and asked to leave. We often discussed our problem of audience reaction and their basic hatred of us, but we kept recording and documenting ourselves despite that. There was a handfull of people that heard us, and supported what we did, but it was miniscule. I guess one reason we fell apart was that lack of support and the difficulty in distributing our work then. I suppose there was a fractional audience, we thought we might be appealing to the schizopherenic element in the world.

It took us 25 years to find an audience; and it's still a very slim one. I'm not sure we really know this audience, but they are probably the same marginalized folks that we were back then. Maybe that schizoid section of the public has grown and those are the folks that relates to it. There seems to be a whole widening section of outsider music that is becoming more mainstream, like Jandek, Daniel Johnston and John Fahey. Everything seems to be acceptable today and relevent. Its really almost impossible to be an "underground act" -- when its all underground.

What were you trying to do - what kind of reaction were you anticipating from your audience?

I'm not sure we knew exactly what we were doing. First, there was no audience. We just did our thing like Van Gogh coughed. We practised our mad-science for ourselves. I don't think our intention was to shock, but I think that's how it was received. We wanted people to really LISTEN…to bust open their heads, to witness something apocolyptic and earth-shaking. We were serious about it too. Few people could put up with us for long. The ones that did were outsiders, mostly jazz players and a few fellow art-students.

A lot of your material seems to be more "performance art" as opposed to "straight" music - it's not simply a static listening experience that you're looking for. DAM seems to be a participatory experience, almost like a party atmosphere, and that your best vehicle for getting your ideas across is in the live setting.

Yes, everything on the 3xCD set happened live, mainly in Mike's basement studio at God's Oasis, sometimes in Jim's bedroom or on the main floor. Everthing was live for us. We had no studio. There are just a few formal in-concert pieces are on it. Most tracks are excerpts from much longer pieces. We'd usually play for ½ hour or so and then self-critique it. I don't see us as a "live party band" unless it was the party happening onboard a UFO. Our live shows are either amazing feats of strength or total duds. There was never anything in-between about DAM.

A lot of the "songs" seem to be poetry with a musical backing. The vocals are more like recitations than "singing." Is this in keeping with your desire to instruct and educate as opposed to entertain a listener?

Niagara, Mike and I just have terrible, monotone voices... it's all God gave us. Jim has a terrific voice, but he rarely sang back then. I never thought of the songs as "instructive," but I like the idea. Why shouldn't musc be as important as a book or painting? John Sinclair's 'Blues Scholar' stuff is what I'd call instructive - a history lesson about the blues: he does an amazing job with that. We did reference some historic events and moments in pop culture, but I don't think the intention was explicit. But I am getting more into narratives in recent work.

Tell us some of the influences that were bubbling around in your head when you were formulating the idea for DAM. A lot of it seems inspired by improvisational/political troupes like The Committee. Could DAM be fairly described as a vaudeville act, or an "anti-rock" band?

I had just come to Ann Arbor after a brief stay with [underground filmmaker] Jack Smith over the summer in New York City. Jack was probably the largest influence for me. I was interested in making a midnight theater and happening events in our loft. These were crazy trash versions of heaven and hell plays. We'd plaster Ann Arbor with announcement posters for these events…. [Back] then, Mike and Jim were doing fake posters for happenings that didn't happen, so it was perfect that we would join forces and conspire together. In one sense we were performance artists that came togetehr as a band to mess with the format.

Musically we were into various oddities: Yma Sumac, Martin Denny, MC5, Stooges, Nico, psychedelic rock, garage bands, Captain Beefheart, krautrock, Varese, Reich, Terry Riley, Sun Ra, big-bands, Arthur Brown, Godz, Silver Apples, etc… DAM was interested in art history; surrealism, dadaism, symbolist poetry, beat lit, avant theater, Artaud, Mad magazine, Crowley's Magick theory, noir movies, Marilyn Monroe and monster films, Stanley Mouse, weirdo trading cards…minimalists we were not. Overthrowing the establishment wasn't as important as propagating our aesthetic.

I don't think of ourselves strictly as vaudeville or comedic (although elements of that are present). A lot of what we did was out of a serious commitment. I think the term "anti-rock band" correctly describes what we were about. DAM is also an "art collective" and that's closer to our identity. We try and work out things together although some elements and ideas are brought into it by single members -- we often all contribute to the development and structuring of the idea. Its often then difficult to tell who was doing what or who brought what into it, and those are the best, most cohesive things - when the individual contributions dissapear into a single new entity.

In the mid-late '70s, there was a shakeup in the personnel and you brought in Ron Asheton from The Stooges and Mike Davis from MC5. Did the dreaded "S" word [Supergroup] ever enter into your head?

Both were heroes from my favorite groups… so it was unbelievable that we would be playing together. It was very special to be doing music with them. Their orientation was high-energy straight rock n roll, and the fantasy (playing in my head) was a combo of Detroit metal and freeform psych/noise experimentation. I wanted to incorporate a lot of multi-media, sort of a Detroit version of "the exploding plastic inevitible" -- it was a visionary concert playing in my head, but it was too difficult to bring into reality. Lots of fragile egos and BS going on.

I assume you remained friends with Mike and Jim over the years and you reformed in 1995 and staged several reunion tours, captured across a half dozen disks and EPs. What prompted everyone to give it another go after nearly 15 years?

The reunion in 1995 marked over 20 years since DAM formed. We had just released the 3xCD set and Kelley was coming to Detroit to give a lecture at the [Detroit] Institute of Arts [DIA]. I had decided to re-release the 'zines from the 70s as the "Geisha This" book, so it came together quickly. We did a couple rehearsals and it just happened. It was like time never passed. We also had an art exhibit of our archives and it was mainly just a fun thing to do. The interest in the CD set was strong and doing a few reunion shows seemed a proper celebration.

Tell us a little about your new "Swamp Gas" release? Did you get together to record new material simply as a means to finally releasing Mike's 'Dexter 1966' rant -- was that the springboard for the project?

That was recorded in Detroit around 1999, with members of Monster Island, Marnie Weber (Jim's wife), and Anneke Auer of Rotterdam also helping out. We recorded the music long before we added Mike's text. His 2002 text was a replacement for "'The Colors of UFOs" - a piece Mike wanted to use for another project, so I was waiting for something that would work with the space theme and music.

We discussed doing a "Swamp Gas" project as we went up north in Michigan to visit the "Shrine of the Pines" - a 1920s cabin full of surreal handmade furniture. Its based on an actual UFO event that happened around Ann Arbor and Dexter in 1966. When Mike came to town for the opening of the "Artists Take On Detroit" exhibition at the DIA (both Mike and DAM had art installations in the show), we recorded his text at the bookstore [Cary's Book Beat shop] and I overlaid it later with the music. I was also working on "The Map Of Eternity," an interactive collage and website project of UFO, channeling, garage rock, and psychedelic trip descriptions. Some of that were incorporated into the Swamp Gas Gazette, a UFO 'zine we put together that accompanies the CD. The eternity map is also featured as the menu and title page for Blastitude 13, a website journal I was guest editing at BLASTITUDE.COM.

How did you come into possession of the Sun Ra vocal track that you sample throughout?

I've been working on a Sun Ra book and CD project for the past five years. I've collected original recordings and interviews, and commissioned some writing and artwork for it. Sun Ra did a week of concerts before New Year's 1980, at the Detroit Jazz Center. They did three shows a day, and played every song in their repertoire. John Sinclair recorded them all off the sound board and it's been our dream to one day release all these recordings - probably a 10 CD set! [Another Terrascope exclusive announcement!]

There's also some material provided by Japanese "noisebrother," Violent Onsen Geisha. Did you meet him during your tour of Tokyo and take the tapes back to weave into the project?

I contacted Nakahara (Violent Onsen Geisha) about a year before we went to Japan, and we played a few dates with him in '96. I was a fan of his noise/collage projects (and he also was into DAM). When I mentioned the "outer-space" project DAM was doing, he agreed to send us some samples for it. He ended up sending us three CDs and we just placed them randomly throughout "Swamp Gas." I should also note that "Swamp Gas" was a single long take, edited into separate tracks. Nakahara hooked up with Kelley and Paul McCarthy in Tokyo and they recorded some noise music -- and soundtrack stuff for their Sod & Soddie Sack installation.

Was your tour of Japan an eye opener in the sense of how people still appreciated what DAM had accomplished? Are you more popular over there than in your own country?

It sure seemed like it. Japan was a great experience. In terms of music, it's incredible how noise and fringe rock had developed into this huge mass of support and energy. It was mainly among young teenagers who followed this stuff. It's hard to imagine all these kids seriously following noise bands - it's such marginal and lightly covered stuff in the USA. The Boredoms were like folk-heroes there, recognized and stopped on the streets. There was this respect and attention given to artists that would never happen over here. Japan seems to honor its artists and they try hard to understand where art comes from. In the USA, art is seen as garbage.

DAM seemed to have a fan base and a history that was already known about in Japan. We spent one day doing nonstop interviews and reporters had an amazing knowledge of this stuff. It was always one of our dreams to play Japan, so it was a great honor to play there, (even though the main show in Tokyo was sort of a flop).

Although you've moved on to Monster Island, is DAM still an active project and do you envision any tours, perhaps to promote "Swamp Gas"?

DAM is still an active group, it just goes into "sleep-mode" often after a performance. They are always very draining. We played at the "All Tomorrows Parties" festival at UCLA in March, 2002, which was an amazing event, an incredible gathering of over 100 avant-garde sound groups from across the world - one of the most inspiring concerts I've been to. So once every year or two, DAM gets together and we do our noise chaos/freakouts. Since the reunion gigs in '95 we've played Osaka and Tokyo (1996), Rotterdam and Vienna (1998), Seattle (2000), Los Angeles (2002), and the UK in 2004.

We recently had an installation of four large murals and video art in the 2002 Whitney Biennial in NYC, but getting us into a van and hitting the road is probably out of the question. We each have too many professional and family commitments, and besides we're not big fans of playing live. It generates a lot of anxiety. We did three reunion gigs in 1995 and were booted off stage in San Diego, actually we were unplugged like the old days, and there was almost a small riot. We are middle aged guys that are trying to hold onto our sanity or what's left of it.

I could see us playing special events, or doing a few more art-related things - mixing the performance with a new installation, or playing inside the installation. We hope to put out a reissue of the 3xCD set, and possibly a double-CD from live shows of the past six years. Mike is now editing that work.[this was released in 2005 as "DAM Live in Tokyo" and "The Detroit Oratorio", Compound Annex label]

Xanadu

You also had a shortlived offshoot, Xanadu, with the Miller brothers (Larry & Ben) and Rob King. That material (the 'Blackout in The City' EP) had a very Zappa & The Mothers quality to it. Another influence or just a damn good impersonation?

I was never a huge fan of Zappa (except maybe "Freakout" and "Hot Rats"). I guess my vocals were a little over the top on that EP, but I wasn't consciously trying to imitate Zappa -- think I was going for a more of a "conjuring," spell-casting/witchy effect. I've just been in touch with Ben and Laurence Miller and we hope to record some vintage Xanadu works that were never recorded (or not recorded properly) and release it with the 'Blackout In The City' EP as a CD. We've also collected unreleased material from the psychedelic/punk DAM days (1977-1979) and hope to get that out soon.[Ben Miller has already released a CD of that material]

The earlier DAM material seems rooted in Zappa's approach to cacophonous mind manipulation.

That's a large leap from early DAM to Zappa! He was really an anal perfectionist, a control freak that constructed his work almost note for note (and that's not meant necessarily as a negative thing). We'd probably be recorded on Straight/Bizzare if we formed five years earlier. Although Zappa took a much more traditional and rarefied approach to music, we both admired the same avant-garde: Varese, Cage, Partch, Reich, etc., but our approach to recording and end results were very different, almost completely opposite…. Zappa was really a minor influence except for some of his acts on Straight, epecially Captain Beefheart and the Trout Mask Replica album. I like his Hot Rats album and sections of Freakout, thats about it.

DAM was playing with chance happenings, psychedelia, theater, ironic humor, crackpot instruments, and lo-fi recording. I don't think the word "control" was in our vocabulary, and we could never reproduce or do the same thing twice. We made postmodern, homemade "elemental" ESP-style trance noise-rock, which was far more gritty, obscure and spontaneous than Zappa.

The overlap is probably in the tongue-in-cheek satire department and our use of parody and black-humor. However, most of the songs done under Xanadu came about through intense visionary experiences. The lyrics and music were composed under altered states of conciousness, even the EP sleeve design was connected to a vision.

It's interesting that you view it as Zappa-esque or "mind manipulation," I was seriously trying to deal with a mental state I was not in control of then. Music and poetry were my safety nets. [The Xanadu material] represents a very different (more dark and removed) body of work. It was the only project we did, but I really enjoyed working with Ben and Laurence - both are sensitive, multi-talented musicians. They brought masterful playing and off-kilter ideas into Xanadu. I hope an expanded CD will show this in a better light.

Nightcrawlerz

I must confess to total ignorance about this project, and I've read some comments that the material was pretty "self-indulgent." What exactly were you on about there?

Nightcrawlerz was an experiment, an outline to a poetic/sound approach. The criteria of the project was an attempt to fuse and meld two fixed points into one. Our collaboration was a deconstrution of methods and techniques…an "unlearning" process, a sort of hole we each dug and filled with each other's dirt (and the dirt of other collaborators). Maybe we were clubbing each other with words and noise, and that might not be exactly soothing to the soul, but it was not exactly an attempt to get radio play. There was no audience for this at the time, but in light of what's happening now, it seemed a good time to fill in the spaces between DAM and now.

After hearing the retrospective, I'll never listen to another Bongwater album in the same light or snicker at the juvenile delinquency of Beavis & Butthead or those Mystery Science Theater videos and marvel at their so-idiotic-it's-brilliant thesis anymore.

I recently heard Bongwater just a few years ago when Mike Kelley and Art Byington played as Ann Magnusen's backing band in Los Angeles. Jim Shaw also painted and designed Ann's "Luv Show" CD. I think they were much more connected to producing conventional music then we were.

I've rarley seen Bevis and Butthead, but Mystery Science Theater was something I dug and watched at my friend George's house almost every Saturday night. That show expressed our attitude when we watched those grade Z bombs in the '60s and '70s, and as DAM we soaked up a lot of those at God's Oasis.

In the '60s there was a TV horror-show host named Ghoulardi from Cleveland who had a shtick of making fun of all the bad movies. In early '60s Detroit, we had "Morgus The Magnificent," and The Ghoul in the '70s. Vampirella did the same thing in Los Angeles. I like the idea of commentary and farce¾ the burlesque of the real (or unreal)¾ there's a high level of parody in the works you mentioned, but as an approach and technique its nothing original. I always cite Mad magazine as being a major influence. We grew up with that beautiful, Mad-genius stuff, hilarious, mind-blowing, as psychedelic as anything in the late '60s - artists like Wolverton and Virgil Partch cast a long shadow on us.

Did it frustrate you to see the attention heaped on these obvious "appropriators" of your aesthetic, and are you concerned that folks picking up "The Third Mind" might just shrug it off as "retro-juvenalia" and ignore it's cultural significance?

I think parody and black humor show up in all these projects. It concerns me that this parodistic reading may be misread as the sole meaning behind Nightcrawlerz; it's there, but not really central to our project, which I consider to be orthodox and spiritually based. My intention in putting out "The Third Mind" was to complete a documentation of a ten-year project that Barry Roth and I began in the late '70s. We were concerned with meaning in poetry, poetic invention, the sound of words¾ "projective verse" and the raw "sound" of sounds¾ the essence of things…getting to the nucleus of matter and form, stripping meat from the bones. Nightcrawlerz was a complex collage and constructionist word-based project that focused on the repetition and chant of sound and words to alter their meanings. There were many layers and different directions explored over ten year's time. We sent hundreds of Nightcrawlerz 'zines to artists around the world, we also tapped into the mail-art network and did some collaborations (both audio and visual) with Ray Johnson, an important figure in Fluxus and pop-art circles.

After DAMs implosion, were you anxious to continue with the same modus operandi and return to what DAM was originally intended to accomplish, or was Nightcrawlerz really nothing more than what it sounds like: a couple of friends fooling around with a bunch of tapes, toy instruments, answering machines and too much time on their hands trying to change the world from the comfort of their own basement?

When I left DAM in '77, it lost most of its drive and imagination, and was headed in the direction of punk rock, the popular idiom of the time. I decided to return to photography and finish a degree at Wayne State University in Detroit, which is where I met Barry Roth, who was an instructor. In one sense Nightcrawlerz was a return to the innocence and experiment of early DAM, but we were into a serious investigation into literature. Gysin and Burroughs were a strong influence. We made collages of poems, drawings, photos, sculptures, and sculptures of sound molded and played with the layers; encoding with signs, Kabbalah notation, and neo-Beat jargon - we tried to keep the work "outside ourselves." While it dealt with daily personal material, it had universal designs. It served as diary, story telling, and magic offering. The Nightcrawlerz' project was a clumsy organic stew. The music hummed like a devotional chant. Maybe it was an attempt to create a new monster music, a golom that could live and protect us. As poet-musicians, we were too stupid/naive to make anything easy or clear, let alone "change the world." I guess the humor sometimes eclipsed the spiritual intent, and to really change the world we need to work on ourselves.

I understand you recorded over fifty 90 minute cassettes worth of material and whittled it down to about 2½ hours and two disks worth of mayhem. Was the selection process as harrowing an experience as recording the material in the first place?

It wasn't too bad. I transferred anything that sounded interesting onto about 12 mini-discs that took a couple months. Then Warn Defever and I edited the pieces down into short sections in a few days. We saved a few long works, but our aim was to get the statement down quickly and go on. We let the computer randomly do the final selection and track layout.

Some of the material sounds like it was a very time-consuming affair to assemble. I'm particularly fond of what you did on "John Lennon." [The track (nothing on here could really be honored with the appelation "song") begins with excerpts from a live newscast describing his assassination, brilliantly incorporates Barbara Stanwyck begging "Johnny" not to die [from the film, Meet John Doe], and then segues into some interviews with folks who attended a Beatles concert. It's chilling the way a totally out-of-context clip from the reaction to John Lennon "live" (in concert) is juxtaposed with almost the exact same reaction to his death.] Your liner notes: "OK, scary, use it, maybe Yoko will sue us! Kool!" I assume you haven't heard from "Mrs. Lennon?"

I heard from Yoko a few years ago. She sent a small drawing with a note that said, "I'll be seeing you on Monster Island one day." (This was after I sent her a copy of the first Monster Island LP), but the piece about Lennon was done from material recorded the night he died. I had a few cassettes of these radio and TV newscasts - everyone commenting on Lennon's life and death. I just couldn't get away from it and recorded everything I heard. It was really made out of shock or disbelief…. The film "Meet John Doe" was also playing that same night, and it seemed to fit into the surrealness of it. The two John's -- heros of the "working class" --Lennon's death was a heavy trip, and it was a way to work through it. The editing on most of "The Third Mind" is pretty straightforward - we just tried to cut out a lot of repetition. Everything was assembled with multiple tape recorders, playing along with us live. Our major technique was splicing tape-loops into repetitve poems or soundscapes.

Did Nightcrawlerz just peter out, or did you and Barry get bored with all the work involved in assembling these sound collages with limited financial return on investment?

Barry had a family to raise and I was trying to get the bookstore afloat -- responsibilities kept creeping in and made it difficult to continue. We also said what we wanted. Just recently we held a small retrospective of our artwork. We've remained close friends and are collaborating on some new sculptural pieces. It's hard to say if we'd go back to recording. There may be an opportunity to produce a Nightcrawlerz theater piece in the future - that's a direction I've always wanted to take. It would open the process up, and I think our sketches and routines would work well in 3-dimensions - dance or dramatic live presentation.

Monster Island

Sitars, tambourines, ouds, violins, harmoniums, Chinese organs, acoustic guitars, etc. converge behind simple sing-song melodies that have fairy tale/nursery-rhyme qualities about them¾ it all comes across like Hapshash meets The Fool. I can imagine the freaks in Golden Gate Park dancing frivously around the Panhandle at some "gathering of the tribes" reunion with this blaring from every beatbox within earshot celebrating the 35th anniversary of the Summer of Love. Based on your previous [track]records and what seems to be a disdain for straightforward song structures, what ever possessed you to start a project like this?

I think song and noise structures are present throughout all [my] projects¾ just certain elements are more or less emphasized. Monster Island started in 1995, just after the DAM reunion. I knew the individual members from a couple years earlier... We all attended a Ghost concert in Detroit at the same time and we decided to get together soon and record this group of songs. I felt most of them were a little too "pretty" for DAM to cover, and since we all were in agreement, it seemed natural to try it out. I had this collection of Indian and African instruments and we were all into similar droney psych-folk like: Marc Bolan, ISB, Exuma, the Godz, etc., so we recorded our practice sessions in Warn's basement studio. Later I sent a tape to Thurston Moore and he said "Lets press an LP...," so the first album ["From The Michigan Floor"] consisted of our practices from that tape. They were mostly onetake recordings with minimal overdubs.

This also seems like the second "supergroup" you've been involved with—this time with some of the major players of the Detroit alternative scene?

I think of Monster Island more as an "anti-supergroup" no flash or talent showoffs, just friends getting together and slowing down.... My hope is we can transcend some of the trappings of our past and individual identities. I always liked Godzuki [Erika Hoffman], Outrageous Cherry [Matt Smith], and His Name Is Alive [Warn Defevre]-- they were/are some of the more creative bands in Detroit. It's always a special natural thing when we get together, and it gives us a chance to try out something different.

You don't so much sing the lyrics as recite them. In this respect, are the songs more like poetry set to music, and is that MIs preferred modus operandi?

I have a monotonal voice with no range, so I try to get other people to do vocals when I can. I'm getting into storytelling with sound -- "Peyote Mind" [see below] and "Fantomas" are examples [the band recently completed the DVD soundtrack for the re-edited version of "Fantomas" (entitled "Fantomash"), which was presented at the Boijman Museum in Amsterdam in October]—it's like adding a document into song...putting another layer on top. I think Erika interprets the songs well. Her voice is child-like and lyrical, so there's a strange balance between singing and recitation. I'm also interested in narratives and extended poetry and hope to do more with that.

The communal vibe around these releases reminds me also of early krautrockers Amon Düül and the ethnic world/folk of Atman/Magic Carpathians and Japanese folk/psych band Ghost. Do you regularly "test the waters" to see what types of music are out there that might benefit from the Cary Loren Treatment - great name for a band, that!

Thanks, that's great company to be in. I was familiar with Amon Düül, Can, and Kraftwerk in the early '70s, and Atman and Ghost in the mid-'90s. [As Cary mentioned earlier, the members of what was to become Monster Island initially met at a Ghost concert!] Also, Erica Pomerance's late '60s ESP freakout disk was a real revelation. I loved Vivaldi's chamber music and Ginsberg's treatment of Blake's poems as a teenager, so everything you experience is probably assimilated somehow…. But I don't approach music as subject for a certain style or "treatment." It must have meaning first. The truth of the moment is an important practice. This gets reinforced when you perform with people focused on the same ideas. Monster Island is basically an acoustic "low volume" band. It's approach to improv relates well with free-jazz and junkyard "folk" creation.

Communal bands sometimes have this tight and responsive nature that's a reflection of love or energy within the group. Shared ideals and backgrounds work together. All bands in a sense are communal, you get together to produce something. Music is one of the most social, yet anti-capitalist artforms and there lies its beauty: it's untouchable, yet it surrounds you in the air and its free.

The name "Monster Island" conveys a sense of both unity and isolation. The various ethnic rhythms and instruments of African, Chinese, Indonesian, Indian, and Haitian music would identify us as a world music bastard. I've always liked the idea of islands. The flowery exoticness, isolation and genetic creativity. The island where all monsters are allowed to exist in peace seemed idyllic, yet it was really a prison for them a place to keep them away from society and civilization. Monster Island is really an outsider band in the sense we are non-commercial and interested in developing tribal and isolated experiemnts in subject and sound. The name also links us back to the motherband [DAM] -- and in Monster Isle we perform many of the songs from the era of DAM.

Was there a lot of backlash from people who didn't realize that 'Hiroshima Bop' was an antiwar song and not a tribal dance celebrating politically sanctioned murder, whether it be at Dachau, Hiroshima, Kent St., Sarajevo, etc.

That was a song DAM did in rehearsals before we went to Japan. I thought it would be a good antiwar song to do, with its chorus; "looking at the fire thru the eyes of the dead." It was written for the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, but no one wanted to do it, they thought the Japanese would misunderstand it so it was dropped. I like doing that song, as it always ends in a big percussion freakout, a reconstruction of an atomic firestorm blast. I was trying to link all these atrocities together. We have such a great capacity for destroying ourselves in new and surprising ways and this is a song that gets misinterpreted a lot.

"Confessions" sounds like Lou Reed leading a Hari Krishna marching band with shakahachi, bells, etc. clattering around in the background. Yet this particular track was dedicated to Sonic Youth. Tell us about the connection with SY, particularly with that song?

It's about the life of Antonio Gaudi: "killed by a streetcar your work left undone"…"Islamic mosaics, pulsing hypnotic"..."walls bejeweled, and windows elliptic." He was a Catalan Catholic architect who was run over by a streetcar and never saw his major masterpiece, the Salgrada cathedral, built: "Barcelona in shadows that crumble and die…." It's a massive structure still under construction today and one of the most dazzling, organic, neo-baroque buildings.

Another theme in 'Confessions' is the Spanish Inquisition: "the torturer, he is your lover too…," which came out of the Garcia-Marquez great novel, Of Love And Other Demons and the book Poison by Kathryn Harrison. Both song and books explore relationships between authority: priests/executioners and the sadistic sexual attractions to their victims and their forbidden lusts: "opening your flesh and seeking the truth…."

The underpinnings of "catholic guilt" body/mind/soul conflicts and commentary on social hypocrisy also are rampant in Sonic Youth. it's a recurrent theme they explore. There's also the unfinished/raw soundscapes SY bring to their music, a kind of baroque form of rock 'n' roll which reminded me of Gaudi's catholic structures: odd organic angles, psychedelic and sensuous textures…. Actually, I gotta fess up: I stole a few chord progressions and odd tunings from a SY song called 'Cotton Crown' -- I think I saw it in one of those slick Guitar Player articles - a totally shameless rip-off...so I thought 'Confession for Sonic Youth' could also be read in a literal sense: I confess its a rip off. The song was also covered by DAM on our "Silver Wedding Anniversary" album.

You're obviously a voracious reader. A lot of literary references appear throughout your various projects, from the obvious (Gysin, Burroughs, Appolonaire, Tennyson) to the implied (Artaud, Lautremont, the existentialists like Camus and Sartre, and the Soviet anarchists), and you also run The Book Beat shop. Tell us how you became involved with that?

The Book Beat opened in 1982. I was unprepared to make a living doing anything else. I collected and sold books while in school. In the fine-arts field you either go into teaching, or try and market yourself. Neither looked promising to me. Bookselling was something one can do while still being somewhat antisocial. It became a successful venture despite my lack of business sense and now helps to support some of these projects.

Tell us about The Gallery. You've put on shows here, but I'm not too sure what the whole concept is about.

The Book Beat Gallery began soon after we opened. I show artwork that intrigues me or that I find interesting. Mainly photography and folk-art. I'm not really a "galleriest" -- marketing and sales are not the point. I have a small space and try to launch creative exhibits onto an unsuspecting public. It helps to keep me stimulated. The gallery is an education and connects us to the community. Detroit can be a bleak space at times, and this is one of the saner areas.

Throughout your career, your material also has many references to modern culture, particularly in the realm of science fiction: Dr. Phibes, Mothra [the title of a song on MIs second album, "Dream Tiger"], Godzilla, et. al. Is that just a genre you find ripe for inspiration or material, or do you think there's more to SF than meets the eye…adhering, perhaps, to the preferred translation of "S.F." as "speculative fiction"?

I'm not a big reader of SF, but am a fan of monster movies and monster movie soundtracks. I guess it's stuff I grew up with and still find fascinating. There are parallels to how we as a society view and picture monsters and how we reflect our fears and phobias onto the face of them. Space aliens with mutated bodies, giant heads, lagoon creatures, zombies, and oozing blob liquids were prominent in the '50s at a time we were [also] hyper-conscious of sexuality, car fins, and the godliness=cleanliness=USA virtues, so our monsters were these sick gross vile concoctions, projections of our fears. Then the hi-tech robotic/bionic transformer Robocop look of the '80s escalated with the dominance of computer technology. We kind of sublimate our fears and anxieties and project them onto the movie screen. I also love the soundtracks in monster flicks. it's usually the most extreme experimental music. In DAM, we used to play along with some of these movies, mixing the movie background noise with our own.

Both of your previous projects gave rise to accompanying fanzines: six issues of Destroy All Monsters magazine and eight issues of the Nightcrawlerz' zine. Any chance a Monster Island 'zine is in the offing?

I'm not sure a 'zine would fit with Monster Island. Recently I was asked to guest edit an on-line zine at Blastitude [see above]. It was a chance to put together various obsessions into 13 categories, so I put together artists, writers, and musicians such as Jack Smith, Ira Cohen, Wallace Berman, Angus Maclise, Ray Johnson, Sun Ra, Akira Ifukube, Father Yod, etc., and it was simple to add lots of photos and long interviews, etc. The process just seems easier, fluid, and more "ziney" than producing a 'zine, so I think a lot of great 'zines have already gone online. Although I can't do the technical stuff very well, it's still possible to work inside the medium. I've also been working on an online gallery: "The Glow in the Dark Gallery" with some friends. This should be up in the near future.

Tell us a bit about the "Peyote Mind" collaboration with John Sinclair? It seems like a match made in hell, marrying your collective political agendas to the avant, freeform jazz sounds that were instrumental to the overall DAM aesthetic.

Thanks, that's a project I'm very happy about. I found this early college notebook of Sinclair's while researching a spoken word CD I did on the White Panther Party. In the notebook were poems and an essay he wrote under the influence of Peyote in 1963, its sort of the beginning, or "Big Bang" for Sinclair. A year later his heightened consciousness would lay the foundation for the communal ideas seeded in the Detroit Artist Workshop, the MC5, the Trans-Love Energies, White Panther Party, and Rainbow Peoples Party. This was the cornerstone of psychedelic culture in the Midwest. I've just published a book by Sinclair about this called The Realization Of Peyote Mind And After and am delighted working on the documentation of this era.

It's so different from the "regular" MI releases, I wonder where you see that project heading. Do you intend on continuing in the wyrdfolk direction on studio releases, but break into avant skronk whenever you hit the stage?

I really don't know where it's headed. I'd like to do a couple more "song" albums, but it might all fall apart and go somewhere else. Playing our songs live is difficult. You need an attentive, quiet audience to pull it off, which is rare to find in Detroit, so we usually opt for the freeform improv [which the band performed with poet Ira Cohen in December].

We thank Cary for his honesty and willingness to share his musical history and personal demons with us. For additional information, please visit Cary's site, or drop him a line. Tell him the Terrascope sent you.

Thsi interview was first published in the Ptolemac Terrascope zine from the UK and is also found online at The THE VINYL JUNKIE, Jeff Penczak's collected writing site.

When worlds collide:
Midwest music and arts collective Destroy All Monsters attacks CoCA.
By Mike McGonigal, Seattle Weekly, June 12, 2000

IN 1974, FOUR of the weirdest people in the Detroit/Ann Arbor, Michigan, area (guitarist Jim Shaw, drummer/ tape manipulator Mike Kelley, singer and guitarist Cary Loren, and vocalist/violin-player Niagra) formed a garage band and named it after the last great Godzilla movie, Destroy All Monsters. DAM's early music was a thick, playful caterwaul: Yoko Ono/Nico/Betty Boop fronting a Velvet Underground practice session with Fred Frith and Bob Ostertag sitting in. All Music Guide terms the group "noise deconstructionists" and tells us, "They were an antirock band founded in direct reaction to the pretensions and complacency of 1970s pop music."

DAM were artists and filmmakers who wanted to make music and didn't fit in anywhere, so they got together. If this does not sound very remarkable, consider that in '74 the lines between underground music, film, and art were firmly drawn, and that Kelley and Shaw today rank among the most influential, genre-exploding folks on the international art scene. Now the group is the subject of a unique multimedia exhibition that kicks off CoCA's 20th anniversary celebration. Curated by Larry Reid, the show begins Friday with a way-rare live DAM performance and runs through August 30.

DAM formed in the dead wake of Detroit's well-documented and deservedly revered late-'60s cultural implosion. John Sinclair and the White Panther Party (whose motto was "dope, guns, and fucking in the streets") had fizzled out, while the Stooges, MC5, SRC, Amboy Dukes, et al. had either split or descended into glam-rock shadowplay. There was a definite need for a music that would tear shit up by reintroducing confusion, spontaneity, and that visceral oomph that would later be identified with punk rock.

"The music scene at the time was mostly roots rock and blues—bar band stuff," Shaw explains on the phone. Enter Destroy All Monsters: Artists Shaw and Kelley had started to make noise on cheap equipment played loud in their shared house/practice space (dubbed "God's Oasis"). They were also playing art-pranks—putting up flyers for events that never happened.

ACROSS TOWN, LOREN and his model girlfriend Niagra had put up their own posters, announcing parties that did take place. But when people showed up, they unwittingly stumbled onto the set of one of Loren's underground films. Loren had previously spent a summer with Jack Smith, the great performance artist and filmmaker whose Flaming Creatures had defined the camp aesthetic. Unsurprisingly, Kelley and Shaw befriended the pair. Shaw describes Loren's art at the time: "He made these beautiful works on paper with arcs of spray paint while lying on the floor; they'd be finished when he passed out from the fumes." Their music was the logical extension of the MC5's freakout "Black To Comm" and the Stooges' free jazz kick, "LA Blues," flavored with contemporaneous influences such as Terry Riley, Captain Beefheart, and Faust.

There were no bands like 'em in the area at the time; pretty much the only shows they played were when they "hijacked another band's equipment, and quickly cleared the room," Shaw recalls. Thurston Moore's label Ecstatic Peace issued a three-disc collection of their early material in '95, ensuring that this era of Destroy All Monsters would endure as more than a footnote in that cool, murky era 'twixt the death of psychedelia and the start of punk, a period that birthed groups like Devo, Pere Ubu, and the Electric Eels in the Midwest and This Heat and the Swell Maps in the UK. Today, the kind of droney, experimental music the group made has a pretty large scene attached to it.

DAM are still best known among record geeks for their later era, after Kelley and Shaw split for California in 1976 to attend grad school at CalArts. Ron Asheton of the Stooges joined the band, along with MC5 bassist Michael Davis, and they sort of hijacked the group. DAM's songs became simpler and harder-edged. Niagra started seeing Asheton; it wasn't long before Loren was kicked out of his own band. "I was very depressed when Mike and Jim left—it was chaos, my world fell apart," Loren says. "I spent some time in a mental ward. When Asheton and Davis came into the band, it was like playing with your teenage heroes, a fantastic dream—high-energy sparks and psychedelic space-music. But it was an overload of ideas and soon blew up." The band continued without Loren until the mid-'80s, and the original lineup has played a few reunion shows since the mid-'90s.

Kelley and Shaw have been subjects of traveling retrospectives (Kelley in '93, Shaw in '99 and again this year) and there are several glossy books of their work to choose from. Kelley has explored every imaginable media, including video, sculpture, performance, writing, and drawing. His charged, psychosexual, humorous work resonates deeply with younger artists. The Los Angeles Times called him "perhaps the most influential American artist of the '90s." The insanely talented Shaw creates work that is super-accessible, especially to those with a knowledge of 20th-century subcultures and advertising. He fluidly draws on a startling array of visual languages: Jack Chick tracts, Boy Scout manuals, Tom of Finland drawings, Family Dog psychedelic posters, tabloids like Weekly World News. He is currently, he says, "starting a new religion."

Niagra's work is bad-girl comix-influenced stuff that fits well within the lowbrow vernacular aesthetic of Juxtapoz magazine, cosponsors of the CoCA exhibition. Cary Loren is a successful bookstore owner (thebookbeat.com) whose current band Monster Island makes "damaged acid-folk." Among the books he's published is a reprint of John Sinclair's 1965 poetry chapbook, This Is Our Music. Loren is currently assembling a CD collaboration between DAM and his holiness, Sun Ra. "Well it's not a true collaboration," Loren explains. "I put together archival spoken tracks by Sun Ra over DAM music; it's a trippy piece called Message From Space."

THE CENTERPIECE OF the CoCA exhibit is four huge 12- by 20-feet banners, one-of-a-kind works Kelley and Shaw made together that depict Detroit pop and underground culture icons from the late '60s and early '70s. Niagra is unable to perform, but her art is on view. There will be continuous showings of Loren's films and a re-creation of Shaw and Kelley's old crash pad, plus photos, flyers, period artwork—the show is a shrine to a band many obscurantists haven't even heard. The exhibit almost seems like a prank in and of itself. Shaw, Kelley, and Loren will speak at a panel, emphatically titled "The Monsters' Mash: Rust Belt Noise, Thrift Store Aesthetics, and the Globalization of Detroit Pop Culture," on Sunday, July 16 at 4pm. The moderator will be UW professor Paul Remley, who happens to be an old pal of the band; he used to tape 'em back in the day.

And what might a visitor take away from this mixed-media feast? "The importance of place," Loren offers—a notion which, curiously, has hovered in the Seattle air since that thing underneath the Space Needle opened its doors—"how the areas of Detroit and Ann Arbor have made inroads into the culture. The crossover of culture and revolutionary politics is one of the main themes [of the CoCA exhibition]. We were riffing on the trash of a society at the brink of self-destruction. Music can be developed to change the direction of thought and bring people into positive action and energy. Music should be important and vital and open up a new era of change."

We at the MAMI Institute, in the interest of goodness & fairness present a recent review of the new "Hotbox" 6 CD set. This review (as are all others we may present) are in NO WAY AN ENDORSEMENT to these prerecorded and digitally manufactured products. We do find the front cover image on the "Hotbox"(pictured in the review) to be fairly interesting and somehow oddly familiar.

And speaking of "nice sets" who could forget Niagara and her Destroy All Monsters! Yeah. I know that kinda remark'll have a whole slew of Women's Libbers pounding down the doors of BLOG TO COMM central demanding this Male Chauvinist Pig to be luau'd, but then again alla them dames are nothing but a buncha Flatty Pattys who couldn't get a date if they tied a bone around their necks and set 'em loose in the dog pound! As for Niagara...sheesh, why didn't they have gals like her back in High School (at least those who would talk to me) but whadevva, the famed songstress from Destroy All Monsters/Dark Carnival and her brood can once again be heard in all their high energy glory on this brand-spanking-new HOT BOX six-disc set (available through Niagara Detroit) and it's worth your while (and welfare check) to dish out the seventy-plus it's gonna cost to procure this because no matter how you slice the thing it is a doozy. Now I gotta admit that I was a rather big follower of the Detroit/Ann Arbor high-energy sound back in the middle portion of the eighties and in fact you could say that it was this very same Detroit scene (along with its Australian brethren) that inspired me to get off my then not-as-fat and pitted butt and do my own fanzine which at the time was heavily devoted to a good portion of high-energy Detroit-styled rock groups both old and new. Thus you can bet your bottom buckskin that the appearance of a set like this really does get me all hot 'n bothered even if the thing did arrive into my life a good twenny-three years too late! And it's a good 'un too...coulda been better, but I'll tell y'all about that later.

Alongsides such post-Sinclair wonders as Rocket From the Tombs, Umela Hmota and Radio Birdman, Destroy All Monsters were one of many groups in the seventies who were helping to keep the late-sixties Michigan Rock flame alive. They certainly were a refreshing switch from the same-old same-old at the time, a nice change from the at-times cloying direction that gnu wave music was not only heading towards but deeply embedded in even though a dolt like myself really couldn't see it until 1981 set it but that's another sick saga. True they had the heavyweight Detroit sound goin' for 'em thanks to the likes of Ron Asheton and Michael Davis in their ranks, but it certainly was chanteuse Niagara who made the entire show worthwhile with her striking stage presence that I'm positive made a whole load of the eighties "women in rock" tough gal schtick look positively wilted in comparison (I mean, if Pat Benetar was supposed to be some sorta role model for an aggressive new female in rock as the likes of Anastasia Pantsios were hypeing her as, then Phyllis Schafley had nothing to worry about!). And what's best about it is that it didn't matter that Niagara couldn't "sing" either! I mean, sure she coulda taken a few lessons from Madame Du Warble, but like the "Granite Lady" in that infamous Plastic Man adventure all she really hadda do was be up there to make Destroy All Monsters the success they were with her pulchritude which, coupled with ear-blasting heavy metal (the real kind) sure came off a lot better'n not only the latest "introspective" clean cut "new music" band fresh from the assembly line but way too many of those hard rock "I'm my own bitch" metal women who tried way too hard and got way too little for it. Destroy All Monsters were the real kahuna even though the entire rock listening public was too brain-damaged from way too much "Album Oriented Rock" to rub two braincells together to notice!

Needless to say...HOT BOX is thee wowzer...disc one has the single sides and some more ne'er before heard rarities although the thing is inexplicably missing the infamous studio version of "Spruce Goose" (the complete sordid saga behind that song which probably tops the f-wordin' spew found in the NATIONAL LAMPOON's Lennon spoofer "Magical Misery Tour" can be found in part two of the Ron Asheton interview which popped up in the now o.p. BLACK TO COMM 15). If you wanna hear it bad enough it does appear on the Fan Club CD of DAM single sides, and while I'm at it, it woulda been great if that Cary Loren rarity of an EP was stuck on here as well (y'know, the one with "Assassination Photograph" and that bee-youtiful Virgil Finlay sleeve I actually reprinted way back in ish 21 because it looked so boss!) but I guess we can't have everything as Mom used to say. The second one's got a live show which is typical audience quality ('n I've heard better inc. an FM broadcast from Delaware or Maryland or somewhere like that which shoulda gotten snagged on here somewhere) but at least it's got that boss cover of Robert Calvert's "The Right Stuff" that always seems to get my blood boiling in a hefty early-seventies fit of power surge! Still, I got the feeling that Asheton's maddening eletric leads and the general heavy jamz woulda upset a few punques out there back inna day of "no guitar solos"...heck I even remember playing the aforementioned DAM live broadcast while Jillery was in the room and this avowed Moody Blues fan actually CHASTIZED me saying "that's ACID ROCK!!!!!"

The rest of this collection features material from Niagara's Dark Carnival days in the equally-dark nineties when she, along with Asheton and a varying array of backing bozos inc. Greasy Carlisi from the old Sirius Trixon group and at times Cheetah Gene O'Connor of Rocket From the Tombs helped to keep the Detroit fires burning a little more...'n maybe they do sound a bit slick here and recording techniques have improved to the point where some of the "edge" of the music is gone, but I like the material her enough, or at least a lot more'n I like what I've heard of most recent Detroit revival material which seems to fall limp once placed upon the laser launching pad. OK, the studio disque (which originally came out back in the day although I was too tapped out to get my hands on it---that and the fact that I was told it was a dog anyway) wasn't quite what I was expecting with its lucid lack of true energetic inspiration, but the live tracks capture the Carnival in its total state of kinetic frenzy making it more or less the only true heir to the 1967 Grande Ballroom putsch extant. Cigarettes have sexed up Niagara's voice by this time so her sultriness has only been enhanced, and the backing group is every bit the equal of the old Monsters or just about any other post-Detroit aggregate that had been playing this planet twixt the fall of the Sinclair empire and the birth of the new punk era. 'n let me tell you, at times the hair on my back was standin' on end...well, I should say where there should be hair it was standin' but it was great to flash back to 1985 pretendin' I was flashing back to 1969 listenin' to this hard mash that never did seem to infect the general rock clime either then or now because...frankly it was too GOOD!!!

Oh yeah, the final disc is actually a DVD of the Dark Carnival show at the Rob Tyner Memorial gig back in '92, taken from a VCR tape and plopped right onto a DVD-R burn(!---I guess they were trying to cut costs, though if your system rejects these dubbed disques I guess caveat is the word!). The recording ain't that long and it's not like it was professionally edited, but at least it's a two-camera job and you get to see a lotta hot shots of Niagara singing as she strips down to bra and meows out the familiar Monsters and Stooges songs for you while rolling around onstage Ig-like getting the rather nineties-looking ninnies in the audience all hot and bothered! (Some nice shots of bouncers tossing a few over-rambunctious patrons back into the audience too!) Now if I were one of those picky rock critics you've seen too much of lo these many years I'd yammer and stammer about the all around tackiness of the whole affair but hey, I gotta admit that I like tackiness about as much as the next suburban brat raised on way too many viewings of entire film reels being run upside down and backwards on local tee-vee so what do aesthetics have to do with ANYTHING anyway??? -- SOURCE: BLOGG TO COMM website

To the Throne of Chaos Where The Thin Flutes Pipe Mindlessly

Some thoughts on the period of transition from progressive rock to punk rock, in the form of liner notes for a three CD box set.

PART 1
Music is eternal; it is ahistorical. So says the polliwog. Music in time is Muzak: floating strains, the meaningless pap that provides the background soundtrack for other peoples lives. It lies behind those that have history, who are old. Like embarrassing cartoon music, this mush shows its age and, in an amusing way, provokes disgusted looks on the enfeebled listeners who are familiar with it, who once thought that it was impervious to cooption. How pathetic . . . to hear these once "hot" sounds demoted to punctuation for children's entertainments, to be made present again . . . but only for the pre-adolescent. This is what happened to Raymond Scott's "Powerhouse" when applied to Bugs Bunny, when Cab Calloway crooned along with Betty Boop, and even now when Jimi Hendrix, in his death, supplies the soundtrack for today's "adult toy" car commercial. It is said that the old always return to their original childlike state, unless they are lucky enough to die first; they sink back to the square-one level of powerlessness. This deflation in caused by the realization that one is in time. Then the potent fuck beats of your prime become limply infantile. I am speaking now from the vantage- point of the old frog. And I tell you, once you have a music history these observations are painful and obvious facts. To the young soul these are incomprehensible notions. To these naives, music is of the moment. There is evolution, but in a constant present . . . always in a state of becoming. Changing reactions to music, and conscious improvements in taste, are not made in reference to a time before but are simply realizations that something could, not . . . be different, but better. New music is an outgrowth - a living thing emerging from a vibrant parent body and not a sickly response to that which has passed away. These sad observations are provided as an around-about way to introduce the genesis of a band, a band that never was - Destroy All Monsters, and to reveal some of the problematics of that attempt.

For me, these old recordings from 1974/76 are still very present. When I listen to them I am again back at their point of creation - because they never came to a conclusion. The "history" that they are part of is not yet written, at least not adequately. I am quite aware of the reasons for their production, and also the reasons why they are, perhaps, failed attempts. I also realize that the general listener will, more than likely, not understand them at all. This puts me in the position of having to construct a history for them, to set them up to age. And I sincerely hope they do become familiar enough to suffer the embarrassment of their position in time . . . to be used in cartoons and soft drink commercials. Why not? Everything else has. To set this process in motion means I must separate myself from my "pure" experience of this noise (which I hope still has the capacity to move other listeners in some approximately similar "pure" sense). I will now attempt to explain these recordings into historical importance, and through this explanation convince you that they are not mere kitsch, that they are still alien enough to be worth examining.

Destroy All Monsters is a band that never was, because it is a band that has become historicized (whatever minor history it does have) in an incorrect way. Destroy All Monsters is generally a footnote in the history of American Punk rock. It has been described in terms of, either, an American proto-Punk history (as an outgrowth of the Stooges because of the presence of ex-Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton in the line-up starting in the late 70s); or as a post-British Punk reaction . . . as one of the many bands to spring up in the States in response to the Sex Pistols. These pigeonholings are dependent on the point in time in which the chronicler became familiar with the band, and also their knowledge of American pre-Punk rock music. To many writers, Punk history is automatically a British history, and whatever manifestations of it that may have occurred in America are only twisted reflections of the real thing. In a sense I agree with this interpretation. The American bands that were influential in the development of British Punk: the Stooges, the New York Dolls and the Ramones, were indeed minor American bands in there own times, without any of the celebration and critical response that the Sex Pistols garnered. And second-string American Punk, especially California Hardcore, was obviously more of an outgrowth of the media-conscious and fashionable Sex Pistols than Midwestern and East Coast garage rock of the late 60s and early 70s. I know this for a fact since I was in L.A. in the late 70s. The scene was primarily Glam oriented when Punk hit, like a disease - a British germ that infected everyone overnight. One day there was no Punk, the next day the city was crawling with torn-clothed, safety-pinned spike heads. In any case, this discussion of Punk as the British Invasion of the late 70s has little to do with Destroy All Monsters, which was already in existence in 1974. We were completely ignorant of the British underground musical developments then in a protean neighborhood state of development . . . just like we were. Warning! To all Anglophiles, this is a history that predates the American popularization of punk. And this history only finds its flowering in a later, supposedly post-Punk development - namely, Industrial music. Warning! Also to Stoogeophiles. This is a history of Destroy All Monsters before the arrival of Ron Asheton. Stooges fan club members will not find any missing nuggets of wisdom here.

To understand Destroy All Monsters one must put themselves into an early 70s mindset. The first wave of alternative rock, and by this I mean the incredible outpouring of garage Psychedelia in the late 60s, was long dead by this time. Musically, this was the era of broken promises. The psychedelic avant-garde vision of a new Pop Music to mimic the new social experiment had proven a pipe dream. There was the sense of living in the decadent twilight occasioned by this fall. And in the mindless flight from this Altamontian negativity a wave of escapist feel-good pap became the dominant musical trend. The music scene was dominated by pseudo-back-to-folk-roots ballads of the James Taylor (or one of his innumerable siblings) variety. The thunderous counter-movement to this laid-back sound was prole-rock. Heavy Metal, despite its surface difference from Folk and Country rock, was similarly "roots rock", though admittedly a more high energy and body-conscious version of it. Yet, it was still a music that was meant to console "the people", not confront them.

In this cultural Suburban wasteland there was only isolation, and a sense of being betrayed. The strange brew of avant-garde experimentation and populism of late 60s acid rock had failed in its social promises. To someone of my age (too young to be a hippie, to old to be a punk) there was definitely a feeling of resentment at having missed the short hedonistic flowering of this dream. These fantasies were only then available on records stolen at K Mart or the mall along with other packaged fantasies: Conan the Barbarian novels and other adolescent juvenilia. And by the time you got these records, the "stars" who made them were already in decline: dead, drugged out, or producing corporate rock. Where was my utopia? Where was my free sex? Nowhere to be seen. It only existed in a corporate dream of packaged freedom, in the pathetic sense that thirteen-year-olds wish to be the eighteen-year-olds they see in movies - movies like "Pretty Poison," where hot teen-age girls snuff their parents and put the blame on a nerd. But, I was the nerd. Because of this overall mood of betrayal, rock music was something to be abandoned and left to the dolts: the new armies of ex-high school football players, now hipster longhairs, who filled stadiums to see "righteous" acts like Grand Funk. In revenge for this betrayal, in revenge for the popularization of rock music, for the rise of arena rock, for the rise of country rock, the most moronic musics of the progressive acid rock period of the late 60s all of a sudden seemed its most important products. The thuggish sounds of the Stooges, Blue Cheer and the insipid acid-whinings of the Seeds revealed the pomposity of the "grand experiment". Thirteen-year-old-music of the late 60s became more important than the technically superior and politically savvy music of the twenty-year olds. "Progressive" English and San Francisco rock was abandoned. Inspirational noise had to be found elsewhere. Even in high school, before any of the self-conscious "criticality" of college, I had these leanings. Even then, I found myself tiring of rock music and explored it in its furthest outposts, where the definition of "rock" was stretched beyond recognition. Noise fests like the weird "songs" by Silver Apples, the more annoying Pink Floyd tunes like "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun", the MC5s "Starship", the Stooges "L.A. Blues", the Mothers of Invention' "Weasels Ripped my Flesh" the Velvet Underground's "Sister Ray" were my preferred listening. These oddities led to the realization that there was "another" history behind these records, a much more brutal, and anti-pop, history that deserved looking into. Brutality, cutting through the pop boundary line, seemed to be the order of the day. Thus I was led to Sun Ra, Morton Subotnik, Harry Partch, Lamont Young, John Cage, Stockhausen, Dadaist Bruitism, and the Futurist noise music theories of Luigi Russolo. Rock was a thing of the past. Disco music was already starting to eclipse it in popularity. I was convinced that what had been interesting in Rock all along was just the volume, your physical response to it. Everything else was just packaging - the marketing strategies necessary to sell pop product.

Georgio Morodor was God and Donna Summer his feminine voice, a voice that only feels the need to speak in orgasms. The first time I heard "I feel Love", it was a revelation. Here was a pure example of pop strategizing. All musicianship was removed; all pretenses to avant-garde theorizing as exemplified by rock acts like the Jimi Hendrix Experience which, to preach their message of freedom, had to make the listener un-free. By that I mean . . . Progressive Rock required a god-like technician, a skilled adept that, like the catholic priest, was a necessary intermediary between you and the "truth". This focus on technical expertise produced the "Rock God" - the guitar hero. Though, at this point, before the rise of codified Heavy Metal guitar worship, there was still a symbiotic relationship between musician and listener. In psychedelic music this relationship centered on feedback and random noise, which equalized musician and listener. Feedback was a sign that the musician was out of control, and the musician and listener shared equally in their experience of this out-of-control state. Feedback was the revolutionary component of acid rock, the anarchic sign of revolutionary freedom. It is the product of the electric instrument monitoring itself, and this self-examination leads to a breakdown of control that is evidenced in the mantra of the feedback loop - the technical equivalent of the acid trip. This was the same sound produced by the Free Jazz saxophone player. The instrument becomes the voice speaking in tongues; it is a pure extension of the voice. The wail of the saxophone is the voice and instrument mirroring each other, eyeing each other, feeling each other out until the one and the other are indistinguishable.

After the fall of the acid rock religion and the loss of faith in its revolutionary signifiers ­ feedback, as a sign, became suspect. The voice no longer seemed an especially true voice. In Morodor's Techno Pop, feedback is synthesized, is domesticated, it becomes pseudo-feedback. What had been hot became cool. And with this change the various categories of rock music as they had existed no longer made sense. Progressive rock became "art" rock - that is, "fake" rock. The digital sequencer roar of Georgio Morodor is feedback harnessed, anarchy pantomimed a confusing contradiction of terms. It is push button rebellion. Yet, oddly, pseudo-feedback still has the same physical effect on the listener as the real thing. Now, the rock god became disposable and the religified communion produced by the relationship between musician and listener, the unequal relationship of devotee to idol, could be rejected. In progressive rock, the technical virtuoso allows you to commune with god only through them. They reveal their equality with you through the symbolic "failure" of feedback. Their "mistake" reveals them, like Jesus, to be also mere man. But with the mechanization of chaos there is no need of a technical virtuoso to symbolically fail. Everyone is equalized automatically because no technical skills are needed. And with this erasure of upper and lower, so also the mystical aspects of rock music are undone. Rock becomes materialistic; its effects have to be explained in somatic terms. If some rock was still "progressive" this term must now be expanded to accommodate market discourse. The question now is: what separates progressive materialist rock from corporate materialist rock?

With the demystification of rock music, its "artistry" shifts away from its truth-value to its codes of irony. The new cognoscenti are those who are steeped in the dictionary of the signs of rock's commodification. Rock stripped of its political trappings becomes, like early rock and roll of the Chuck Berry sort, linked with the purely hedonistic. Except that it is no longer associated with the lower classes, it becomes an intellectual property. This is implicit in the ironic Eurotrash posturings of Roxy Music. Rock now is simply a sign of the "trendy"; it is pure image. Rock becomes a word put to something to signify its acceptability. Avant-garde bands like Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk all of a sudden were acceptable to large audiences of teens once they packaged themselves as a rock bands and separated themselves from the intellectual ghetto of electronic music. After "I Feel Love" it was apparent that all you needed to produce a pop hit was a machine rhythm and a sexualized image. Techo Pop (and Punk, Techno Pop's sloppy cousin) were born. Punk was born out of this same freedom from virtuosity. Punk shared Techno Pop's rejection of virtuosity, but also rejected the intellectual removal and irony of this gesture as seen in Art Rock bands such as Roxy Music, Kraftwerk and Devo. Anti-virtuosity was a democratic, populist gesture in favor of a decadent one. The pop hooks and guitar solos of prole rock might have been dismissed, but not the class affiliation, and the musical signifiers of that class: guitar, bass and drums.

The German bands were the most willing to play with and extend rock signifiers, perhaps because it was not a music born there and the class ties were not so strong. In the early 70s German trance bands like Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk were on the cutting edge of rock music. Tangerine Dream was still avant-garde in an old-fashioned way. The drone might be synthesized but the wail was still the mystical siren song of Hendrix's acid-soaked guitar. Tangerine Dream made a hippyish attempt to humanize technology. They were a Modernist science fiction band. Their populism is obvious in the fact that they added guitar solos to their live concerts - a kind of gesture of contact with their rock audience. In fact, no one needed to be on stage to perform Tangerine Dream's music. The machines could do it themselves, if they were allowed to. Kraftwerk, on the other hand, like the Pop Art-inspired Roxy Music in England, were cool and ironic. Their synth work was meant to be overtly kitsch - a modernist joke. How could it not be? The Moog had already become the more up-to-date replacement for the Wurlitzer organ: a wondrous machine to charm the lower classes with its power to mimic and make exotic the worn-out. Every old musical chestnut, from easy-listening mush to classical music to hard rock was available in "switched on" versions. Like the Theramin before it, the synthesizer quickly fell from grace as the great technological hope that would change music, to become a humorous "specialty" instrument used for novelty records and fantasy soundtracks. Kraftwerk mined this kitsch potential to produce phony "art" music. Unlike Tangerine Dream they would never sink to such proletarian populist gestures as a live guitar solo. Sometimes, in fact, their music would be performed on stage by showroom dummies that stood immobile in front of the self-operating machines. Populism to Kraftwerk was not heroicized class unity, but a word connoting the infantile products geared toward an infantalized social group. Pop music is inherently kitsch music.

This rock decadence was obviously in the air in the early 70s, in the states as well as in Europe. At the Ann Arbor Film Festival, sometime in the mid 70s, I saw a short comedic promotional film (a kind of precursor to a rock video) by a group called Devo (short for de-evolution). I was very impressed with Devo's whole package: their adoption of everything that was hated in rock music at the moment. They ditched the macho lead singer of boogie rock for a pudgy costumed nerd "Boogi Boy', who would sometimes perform in a playpen making overt the infantilist nature of rock music. Rock music: industry produced pabulum for the masses. Every rock band was the Monkees in their eyes. This industrial aesthetic was overt in their packaging of themselves: that they were a "corporation" not a band, that they did overt promotional commercials for themselves, made dysfunctional by stripping away all of the sexualized glamour that was there in both rock and disco. I don't think a band like this could have come out of Detroit because of the city's rich history of class-conscious rock culture. Detroiters were embarrassed. There was such an important history there to mine: the Psychedelic Stooges, MC5, SRC, Amboy Dukes, Alice Cooper, Früt - all important local bands during my junior high school years. But now, there was not one single good rock band in Detroit. Detroit, like all of the other industrial cities of the Midwest had died an ignoble death. But Detroit still had its cultural pride; it was still "Rock City" (to quote Kiss). Detroit was pathetically in denial. It makes perfect sense that Ohio would be the place that a vibrant grunge scene would spring up. Buckeyes were more willing, and able, to see the cultural death surrounding them and to capitalize on it. Besides Devo, Ohio produced Pere Ubu, a less ironic band whose approach to the "industrial" aesthetic was to adopt the tonalities of the gothic sublime ­ the romance of the ruin applied to the dead husk of Modernist industrialization. No, in Ohio there was no glorious past music history to get in the way - inn Detroit, on the other hand, it seemed as if the world had ended, and all outside communication to whatever small outposts were left was cut off. Destroy All Monsters operated in this vacuum. We truly thought we were the only ones doing what we were doing.

In a way, Destroy All Monsters are a mixture of the two trajectories (prole rock/punk, art rock/techno) I have outlined. We reveled in the death of rock. We gave up straight rock instrumentation by playing mostly old electronic cast-offs, tape recorders and noise makers, but we felt no qualms about using standard rock instruments either - or playing rock cover versions, albeit very fucked up ones. We had slightly artistic and avant-garde pretensions, we were in your face but we also had a sense of humor - albeit a very sour one. And as with the punk rockers, there was a definite class affiliation which we were unwilling to give up, even if we weren't very happy about it. We would, or could, not adopt totally the ultra-cool ironic and commercially packaged stances of Kraftwerk and Roxy Music. The pure noise we cranked out was still moving to us; there were vestiges of the uplifting psychedelic rock aura left about it. Though this might have been apparent only to us and not the average listener. We could hear it. We still were, after all, a Detroit band. We had our cultural pride. And, I was not particularly interested in making sense. All the best bands of my youth were ones that were full of contradictions: Captain Beefheart, the Stooges, the Doors, the Velvet Underground, early Pink Floyd. All of these bands were simultaneously ironic and heartfelt, funny and serious, pop and experimental, lowbrow and highbrow. They were hard to figure out.

After I moved to Los Angeles in 1976 I discovered that there indeed were other bands working in the world who had somewhat the same interests as Destroy All Monsters: Suicide, Airway, Pere Ubu, Throbbing Gristle, Half Japanese, Devo, the Screamers, Non, the Residents and such New York No Wave groups as Teenage Jesus and the Jerks and DNA. All of these bands were of interest to me. I, however, found the L.A. scene not very supportive of this type of ugly noise and I quickly gave up the idea of continuing in bands. I began to do solo performance work geared toward an art audience. L.A. was dominated by hardcore and British-style punk. Destroy All Monsters, as it still existed in Detroit, switched directions after Ron Asheton came into it, going after more of a hard rock sound. And soon the only original member left in Destroy All Monsters was Niagara, on vocals. This band bears no similarity to early DAM and belongs solely within the confines of a punk rock history.

PART II

Destroy All Monsters was formed in Ann Arbor Michigan in the winter of 1974. The founding members were: Cary Loren, Mike Kelley, Niagara, and Jim Shaw. Niagara, Shaw, and myself met as students at the art school at the University of Michigan in 1972.

Niagara was one of the first persons I met upon my arrival in Ann Arbor in 1972. I got onto a bus giving new students an orientation tour of the U of M Campus and was immediately struck with her beauty. She stood out from the busload of typical hippie youth as a dark star. She was a freak, no doubt about it. Pale, introverted, and trashy, she looked like some sort of B Movie star - a sickly anti-blonde Marilyn Monroe, the negative reversal of healthy sex kitten Marilyn. Niagara had a reciprocal beauty, fed by Nyquil, Tab and Sanders' chocolate cake. She was what Anita Pallenberg was to Jane Fonda in Barbarella. The dead Marilyn, as filtered through the decadence of Warhol's factory was very important to Niagara I was to find out. At this point Niagara was not yet Niagara. She had not yet given up her "slave name" ala Malcolm X to take on her new name derived from an old Marilyn movie. At this point Niagara was sequestered away in an all girl dormitory that made her difficult to visit. Unlike other dorms where you could walk right in and knock on the door, in this one you had to call ahead and make a reservation, very formal. At least this is how I remember it, though this might be an example of false memory syndrome wish fulfillment. Even so, it adds to my construction of Niagara as a remote and unreachable ideal - a surrealist girl. It turned out we were both in art school and shared some first year classes. I remember specifically being in a life drawing class with her. I do not, however, remember her ever drawing from the models. Instead, she did small delicate watercolors reminiscent of 19th century fairy tale illustration. They were not the flowery hippie sort that I was familiar with, the kind filled with mushrooms, rainbows and unicorns. Niagara's drawings were a scarier, more darkly realistic version of this aesthetic - one that might now be called "gothic". They were the bad acid trip, somehow appropriate to a town where a major university building was named after Arthur Rackam. But, sadly, even if someone in the dim past had felt like paying homage to Rackam by naming a portion of the University after him, Rackam 's aesthetics themselves were not given much respect in the School of Art. I am fairly sure that Niagara did not attend art school after this first year. She never quite seemed to be there in any purposeful way anyway. Niagara had already developed her own aesthetic, so it only seemed natural when she dropped out of school.

Some of Niagara's drawings included a nude male figure with long dark hair. This was her mysterious friend Cary, who she spoke of often. Cary Loren soon moved to Ann Arbor to join Niagara. They got an apartment not far from where I now lived, myself having also gotten out of my dorm (though not out of school). I would visit them there to listen to records and see the various items, the interesting trash, that they would collect off the street to decorate their home with. Cary made trash art - odd lumpen sculptures made of brightly painted papier mache which reminded me of the kinds of disturbing biomorphic forms found in paintings by Arshile Gorky as would be produced in a elementary school art class. He also made evil psychedelic collages on posterboard composed of low imagery cut from magazines intermixed with pulpy peaks of painted papier mache and small objects, such as bits of cheap jewelry and plastic trinkets from bubble gum machines. This street trash aesthetic extended into the social as well as the artistic, with the collection and documentation of Ann Arbor's rich street people community. Cary would post flyers on telephone poles around Ann Arbor advertising a free party. When the resulting strange mix of people showed up, the event was documented on film.

Cary made film collages as well, utilizing cutup commercial super 8 films and his own films of deviant behavior by his friends and young relatives, as well as more abstract stop motion animated films of common objects, like light bulbs, moving about. He also was constantly taking photographs and making audio recordings on a cheap portable cassette recorder. His photographs where especially interesting and ranged from close up still lives of small odd objects, to set up tableaus utilizing his friends that looked like dysfunctional perfume adds, to photos of Niagara: Niagara in underwear laying in a pool of blood at the bottom of a cellar stairway, or Niagara as a murderous vixen ala a cheap Mexican movie, or Niagara in gloomy cheesecake photos looking somewhat like Vampira, all looking as if they had been clipped from the pages of Police Detective magazine. He also made zines and chapbooks of his own writings, much of which was inspired by the imagery of Jack Smith (Cary every once in a while alluded to a mysterious episode when he ran off to New York to live at Jack Smith's Lower East Side plaster palace). Cary interfaced with the world through media. It was as if he took Warhol's novel A
(a verbatim transcription of "superstar" Ondine's conversations in the course of one day) as the model for his life. Daily life was art, and it should all be recorded. Interestingly, it was the act of recording, more than the final product, which was of interest. There was little attention paid to the quality of the various recordings themselves. Photographs, which he printed himself in a home darkroom, were poorly printed and fixed improperly so they soon faded, audio was taped on the cheapest cassettes (mostly used cassettes bought second hand or K-Mart brand three-pack cheapies). Daily life filtered through the media immediately became trash itself. Trash was life.

I lived a couple of blocks away in a three-story Victorian house housing a large enough group of freaks to make the rent affordable to everyone. I think around seven or eight people lived there. I moved into the basement, which cost me between 40 and 50 dollars a month. This house, it could be called a commune except no one shared anything, was called God's Oasis Drive In Church because a sign saying as much was nailed to the front porch. This sign was just one of many oddities that the house was museum to. The place reminded me of the Adam's Family home. Jim Shaw, who also lived in the house, had found most of these cultural cast-offs. Jim had a bloodhound's nose for weird things. He was dedicated to finding them. Garage sales and thrift stores were magnets to him. Unlike Cary, who had a fondness for junk with suburban Pop appeal, Jim went for the most surreal of cultural rejects: the crackpot, the outmoded yet unhip throwaways of all cultural periods. And all of these were piled in one immense heap oozing its way throughout the building. God's Oasis was decorated with a strange mix of 40s overstuffed furniture and flowery print curtains mixed indiscriminately with 50s boomerang pattern curtains, harlequin and ballerina paintings and lamps in the form of maraca-playing Latin musicians, all swamped in a tide of knick knacks and cultural oddities too numerous to list. In fact the house was barely habitable because of the large amount of garbage it was storehouse to.

I had met Jim very soon upon my arrival in art school. I noticed him immediately because of his odd dress. He wore the most amazing things: ladies' stretch pants, message-oriented t shirts that he would hand alter to pervert their uplifting slogans, bits of fast food restaurant uniforms, and a long flasher-type 40s storm coat that had a hump sewn on the back. To this hump he affixed a boy's jacket with award patches; he looked like Charles Manson with a Cub Scout growing out of his back. He was hard to miss. I also quite admired his artwork. Among many other things, he made paintings utilizing various psychosexual images derived from old advertisements mixed together in a seemingly random fashion on top of splatter color fields. These were often painted on top of the same kind of ugly old drapes, stretched over canvas stretchers, that were hanging in the house. The coloration of these paintings was quite dismal and weird, due to the fact that much of the oil paint that they were painted with was scrounged from the garbage can in the art school painting studios, deposited there after other students had scraped it off the pallets. I remember him distinctly using the garbage can itself as a palette, mixing the paint he found there right on the rim of the can. He was fond of the gray/brown sludge that accumulated on the bottom of the communal cans of paint thinner used to clean brushes. This would be used as the ground on which he painted - the primal void, if you will, that the painting cosmos grew out of.

I lived in the basement of God's Oasis. It was a large space, well suited to working and with all the luxuries of a true home - its own slop sink and toilet. My own world. In one corner was a raised concrete slab, about 4 by 8 feet in size. This is the corner where I slept, on an old single-frame metal hospital bed, which seemed appropriate since the basement was painted in fading hospital green. To differentiate my sleeping corner from the rest of the space I painted it pink. Next to my bed was the water heater for the house. The murmur of its pilot light lulled me to sleep at night. This underground enclave was to become the rehearsal room for Destroy All Monsters.

It was at a party in 1974 that the four of us, Jim, Cary, Niagara and myself decided to form a band. It was the natural thing to do, the perfect way to encapsulate the various public actions we were already engaged in. The form was right - popular, people will come see us instead of us having to fool them (this was a strategy Jim had employed before to get people to attend actions of his - he would make false flyers for nonexistent events, a speech by Baba Ram Das for example, to attract an audience). No one, except Cary, had any musical abilities. Cary could play guitar a bit. I went to K Mart with Jim and he bought the cheapest electric guitar you could buy, a Tesco, I think. He proceeded to "prepare" it in the manner of John Cage's pianos, with old tie clips, etc. We went to the organ shop and bought a used drum box to solve the drummer problem. I accumulated odd bits of electronic equipment - cheap electric organs, old PA systems and tape recorders which often would only feed back, and sound producing toys which I would highly amplify. I was a big fan of the way in which the Art Ensemble of Chicago used small sounds: bird calls, rattles, toys, which were put together in a fabric of never ending shifting assortments of little events that punctuated their frenetic shows. These little events, when highly amplified, had the power of heavy metal power chords. Each little sound could be an atomic explosion. Jim named the band. There was not much argument about it. The film, Destroy All Monsters, was loved by us all. It was "the ultimate monster party", the meeting of every Japanese monster on Monster Island to battle it out. This cacophony of bestial battle was what we were after. We loved the sound of Godzilla's roar - that backwards-sounding growl with a subliminal tolling bell buried in it, and the sweet cadences of the singing twins who were the consorts of Mothra. That was the dialectic we were after, Those was truly inspiring musics.

Destroy All Monsters in actuality never was one band but an agreement between two bands to share a name and sometimes perform together. On one side were Cary and Niagara, and on the other were Jim Shaw and I. Cary and Niagara were more interested in song structures and had a love of pop trash, glitter rock and gloom and doom Mansonesque imagery -very "witchy". They were fans of Bowie, T Rex, Roxy Music, the New York Dolls and such. Jim and I were more interested in pure noise and had little interest in bothering with song structures or pop licks, except as simple book-ending devices for the noise - like free jazz players, Coltrane for instance, would use pop standards such as Disney tunes to build off of and eventually fuck up and distort. Our tastes were somewhat different. Jim had a soft spot for gothic sweetness. He liked to listen to the death folk of the Incredible String Band, John Fahey, and the more depressing folksy Led Zepplin songs, and even pomp rock like Yes, which I could not stomach. Yet we did share a love of psychedelia and Sun Ra. At this time I was listening mostly to free jazz: Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp, the Art Ensemble, etc, and to German psychedelia and trance music: Popul Vuh, Can, Terry Riley. But there were a few things all of us could all agree on, and that was the noise rock of the first MC5 album, the Stooges, and the Velvet Underground. Those bands allowed for both the factory-driven pulse of metal and the electric wail of pure noise. Cary and Niagara began to write songs, Jim and I set up a situation where there was constant noise improvisation.

This structure did not allow for elaborately worked-out product. Instead, we would pick a situation, and just show up and play. We did not play publicly very much for the simple fact that there was no place to do so, and no audience for the kind of thing we were doing. Our first gig was at a comic book convention. We were not invited. We simply crashed the event, set up and played. This was how we got the majority of our gigs. We asked the band to use their PA system but after one song, a variation on Black Sabbath's Iron Man, we were asked to leave. We also played a Halloween show at the U of M art school where we did a minimalist version of Shaking All Over, the loft of local jazz musician Gerhard Schlanzky, and several private parties ­ one gig consisted only of an endless trance version of "Nature Boy." These are the only public gigs I can remember; though we also played quite often at open parties held at God's Oasis. Sometimes it would just be the God's Oasis half of the band, where Jim and I would be joined by some of the other peoples who lived at the house: John Reed on guitar, Kalle Nemvalts on trumpet or Dave Owen on clarinet. These were pure noise-fests dominated primarily by Jim Shaw's huge walls of distorted guitar feedback, and my other varied noise products: squealing amplified toys, saxophone or voice, tape effects, bashing metal and drums, etc. When Cary and Niagara joined us, we would try to accompany their gloomy lyrics (songs like: I'm Dead, You're Going to Die, I'm Bored, Acid Monster) as best we could, with me sometimes on drums and Niagara on scratchy John Cale-inspired violin. Cary and Niagara would take turns on the various songs. Cary had the better voice: a Jim Morrisonesque low tone, but Niagara was the center of attention. Niagara's anti-stage presence was captivating. Her emotionless monotone made Nico sound like a screamer, and generally she sang so softly you could barely hear her over the din. Oftentimes she would sing seated, facing away from the audience, and in one memorable show, she lay on the floor in a fetal position with her head on the pillow inside of the bass drum, letting out a pitiful cry every time the bass was struck, yet unwilling, or unable, to get up.

Not surprisingly, our music was pretty much despised. There was, at most, an audience of 50 people who had any interest in noise music in the Detroit area at that time. All of the members of Destroy All Monsters had grown up during the alternative cultural renaissance of the late Sixties. We had all been raised on the psychedelic excesses of the MC5 and the Stooges, and the general feeling of that time: that every form could be combined and all excesses were possible. Now we were in the dark ages. Detroit's economy had collapsed and taken with it its radical culture. Detroit was a dead city. And Ann Arbor, once the "drug capital of the Midwest", Eden to every unhappy teen-age runaway, home of the SDS, the White Panther Party, and a thriving radical intellectual scene, was now slipping back into being a sleepy and conservative fraternity-row college town. All of the musicians of the previous generation were trying to adapt to the cleaner hard rock sound of the day. Fred Smith's Sonic Rendezvous Band and Ron Asheton's New Order were dull plodding outfits, trying to match the success of Ted Nugent. I believe they were embarrassed at the psychedelic extravagances of their youth. And those of our own age were basking in the mellow sounds of country rock and the tired noodlings of the Alman brothers and the Grateful Dead. Things were very depressing. This was the milieu that birthed Destroy All Monsters. We were designed to be a "fuck you" to the prevailing popular culture.

I, personally, saw no future in it and left for California to attend graduate school, soon followed by Jim Shaw. After our departure, Cary brought Ron Asheton into the band. The trials and battles of that group are another story - though a quite interesting one, and I'll leave that to the participants to tell.

Mike Kelley
1993

---