Appetite For Distortion

C.A. QUINTET - Trip Thru Hell (1969)

This is the kinda album I was forever seeking back in Thee Olde Record Store Clerk Daze-- y'know, the kind that'd jump out atcha no matter how large the sluice of product ya hadda pick through whilst stocking the shelves was... I mean, lookit that cover art! Hieronymus Bosch as reinterpreted by a stoned kid in 11th Grade recently enthralled by Dante's Inferno... song titles like "Cold Spider," "Underground Music" and "Sleepy Hollow Lane"-- it's obvious it can't miss! And it doesn't-- we're talkin 'bout a bargain basement version of Deep Purple or mebbe the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, complete with majestic church organ, wild, wah'd fuzz geetars, ethereal, choral femme backing vox and detours into Morricone-like Spaghetti Western passages with blaring brass. Turns out the C.A. Quintet were the brainchild of Ken Erwin, a teenage, Minneapolis-based singer-songwriter & multi-instrumentalist who'd never touched anything stronger than cough syrup (ah, but was it Romilar?) until AFTER "Trip"'s release. See kids: Ya don't need to inundate your defenseless braincells with toxic chemicals. Why, if you stay on the straight & narrow, you too may form your own Psychedelic Mariachi Marching Band From Purgatory some day.

Enter your perdition in the comments.


MICHAEL YONKERS - Microminiature Love

"The body was sawed off, and it was silvery, and there were a couple of large knobs on it, and --I swear this is true --some kind of antenna thing sticking out of it. Kind of spronging around, like a prop from a 1950s science-fiction movie. Then he plugged it in and we went for the first take. Hraww wrahhraw hhharah hhhrahhh! It was wah-wah-ing even before I knew what a wah-wah was! And I started laughing, it was such a shock!"

--- Recording engineer Steve Longman on his first encounter with Michael Yonkers & his heavily-modified guitar

In keeping with that ever-elusive "conceptual continuity" a certain Mr. Zappa useta harp on about, I give thee another underground legend from the Land of 10,000 Lakes: Michael Yonkers. This is one o' those platters that is often relegated to the "Record Collector Rock" pile by snobby rockcrits (no money to be made pimping this kinda stuff, y'see) insuring that only a handful of those of us with an Appetite For Distortion will ever seek it out. You can remedy this situation by playing it for yer granny and gramps, 2.4 kids, Ma and Pa... it should be experienced by all and sundry.

A DIY electronics wizard, Yonkers cut his Telecaster in half, outfitting it with a variety of homemade effects and gadgets (the "antenna" that Longman saw was actually a theremin protruding from Yonkers' guitar case-- he'd made it out of a PIAA kit)-- oscillators, a makeshift echoplex constructed from a cassette deck with an extra recording head-- he also designed his own distortion boxes, one of which, the "Fuzz 'N' Bark," earned raves from local musicians. "Microminature Love" was recorded at Minneapolis' famed Dove Studios in an hour-long session (!) in 1969-- most tracks being (natch) one take wonders (!). Initially, a deal was in place with Sire Records to release it, but for reasons unknown, this never came to be. The master tapes languished in Yonkers' house for 35 years.

According to legend, Yonkers discovered his odd guitar tuning when he accidentally knocked over his axe at a gig-- liking what he heard at first strum, he memorized the outta whack timbre and began using it regularly as it also conformed nicely to his vocal pitch. Its mournful drone blends in perfectly with the all-pervasive sense of doom hovering over this LP-- Vietnam figures prominently in the lyrics, albeit in a cryptically poetic way, making this a work very much relevant to the political climate of today. Ditties like "Kill the Enemy" and "Boy in the Sandbox" positively reek of death-- the latter particularly affecting with its irony-laden storyline-- a boy who loved to play with his toy soldiers in his sandbox, growing to adulthood, sent to war and ultimately, "a tomb of sand."

It is Yonkers' fretwork that will keep you returning to MML, though-- whirring and sloshing around in shapeless fragments one moment, slicing through the murk with punkish authority the next. I can think of no one doing anything quite this extreme at the time-- not the Stooges, the 'Five or even VU's epic odysseys into Feedback Hell on the dozens of live boots I've heard. Yonkers was exploring a musical dimension that contained only himself-- and fuck all the high-falutin' types that would dismiss this magnificent goop as yet another poorly-executed stab at "downer rock": Michael Yonkers was/is a one-of-a-kind innovator on par with Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman and Sonny Sharrock. Too bad we had to wait over three decades to find that out.

Look in comments.