a detailed history of
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I met Jaffe in August of 1981 while I was working as a prep cook at The Jumping Beanery Mexican Restaurant (owned by Keith Kauffman) at 7035 Michigan Road in Indianapolis. I was 23 years old and living at home with my parents.
I went to work every morning at 5:30 and chopped up 50-pound bags of onions; diced big cans full of jalapeno peppers; shredded 25-pound blocks of cheese; and prepared items like chimichangas and quesadillas, to be used later by the cooks. It was a boring job and didn’t pay much, but it did give me spending money with which to buy records.
One day at work I saw Jaffe’s personal ad in Hot Potato (a free local entertainment magazine) seeking people to play music with. She was looking for people who were into such “weird” music artists as Talking Heads, Red Crayola, Gruppo Sportivo and Patti Smith.
Jaffe remembers the ad differently: “My mom was moving and I needed a roommate so I could attempt to pay the rent.”
I telephoned her from work. We chatted briefly and made arrangements to meet.
I borrowed my parents’ automobile and drove to her apartment on West 38th Street. We talked about all our favorite musical artists. She played a few of her favorite records for me.
At the time I had a short, spiky haircut like John Lydon of Public Image Ltd., and always wore a black jacket over a brightly colored T-shirt.
I wanted to give her a sample of the kind of creative things I did. So, banging on a tambourine, I declaimed a lyric I had composed in a loud, booming voice:
“Brother, brother, brother
won’t you lend me a hand?...”
and “Sister, sister, sister...”
...all very pseudo-soulful and full of that world-consciousness love-fellowship I-deeply-care-about-my-fellow man kind of thing.
I guess she was impressed, or at least not sufficiently embarrassed to kick me out the door. Later she told me that her mother Dorothy wanted to know how anyone could be so rude to come into someone else’s apartment like that and do all that shouting!
Debbie and I made plans to go visit her friends Rick Karcasheff and David Mattingly, who knew a lot about weird avant garde music. I picked her up in my parents’ car a few days after we first met, and we traveled to Rick’s house on North Park Avenue in the hip part of town, the Broad Ripple area.
I was amazed at the thousands of records and tapes that lined the walls and filled the cabinets and closets of Rick’s house. Rick and David had turned Debbie on to a lot of cool music by artists she’d never heard of before.
They had a group called Gabble Ratchet and they played analog synthesizers and recorded their noisy experimental music on cassette tapes. Jack Sexson (pop music artist John Hiatt’s brother-in-law) played electric guitar as a member of Gabble Ratchet.
Jaffe recalls how she met Rick and Dave:
“I read their letter to the editor in The Hot Potato about "alternative/underground" music, or some such , and being completely bored and frustrated in Marion [a small town where she lived before moving to the apartment in Indianapolis], I wrote a rebuttal letter and sent it in.
“The editor called me to tell me he ran my letter and that Rick & David wanted to contact me. I said sure. Rick called and ‘tested’ my knowledge of weird music (weird at the time seemed to be Laurie Anderson). I faked it and got a ‘B-’ (he informed me of this grade!).
“He came up and brought me back to Indianapolis where he played Throbbing Gristle, Lemon Kittens and more for me for the first time. I was stunned to hear such music and thrilled to be a part of something.
“Once I moved to Indianapolis they got 'too depressed' to record, so that was that. But I do credit them for introducing me to the strangest, weirdest music I've ever heard that set me on a path to find more like it.”
Debbie and I became best friends. We enjoyed each other’s company and had a lot to talk about. We often went to the Steak N Shake restaurant near Deb’s apartment late at night and talked about art and music and our experiences over endless cups of coffee until three or four in the morning.
We listened to a lot of commercial music records back then. Our favorites were Patti Smith , Talking Heads , Eno, Bowie, Cluster, Public Image Ltd., Captain Beefheart, The Cure, Iggy Pop, Kraftwerk, Blondie, B-52s, and The Roches.
Debbie and I went over to Rick’s a lot to hang out and listen to all those really great records and tapes he had so many of.
There were always interesting people to meet when we went over to Rick’s. There was always plenty of wine, tequila and vodka, and marijuana. Often there would be poetry readings, in which many of those present would recite something they had written.
Rick played for us classic underground albums by The Residents, Lemon Kittens, Cabaret Voltaire, Whitehouse, Throbbing Gristle and Nurse With Wound.
He also played some interesting avant garde classical records by Philip Glass, Glenn Branca, and Terry Riley.
Rick introduced us to some intense post-punk rock music by Joy Division, Bauhaus, Wire, Durutti Column, Chrome, Pere Ubu, and New Order.
He also turned us on to a lot of the great classic artists of Progressive Rock: Heldon, Magma, Henry Cow, Art Bears, Gong, Amon Duul, Faust, Univers Zero, Popol Vuh, Ash Ra Tempel, and especially Can and Soft Machine.
I owe Rick a debt of gratitude for introducing me to such a lot of challenging art music.
Rick published a small press zine called The Active Listener, which contained poetry and prose by Rick and some of his friends. He wrote reviews, and critical articles about a lot of the great music he was collecting.
It was in The Active Listener that we read about a lot of the artists we would come to love, admire and emulate.
Rick was the first to stress to me the importance of the listener in postmodern avant garde experimental music. The listener must complete the equation. In a sense the listener must complete the audio work by active listening. This meant that the listener not only had to have an open mind for new, challenging sounds, but it was also a challenge to the listener to interpret, to make of the work what they would. Clouds in the sky. What do you see?
We also visited other people we knew:
---my best friend since grade school, Toby O’Brien....
---a waitress friend of mine from The Jumping Beanery, Trish.
---a rock guitar player named Roger Vice.
We always took our portable cassette recorder to capture the drunken, high party conversation or a poetry or abstract poetry rave-up or rock jam session.
About a month after I met Deb I moved into her apartment.
I looked forward to a life of living my art, living with and mingling with people whose main love was artistic things.
It was good to have a close friend with whom to do lots of artistic activities:
--painting and photography
--writing poetry and prose and manifestos about everything and nothing
--and constructing photocopy collages.
We employed elements of improvisation, chance process, coincidence, randomness and juxtaposition not only in our artistic works, but in our daily lives as well.
It was fun to stay up late at night, drinking cheap lambrusco or coffee and smoking pot (when we could afford it for ourselves). We recorded ourselves acting our poems, kind of a little audiocassette theater. Sometimes while one of us intoned or rhythmically chanted the words, the other might beat on sticks or cans or a tambourine or whatever was around or chatter nonsense or howl or moan in counterpoint to the other’s declaiming.
At that time the emphasis of our activities was words, not music. Words: chopped, inverted, chosen arbitrarily, often used for their sounds and how those sounds sounded with other word sounds, employed as weapons to disrupt or destroy themselves.
We both had read a lot of the Beat writers. In college I had read all of Jack Kerouac’s novels.
I absolutely devoured everything by William Burroughs. Burroughs has been the single biggest inspiration on my artistic activities, ideas and development.
I had attempted at times to write like Kerouac and Burroughs. I’d gone on road trips and hitchhiked; drank a lot of wine and smoked cigarettes and pot; had kept journals from time to time.
I had tried to get in touch with the real inner me – underneath all the piled-up layers of societal conditioning, the mind-numbing mediocrity of middle class life and the utter mindlessness of mass media entertainment. I wanted to be free of all societal restrictions and be an artist and live for my art.
Debbie published a small press magazine called 12 Seconds Of Laughter, the subject of which was “the obscure, in all forms”.
She described 12 Seconds Of Laughter as appealing “... to intelligent readers who can recognize the absurd and ridiculous in all the ‘serious institutions’ in our society...”.
Debbie took photos from foreign film catalogues, nonsense absurdist phonetic poems, cut-outs from advertisements, tracts, etc. and collaged them together to make non-statements about “love, sex, politics, psychology, religion”.
In March 2000 Jaffe wrote:
“People didn't know what to make of 12SOL. Was it serious fictional literature? No. Was it informational? No. Was it humor? Maybe, but strange humor.”
After publishing three issues – the second and third issues were titled 13 Seconds Of Laughter and 14 Seconds Of Laughter – she conceived of an audio version on cassette.
60 Minutes Of Laughter was a compilation of audio routines of material by ourselves and our friends that Debbie and I had recorded on a small portable “shoebox” cassette recorder during 1981 and 1982.
We recorded all of the original material on 60 Minutes Of Laughter on cheap 29-cent Certron cassettes that we bought several in a bag, without cases, in drugstores.
Deb made a collage of these live performance recordings with various segments from poetry and language instruction records, a Wurlitzer organ, domestic audio scenes, her junior high school band and sundry sonic doodles.
Jaffe constructed it on our Pioneer cassette deck at our place at 821 North Pennsylvania Avenue in Indianapolis, Autumn 1982.
60 Minutes Of Laughter consists of more than 50 audio fragments, extracts and routines.
60 Minutes Of Laughter was not intended for the home audiotaper scene, of which we knew little or nothing at that time.
60 Minutes Of Laughter was not intended even for the mail art people.
60 Minutes Of Laughter was an audio issue of a small home press poetry zine, and was intended for the small press poetry zine scene.
60 Minutes Of Laughter addressed all the same issues (love, sex, politics, psychology, religion) as 12 SOL.
Debbie wrote:
“60 MOL was a collage of sounds in a similar vein only using auditory sounds instead of words and graphics on paper.
“It wasn't intended for a lot of people to understand. It was part of the home taper scene, in the sense it was taped at home (!) but .... not in the sense of it trying to be serious music, per se. I took it all very seriously at the time, but also was aware that most people wouldn't get it. But that was one of the reasons FOR doing it! If that makes any sense!”
60 Minutes Of Laughter was my big introduction to the world of audio art! I subsequently developed and reiterated many of the ideas and themes on 60 Minutes Of Laughter throughout my long career as a home audio artist.
The original recordings of works by Jaffe and McGee from that Autumn and Winter of 1981 were intended as documents of performances of:
--abstract sound poetry.
--deconstructed rock music.
--our first experiments with noise and ambient music.
The recordings of our first works as a duo under the name Viscera, came from several months later, in Summer ‘82.
60 Minutes Of Laughter is loaded with audio poetics. We tried a little of every different method we read about, adapted, or thought up ourselves.
DJ & HM
Red House Blue House
Bird Is Dead
Public Lavatory/Blue Light
I Don’t Understand
Burnt Circuits
Tiger Talk
Why Do You Do It?
Debbie and I recorded numerous simultaneous poems.
We chose texts from a wide variety of sources -- our own poems, magazine articles, shopping lists, advertisements, The Bible, etc.
The often arbitrarily-chosen texts clashed, collided and melted into one another. They seemed to come together, to resonate, to almost mean something at times; at other times they canceled each other out. Drifting in and out of sync. Phasing meanings, near-meanings, near-misses. The words, borne along on voices, were shaped and re-shaped by the eddies and currents of the event.
Tristan Tzara, Richard Huelsenbeck and Marcel Janco had performed simultaneous poems to bewildered audiences at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in 1916.
The Dadaists’ simultaneous poems were a form of nihilist protest intended to destroy words. They viewed words as poisonous instruments of so-called rational thought -- the same kind of thinking that had led to the outrageous, unprecedented bloodshed of the First World War.
Simultaneous poetry was just one of many methods we employed in our efforts to demystify, decode and strip words of their excess baggage. The mass media, the church and politicians, acting as sinister servants of the military-industrial complex, had used words as psychological tools of control to promote and sustain sexism, racism, nationalism and all prejudices that fetter the human mind and spirit.
We also wanted to re-empower words by reconnecting them with the voice in a mystical reunion in which the world is reborn, revivified.
We explored the rich possibilities of chance process, juxtaposition and coincidence. Meanings, if any, arise from unexpected concurrences/ confluences.
We wondered whether there is really any such thing as coincidence, as accident, in this universe. Or is everything that happens meant to happen that way? Is every event fortuitous? Does every event, intended by human will, or not, have significance? In other words: is the Universe revealing itself to us?...
We were very idealistic at that time.
We stripped the words from the page, removed them from the world of sign...cast them into a vocal cauldron...stirred them in with other ingredients...captured by a tiny condenser microphone on a portable tape recorder...and recorded onto a cheap-quality electromagnetic audiocassette tape.
I went to work every morning at 5:30 and chopped up 50-pound bags of onions; diced big cans full of jalapeno peppers; shredded 25-pound blocks of cheese; and prepared items like chimichangas and quesadillas, to be used later by the cooks. It was a boring job and didn’t pay much, but it did give me spending money with which to buy records.
One day at work I saw Jaffe’s personal ad in Hot Potato (a free local entertainment magazine) seeking people to play music with. She was looking for people who were into such “weird” music artists as Talking Heads, Red Crayola, Gruppo Sportivo and Patti Smith.
Jaffe remembers the ad differently: “My mom was moving and I needed a roommate so I could attempt to pay the rent.”
I telephoned her from work. We chatted briefly and made arrangements to meet.
I borrowed my parents’ automobile and drove to her apartment on West 38th Street. We talked about all our favorite musical artists. She played a few of her favorite records for me.
At the time I had a short, spiky haircut like John Lydon of Public Image Ltd., and always wore a black jacket over a brightly colored T-shirt.
I wanted to give her a sample of the kind of creative things I did. So, banging on a tambourine, I declaimed a lyric I had composed in a loud, booming voice:
“Brother, brother, brother
won’t you lend me a hand?...”
and “Sister, sister, sister...”
...all very pseudo-soulful and full of that world-consciousness love-fellowship I-deeply-care-about-my-fellow man kind of thing.
I guess she was impressed, or at least not sufficiently embarrassed to kick me out the door. Later she told me that her mother Dorothy wanted to know how anyone could be so rude to come into someone else’s apartment like that and do all that shouting!
Debbie and I made plans to go visit her friends Rick Karcasheff and David Mattingly, who knew a lot about weird avant garde music. I picked her up in my parents’ car a few days after we first met, and we traveled to Rick’s house on North Park Avenue in the hip part of town, the Broad Ripple area.
I was amazed at the thousands of records and tapes that lined the walls and filled the cabinets and closets of Rick’s house. Rick and David had turned Debbie on to a lot of cool music by artists she’d never heard of before.
They had a group called Gabble Ratchet and they played analog synthesizers and recorded their noisy experimental music on cassette tapes. Jack Sexson (pop music artist John Hiatt’s brother-in-law) played electric guitar as a member of Gabble Ratchet.
Jaffe recalls how she met Rick and Dave:
“I read their letter to the editor in The Hot Potato about "alternative/underground" music, or some such , and being completely bored and frustrated in Marion [a small town where she lived before moving to the apartment in Indianapolis], I wrote a rebuttal letter and sent it in.
“The editor called me to tell me he ran my letter and that Rick & David wanted to contact me. I said sure. Rick called and ‘tested’ my knowledge of weird music (weird at the time seemed to be Laurie Anderson). I faked it and got a ‘B-’ (he informed me of this grade!).
“He came up and brought me back to Indianapolis where he played Throbbing Gristle, Lemon Kittens and more for me for the first time. I was stunned to hear such music and thrilled to be a part of something.
“Once I moved to Indianapolis they got 'too depressed' to record, so that was that. But I do credit them for introducing me to the strangest, weirdest music I've ever heard that set me on a path to find more like it.”
Debbie and I became best friends. We enjoyed each other’s company and had a lot to talk about. We often went to the Steak N Shake restaurant near Deb’s apartment late at night and talked about art and music and our experiences over endless cups of coffee until three or four in the morning.
We listened to a lot of commercial music records back then. Our favorites were Patti Smith , Talking Heads , Eno, Bowie, Cluster, Public Image Ltd., Captain Beefheart, The Cure, Iggy Pop, Kraftwerk, Blondie, B-52s, and The Roches.
Debbie and I went over to Rick’s a lot to hang out and listen to all those really great records and tapes he had so many of.
There were always interesting people to meet when we went over to Rick’s. There was always plenty of wine, tequila and vodka, and marijuana. Often there would be poetry readings, in which many of those present would recite something they had written.
Rick played for us classic underground albums by The Residents, Lemon Kittens, Cabaret Voltaire, Whitehouse, Throbbing Gristle and Nurse With Wound.
He also played some interesting avant garde classical records by Philip Glass, Glenn Branca, and Terry Riley.
Rick introduced us to some intense post-punk rock music by Joy Division, Bauhaus, Wire, Durutti Column, Chrome, Pere Ubu, and New Order.
He also turned us on to a lot of the great classic artists of Progressive Rock: Heldon, Magma, Henry Cow, Art Bears, Gong, Amon Duul, Faust, Univers Zero, Popol Vuh, Ash Ra Tempel, and especially Can and Soft Machine.
I owe Rick a debt of gratitude for introducing me to such a lot of challenging art music.
Rick published a small press zine called The Active Listener, which contained poetry and prose by Rick and some of his friends. He wrote reviews, and critical articles about a lot of the great music he was collecting.
It was in The Active Listener that we read about a lot of the artists we would come to love, admire and emulate.
Rick was the first to stress to me the importance of the listener in postmodern avant garde experimental music. The listener must complete the equation. In a sense the listener must complete the audio work by active listening. This meant that the listener not only had to have an open mind for new, challenging sounds, but it was also a challenge to the listener to interpret, to make of the work what they would. Clouds in the sky. What do you see?
We also visited other people we knew:
---my best friend since grade school, Toby O’Brien....
---a waitress friend of mine from The Jumping Beanery, Trish.
---a rock guitar player named Roger Vice.
We always took our portable cassette recorder to capture the drunken, high party conversation or a poetry or abstract poetry rave-up or rock jam session.
About a month after I met Deb I moved into her apartment.
I looked forward to a life of living my art, living with and mingling with people whose main love was artistic things.
It was good to have a close friend with whom to do lots of artistic activities:
--painting and photography
--writing poetry and prose and manifestos about everything and nothing
--and constructing photocopy collages.
We employed elements of improvisation, chance process, coincidence, randomness and juxtaposition not only in our artistic works, but in our daily lives as well.
It was fun to stay up late at night, drinking cheap lambrusco or coffee and smoking pot (when we could afford it for ourselves). We recorded ourselves acting our poems, kind of a little audiocassette theater. Sometimes while one of us intoned or rhythmically chanted the words, the other might beat on sticks or cans or a tambourine or whatever was around or chatter nonsense or howl or moan in counterpoint to the other’s declaiming.
At that time the emphasis of our activities was words, not music. Words: chopped, inverted, chosen arbitrarily, often used for their sounds and how those sounds sounded with other word sounds, employed as weapons to disrupt or destroy themselves.
We both had read a lot of the Beat writers. In college I had read all of Jack Kerouac’s novels.
I absolutely devoured everything by William Burroughs. Burroughs has been the single biggest inspiration on my artistic activities, ideas and development.
I had attempted at times to write like Kerouac and Burroughs. I’d gone on road trips and hitchhiked; drank a lot of wine and smoked cigarettes and pot; had kept journals from time to time.
I had tried to get in touch with the real inner me – underneath all the piled-up layers of societal conditioning, the mind-numbing mediocrity of middle class life and the utter mindlessness of mass media entertainment. I wanted to be free of all societal restrictions and be an artist and live for my art.
Debbie published a small press magazine called 12 Seconds Of Laughter, the subject of which was “the obscure, in all forms”.
She described 12 Seconds Of Laughter as appealing “... to intelligent readers who can recognize the absurd and ridiculous in all the ‘serious institutions’ in our society...”.
Debbie took photos from foreign film catalogues, nonsense absurdist phonetic poems, cut-outs from advertisements, tracts, etc. and collaged them together to make non-statements about “love, sex, politics, psychology, religion”.
In March 2000 Jaffe wrote:
“People didn't know what to make of 12SOL. Was it serious fictional literature? No. Was it informational? No. Was it humor? Maybe, but strange humor.”
After publishing three issues – the second and third issues were titled 13 Seconds Of Laughter and 14 Seconds Of Laughter – she conceived of an audio version on cassette.
60 Minutes Of Laughter was a compilation of audio routines of material by ourselves and our friends that Debbie and I had recorded on a small portable “shoebox” cassette recorder during 1981 and 1982.
We recorded all of the original material on 60 Minutes Of Laughter on cheap 29-cent Certron cassettes that we bought several in a bag, without cases, in drugstores.
Deb made a collage of these live performance recordings with various segments from poetry and language instruction records, a Wurlitzer organ, domestic audio scenes, her junior high school band and sundry sonic doodles.
Jaffe constructed it on our Pioneer cassette deck at our place at 821 North Pennsylvania Avenue in Indianapolis, Autumn 1982.
60 Minutes Of Laughter consists of more than 50 audio fragments, extracts and routines.
60 Minutes Of Laughter was not intended for the home audiotaper scene, of which we knew little or nothing at that time.
60 Minutes Of Laughter was not intended even for the mail art people.
60 Minutes Of Laughter was an audio issue of a small home press poetry zine, and was intended for the small press poetry zine scene.
60 Minutes Of Laughter addressed all the same issues (love, sex, politics, psychology, religion) as 12 SOL.
Debbie wrote:
“60 MOL was a collage of sounds in a similar vein only using auditory sounds instead of words and graphics on paper.
“It wasn't intended for a lot of people to understand. It was part of the home taper scene, in the sense it was taped at home (!) but .... not in the sense of it trying to be serious music, per se. I took it all very seriously at the time, but also was aware that most people wouldn't get it. But that was one of the reasons FOR doing it! If that makes any sense!”
60 Minutes Of Laughter was my big introduction to the world of audio art! I subsequently developed and reiterated many of the ideas and themes on 60 Minutes Of Laughter throughout my long career as a home audio artist.
The original recordings of works by Jaffe and McGee from that Autumn and Winter of 1981 were intended as documents of performances of:
--abstract sound poetry.
--deconstructed rock music.
--our first experiments with noise and ambient music.
The recordings of our first works as a duo under the name Viscera, came from several months later, in Summer ‘82.
60 Minutes Of Laughter is loaded with audio poetics. We tried a little of every different method we read about, adapted, or thought up ourselves.
DJ & HM
Red House Blue House
Bird Is Dead
Public Lavatory/Blue Light
I Don’t Understand
Burnt Circuits
Tiger Talk
Why Do You Do It?
Debbie and I recorded numerous simultaneous poems.
We chose texts from a wide variety of sources -- our own poems, magazine articles, shopping lists, advertisements, The Bible, etc.
The often arbitrarily-chosen texts clashed, collided and melted into one another. They seemed to come together, to resonate, to almost mean something at times; at other times they canceled each other out. Drifting in and out of sync. Phasing meanings, near-meanings, near-misses. The words, borne along on voices, were shaped and re-shaped by the eddies and currents of the event.
Tristan Tzara, Richard Huelsenbeck and Marcel Janco had performed simultaneous poems to bewildered audiences at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in 1916.
The Dadaists’ simultaneous poems were a form of nihilist protest intended to destroy words. They viewed words as poisonous instruments of so-called rational thought -- the same kind of thinking that had led to the outrageous, unprecedented bloodshed of the First World War.
Simultaneous poetry was just one of many methods we employed in our efforts to demystify, decode and strip words of their excess baggage. The mass media, the church and politicians, acting as sinister servants of the military-industrial complex, had used words as psychological tools of control to promote and sustain sexism, racism, nationalism and all prejudices that fetter the human mind and spirit.
We also wanted to re-empower words by reconnecting them with the voice in a mystical reunion in which the world is reborn, revivified.
We explored the rich possibilities of chance process, juxtaposition and coincidence. Meanings, if any, arise from unexpected concurrences/ confluences.
We wondered whether there is really any such thing as coincidence, as accident, in this universe. Or is everything that happens meant to happen that way? Is every event fortuitous? Does every event, intended by human will, or not, have significance? In other words: is the Universe revealing itself to us?...
We were very idealistic at that time.
We stripped the words from the page, removed them from the world of sign...cast them into a vocal cauldron...stirred them in with other ingredients...captured by a tiny condenser microphone on a portable tape recorder...and recorded onto a cheap-quality electromagnetic audiocassette tape.
Jolifanto Karawane & Mipoola Palinga
The Sanctuary
Dharma Proclivity/The Butchered Calf
Deb not only introduced me to a lot of really interesting music, but also a lot of interesting books. One that made a big impression on me was Dada: Art And Anti-Art by Hans Richter.
We wrote lots of Dada-flavored poetry and recorded ourselves reading them, often simultaneously.
The Sanctuary
Debbie and I read in the newspaper that a local Country & Western Music bar called The Sanctuary had an open microphone night every Wednesday. Anybody could go into the little performance area and play a song.
We plotted to go to the open mike night and do something really off the wall and prove to those Country & Western Music people just how shallow and conditioned and backwards they really were. We were going to try to freak them out!
We constructed big paper cones to put on our heads. We chose Dada names for ourselves: I was Jolifanto Karawane. Debbie was named Mipoola Palinga. We wrote our new names on the hats. I taped the words of Hugo Ball’s Dada abstract phonetic poem “gadgi beri bimba” (1916) onto my beat-up $70 acoustic guitar. We both donned long black coats.
Debbie and I had to walk several blocks to get to The Sanctuary on a cold, windy day in November 1981. It was near sunset and the clouds to the west were streaked pink and dark purple.
I smoked a lot of cigarettes as I walked and talked with Deb...plotting. I squinted a lot because the setting sun hurt my eyes.
Debbie took her sunglasses out of her coat pocket and put them on. After a few minutes she began to complain of her eyes and face hurting and burning. Her face turned bright red, sweat poured off her face and tears streamed out of her eyes. It was an awful situation. She was in a lot of pain and I felt really sorry for her.
We figured out that she had put her sunglasses in the same pocket in which she kept a spraycan of mace, and that some mace had gotten on the glasses and then onto her face.
When we got to The Sanctuary she went to the women’s room and splashed cold water on her face to try to get the burning to stop. It was quite a scene and everybody was staring at us. Finally, Deb was able to come out into the club. We had signed up for third spot on the open mike night bill.
The two performers before us were guys with shiny shoulder-length hair and beards who wore jeans and plaid shirts and wore pointed boots and sang gentle, sensitive, melodic songs of country folk pop stuff.
They sang songs by John Denver and Dan Fogelberg or sang their own original songs which tried to sound like John Denver and Dan Fogelberg, with lyrics about mountains and country roads and wild flowers and how the eagle flies free and proud and about true love and their truest friend, their guitar.
When it was our turn we donned our big tall cardboard cone-hats and walked to the stage. Deb went to the microphone on a stand stage right. I sat down in a chair in front of a boom mike lowered to my mouth level. At this point I don’t think the audience suspected too much of anything out of the ordinary, except there seemed to be some whispering about the paper cones on our heads.
I spoke into the microphone, addressing the audience:
“The first step is to realize you’re asleep.
I mean, would it really matter if you stuck your head in a Waring blender?”
I began to rub and scrape a grooved stick against the guitar strings, pulling the stick back and forth roughly over the strings and striking the body of the guitar with my hands and the stick.
I increased the speed of the rubbing and striking and abrasive scraping up to a big crescendo. I cried out in a loud voice inflected with a pseudo-Caribbean-tribal wail, stretching the phrasing out and down and around as far as I could:
Gadji beri bimba!
Debbie took up the response in a long cascade of wails, yelps and pseudo-operatics. Our vocal lines crashed into silence.
Then I took up the next call:
Glandridi lauli lonni cadori...
We continued this call and response of a line from Ball’s poem with Debbie providing the elements of contrast, background and setting. Debbie warbled and chirped and giggled like a maniac and screamed and bellowed out and swooped in big arcs up and down.
I leaned into the microphone, coughed up the words, rolled and gargled them around in my mouth and throat and spitted and barked them out – going through a rapid-fire catalog of exaggerated phrasings, monkey chattering, accents and character voices from Monty Python and bad jungle movies.
The audience soon started to make lots of noise, with lots of loud talking and people standing up, shouting and yelling and shaking their hands and gesticulating.
People yelled out their responses to what we were doing, things like: Devo! Was it because we were wearing the cones on our heads? Were they thinking of the cover of Freedom Of Choice, on which Devo are wearing inverted flowerpots on their heads? We looked more like The Coneheads (a family of outer space aliens living among Earthlings) from Saturday Night Live.
The audience reacted to the alien-ness of what we were doing. It wasn’t music in the sense they understood it. I’m sure a lot of those people thought that Devo couldn’t really play their instruments, that what they did wasn’t real music.
Devo’s stuff was stiff and nerdy and mechanical-sounding and ironic and poking fun at the musical and social values the audience honored. It wasn’t about being mellow and laid-back and sensitive.
We were up there making a bunch of racket, just yelling a bunch of stuff, and me beating and misusing and abusing my guitar.
After several minutes of this chaos we brought the assault to a close and the audience burst out yelling and clapping and shouting – united together in their response to us. As we finished a guy in the audience yelled out “Heil Hitler!”. And the rest of the audience burst out cheering and laughing in agreement at the sentiment. They were clearly excited and everybody was having a good time.
We were scared and decided it would be a good idea to pack our stuff and head out the door as quickly as possible before we were attacked. Neither of us wanted to get beaten up and we didn’t think it was unlikely if we hung around much longer.
Just before we reached the exit this big burly guy stood in our way and growled in a low, gruff tone (with perhaps an undertone of admiration), “What you did took a lot of balls...”. We hoped that was a good thing, muttered thanks, and made our way out into the cold night air.
Well, we had certainly gotten a response! Best of all, not lukewarm. I’m sure we congratulated ourselves on how clever and right we’d been – they were all asleep in their mundane, unimaginative lives. They all lived their lives by formulas, and they couldn’t understand anything outside their own stale conformity. We had proven it all through this demonstration of the politics of confrontation, we figured.
It was a cheap shot, I admit. We picked an easy target to outrage. We were making fun of them and a lot of them knew it and didn’t like it.
I also admit it was a cheap pseudo-Dada take off, and really pretty silly. But it had been a daring thing to do, and we had succeeded! We went after a big reaction and we got one.
If nothing else, we got a good tape out of our performance “Live At The Sanctuary”. The tape is all that remains now any way.
Selected words from
Dharma Proclivity/The Butchered Calf
... for the paint on your head
When the words become drowned in the quacking of tongues and melting of scissors
When pastels over a castle battlement forget their own residents
The rising and falling of birds on a stick
Fly – fly – to – across the room and fill the whole world with failing pantaloons
Can we gain insight into failure?
With one toe scratched
With one finger bugged
Like your bedroom with goats
************ for exquisite dharma proclivity
Epoch-making monthly pretty good for duck inchoate clues
It’s parody – words! – words!
like toothbrush fibers stuck between deadly providential demographic psychic teeth
Melting of scissors
The pet blues in spots
Women are Kwakiutl incompatible
Figures figures about sex-stitching up
Keep your club members x-y-z’d, fagged plus
Happy with cow fecal faucet empty boxes
Up-stitch with hope that died
A sound of shadow
What is she doing?: Failing?
New kind of TV-watching
Speed up – where they should be
For gibberish club sandwich
L-l-l-laugh at the butchered calf
B-b-b-b-b-b-burning b-b-bush
H-h-h-harmony
C-c-c-calumny
S-s-s-symphony
R-r-r-rhapsody
P-p-p-polyphony
M-m-m-monophony
Sing alone in the shower
Dancing Invisibles:
Floatin’ On The Waves and
Airplanes And Engines (Are Beautiful)
Roger Vice was a guitar player Debbie had contacted, probably through the same advertisement to which I had responded.
Deb and I went over to his apartment a couple of times in October of 1981. We tried to work out some songs, with Deb and I doing some vocals along with Roger’s hot electric playing.
Roger greatly admired rock singer Tom Petty. He looked like he stepped out of the cover photograph of Petty’s 1979 album Damn The Torpedoes. He dressed like Petty, had a guitar that looked like Petty’s, and most importantly, had a haircut like Petty’s.
It’s really not fair of me to poke fun at Vice. I have had my own share of pop star idolatry.
The excerpts from “Airplanes And Engines” were extracted from an epic nine-minute version. I had written a poem of several pages treating the subject of how technology, in spite of its drawbacks, will be the instrument through which we will transcend earthly, bodily limitations and enter into different realms of the spirit or consciousness.
Jim Morrison of The Doors was one of my pop idols. On this song I do my very worst imitation of The Lizard King’s crooning vocal style.
It all seems like pretty serious stuff, until the bridge of the song, when the tempo changes drastically. Over Vice’s slashing, churning guitar lines I screech and bellow a bunch of nonsense about how...
Well, I’m Santa Claus, baby
Gonna pop down the chute
With lots of toys and joys
And love in my boots
Blood on the rooftops
Blood in the pass
I need you baby
Know our love will last...
Vice was probably not amused by this scenario of a murderous, raping Santa Claus wreaking havoc on middle class neighborhoods. It also seems likely that he understood that I was making fun of rock music, spewing out lyrics which were chosen for the way they rhymed and were as cliched as possible.
Roger did not want to do nine-minute poetic anthems. He wanted to do tight three-minute pop songs with a good melody, loaded with plenty of hooks – stuff that was serious music.
“Floatin’ On The Waves” was another example of how Deb and I banalized and deconstructed rock music. The excerpt here shows us reducing song lyrics to mere arbitrary sounds, with no regard to content – only to the way the words sounded together.
With idiot glee we sang our ditty about “a bottle in a bottle, floatin’ on the waves”. You don’t even get a message in the bottle, just another bottle; but it floats on the waves, and that is the important part.
I had listened to a little of The Beach Boys, and I have never been able to understand why everybody thought they were so great.
To me rock music has usually been a big disappointment (with one exception being Velvet Underground & Nico), because it is often nothing more than a grab bag of interchangeable phrases, gestures, poses, haircuts, riffs and cliches.
I hate nothing more than some guy showing me all the hot licks he can play on the guitar – I am so impressed!
Please note my hypocrisy and jealousy. I possess none of the skills and patience necessary to play a musical instrument, but if I could I would definitely show off and play hot licks for everyone to hear and be impressed.
Trish & The Swishettes
Love Is On My Side
Yeah, Yeah, Yeah
Pain Research
A couple of times that Autumn we went over and visited Trish, a waitress I knew from The Jumping Beanery. Her last name –something Irish – maybe with a Mc. I can remember what she looked like. Long curly red hair, freckles, petite. Intelligent and witty, with a nice laugh, and a kind of scratchy voice.
Waitresses are often interesting people, and they know how to party. I noticed from 15 years of working in restaurants that a lot of restaurant workers–
1) Smoke cigarettes.
2) Drink alcohol.
3) Smoke marijuana.
Restaurant workers usually know where a good party is. The same was true of people who worked in record stores.
We had a good time at Trish’s place. It was very relaxed and comfortable. Trish had some pot, and we maybe drank some wine.
We all had a lot of fun sitting around in her house doing trio vocal improvisations – stream of consciousness – start with no preconceived idea – listen to the others – make sounds in reaction to what you hear – whatever came into our heads.
Deb and I were trying to cultivate a kind of artistic infantilism, to draw closer to true uninhibited expression. A child’s world is unspoiled by consensus reality and societal conventions and words. We experimented quite a lot with babbling, shouting, crying, screaming, whining and giggling.
We also cultivated artistic “primitiveness” in an effort to communicate as directly and instinctively as possible.
We hoped that the listener thought that it was a bit odd that an adult would actually sing
Auto-phonetic poetry. Yelling, screaming, babbling, crying like a baby, reading from magazines, and a lot of other nonsense and fun. Abstract use of our voices, as sound-makers, like a child or an insane person or a “primitive simpleton”. A portable cassette recorder as sound-recorder. Our voices as only sound-makers. Not even a pot, pan or blender.
HM:
Ant War
Composition
These solo works are examples of my early use of instruments– electric guitar, keyboards, and amplification.
On the tracks on 60 Minutes Of Laughter that Debbie and I are both on, I almost always did the lead voice. Debbie did either instrumentation or a backing or a co-voice. I almost never did backing or instrumentation of any sort on the pieces we were both on.
“Ant War” was culled from a recording of me playing my electric guitar through a small amplifier. The guitar had cost about $125. I think it had a sunburst design on it. I never tuned the strings.
The amp had two audio inputs, and treble and bass controls, and effects knobs for reverb and tremolo. I don’t remember the brand name of the amp, but I think it was something vaguely Western, like: Amarillo or Apache or Cimarron or Bonanza or Sagebrush or Laredo or Lariat. It probably cost about $125 too.
It could get fairly loud for an apartment living room space. One afternoon when we were still living in the Roach Apartments on West 38 th Street the apartment manager came banging on the door, telling me to turn that shit down!
I liked to misuse, abuse and overuse the tremolo and reverb effects on the amp, and I usually turned them up really high.
“Ant War” is a pure soundscape. I was trying to create something that had a lot of energy but that evoked cerebral imagery. Driving pulse without being rhythmic; at the core, noise in overlapping, frothing currents of distortion and crackling electricity, controlled feedback and pitch manipulation.
I was trying to create something really abstract, without too obvious a form.
Did the title “Ant War” come first, and then I created it; or did I create something, and then give it the title “Ant War”?
I next used the electric guitar on my first tape as Dog As Master in 1985, Coffee Spleen & The Barking Dog.
“Composition” was composed with a Casio VL-Tone. The VL-Tone was the first keyboard ever made by Casio. We bought ours at a Target department store around the time they first came out in 1982, for $30.
The VL-Tone was a hybrid calculator/musical instrument. The keyboard keys looked like the buttons on a calculator. It was the first electronic instrument we owned, and it would figure prominently on our first few tapes.
You could program long patterns of notes into the VL-Tone and then play them back. I constructed “Composition” using elements of chance process. I programmed two patterns into the VL-Tone, consisting of just a few related tones played in varying and seemingly random order. I did not listen to the first pattern while programming the second, so the two patterns were not temporally synchronized.
“Composition” is the earliest example of my use of a programmed music system, in which I set up certain conditions and parameters and then let the machine make the music. I have been interested for a long time in audio work that seems to have a life of its own, that evolves and grows into a unique form.
In my use of an open music system I was of course influenced greatly by Brian Eno’s albums, such as Discreet Music.
In the 1970s and 1980s I spent many hours listening to Eno’s records and reading every article on him I could find. There is no way that I can overstate my profound admiration for Eno’s work and ideas.
Later, especially on the Dog As Master tapes, I developed and incorporated many of Eno’s methods and ideas into my own creative practices.
Gabble Ratchet and Rick Karcasheff
There are two recordings of Rick Karcasheff and David Mattingly’s experimental music group Gabble Ratchet on 60 Minutes Of Laughter. Both date from the months before I met Debbie, Summer 1981.
I admired not only Gabble Ratchet’s improvisational style, but also their use of synthesizers. Rick and David had Korg MS-10 analog synthesizers. The MS-10 was black and shiny and had a control panel with lots of knobs and cords. It was one of the first portable analog synths, and it was relatively inexpensive.
Debbie and I really envied Rick and Dave and wanted to get an analog synth. In 1983 we borrowed a Moog Prodigy from a friend for a few weeks. About a year after that we bought a Moog Rogue.
“Improv” is a short snippet from a much longer jam. Debbie included it here to showcase her weird stifled scream.
“Collage/Gertrude Stein” is composed of a collage of pop music, news programs, TV ads and other sonic detritus, mixed completely into the left channel; and in the other speaker, a Gabble Ratchet jam tape with Deb doing readings from a book by Gertrude Stein.
Debbie did a good job putting this collage together. Every time I hear it I recognize and understand and remember more.
Music from radio and records: the Meet The Residents LP, the Sex Pistols, David Bowie (“Young Americans”), The Monkees and The Beatles (“Norwegian Wood”), etc.
The excerpts from TV and radio are like small windows on a different time and place. I hear a lot of TV ads for household products. There’s a news story about an industrial accident releasing radiation into the atmosphere.
Debbie told me that Rick took a Gertrude Stein book from a shelf, handed it to her and told her to read something from it.
Gabble Ratchet used a small inexpensive drum machine called the Dr. Rhythm. Later, Debbie and I bought one and used it extensively on recordings by Viscera, Dog As Master and Master/Slave Relationship.
Rick’s two short tracks are original works that clearly point to an infatuation many of us had at that time with The Residents.
“Three Blind Pigs” is based on a traditional nursery rhyme I knew well from childhood, but in the original it was three blind mice. In Residential Rick’s world the mice become pigs. Pigs are much bigger than mice. It means something altogether different to run after a pig to try to cut its tail off. There would be a lot more blood, for one thing.
On 60 Minutes Of Laughter Debbie Jaffe included several audio scenes and oblique references to her life that illustrated some of the themes that she would later develop in Viscera and Master/Slave Relationship.
Debbie’s early life experiences caused her to doubt and rebel against common notions of romance, marriage, family, religion and popular taste.
Her parents separated and divorced when she was young. Family life was a chaotic mess, with lots of tears and shouting and very little affection. Marriage and love obviously did not mean much.
On 60 Minutes Of Laughter there are five pieces with the word “love” in the title.
“Love In The Tropics” is a sound sample of a thunderstorm from a sound effects record.
“Love Is On My Side” by Trish & The Swishettes is a scream fest!
“To Tristan, With Love” is an excerpt from a language instruction record. Deb’s wish of love was for Romanian-born Dada poet Tristan Tzara.
“I Love You I Love You I Love You” is a recording of a merry go round at a fair.
The title of “Silly Love Songs” is of course a reference to Paul McCartney’s pop song, but I’m not sure how. On the tape there’s a snippet of Deb saying, “And they do their silly love songs” in-between two absurdist duo poems.
The pieces “Husband And Wife Scenario” and “New Eyes” were from a recording Deb made of her much older half-brother Jim , his ex-wife Val and their church minister in 1973 in Des Moines, Iowa.
Her other half brother was a born-again Christian, as prudish and boring as you’d expect. All the religious people she knew were hypocritical, bigoted, judgmental, backwards backstabbers.
Warsaw, Indiana, where Debbie was born and spent her early years, was a hotbed of born-again Christian fundamentalism. Her parents were Jewish, and her father legally changed his name from Jaffe to avoid anti-Semitic persecution.
Debbie’s childhood was a long painful, lonely, isolated, friendless, alienated, boredom-filled struggle. People in general didn’t make a whole lot of sense, with their transparent duplicities and willful ignorance. The world as they perceived it didn’t make a whole lot of sense either.
Debbie’s strategy was to turn to her imagination and withdraw into a world of her own making. Art was the only thing that gave her life meaning and kept her alive.
She composed hundreds of poems, songs, paintings, drawings, stories, and two big novels.
Debbie learned how to play the clarinet, organ and piano.
“Kurtz Kapers” was taken from a recording she made of her junior high school band in 1976. She played clarinet in the band. Can you pick her out? She used her clarinet extensively on the Viscera recordings.
When she lived in Marion, Indiana she went to the Wurlitzer Electric Organ shop downtown and played the organs, which were available for rent on an hourly basis. There were cassette recorders built into the organs. Debbie took extracts from her hours of organ jam tapes for the “Wurlitzer Intermission” segments on 60 Minutes Of Laughter.
Debbie did most of the instrumentation on our early Viscera tapes – from 60 Minutes Of Laughter to In A Foreign Film (1983) to A Whole Universe Of Horror Movies (1984).
Deb got the sound effects, language and poetry records from the main branch of the Indianapolis Public Library, which was across the street from where we lived on Pennsylvania Avenue.
One of her great finds was the Gertrude Stein record that had a scratch on it that caused the phrase “sometimes Vollard mumbled” to repeat over and over. Debbie used this recording as a segue into the first Viscera piece on the 60 Minutes Of Laughter tape.
Debbie Jaffe and I made our first recordings together as a duo using the name Viscera in the Summer of 1982. We were living at my Mom and Dad’s house at 7433 Dorothy Drive in Indianapolis, Indiana. My family first moved into the split level 3 bedroom, one a half bath house on a half acre plot in the northwest section of the city, in 1967.
It was a long, boring Summer. We didn’t have much money, both unemployed, and except for odd and temporary jobs we relied on my parents for support. We spent much of our time drinking coffee, writing poems and stories, sleeping and being depressed.
Occasionally we visited Rick and David, but not quite as frequently perhaps, as personality conflicts arose. My school chum Toby, who lived about five blocks away, would often come and pick us up in his red Volkswagen Rabbit and we’d go driving around looking at stuff.
Generally we were incredibly bored and frustrated, and didn’t know what would happen next.
In April I had gotten fed up sick and tired of my job at The Jumping Beanery. I did not get along very well with one of the managers, and one day I told him I was going to quit. Deb didn’t have a steady job during that time. We felt like we just had to get out of Indianapolis and get away from all of our problems for a while. We wanted to travel and go see lots of places we’d never been to before. We’d just recently gotten our tax returns and we had enough money to buy Greyhound Bus tickets for one month unlimited travel. We went traveling across the United States during that month of May 1982.
We traveled eastward to New York City. We got off the bus and walked around on the deserted New York City streets at 6 o’clock in the morning. Deb and I walked around in the Greenwich Village area. We got coffee and breakfast at a McDonalds as soon as it opened. After a few hours we got tired and walked back up the Port Authority Bus Terminal at 42 nd Street.
At each bus station we had to buy a new ticket for our next destination. I don’t remember anything about the trip between New York and Montreal, but I think we went through Boston. Montreal was interesting-looking, but again, just like NYC, we arrived there early in the morning, before anything was open. We walked around a bit and looked at the buildings and imagined what it would be like if they were open and there were people doing things in them. We ate breakfast and freshened up a bit. Later in the morning, before anything opened up, we got tired again and got back on a bus heading south.
We traveled back through the Midwest and out to Des Moines, Iowa, where Debbie’s mom was living at the time, and Deb’s half brother Jim and ex-wife Val and their kids. We stayed at Val’s house for two or three days and rested and slept. Sex was out of the question because there were a few more weeks to go until I could remove the stitches on my testicles.
Deb and I decided to travel next out to California. We really enjoyed walking around in San Francisco for hours and hours.
Near the end of the four weeks we started to run out of money. We had about $7 to feed us from Los Angeles back to Indianapolis.
When we got back to Indy we were penniless and exhausted. We had seen a lot of interesting things on our trip across America, but now we were more depressed than ever.
Our relationship had changed quickly and deepened considerably. Deb and I intended to devote our lives to art. We questioned life and death and of course our sanity. Birth and death and life tied up in a big vicious cycle spinning forever, repeating itself over and over. Existence is suffering. That Winter of 81-82 was one of great pain, conflict, upheaval and confusion.
Out of these experiences, and out of all the disillusionment, the cold and snow, and too many nights drinking too much and lots of little illnesses and emotional episodes and crying came the recordings we made that Summer as Viscera.
I wrote lots of prose that Summer, a lot of it done in a cut-up style. I would type out the text of a story I’d written in a temporally conventional fashion, then take some scissors, cut up the typewritten sheets into phrase snippets, shuffle them and re-arrange them.
One of the stories I wrote that Summer was called “The Edge”. I still have a few of the original photocopy booklets I did of it. The narrator is paranoiac to the nth degree: “I felt a hair out of place on the top of my head”. He perceives that everyone is watching him and judging him and discussing his worthiness. Mostly, they observe what he says, looking for any excuse to condemn him – taking slips of the tongue and unintentional alternate meanings of words as evidence of his real intentions, and his shortcomings. The narrator’s mysterious host is not only his mentor and guardian but a cruel vampiric master and pitiless executioner as well. A lot of the imagery around which I based this cut-up short story was influenced by early 20 th Century German films I’d seen in my Film History class at Indiana University (Autumn 1980), especially The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari (1919) and Nosferatu The Vampire (1923).
In his desire to escape the hell that other people were, and to get away from their control, the narrator escapes from the master’s house and travels to the brink of the void, a precipice. Behind him is the world as he knows it. It is insufferable. Going back is not a choice. Beyond is Nothing, or at least the Unknown. Jumping out from The Edge he seeks release --and consciousness -- in extinction.
That Summer Deb and I started developing some pieces in which I would recite, sing or act out poems and stories we’d both written, and Deb would compose a minimalist background/ backdrop or mood setting using simple instrumentation – mostly our Casio VL-Tone mini keyboard.
We wanted to get right to the heart and guts of the matter of life and existence: to live and show the pain and torment of existence through the art. There was no redemption in life except for the artistic expression of our experiences. This expression must be direct and bare, devoid of artifice and rationalization, all the loose psychic wires hanging loose and going every which way. Erratic mood swings and spurts of energy followed by lassitude...our fragmented perplexed perception of the world outside and our fragile mental states.
The Edge
“You are mistaken my boy. A life does not mean all that much. A human life is like a fly. There will always be more flies...”
This world is fallen boy turned to my homeland...is reasonable nothing folks with their would they punish me? Knife and pistol when all the villagers...reason is an act of the village streets...streets of un-reasoned victory...
“Do you find that book interesting my boy?”
“Oh yes very much so!”
“May I ask you why you find it so?”
“Yes...well...until I started reading this book I didn’t know that much about you...”
“Half of it is lies...”
“And the other half?”
“Half the truth...”
I felt a hair out of place on top of my head...
There are no innocent victims and I promise to be salt in their wounds. The gravedigger will be happy on that day when they all wake up...
Submissive during his lifetime I now am no longer connected with his name...but I can see him out of the corner of my eye...
The edge is sharp but I jumped out almost conscious of myself.
I feared I would reveal too much and in doing so compromise myself. I soon learned it was better sometimes not to say anything. A shrug of the shoulders or a nod of the head sufficed. Words could get one in an awful lot of trouble. What was a clear thought in my head became a deadly confession in the ears of others. Quiet! Don’t let them overhear you talking about your wounds. Damn the Mountain!
The edge is sharp but I jumped out almost conscious of myself...
A Different Kind Of Music
Do you want to hear a different kind of music?
No?
Well, it’s better to listen to it after dark any way
I actually ran the risk of caring
I wondered if it was maybe a mistake
Some people never see the gray areas in-between
Until I punch out the holes in their walls
The point was:
That if everything is devoid of meaning
Was it not possible that this belief itself suffered the same fate as that which it condemned?
Starvation And Beating
Always black and white pictures!
The rot!
Lock in on starvation and beating!!
Of course there’s not much you could do about it
No one would believe it was happening
They didn’t fight it
It’s just a book I studied
Referring to one’s influences is a tricky thing indeed. Every time I read about someone listing their influences I get a little embarrassed. I wonder what they’re trying to prove. Do they want to show their credentials, prove their pedigree?
The influences on Viscera’s style are too numerous to mention. We both listened to a hell of a lot of records and tapes back then, and much of it made a big impression on us. On the Viscera pieces on 60 MOL I can hear traces of recording artists Lemon Kittens, Nico, Patti Smith, Suicide, Captain Beefheart, Throbbing Gristle, and Joy Division, along with William Burroughs, Existentialist literature and the Theater Of The Absurd.
Our earliest Viscera works for the most part weren’t exactly music: more like miniature audio theater pieces. See the darkened pitch black theater with two spotlights stabbing through swirling smoke. The woman in black plays a deep throbbing organ tone on a tiny keyboard. The man, also dressed in black, bespectacled, his gaze fixed deep in inner space, steps forward and makes a sound with his mouth.
Deb used the Casio VL-Tone and my amplifier to full advantage on these Viscera pieces. Sure, the sound was cheesy as hell, and it was monophonic; but the VL-Tone had a good, deep bassy tone – aided by the liberal use of reverb and tremolo. The VL-Tone had a few rhythm patterns you could choose from, and you could increase or decrease the speed. The drum machine sounds were thin and ticky-tocky, but through that amp we were sometimes able to get them into a penetrative space.
All of the Viscera tracks on 60 Minutes Of Laughter were recorded on our portable mono cassette recorder. My voice doesn’t sound like it was amplified, probably because we didn’t own a microphone at the time. The patch cord to connect the VL-Tone to the input of the amp could be bought at Radio Shack for a couple of dollars.
We developed a style that lent itself well to the limitations of our equipment, and perhaps our technical abilities as well. We tried to paint sound pictures through the juxtaposition of spoken words and stark, ultra-minimal electronics. We wanted to create a state of heightened sensation...immediate emotional impact...to be there and feel it...with no curtains or screens no masks no blinders to our truth of existence.
Debbie at that time was obsessive/compulsive – she could spend hours literally splitting hairs. She had a strongly addictive personality, and was addicted to chocolate and Bronk-Aid asthma-relief tablets. Deb’s childhood scars revealed themselves in pseudo-infantile mannerisms and imaginary companions.
I was schizo-affective schizophrenic, with giant mood swings from ecstatic to sad, depressed, crying and gray. Back in like 1980 or so I was voluntarily hospitalized in the Psychiatric unit of Methodist Hospital in Indianapolis, for two terms of two weeks each. Dr. M------- recommended that I receive electroshock therapy. I told him to forget it. While in the psych unit I would read a lot. I read Thus Spake Zarathustra by Nietzsche during one term.
Later, I took prescription drugs to curb the schizophrenic stuff: Lithium, Stelazine and Ativan. I used them all through the time of the earliest Viscera tapes. Plus, I smoked about a pack of cigarettes a day, which made me twitchy as hell. Coffee had me well in its clutches by the age of 18, and I drank several cups of Folger’s Instant coffee with two teaspoons of sugar and 2% Low Fat milk. The tranquilizers, in combination with nicotine, caffeine, cheap red wine, two bad LSD trips in Spring 1981, marijuana, and dark, ultra-serious depressing-as-hell-literature (Dostoevsky, Kafka, Camus) helped turn me into a flighty, irritable, loud-mouthed, self-pitying, self-doubting emotional cripple, but existentialist as hell. I had attempted suicide, albeit halfheartedly.
At least I was sincere about my inner personal struggles and strived to express myself in an evocative fashion...there was part of me that wanted to act out these scenes... In some ways I invented myself as an artist. I set out to be an artistic person, no matter what it took. I drew a lot when I was like five to eight years old or so, and in high school I had done a lot of theater work. I had never learned how to play a musical instrument.
Yes, I wanted to do what it took to be an artist, and if that meant deranging my senses a la Rimbaud in order to scrape away the societal camouflage which obstructed our view of the emotional truth of our existences, then so be it. If it meant to court a little insanity just for what could be gleaned for a good artistic purpose I was willing to do it. All of my problems and struggles and anguish and pain were of and by my own design. I sought out difficulty because I wanted to feel and experience something very real and very intense.
I had come from a good family, with loving, positive, supportive parents and siblings. I was among other things taught to strive to do great important things, and to use my intelligence. At about the age of five I decided that I would grow up and do something important enough that I would be in the World Book Encyclopedia.
I never had any serious problems as a child...just several blows to the head. Physically fit, but not athletic. Good in school without trying. Bookish. Black-horn-rimmed glasses. Never fit in with most people of my age. Most of my friends were outcasts and nerdy types. All of the problems I have had in my life were of my own doing, purposefully.
Not long after I graduated from high school I decided that my life was boring, that I hadn’t had any real experiences. I set out to do whatever it would take to get free and be an artist. I’ve always been attracted to intense mental experiences and drugs provided enough mind exercise, at least, and they helped to un-hinge one’s consciousness, to get to the real you, under the act.
Home
Why do I live in this place?
Mr. Lincoln, tomorrow’s figure
Redeemer of the cloth sack
The colored locks of silk burnoose
What is this place?
Broken eye
Crumbling, pacing bewildered eye
Simple eye, straight like a rapid whole volley
A broke-down wheel
A bad poem
I bed down for the night
A shot of whiskey
Wind whistling the telephone line
Outraged Civilized World
Cruelty in the pages
A deep murky prison
Outraged civilized world dying
************************************
************************************
Heartsick immediate dead effort
I know it should make me want to cry
But it doesn’t
A few bloody days
He refused to repair it
The bottom fell out of the sack
I saw bone through the skin
Money taken / actual results
Crucial little difference account
What are those men’s names
Behind those bars
And these doors
And these windows
Frozen
Rough
A handle to speak less harshly
For the public ear
I know it should make me want to cry
But it doesn’t
Seeing The Future
Suspense division rectification
See the future dressed in rags
See the women in a row
*********************
Dropping his hands
He seems to belong here
He does not know
Jumping light disk thrown
Rug off the truck
His sister on a rooftop
Simple, contrite
Simple wares
Sees his whole life before him
Behind him
Remembering lightning space stars dreams
Grown tired of waiting for it to happen
Takes hold of it with his own two hands
No continuity: Is it dying?
Did he take hold too late?
He has to strain his eyes to see the things he wants to see
“Is it any wonder?” he asks himself
He is moving
He is seeing
He is the gray light bulb lying down down
His eyes begin to hurt
He turns away from the page
********* the skin to the touch
Bright, swimming in pools of still water
Everything And Nothing
... and Everything And Nothing issued forth from Mystic Orange
Everything And Nothing
Everything And Nothing
Everything And Nothing
Bamen and Bamen and Bamen
And Bamen and Bamen
It was OK
It was OK
It was OK
Really it was
Really it was...
[August 26, 2013 -- below are questions I asked of Debbie Jaffe in 2000]
-- Do you remember what Stein writings you read on the piece "Collage/Gertrude Stein"?
That was from a book Rick pulled off his bookshelf. I don't know for sure.
-- Do you remember the name of the song from Kurtz Capers you included the fragment of on 60 MOL? Do you remember what year it was recorded?
The Kurtz Kapers stuff was from my 8th & 9th grade band class - so... 1975 or 1976.
-- What was your half-brother's name who was married to Val? What year were those conversation snippets on "Husband And Wife Scenario" and "New Eyes" recorded? I guess it was in Des Moines.
My half brother Jim, recorded approximately in 1973(?) in Des Moines.
-- What was the name of the music shop in Marion where you recorded "Wurlitzer Intermission"?
Oh, gee. All I remember was that it was downtown, and the organ rooms were in the basement, and for rent on an hourly basis. The cassette recorder was built into the Wurlitzers! I was bored and this gave me something to do. Those were the days when I had nothing to do but mope around!! :-)
Small press info: Ric Soos from San Jose was a supporter of my written work
and published my fictional posthumous interviews with Tristan Tzara and
Gertrude Stein. My work did not get a huge positive response, to say the
least, including 12SOL - people didn't know what to make of it. Was it
serious fictional literature? No. Was it informational? No. Was it humor?
Maybe, but strange humor. As for other names, I'm drawing a blank too.
I did 12SOL to express my own feelings of absurdity, and dada humor. I also
did not mind befuddling people, I suppose. I was out to show that if
something doesn't overtly spoonfeed people, they won't understand it. I
think I succeeded in that regard anyway.
60 MOL was a collage of sounds in a similar vein only using auditory sounds
instead of words and graphics on paper. Again, it wasn't intended for a lot
of people to understand. It was part of the home taper scene, in the sense
it was taped at home (!) but .... not in the sense of it trying to be
serious music, per se. I took it all very seriously at the time, but also
was aware that most people wouldn't get it, but that was one of the reasons
FOR doing it! If that makes any sense!
01 01:41 Red House Blue House DJ & HM
02 00:23 Voulez In The Voulez Gertrude Stein
03 01:44 The Edge, Part 1 Viscera
04 00:09 Preacher
05 03:03 Ant War HM
06 00:14 Hard On I’ve Got A....!
07 00:42 Kurtz Kapers
08 00:26 Laughter
09 00:42 A Different Kind Of Music Viscera
10 00:07 Love In The Tropics Tropical thunderstorm
11 00:35 Starvation & Beating Viscera
12 01:19 Floatin’ On The Waves Dancing Invisibles
13 00:41 Love Is On My Side Trish & The Swishettes
14 00:10 Telephone
15 01:39 Home Viscera
16 01:37 Composition HM
17 02:20 Outraged Civilized World Viscera
18 00:27 Another Simon And Garfunkel Hit record-scratching
19 00:54 Three Blind Pigs Residential Rick
20 00:16 To Tristan, With Love Romanian language
21 01:19 Yeah, Yeah, Yeah Trish & The Swishettes
22 02:04 Seeing The Future Viscera
23 02:32 Airplanes And Engines Dancing Invisibles 2350
24 00:15 Husband & Wife Scenario
25 00:45 New Eyes
26 00:35 Pain Research Trish & The Swishettes
27 01:00 Improv Gabble Ratchet “stifled scream”
28 00:44 Apple Pie English instruction
29 02:08 Wurlitzer Intermission DJ
31:25
30 00:00 Wurlitzer Intermission (cont)
31 01:01 Collage/Gertrude Stein Gabble Ratchet
32 06:20 Dharma Proclivity JK & MP
33 08:40 Tinyness Park Avenue Rick
34 10:01 Birds
35 10:22 The Sanctuary JK & MP
36 16:38 Bird Is Dead HM & DJ
37 18:10 Carnival
38 19:00 Repercussive Illusion HM
39 19:11 WWWIII/WWIV Army Brats
40 22:15 My Balls LE
41 22:31 Public Lavatory, Blue Light HM & DJ
42 24:21 The Edge Viscera
43 25:34 Negative Image
44 25:40 Everything And Nothing Viscera
45 26:13 Tiger Talk Burnt Circuits
46 26:18 I Don’t Understand DJ w/ “Mr British”
47 26:31 Silly Love Songs
48 26:35 Why Do You Do It? Burnt Circuits
49 26:49 Freedom To Be Immoral The Conversations
49 27:26 Accepting Things As They Are Viscera
31:10
The Sanctuary
Dharma Proclivity/The Butchered Calf
Deb not only introduced me to a lot of really interesting music, but also a lot of interesting books. One that made a big impression on me was Dada: Art And Anti-Art by Hans Richter.
We wrote lots of Dada-flavored poetry and recorded ourselves reading them, often simultaneously.
The Sanctuary
Debbie and I read in the newspaper that a local Country & Western Music bar called The Sanctuary had an open microphone night every Wednesday. Anybody could go into the little performance area and play a song.
We plotted to go to the open mike night and do something really off the wall and prove to those Country & Western Music people just how shallow and conditioned and backwards they really were. We were going to try to freak them out!
We constructed big paper cones to put on our heads. We chose Dada names for ourselves: I was Jolifanto Karawane. Debbie was named Mipoola Palinga. We wrote our new names on the hats. I taped the words of Hugo Ball’s Dada abstract phonetic poem “gadgi beri bimba” (1916) onto my beat-up $70 acoustic guitar. We both donned long black coats.
Debbie and I had to walk several blocks to get to The Sanctuary on a cold, windy day in November 1981. It was near sunset and the clouds to the west were streaked pink and dark purple.
I smoked a lot of cigarettes as I walked and talked with Deb...plotting. I squinted a lot because the setting sun hurt my eyes.
Debbie took her sunglasses out of her coat pocket and put them on. After a few minutes she began to complain of her eyes and face hurting and burning. Her face turned bright red, sweat poured off her face and tears streamed out of her eyes. It was an awful situation. She was in a lot of pain and I felt really sorry for her.
We figured out that she had put her sunglasses in the same pocket in which she kept a spraycan of mace, and that some mace had gotten on the glasses and then onto her face.
When we got to The Sanctuary she went to the women’s room and splashed cold water on her face to try to get the burning to stop. It was quite a scene and everybody was staring at us. Finally, Deb was able to come out into the club. We had signed up for third spot on the open mike night bill.
The two performers before us were guys with shiny shoulder-length hair and beards who wore jeans and plaid shirts and wore pointed boots and sang gentle, sensitive, melodic songs of country folk pop stuff.
They sang songs by John Denver and Dan Fogelberg or sang their own original songs which tried to sound like John Denver and Dan Fogelberg, with lyrics about mountains and country roads and wild flowers and how the eagle flies free and proud and about true love and their truest friend, their guitar.
When it was our turn we donned our big tall cardboard cone-hats and walked to the stage. Deb went to the microphone on a stand stage right. I sat down in a chair in front of a boom mike lowered to my mouth level. At this point I don’t think the audience suspected too much of anything out of the ordinary, except there seemed to be some whispering about the paper cones on our heads.
I spoke into the microphone, addressing the audience:
“The first step is to realize you’re asleep.
I mean, would it really matter if you stuck your head in a Waring blender?”
I began to rub and scrape a grooved stick against the guitar strings, pulling the stick back and forth roughly over the strings and striking the body of the guitar with my hands and the stick.
I increased the speed of the rubbing and striking and abrasive scraping up to a big crescendo. I cried out in a loud voice inflected with a pseudo-Caribbean-tribal wail, stretching the phrasing out and down and around as far as I could:
Gadji beri bimba!
Debbie took up the response in a long cascade of wails, yelps and pseudo-operatics. Our vocal lines crashed into silence.
Then I took up the next call:
Glandridi lauli lonni cadori...
We continued this call and response of a line from Ball’s poem with Debbie providing the elements of contrast, background and setting. Debbie warbled and chirped and giggled like a maniac and screamed and bellowed out and swooped in big arcs up and down.
I leaned into the microphone, coughed up the words, rolled and gargled them around in my mouth and throat and spitted and barked them out – going through a rapid-fire catalog of exaggerated phrasings, monkey chattering, accents and character voices from Monty Python and bad jungle movies.
The audience soon started to make lots of noise, with lots of loud talking and people standing up, shouting and yelling and shaking their hands and gesticulating.
People yelled out their responses to what we were doing, things like: Devo! Was it because we were wearing the cones on our heads? Were they thinking of the cover of Freedom Of Choice, on which Devo are wearing inverted flowerpots on their heads? We looked more like The Coneheads (a family of outer space aliens living among Earthlings) from Saturday Night Live.
The audience reacted to the alien-ness of what we were doing. It wasn’t music in the sense they understood it. I’m sure a lot of those people thought that Devo couldn’t really play their instruments, that what they did wasn’t real music.
Devo’s stuff was stiff and nerdy and mechanical-sounding and ironic and poking fun at the musical and social values the audience honored. It wasn’t about being mellow and laid-back and sensitive.
We were up there making a bunch of racket, just yelling a bunch of stuff, and me beating and misusing and abusing my guitar.
After several minutes of this chaos we brought the assault to a close and the audience burst out yelling and clapping and shouting – united together in their response to us. As we finished a guy in the audience yelled out “Heil Hitler!”. And the rest of the audience burst out cheering and laughing in agreement at the sentiment. They were clearly excited and everybody was having a good time.
We were scared and decided it would be a good idea to pack our stuff and head out the door as quickly as possible before we were attacked. Neither of us wanted to get beaten up and we didn’t think it was unlikely if we hung around much longer.
Just before we reached the exit this big burly guy stood in our way and growled in a low, gruff tone (with perhaps an undertone of admiration), “What you did took a lot of balls...”. We hoped that was a good thing, muttered thanks, and made our way out into the cold night air.
Well, we had certainly gotten a response! Best of all, not lukewarm. I’m sure we congratulated ourselves on how clever and right we’d been – they were all asleep in their mundane, unimaginative lives. They all lived their lives by formulas, and they couldn’t understand anything outside their own stale conformity. We had proven it all through this demonstration of the politics of confrontation, we figured.
It was a cheap shot, I admit. We picked an easy target to outrage. We were making fun of them and a lot of them knew it and didn’t like it.
I also admit it was a cheap pseudo-Dada take off, and really pretty silly. But it had been a daring thing to do, and we had succeeded! We went after a big reaction and we got one.
If nothing else, we got a good tape out of our performance “Live At The Sanctuary”. The tape is all that remains now any way.
Selected words from
Dharma Proclivity/The Butchered Calf
... for the paint on your head
When the words become drowned in the quacking of tongues and melting of scissors
When pastels over a castle battlement forget their own residents
The rising and falling of birds on a stick
Fly – fly – to – across the room and fill the whole world with failing pantaloons
Can we gain insight into failure?
With one toe scratched
With one finger bugged
Like your bedroom with goats
************ for exquisite dharma proclivity
Epoch-making monthly pretty good for duck inchoate clues
It’s parody – words! – words!
like toothbrush fibers stuck between deadly providential demographic psychic teeth
Melting of scissors
The pet blues in spots
Women are Kwakiutl incompatible
Figures figures about sex-stitching up
Keep your club members x-y-z’d, fagged plus
Happy with cow fecal faucet empty boxes
Up-stitch with hope that died
A sound of shadow
What is she doing?: Failing?
New kind of TV-watching
Speed up – where they should be
For gibberish club sandwich
L-l-l-laugh at the butchered calf
B-b-b-b-b-b-burning b-b-bush
H-h-h-harmony
C-c-c-calumny
S-s-s-symphony
R-r-r-rhapsody
P-p-p-polyphony
M-m-m-monophony
Sing alone in the shower
Dancing Invisibles:
Floatin’ On The Waves and
Airplanes And Engines (Are Beautiful)
Roger Vice was a guitar player Debbie had contacted, probably through the same advertisement to which I had responded.
Deb and I went over to his apartment a couple of times in October of 1981. We tried to work out some songs, with Deb and I doing some vocals along with Roger’s hot electric playing.
Roger greatly admired rock singer Tom Petty. He looked like he stepped out of the cover photograph of Petty’s 1979 album Damn The Torpedoes. He dressed like Petty, had a guitar that looked like Petty’s, and most importantly, had a haircut like Petty’s.
It’s really not fair of me to poke fun at Vice. I have had my own share of pop star idolatry.
The excerpts from “Airplanes And Engines” were extracted from an epic nine-minute version. I had written a poem of several pages treating the subject of how technology, in spite of its drawbacks, will be the instrument through which we will transcend earthly, bodily limitations and enter into different realms of the spirit or consciousness.
Jim Morrison of The Doors was one of my pop idols. On this song I do my very worst imitation of The Lizard King’s crooning vocal style.
It all seems like pretty serious stuff, until the bridge of the song, when the tempo changes drastically. Over Vice’s slashing, churning guitar lines I screech and bellow a bunch of nonsense about how...
Well, I’m Santa Claus, baby
Gonna pop down the chute
With lots of toys and joys
And love in my boots
Blood on the rooftops
Blood in the pass
I need you baby
Know our love will last...
Vice was probably not amused by this scenario of a murderous, raping Santa Claus wreaking havoc on middle class neighborhoods. It also seems likely that he understood that I was making fun of rock music, spewing out lyrics which were chosen for the way they rhymed and were as cliched as possible.
Roger did not want to do nine-minute poetic anthems. He wanted to do tight three-minute pop songs with a good melody, loaded with plenty of hooks – stuff that was serious music.
“Floatin’ On The Waves” was another example of how Deb and I banalized and deconstructed rock music. The excerpt here shows us reducing song lyrics to mere arbitrary sounds, with no regard to content – only to the way the words sounded together.
With idiot glee we sang our ditty about “a bottle in a bottle, floatin’ on the waves”. You don’t even get a message in the bottle, just another bottle; but it floats on the waves, and that is the important part.
I had listened to a little of The Beach Boys, and I have never been able to understand why everybody thought they were so great.
To me rock music has usually been a big disappointment (with one exception being Velvet Underground & Nico), because it is often nothing more than a grab bag of interchangeable phrases, gestures, poses, haircuts, riffs and cliches.
I hate nothing more than some guy showing me all the hot licks he can play on the guitar – I am so impressed!
Please note my hypocrisy and jealousy. I possess none of the skills and patience necessary to play a musical instrument, but if I could I would definitely show off and play hot licks for everyone to hear and be impressed.
Trish & The Swishettes
Love Is On My Side
Yeah, Yeah, Yeah
Pain Research
A couple of times that Autumn we went over and visited Trish, a waitress I knew from The Jumping Beanery. Her last name –something Irish – maybe with a Mc. I can remember what she looked like. Long curly red hair, freckles, petite. Intelligent and witty, with a nice laugh, and a kind of scratchy voice.
Waitresses are often interesting people, and they know how to party. I noticed from 15 years of working in restaurants that a lot of restaurant workers–
1) Smoke cigarettes.
2) Drink alcohol.
3) Smoke marijuana.
Restaurant workers usually know where a good party is. The same was true of people who worked in record stores.
We had a good time at Trish’s place. It was very relaxed and comfortable. Trish had some pot, and we maybe drank some wine.
We all had a lot of fun sitting around in her house doing trio vocal improvisations – stream of consciousness – start with no preconceived idea – listen to the others – make sounds in reaction to what you hear – whatever came into our heads.
Deb and I were trying to cultivate a kind of artistic infantilism, to draw closer to true uninhibited expression. A child’s world is unspoiled by consensus reality and societal conventions and words. We experimented quite a lot with babbling, shouting, crying, screaming, whining and giggling.
We also cultivated artistic “primitiveness” in an effort to communicate as directly and instinctively as possible.
We hoped that the listener thought that it was a bit odd that an adult would actually sing
Auto-phonetic poetry. Yelling, screaming, babbling, crying like a baby, reading from magazines, and a lot of other nonsense and fun. Abstract use of our voices, as sound-makers, like a child or an insane person or a “primitive simpleton”. A portable cassette recorder as sound-recorder. Our voices as only sound-makers. Not even a pot, pan or blender.
HM:
Ant War
Composition
These solo works are examples of my early use of instruments– electric guitar, keyboards, and amplification.
On the tracks on 60 Minutes Of Laughter that Debbie and I are both on, I almost always did the lead voice. Debbie did either instrumentation or a backing or a co-voice. I almost never did backing or instrumentation of any sort on the pieces we were both on.
“Ant War” was culled from a recording of me playing my electric guitar through a small amplifier. The guitar had cost about $125. I think it had a sunburst design on it. I never tuned the strings.
The amp had two audio inputs, and treble and bass controls, and effects knobs for reverb and tremolo. I don’t remember the brand name of the amp, but I think it was something vaguely Western, like: Amarillo or Apache or Cimarron or Bonanza or Sagebrush or Laredo or Lariat. It probably cost about $125 too.
It could get fairly loud for an apartment living room space. One afternoon when we were still living in the Roach Apartments on West 38 th Street the apartment manager came banging on the door, telling me to turn that shit down!
I liked to misuse, abuse and overuse the tremolo and reverb effects on the amp, and I usually turned them up really high.
“Ant War” is a pure soundscape. I was trying to create something that had a lot of energy but that evoked cerebral imagery. Driving pulse without being rhythmic; at the core, noise in overlapping, frothing currents of distortion and crackling electricity, controlled feedback and pitch manipulation.
I was trying to create something really abstract, without too obvious a form.
Did the title “Ant War” come first, and then I created it; or did I create something, and then give it the title “Ant War”?
I next used the electric guitar on my first tape as Dog As Master in 1985, Coffee Spleen & The Barking Dog.
“Composition” was composed with a Casio VL-Tone. The VL-Tone was the first keyboard ever made by Casio. We bought ours at a Target department store around the time they first came out in 1982, for $30.
The VL-Tone was a hybrid calculator/musical instrument. The keyboard keys looked like the buttons on a calculator. It was the first electronic instrument we owned, and it would figure prominently on our first few tapes.
You could program long patterns of notes into the VL-Tone and then play them back. I constructed “Composition” using elements of chance process. I programmed two patterns into the VL-Tone, consisting of just a few related tones played in varying and seemingly random order. I did not listen to the first pattern while programming the second, so the two patterns were not temporally synchronized.
“Composition” is the earliest example of my use of a programmed music system, in which I set up certain conditions and parameters and then let the machine make the music. I have been interested for a long time in audio work that seems to have a life of its own, that evolves and grows into a unique form.
In my use of an open music system I was of course influenced greatly by Brian Eno’s albums, such as Discreet Music.
In the 1970s and 1980s I spent many hours listening to Eno’s records and reading every article on him I could find. There is no way that I can overstate my profound admiration for Eno’s work and ideas.
Later, especially on the Dog As Master tapes, I developed and incorporated many of Eno’s methods and ideas into my own creative practices.
Gabble Ratchet and Rick Karcasheff
There are two recordings of Rick Karcasheff and David Mattingly’s experimental music group Gabble Ratchet on 60 Minutes Of Laughter. Both date from the months before I met Debbie, Summer 1981.
I admired not only Gabble Ratchet’s improvisational style, but also their use of synthesizers. Rick and David had Korg MS-10 analog synthesizers. The MS-10 was black and shiny and had a control panel with lots of knobs and cords. It was one of the first portable analog synths, and it was relatively inexpensive.
Debbie and I really envied Rick and Dave and wanted to get an analog synth. In 1983 we borrowed a Moog Prodigy from a friend for a few weeks. About a year after that we bought a Moog Rogue.
“Improv” is a short snippet from a much longer jam. Debbie included it here to showcase her weird stifled scream.
“Collage/Gertrude Stein” is composed of a collage of pop music, news programs, TV ads and other sonic detritus, mixed completely into the left channel; and in the other speaker, a Gabble Ratchet jam tape with Deb doing readings from a book by Gertrude Stein.
Debbie did a good job putting this collage together. Every time I hear it I recognize and understand and remember more.
Music from radio and records: the Meet The Residents LP, the Sex Pistols, David Bowie (“Young Americans”), The Monkees and The Beatles (“Norwegian Wood”), etc.
The excerpts from TV and radio are like small windows on a different time and place. I hear a lot of TV ads for household products. There’s a news story about an industrial accident releasing radiation into the atmosphere.
Debbie told me that Rick took a Gertrude Stein book from a shelf, handed it to her and told her to read something from it.
Gabble Ratchet used a small inexpensive drum machine called the Dr. Rhythm. Later, Debbie and I bought one and used it extensively on recordings by Viscera, Dog As Master and Master/Slave Relationship.
Rick’s two short tracks are original works that clearly point to an infatuation many of us had at that time with The Residents.
“Three Blind Pigs” is based on a traditional nursery rhyme I knew well from childhood, but in the original it was three blind mice. In Residential Rick’s world the mice become pigs. Pigs are much bigger than mice. It means something altogether different to run after a pig to try to cut its tail off. There would be a lot more blood, for one thing.
On 60 Minutes Of Laughter Debbie Jaffe included several audio scenes and oblique references to her life that illustrated some of the themes that she would later develop in Viscera and Master/Slave Relationship.
Debbie’s early life experiences caused her to doubt and rebel against common notions of romance, marriage, family, religion and popular taste.
Her parents separated and divorced when she was young. Family life was a chaotic mess, with lots of tears and shouting and very little affection. Marriage and love obviously did not mean much.
On 60 Minutes Of Laughter there are five pieces with the word “love” in the title.
“Love In The Tropics” is a sound sample of a thunderstorm from a sound effects record.
“Love Is On My Side” by Trish & The Swishettes is a scream fest!
“To Tristan, With Love” is an excerpt from a language instruction record. Deb’s wish of love was for Romanian-born Dada poet Tristan Tzara.
“I Love You I Love You I Love You” is a recording of a merry go round at a fair.
The title of “Silly Love Songs” is of course a reference to Paul McCartney’s pop song, but I’m not sure how. On the tape there’s a snippet of Deb saying, “And they do their silly love songs” in-between two absurdist duo poems.
The pieces “Husband And Wife Scenario” and “New Eyes” were from a recording Deb made of her much older half-brother Jim , his ex-wife Val and their church minister in 1973 in Des Moines, Iowa.
Her other half brother was a born-again Christian, as prudish and boring as you’d expect. All the religious people she knew were hypocritical, bigoted, judgmental, backwards backstabbers.
Warsaw, Indiana, where Debbie was born and spent her early years, was a hotbed of born-again Christian fundamentalism. Her parents were Jewish, and her father legally changed his name from Jaffe to avoid anti-Semitic persecution.
Debbie’s childhood was a long painful, lonely, isolated, friendless, alienated, boredom-filled struggle. People in general didn’t make a whole lot of sense, with their transparent duplicities and willful ignorance. The world as they perceived it didn’t make a whole lot of sense either.
Debbie’s strategy was to turn to her imagination and withdraw into a world of her own making. Art was the only thing that gave her life meaning and kept her alive.
She composed hundreds of poems, songs, paintings, drawings, stories, and two big novels.
Debbie learned how to play the clarinet, organ and piano.
“Kurtz Kapers” was taken from a recording she made of her junior high school band in 1976. She played clarinet in the band. Can you pick her out? She used her clarinet extensively on the Viscera recordings.
When she lived in Marion, Indiana she went to the Wurlitzer Electric Organ shop downtown and played the organs, which were available for rent on an hourly basis. There were cassette recorders built into the organs. Debbie took extracts from her hours of organ jam tapes for the “Wurlitzer Intermission” segments on 60 Minutes Of Laughter.
Debbie did most of the instrumentation on our early Viscera tapes – from 60 Minutes Of Laughter to In A Foreign Film (1983) to A Whole Universe Of Horror Movies (1984).
Deb got the sound effects, language and poetry records from the main branch of the Indianapolis Public Library, which was across the street from where we lived on Pennsylvania Avenue.
One of her great finds was the Gertrude Stein record that had a scratch on it that caused the phrase “sometimes Vollard mumbled” to repeat over and over. Debbie used this recording as a segue into the first Viscera piece on the 60 Minutes Of Laughter tape.
Debbie Jaffe and I made our first recordings together as a duo using the name Viscera in the Summer of 1982. We were living at my Mom and Dad’s house at 7433 Dorothy Drive in Indianapolis, Indiana. My family first moved into the split level 3 bedroom, one a half bath house on a half acre plot in the northwest section of the city, in 1967.
It was a long, boring Summer. We didn’t have much money, both unemployed, and except for odd and temporary jobs we relied on my parents for support. We spent much of our time drinking coffee, writing poems and stories, sleeping and being depressed.
Occasionally we visited Rick and David, but not quite as frequently perhaps, as personality conflicts arose. My school chum Toby, who lived about five blocks away, would often come and pick us up in his red Volkswagen Rabbit and we’d go driving around looking at stuff.
Generally we were incredibly bored and frustrated, and didn’t know what would happen next.
In April I had gotten fed up sick and tired of my job at The Jumping Beanery. I did not get along very well with one of the managers, and one day I told him I was going to quit. Deb didn’t have a steady job during that time. We felt like we just had to get out of Indianapolis and get away from all of our problems for a while. We wanted to travel and go see lots of places we’d never been to before. We’d just recently gotten our tax returns and we had enough money to buy Greyhound Bus tickets for one month unlimited travel. We went traveling across the United States during that month of May 1982.
We traveled eastward to New York City. We got off the bus and walked around on the deserted New York City streets at 6 o’clock in the morning. Deb and I walked around in the Greenwich Village area. We got coffee and breakfast at a McDonalds as soon as it opened. After a few hours we got tired and walked back up the Port Authority Bus Terminal at 42 nd Street.
At each bus station we had to buy a new ticket for our next destination. I don’t remember anything about the trip between New York and Montreal, but I think we went through Boston. Montreal was interesting-looking, but again, just like NYC, we arrived there early in the morning, before anything was open. We walked around a bit and looked at the buildings and imagined what it would be like if they were open and there were people doing things in them. We ate breakfast and freshened up a bit. Later in the morning, before anything opened up, we got tired again and got back on a bus heading south.
We traveled back through the Midwest and out to Des Moines, Iowa, where Debbie’s mom was living at the time, and Deb’s half brother Jim and ex-wife Val and their kids. We stayed at Val’s house for two or three days and rested and slept. Sex was out of the question because there were a few more weeks to go until I could remove the stitches on my testicles.
Deb and I decided to travel next out to California. We really enjoyed walking around in San Francisco for hours and hours.
Near the end of the four weeks we started to run out of money. We had about $7 to feed us from Los Angeles back to Indianapolis.
When we got back to Indy we were penniless and exhausted. We had seen a lot of interesting things on our trip across America, but now we were more depressed than ever.
Our relationship had changed quickly and deepened considerably. Deb and I intended to devote our lives to art. We questioned life and death and of course our sanity. Birth and death and life tied up in a big vicious cycle spinning forever, repeating itself over and over. Existence is suffering. That Winter of 81-82 was one of great pain, conflict, upheaval and confusion.
Out of these experiences, and out of all the disillusionment, the cold and snow, and too many nights drinking too much and lots of little illnesses and emotional episodes and crying came the recordings we made that Summer as Viscera.
I wrote lots of prose that Summer, a lot of it done in a cut-up style. I would type out the text of a story I’d written in a temporally conventional fashion, then take some scissors, cut up the typewritten sheets into phrase snippets, shuffle them and re-arrange them.
One of the stories I wrote that Summer was called “The Edge”. I still have a few of the original photocopy booklets I did of it. The narrator is paranoiac to the nth degree: “I felt a hair out of place on the top of my head”. He perceives that everyone is watching him and judging him and discussing his worthiness. Mostly, they observe what he says, looking for any excuse to condemn him – taking slips of the tongue and unintentional alternate meanings of words as evidence of his real intentions, and his shortcomings. The narrator’s mysterious host is not only his mentor and guardian but a cruel vampiric master and pitiless executioner as well. A lot of the imagery around which I based this cut-up short story was influenced by early 20 th Century German films I’d seen in my Film History class at Indiana University (Autumn 1980), especially The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari (1919) and Nosferatu The Vampire (1923).
In his desire to escape the hell that other people were, and to get away from their control, the narrator escapes from the master’s house and travels to the brink of the void, a precipice. Behind him is the world as he knows it. It is insufferable. Going back is not a choice. Beyond is Nothing, or at least the Unknown. Jumping out from The Edge he seeks release --and consciousness -- in extinction.
That Summer Deb and I started developing some pieces in which I would recite, sing or act out poems and stories we’d both written, and Deb would compose a minimalist background/ backdrop or mood setting using simple instrumentation – mostly our Casio VL-Tone mini keyboard.
We wanted to get right to the heart and guts of the matter of life and existence: to live and show the pain and torment of existence through the art. There was no redemption in life except for the artistic expression of our experiences. This expression must be direct and bare, devoid of artifice and rationalization, all the loose psychic wires hanging loose and going every which way. Erratic mood swings and spurts of energy followed by lassitude...our fragmented perplexed perception of the world outside and our fragile mental states.
The Edge
“You are mistaken my boy. A life does not mean all that much. A human life is like a fly. There will always be more flies...”
This world is fallen boy turned to my homeland...is reasonable nothing folks with their would they punish me? Knife and pistol when all the villagers...reason is an act of the village streets...streets of un-reasoned victory...
“Do you find that book interesting my boy?”
“Oh yes very much so!”
“May I ask you why you find it so?”
“Yes...well...until I started reading this book I didn’t know that much about you...”
“Half of it is lies...”
“And the other half?”
“Half the truth...”
I felt a hair out of place on top of my head...
There are no innocent victims and I promise to be salt in their wounds. The gravedigger will be happy on that day when they all wake up...
Submissive during his lifetime I now am no longer connected with his name...but I can see him out of the corner of my eye...
The edge is sharp but I jumped out almost conscious of myself.
I feared I would reveal too much and in doing so compromise myself. I soon learned it was better sometimes not to say anything. A shrug of the shoulders or a nod of the head sufficed. Words could get one in an awful lot of trouble. What was a clear thought in my head became a deadly confession in the ears of others. Quiet! Don’t let them overhear you talking about your wounds. Damn the Mountain!
The edge is sharp but I jumped out almost conscious of myself...
A Different Kind Of Music
Do you want to hear a different kind of music?
No?
Well, it’s better to listen to it after dark any way
I actually ran the risk of caring
I wondered if it was maybe a mistake
Some people never see the gray areas in-between
Until I punch out the holes in their walls
The point was:
That if everything is devoid of meaning
Was it not possible that this belief itself suffered the same fate as that which it condemned?
Starvation And Beating
Always black and white pictures!
The rot!
Lock in on starvation and beating!!
Of course there’s not much you could do about it
No one would believe it was happening
They didn’t fight it
It’s just a book I studied
Referring to one’s influences is a tricky thing indeed. Every time I read about someone listing their influences I get a little embarrassed. I wonder what they’re trying to prove. Do they want to show their credentials, prove their pedigree?
The influences on Viscera’s style are too numerous to mention. We both listened to a hell of a lot of records and tapes back then, and much of it made a big impression on us. On the Viscera pieces on 60 MOL I can hear traces of recording artists Lemon Kittens, Nico, Patti Smith, Suicide, Captain Beefheart, Throbbing Gristle, and Joy Division, along with William Burroughs, Existentialist literature and the Theater Of The Absurd.
Our earliest Viscera works for the most part weren’t exactly music: more like miniature audio theater pieces. See the darkened pitch black theater with two spotlights stabbing through swirling smoke. The woman in black plays a deep throbbing organ tone on a tiny keyboard. The man, also dressed in black, bespectacled, his gaze fixed deep in inner space, steps forward and makes a sound with his mouth.
Deb used the Casio VL-Tone and my amplifier to full advantage on these Viscera pieces. Sure, the sound was cheesy as hell, and it was monophonic; but the VL-Tone had a good, deep bassy tone – aided by the liberal use of reverb and tremolo. The VL-Tone had a few rhythm patterns you could choose from, and you could increase or decrease the speed. The drum machine sounds were thin and ticky-tocky, but through that amp we were sometimes able to get them into a penetrative space.
All of the Viscera tracks on 60 Minutes Of Laughter were recorded on our portable mono cassette recorder. My voice doesn’t sound like it was amplified, probably because we didn’t own a microphone at the time. The patch cord to connect the VL-Tone to the input of the amp could be bought at Radio Shack for a couple of dollars.
We developed a style that lent itself well to the limitations of our equipment, and perhaps our technical abilities as well. We tried to paint sound pictures through the juxtaposition of spoken words and stark, ultra-minimal electronics. We wanted to create a state of heightened sensation...immediate emotional impact...to be there and feel it...with no curtains or screens no masks no blinders to our truth of existence.
Debbie at that time was obsessive/compulsive – she could spend hours literally splitting hairs. She had a strongly addictive personality, and was addicted to chocolate and Bronk-Aid asthma-relief tablets. Deb’s childhood scars revealed themselves in pseudo-infantile mannerisms and imaginary companions.
I was schizo-affective schizophrenic, with giant mood swings from ecstatic to sad, depressed, crying and gray. Back in like 1980 or so I was voluntarily hospitalized in the Psychiatric unit of Methodist Hospital in Indianapolis, for two terms of two weeks each. Dr. M------- recommended that I receive electroshock therapy. I told him to forget it. While in the psych unit I would read a lot. I read Thus Spake Zarathustra by Nietzsche during one term.
Later, I took prescription drugs to curb the schizophrenic stuff: Lithium, Stelazine and Ativan. I used them all through the time of the earliest Viscera tapes. Plus, I smoked about a pack of cigarettes a day, which made me twitchy as hell. Coffee had me well in its clutches by the age of 18, and I drank several cups of Folger’s Instant coffee with two teaspoons of sugar and 2% Low Fat milk. The tranquilizers, in combination with nicotine, caffeine, cheap red wine, two bad LSD trips in Spring 1981, marijuana, and dark, ultra-serious depressing-as-hell-literature (Dostoevsky, Kafka, Camus) helped turn me into a flighty, irritable, loud-mouthed, self-pitying, self-doubting emotional cripple, but existentialist as hell. I had attempted suicide, albeit halfheartedly.
At least I was sincere about my inner personal struggles and strived to express myself in an evocative fashion...there was part of me that wanted to act out these scenes... In some ways I invented myself as an artist. I set out to be an artistic person, no matter what it took. I drew a lot when I was like five to eight years old or so, and in high school I had done a lot of theater work. I had never learned how to play a musical instrument.
Yes, I wanted to do what it took to be an artist, and if that meant deranging my senses a la Rimbaud in order to scrape away the societal camouflage which obstructed our view of the emotional truth of our existences, then so be it. If it meant to court a little insanity just for what could be gleaned for a good artistic purpose I was willing to do it. All of my problems and struggles and anguish and pain were of and by my own design. I sought out difficulty because I wanted to feel and experience something very real and very intense.
I had come from a good family, with loving, positive, supportive parents and siblings. I was among other things taught to strive to do great important things, and to use my intelligence. At about the age of five I decided that I would grow up and do something important enough that I would be in the World Book Encyclopedia.
I never had any serious problems as a child...just several blows to the head. Physically fit, but not athletic. Good in school without trying. Bookish. Black-horn-rimmed glasses. Never fit in with most people of my age. Most of my friends were outcasts and nerdy types. All of the problems I have had in my life were of my own doing, purposefully.
Not long after I graduated from high school I decided that my life was boring, that I hadn’t had any real experiences. I set out to do whatever it would take to get free and be an artist. I’ve always been attracted to intense mental experiences and drugs provided enough mind exercise, at least, and they helped to un-hinge one’s consciousness, to get to the real you, under the act.
Home
Why do I live in this place?
Mr. Lincoln, tomorrow’s figure
Redeemer of the cloth sack
The colored locks of silk burnoose
What is this place?
Broken eye
Crumbling, pacing bewildered eye
Simple eye, straight like a rapid whole volley
A broke-down wheel
A bad poem
I bed down for the night
A shot of whiskey
Wind whistling the telephone line
Outraged Civilized World
Cruelty in the pages
A deep murky prison
Outraged civilized world dying
************************************
************************************
Heartsick immediate dead effort
I know it should make me want to cry
But it doesn’t
A few bloody days
He refused to repair it
The bottom fell out of the sack
I saw bone through the skin
Money taken / actual results
Crucial little difference account
What are those men’s names
Behind those bars
And these doors
And these windows
Frozen
Rough
A handle to speak less harshly
For the public ear
I know it should make me want to cry
But it doesn’t
Seeing The Future
Suspense division rectification
See the future dressed in rags
See the women in a row
*********************
Dropping his hands
He seems to belong here
He does not know
Jumping light disk thrown
Rug off the truck
His sister on a rooftop
Simple, contrite
Simple wares
Sees his whole life before him
Behind him
Remembering lightning space stars dreams
Grown tired of waiting for it to happen
Takes hold of it with his own two hands
No continuity: Is it dying?
Did he take hold too late?
He has to strain his eyes to see the things he wants to see
“Is it any wonder?” he asks himself
He is moving
He is seeing
He is the gray light bulb lying down down
His eyes begin to hurt
He turns away from the page
********* the skin to the touch
Bright, swimming in pools of still water
Everything And Nothing
... and Everything And Nothing issued forth from Mystic Orange
Everything And Nothing
Everything And Nothing
Everything And Nothing
Bamen and Bamen and Bamen
And Bamen and Bamen
It was OK
It was OK
It was OK
Really it was
Really it was...
[August 26, 2013 -- below are questions I asked of Debbie Jaffe in 2000]
-- Do you remember what Stein writings you read on the piece "Collage/Gertrude Stein"?
That was from a book Rick pulled off his bookshelf. I don't know for sure.
-- Do you remember the name of the song from Kurtz Capers you included the fragment of on 60 MOL? Do you remember what year it was recorded?
The Kurtz Kapers stuff was from my 8th & 9th grade band class - so... 1975 or 1976.
-- What was your half-brother's name who was married to Val? What year were those conversation snippets on "Husband And Wife Scenario" and "New Eyes" recorded? I guess it was in Des Moines.
My half brother Jim, recorded approximately in 1973(?) in Des Moines.
-- What was the name of the music shop in Marion where you recorded "Wurlitzer Intermission"?
Oh, gee. All I remember was that it was downtown, and the organ rooms were in the basement, and for rent on an hourly basis. The cassette recorder was built into the Wurlitzers! I was bored and this gave me something to do. Those were the days when I had nothing to do but mope around!! :-)
Small press info: Ric Soos from San Jose was a supporter of my written work
and published my fictional posthumous interviews with Tristan Tzara and
Gertrude Stein. My work did not get a huge positive response, to say the
least, including 12SOL - people didn't know what to make of it. Was it
serious fictional literature? No. Was it informational? No. Was it humor?
Maybe, but strange humor. As for other names, I'm drawing a blank too.
I did 12SOL to express my own feelings of absurdity, and dada humor. I also
did not mind befuddling people, I suppose. I was out to show that if
something doesn't overtly spoonfeed people, they won't understand it. I
think I succeeded in that regard anyway.
60 MOL was a collage of sounds in a similar vein only using auditory sounds
instead of words and graphics on paper. Again, it wasn't intended for a lot
of people to understand. It was part of the home taper scene, in the sense
it was taped at home (!) but .... not in the sense of it trying to be
serious music, per se. I took it all very seriously at the time, but also
was aware that most people wouldn't get it, but that was one of the reasons
FOR doing it! If that makes any sense!
01 01:41 Red House Blue House DJ & HM
02 00:23 Voulez In The Voulez Gertrude Stein
03 01:44 The Edge, Part 1 Viscera
04 00:09 Preacher
05 03:03 Ant War HM
06 00:14 Hard On I’ve Got A....!
07 00:42 Kurtz Kapers
08 00:26 Laughter
09 00:42 A Different Kind Of Music Viscera
10 00:07 Love In The Tropics Tropical thunderstorm
11 00:35 Starvation & Beating Viscera
12 01:19 Floatin’ On The Waves Dancing Invisibles
13 00:41 Love Is On My Side Trish & The Swishettes
14 00:10 Telephone
15 01:39 Home Viscera
16 01:37 Composition HM
17 02:20 Outraged Civilized World Viscera
18 00:27 Another Simon And Garfunkel Hit record-scratching
19 00:54 Three Blind Pigs Residential Rick
20 00:16 To Tristan, With Love Romanian language
21 01:19 Yeah, Yeah, Yeah Trish & The Swishettes
22 02:04 Seeing The Future Viscera
23 02:32 Airplanes And Engines Dancing Invisibles 2350
24 00:15 Husband & Wife Scenario
25 00:45 New Eyes
26 00:35 Pain Research Trish & The Swishettes
27 01:00 Improv Gabble Ratchet “stifled scream”
28 00:44 Apple Pie English instruction
29 02:08 Wurlitzer Intermission DJ
31:25
30 00:00 Wurlitzer Intermission (cont)
31 01:01 Collage/Gertrude Stein Gabble Ratchet
32 06:20 Dharma Proclivity JK & MP
33 08:40 Tinyness Park Avenue Rick
34 10:01 Birds
35 10:22 The Sanctuary JK & MP
36 16:38 Bird Is Dead HM & DJ
37 18:10 Carnival
38 19:00 Repercussive Illusion HM
39 19:11 WWWIII/WWIV Army Brats
40 22:15 My Balls LE
41 22:31 Public Lavatory, Blue Light HM & DJ
42 24:21 The Edge Viscera
43 25:34 Negative Image
44 25:40 Everything And Nothing Viscera
45 26:13 Tiger Talk Burnt Circuits
46 26:18 I Don’t Understand DJ w/ “Mr British”
47 26:31 Silly Love Songs
48 26:35 Why Do You Do It? Burnt Circuits
49 26:49 Freedom To Be Immoral The Conversations
49 27:26 Accepting Things As They Are Viscera
31:10