“I’m Art Kumbalek and man oh manischewitz what a world, ain’a?’ --Art Kumbalek
“You can’t write a chord ugly enough to say what you want to say sometimes, so you have to rely on a giraffe filled with whipped cream.” --Frank Zappa
“Good people drink good beer.” --Hunter S. Thompson
Hello, fellow Travelers and Troglodytes! Electric Dave here comin’ back at ya with another exciting installment of reminiscences about TWO BUCK HOWIE and his feats of derring-do and ordinary madness, shocking exploits and never-before-until-now revealed mysteries about our musical odyssey together. These stories are guaranteed to make your hair shrivel, your toenails liquefy, and your tooth enamel decay. So if you don’t feel up to it, maybe you should just go and get yerself some milk and cookies and watch Sesame Street instead, brought to you today by the letters W and E and A and K!
Now,
we had some emails about the first installment sayin’ things like,
“I thought this TWO BUCK HOWIE was supposed to be some kinda mad
rock ‘n’ roll Visigoth tearing up the countryside, rustling
sheep, scaring the cattle and whatnot, ripping “DO NOT REMOVE”
tags from mattresses and all this bitch does is thank
the PA guys for fuckin’ up? Wassup with that?” and “Izzat all
you got?” and “I thought this blog was supposed to be about
constructing a rumpus room on a budget” and that kinda crappola.
Alright, alright, we’re just gettin’ warmed up. We didn’t wanna
scare away the faint of heart or bring harm to those with pacemakers
right offa the bat, but if ya ask for the hot sauce, yer gonna get
the hot sauce. So watch it, punters.
Some
other emailers asked, Hey, how do you remember all these shenanigans
through the smoky haze of time? Good question! The answer: cassette
tapes! Back then, I had an Onkyo tape deck (I still have it!
Wooooot!) and most times we had a jamboree or smoked garfongs, I’d
stick a tape in and let ‘er roll. When we played out, one of our
friends would man the tape deck and so we have at least a partial
historical—and fully hysterical--record of us mucking up the same
song, like, 40 times. Yee-ha!
Be
all that as it may, after the wild success of TUF at Club Garibaldi,
it would have seemed natural for da boys to kick it into high gear,
go a-viking, and take the rest of the city of MKE by storm, but, dear
reader, in the famous words of Robert Burns, “The best laid schemes
o' mice an' men / Gang aft a-gley.” (That’s the poetic version of
Murphy’s basic law.) I won’t bore you with all the gory details,
but health issues, work hassles, money troubles, drugs, women, booze,
the Spanish Inquisition, and the heartbreak of psoriasis all
conspired against TUF so that although there are some cool Mushroom
Lounge tapes from the year of our Lord 1986, it was pretty much a
lost year. But it wasn't just us: the Pet Shop Boys, Cyndi Lauper,
Madonna, and Bananarama were clambering up and down the charts.
Sheesh. Hair was about as huge as it could get without actually using
cranes. Genesis had a US top five single with "Tonight, Tonight,
Tonight," despite the competition from Howie's song, "Tonite,
Tonite." I guess their extra "tonight" and the fact
that they spelled the word correctly put them on the charts instead
of us. 1986, in a word, sucked.
By
1987, Jack had left the band owing to "creative differences,"
The Mushroom Lounge was shut down, and THEN THERE WERE THREE: Jim and
Todd and me. We migrated to HAZ-MAT Central, which was Todd’s
asbestos removal equipment emporium and practiced in a loft in there.
It was frezzing in the winter and like an oven in the summer. In the
dead of the 'Sconsin winter, my fingers would get so cold that I
could barely move them to play guitar. We played in our parkas. I was
afraid Jim's lips would freeze offa his face. Todd had to chip the
ice offa the drum skins. It often required repeated applications of
spiritous liquors to warm ourselves to the proper temperatures where
spontaneous combustion could occur. It was in this period that
Jim—whom we never called "Jim," BTW—it was always
“Howie”—got the nickname TWO BUCK HOWIE. And now, dear readers,
all shall be revealed about how this moniker came to be attached to
our intrepid hero. We used to hang out at Admar’s Golden Note in
South Milwaukee a lot (later, under equally beat management, the dive
was called Oak Manor) and I think Jim didn’t have a lotta liquid
cash at the time (and the rule usually is, no cash, no liquid)
because he’d show up with two bucks in his pocket for a night on
the town. Now, two bucks doesn’t sound like a lotta dough and
there’s a very good reason for that: IT’S BECAUSE IT WASN’T
GODDAMMIT! Sure, back then, 7 oz. taps were like 40 cents apiece, but
that’s only a few beers and for Howie on a rampage—and when, I
ask, dear readers, wasn’t he on a rampage back in those halcyon
days?—that was nothin’, it couldn’t even begin to wet his
whistle. And that isn’t even taking shots into account, AND SHOTS
MUST BE TAKEN INTO ACCOUNT. So he’d half apologize for being a
little light that night and half berate us for not knowing what his
expenses were (I think he was putting his pet lizard through
finishing school) and we’d pony up for him and the next time we’d
go out, he’d stroll into the pub, throw two bucks up onto the bar,
and LO! a star is born: TWO BUCK HOWIE. He made it part of his act:
he began to get two-dollar bills and proudly wear them in the band of
his hat. So the next time we played out (the lineup being just Howie
and Todd and I), we were billed as TWO BUCK HOWIE WITH THE EXACT
CHANGE. I’m not sure who thought up “the exact change” part,
but here's a story that might be close enough to the truth to work:
One night after he finished his two bucks, we started giving him shit
and refused to pay for a round for him, so he fished the exact change
to pay for a beer outta his broke-ass pocket. That may or may not be
the origin of "the exact change" part of the band name, I’m
only guessing—you’ll have to ask ol’ TWO BUCK. (It was Stritcho) Now, to be fair
to Jim, he had always been generous before this with his time, his
money, and his beer, so I don’t want you to get the wrong
impression that he’s some kinda congenital cheapskate. “TWO BUCK”
is an image belied by Jim’s actual generosity. At least, that’s
my story and I’m stickin’ to it.
Even
when there’s circumstantial evidence to the contrary. So one night
I’m out in the local bars with TWO BUCK HOWIE, Stritch, and Todd,
and Howie, broke and desperate, he is drilling into the bar with his
forefinger for shots of tequila like a crazed woodpecker. (Actually,
that could have described any night, but I’m thinking of one night
in partickler.) Now, I usually knew my limit (and, as we learn from
Magnum Force,
a man’s gotta know his limitations) and most times I wouldn’t
dream
of trying to keep up with $2 Howie and Stritch, but we were within
walking distance of my pad and that night for some reason I was
slamming beers and shots of tequila at degenerate levels right along
with them and needless to say, I got way, way, way
hammered. Well, ya swim with sharks, yer gonna get bit once in a
while. Todd intelligently bailed after bar time but Howie and Stritch
and I wended our way back to my little hole-in-the-wall apartment in
back of the S.M. Library where I promptly withdrew and threw myself
onto my bed and holy creeping Jesus hung on for dear life as the
world revolved around me and refused to stay put. I had that very day
bought a fresh case of beer and stashed it all in the refrigerator,
to which Howie and Stritch eagerly helped themselves, and remember,
this is after a full night of debauchery that would impress even the
most crapulent inebriate. As I lay in my rapidly spinning bed, I
could hear those guys pop-a-topping and guzzling my beer. I shouted,
“Hey, you fuckers! Quit drinking my beer and get the hell outta
here!” They just laughed and called out to me, “Go to sleep,
Dave! Everything’s under control out here! Ha, ha, ha! Don’t
worry about a thing, ha, ha, ha! I'm afraid we can't do that, Dave!”
and other mocking stuff. This went on for awhile but at some point I
blacked out and eventually those guys left me for dead. When I woke
up in the morning or whenever and eventually overcame my
railroad-spike-through-the-skull paralysis enough to venture out into
the living room/kitchen to survey the carnage, I discovered that THEY
HAD DRUNK MY ENTIRE CASE OF BEER. They had, it is true, put all the
returnable bottles neatly back into the case, so I’ll give them
that, those stolen-beer-swilling bastards.
By
the late summer of 1988, Jim’s liquidity problems, owing to some
nefarious dealings that to this day remain shrouded in deep mystery,
had abated to the point that he approached Todd and I with a
proposition that he buy some studio time and record his originals for
posterity, to which plan we acquiesced. So, we practiced in Todd’s
loft and eventually made our way to Cornerstone Studio in MKE to
record our one and only actual professionally-made studio album, made
as God had intended music to be preserved: recorded on a reel-to-reel
tape.
Where
to begin the description of this most momentous tape? This tape had
some bizarre, unexpected outcomes. Human beings have come into
existence because of the making of this tape (I’m not making that
up). Lives were also, if not exactly shattered because of the making
of this tape, at least had little chips broken off. Mountains
crumbled into the sea, suns burnt out, tides were turned back, and
SPAM dehydrated.
A
Brief History of the Making of the Album White
Cars! by TWO BUCK
HOWIE with the EXACT CHANGE:
Once
there was a non-galaxy long ago and so very far away, in which a
single atom of substance came into being when the void eventually got
sick of not being anything and imploded upon itself into being. There
was nothing, nothing, nothing, then suddenly, in the blink of an ion,
a little ball of matter off somewhere appeared, and then bing, bang,
boom, an explosion, stuff spinning off in every direction, fully
knowing what it was supposed to do, just getting on with it in the
beauty of the moment, unquestioning and unquestioned, galactic and
superb, expansive and indomitable. And lo, it was not too shabby.
Matter increased in plenitude and fullness, expanding in depth and
intensity in every direction, creeping into the nooks and crannies of
the nothingness of deep space. In a continuing dialectic of the
concatenation and division of matter and energy, the materiality of
the universe continued to expand until it became difficult to find a
parking space. Spinning, spinning, spinning, the stuff began to cool,
to become locked and yet volatile in a predictably chaotic dance. An
infinity of factors, data, random and chance slippages coalesced,
carbon-based, chanting a mysterious mantra as old as life, singing it
to the heavens, chanting it to the waters, the mountains, the plains.
Pea soup. Primeval
pea soup. It roiled, it boiled, it splashed around, murkily, milkily
with the seeds of life floating suspended, reproducing themselves,
creating in their own likeness, directed by inward impulses, random
yet towards a monolithic convergence, impulsive, blind, but directed.
Generating, mutating, saying yes and no to a million million million
variables, to blind paths and forgotten forms, sifting and evading,
perpetuating and competing, eating and excreting. Excretia.
Eventually, the atomic stuff of life grew and large, ominous,
threatening, and cumbersome shapes slid silently through silty seas.
Terrible creatures spawned and multiplied in the relentless deep.
They were horrified even of themselves. The flickering sun itself
feared to peer down into the lightless pools populated with the slimy
denizens of the deep oozing a sinful muck. The creatures themselves
blinked and shuddered to find themselves suspended in this world of
water and darkness. They drifted up, up towards the world of light,
yearning for some sort of deliverance. Their shadows played across
the surface of the oceans as they raised a tentative snout to the
briny air. Gill, snout, and limb, limb, snout, and gill, they nibbled
the tender flesh of aquatic, littoral plants and dreamed of the day
when they would emerge, dragging themselves forward, gasping with the
cruelty of earthbound existence, expiring in the brakes and rushes of
their swampy world. Eventually, with upturned faces, they shuffled
through the darkening forests, unblinking warriors clad in supple
armor, hairy, hairless, scaly, or feathered. They engaged in mortal
combat, shrieking through jaws dripping with blood, their very souls
gripped in an overwhelming carnivorous lust.
OK,
I'm running out of time, so we'll fast forward a couple of billion
years or so and not much had evolved except that $2 Howie came up
with the brilliant idea that he could pay another humanoid to record
the sound patterns that he and his fellow sound mongerers, in a
violent rejection of the received tradition and scoffing at any sort
of "civilized" musical principles, came up with in response
to the utter despair of existing in an absurd post-modern world. And
so it goes.
We
went to Cornerstone Studio in MKE in the late summer/fall of 1988,
not knowing what to expect, and began to record our album. It was TWO
BUCK HOWIE on vocals, bass, and acoustic guitars, Todd on drums (or,
as the cover had it, “smashing, bashing, crashing, whispers &
screams), Sandra the Bukka Biker on vocals, and meself, Electric
Dave, on electric guitar and vocals. The audio engineer who was
recording us and doing all the mixing and mastering was also named
Dave, and at first, either he didn’t get us or he was jerking us
around. For starters, he took away Todd’s drum kit and made him
play on this crappy little tinny-sounding set he already had set up
in the isolation booth in the studio. He made some kind of excuse
like he couldn’t properly mic Todd’s set or some damn thing, but
I think he was just being lazy and didn’t want to go through the
hassle of setting up and breaking down the mics for Todd’s set each
day. So we laid down all the scratch tracks with Jim and me in the
main recording area and Todd in his little quarantine cage, grumpy
because he was forced to play on drums from Toys ‘R’ Us, and also
the iso booth was no fun ‘coz you’re outta the mix. Todd had this
huge sound, he really drove the band (even when we didn’t have
monitors and couldn’t hear boo), and without him in our midst
holding things down, we were a pale imitation of ourselves. Even
though he was pissed off and frustrated by the chickenshit drum kit,
he still did his best, but the drums on the album are not only not
vintage Todd, they’re somewhat buried in the mix.
Next,
Dave the butcher engineer started messing with me. He said I kept
redlining from the overdrive and distortion from my amp and he asked
me to play clean without so much gain and clipping—that he’d “add
it later.” Now, anyone who knows the first thing about rock guitar
knows that the grit, distortion, and sustain you get from high gain
and tube saturation is integral to technique and can’t be “added
later.” I argued with the guy a little bit and he said something to
the effect that we should do it clean just for the scratch tracks and
work from there. $2 Howie—who, you will remember, was paying for
the whole shindig—said something like, “Just try it his way and
if we don’t like it, we can change it later.” So I did my best to
get that George Benson tone, but it was a debacle, and when we
listened to the playback, it sucked. It sounded like guitar playing
you’d hear in a fern bar.
Dave
from Cornerstone also got into Howie’s head. Howie would start
singing to the scratch track and Dave would abruptly stop tape and
say, “You’re flat. Try it again.” Then he’d roll all the way
back to the beginning and Howie would wait for his cue and start
singing and Dave would stop the take and say, “Now you’re sharp.
Try it again.” On the next take, Jim would miss his cue. On one
song, “Seasonal Change,” he got Howie so uptight that I thought
we’d be in studio recording that song while all the seasons did
indeed change.
I
could go on, but the point is, engineer Dave was not on the same page
as us at first. I know, I know, it’s easy to blame the audio
engineer guy if things don’t go right, and it’s true that none of
us had the first clue about doing studio work, but we weren’t
altogether sure if Dave was trying to be helpful or trying to run up
the studio time and his fees. Maybe a little of both. So one night
after we had repaired to The Rusty Bucket (this dive bar right across
the street from Cornerstone where Stritch met his future wife, I kid
you not) Howie, Todd, Stritch, and I sat and nursed beers and tried
to regroup. We started to gang up on Howie, telling him to stop
taking shit from Dave, it was his show after all, and who was working
for whom? Howie was paying Dave's salary and it was his
job to accommodate himself to us,
not the other way round. Jim said that he just wanted good, clean
recordings of his originals for posterity and he trusted that Dave
knew what he was doing. We said, OK, but this fucker’s trying to
make us sound like elevator MUZAK and that’s not us. Jim chewed on
this for awhile and eventually we struck a compromise: we’d do
things Dave’s way on the low-key songs centered on acoustic guitars
and vocals and then we’d let the throttle out on the rockers. But
Jim also took me aside and talked to me about my playing. I’m a
sloppy electric guitarist and sometimes the magic works (in a blue
note, punkish kinda way) and sometimes it don’t. And playing in
studio, as I was learning, called for a more precise way of
playing—this is what Jim asked me to do. Even my girlfriend at the
time (who was an actual classical musician) agreed I needed to
tighten things up. So I did and, as much as it pains me to admit,
Howie was right--things started going more smoothly. Howie started
calling me “The New Kalu” because of my more articulated playing
style, and that’s the name that went on the album. Speaking of
names, here’s how the album got its name, White
Cars! At that time, by
complete serendipity, we all owned white cars (no, not a racial
thing), and one evening when we were feeling no pain, we began to
badger poor ol' Howie until he agreed to that title. So shall it be
written; so shall it be done.
In
retrospect (and is there any other kind of spect?), in engineer
Dave’s defense, the album is kinda schizoid. I get it that Howie
wanted a balance between hard rock and acoustic songs, but how do you
put songs like “Love Should Flower” on the same album as “Gein
is Keen”? The former is a torch song, a love ballad, sung by Bukka
Biker, while the latter is an acid rock psych anthem about the
infamous Ed Gein of Wisconsin, a grave robber who graduated into
murder and making lampshades from people’s skin. It’s kinda like
having Barbara Streisand and The Dead Kennedys on the same concert
ticket—who ya pitchin’ to? What’s that demographic like? But
those considerations were probably far from Howie’s mind (which, it
is true, contains multitudes). Bukka Biker was our friend and Howie
definitely wanted her in the mix and I suppose that the vicious
juxtaposition of these and other polar opposite songs demonstrated
“Another Side of TWO BUCK HOWIE.” And Howie got what he wanted:
fairly accurate renderings of most of his originals to that date
recorded with a fair degree of competence. So, get out from under
that bus, engineer Dave! And Dave actually liked the song “Gein is
Keen”—he thought it was hilarious. He’d walk around the studio
at the end of the night shutting down and singing “Gein is Keen.”
It is a kinda catchy tune, come to think of it. I think it was also
the only song on the album we were all in the same recording space
playing together as a band--so it had a kind of "live"
flavor to it. Dave was also kind enough to provide a mix of three of
my guitar solos on one version of “Tonite, Tonite.” I laid down
three different versions of this little figure I do in between verses
and the solo at the end of the song and we couldn’t figure out
which take was best, so I asked Howie to get Dave to make an
alternate mix with all three at the same time. A little busy,
perhaps, but I’m glad we did—and thanks, Howie!
BTW,
I think Howie has links to all these songs on his blog (Most of them) so you can see
what I’m talking about above. The best songs on the album IMHO are
the rockers “Tonite, Tonite,” “My Consciousness,” “Don’t
Take the Children,” “This Curse,” “El Salvador,” “Rock
‘n’ Roll Dance,” "What I Want," "Original Sin," and “Gein is Keen” (on the tape jacket it
is incorrectly labeled “Ed Gean”). All of these songs totally
rock, whereas a couple of the others, whatever their merit, were not
in our wheelhouse. And I have tons of basement recordings of us doing
these songs with more verve than in studio—or at least, we rock
harder or do them in innovative ways. In fact, we never played songs
exactly the same way twice. ABBA we were not. But each of these songs
is better than yer average bear and they are now as engrained in my
consciousness as any song by The Beatles or Stones or Led Zep. I’m
not saying they’re as good, mind you, I’m just telling you what’s
in my head (a frightening location, admittedly). Take a song like “My
Consciousness” for example, with one of the great lines: “Tennis
shoe red, punk is not dead.” That might not seem like much of
anything, but it’s a perfect balance of an image with an aesthetic
and personal manifesto. Remember, Howie started his musical career in
a punk band and the red Converse sneakers were as de
rigueur as spikey hair
and safety pins. And even though by the time he penned those lines,
Howie had moved on from the punk scene, the aesthetic still lived on
in mutated forms. This was the 80s, full of New Wave, overproduced,
drum machine bullshit music, but Howie was still wild at heart. To
which I say: Bravo, TWO BUCK!
The
above qualifications notwithstanding, and all things considered,
White Cars!
turned out to be a pretty good first effort at a studio album. It was
a blast making it and we felt like big shots the whole time we were
in the studio. And we were. And if the world did not snap up the
album like the last few ice cubes in hell, well, that’s on the
world!
Thus
endeth installment two of “TWO BUCK HOWIE: THE MAN, THE BAND, THE
MUSIC, THE LEGEND.” If you liked what you read, click on some ads
and stuff and earn Howie one one millionth of a kopek or whatever
they’re paying blog sites these days to get the people the
misinformation that keeps America’s fur shiny. Or just cut him a
check or Venmo him some dough, ya cheapskate! Next time we’ll deal
with the final days of the shooting star Two Buck Howie and how it
all disintegrated into twisted wreckage and smoldering ash, ptooey,
ptooey, ptooey!
This is,
I Still Wear Red Tennis Shoes
Jim Hauenstein
And,
A fool always finds a greater fool to admire him.”
-
-
That is my story and I am sticking to it!
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Be Kind To Everyone.
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