I Was An Idiot Savant But No One Noticed

Reading

Electric Dave's

unauthorized biography for the last three days,

of the time we spent together playing music from the years 1984 to 1985,

brought back a lot of memories.

If you haven't already,

take the time to read his rendition of what happened in the story of

TwoBuckHowie: The Man, The Band, The Music, The Legend.

Prologue

Part Uno

Part Deux

Part Drei

After reading it you will understand why,

when five different people give an eyewitness police report,

you will get five different answers.

Yet,

I still like to thank

Dave

for all the kind words when he did finally say some! 

*****

Let us take a moment to reflect on what

The Electric One

had to say by listening to a song that he describe in his narrative as

Chasing Women.

This is,

I Was A Idiot Savant

But No One Noticed

Jim Hauenstein

And Yes Some Say,

Just An Idiot Savant In Drinking Alcohol

“It isn't against the Law to be an idiot.”
- Cassandra Clare -

 

That is my story and I am sticking to it!

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Sign up as a Follower,

or leave a Comment.

If it's worthy enough,

I'll answer you in a Post.

Thanks for reading.

Be Kind To Everyone.

I'll Be Seeing You!

Part Drei Of TWO BUCK HOWIE: THE MAN, THE BAND, THE MUSIC, THE LEGEND By Electric Dave

“We Poets in our youth begin in gladness; But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.” --William Wordsworth 

 

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night . . . .” --Allan Ginsberg 

 

“They called me mad, and I called them mad, and damn them, they outvoted me.” --Nathaniel Lee, on being committed to the Bethlehem Hospital for the Insane, a.k.a Bedlam 

 

“I have felt the wind on the wing of madness.” --Charles Baudelaire 

 

“Lost in a Roman wilderness of pain And all the children are insane.” 

--Jim Morrison 

 

   Hello, my fellow Travelers and Troglodytes! This is Electric Dave, and now, O my little droogies, comes the weepy and lugubrious part of my wee tale, all full of tears and flapdoodle, partings with such sweet sorrow, the end of an era, the death rattles of the American Dream, cough, cough, cough. Ahem. In this final installment, (Before the Epilogue) I pull out all the stops and describe our intrepid hero's final dark descent into madness and mayhem with all the fixin’s. Ya want cheese with that? 

   When last we left our intrepid poet-warrior, he had just cut the album White Cars! to the acclaim of dozens. Well, maybe a baker’s dozen, if you include the baker. But did our hero rest on his laurels? Did he decide that all that rock ‘n’ roll fame, the excess, the booze, the women, the drugs, the screaming madness, it was all too much? Huh, did he? Maybe. Maybe not. You’ll just have to read on and find out. 

   Around that time we decided ROAD TRIP! Destination: Minneapolis to watch a Brewers-Twins game at the Metrodome. It was to be Howie, Todd, Tim, and yours truly blasting off in the white shark, but at the last second Tim said, and I quote, “I got a bad feeling about this one,” and bowed out, so his brother Jeff climbed aboard (big mistake!) and we set off guiding our way by the astrolabe and the occasional interstate highway sign. It turns out that Tim was prescient because Howie was in rare form that weekend and got himself rat-arsed almost immediately upon arrival at the hotel bar. We dialed in the Mothership, frantically yelling at them, “Houston! We got a problem!” but all we got was a lotta static and when they finally replied, they just laughed at us and gave us fake demon rum incantations to ward off the evil spirits. But it was of no use, our fate was sealed, Howie was pretty much like Captain Ahab and canned heat was his white whale. There was Howie, fighting that big ol' Moby-Dick, but it took a lot outta him and eventually he got so snookered that we all told him, Look, Howie, why don’tcha go sleep it off before we go to the game tonight? So he went up to our room. We continued our own peaceable drinking at the hotel bar and when we went up later to wake him up he had put the chain on the door and at first he was so ploughed under he couldn’t even get up to let us in. We had to shout wicked words at him and threaten to break down the door before he finally struggled to his feet and let us in. Whereupon, he started to get belligerent with Todd and although Howie was a strong dude back then, Todd was stronger (and soberer), and rassled him down while Jeff deftly grabbed a beer outta Howie’s hand. We were not amused and so we left Howie in the hotel room and walked to the game, a couple of blocks away. But after about the 2^nd or 3^rd inning, Howie stumbled in, drink in hand, and found his seat. We sat there wondering “What the eff next?” but miraculum miraculorum, there was no further trouble. Howie just sat there emitting mumblings and burblings, and after another 2 or 3 innings, he got up and disappeared. We probably shoulda followed him to make sure he didn't get rolled on the mean streets of Minneapolis, but we didn’t, and that was bad on us. But after the game, we went back to the hotel and found him passed out in our room, so no worries, mate. The next day, the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Howie show was over, so we did some sightseeing before driving back to MKE. All day, Howie was contrite, deferential, and courteous: his affable old self. What a difference a day makes! 

   After Jack left the band, we tried to make it as a three-piece, but it wasn’t working. Oh, it was fine for the studio, but it became apparent that it was unsustainable live, so Howie invited Kelly, a loafers-and-no-socks wearing guitarist/vocalist to audition for the band and he passed. Around the same time, “THE EXACT CHANGE,” i.e., Todd and me, advised TWO BUCK that we were going to start playing some new material or that we would nail his sneakers to the floor. The rock songs from White Cars! were still good, but the rest of our repertoire was getting stale. So Howie agreed and we started playing songs by the likes of Hüsker Dü, The Smithereens, Hendrix, Black Sabbath, The Ramones, The Replacements, and some of our originals. With Kelly on board, we got tight in a hurry and played Garibaldi at the end of the year, and, despite a few gaffes, it was a good show. After playing together that long and what with the studio work, I guess we found a groove. Kelly brought his own entourage who kept requesting the one song he wrote to that point and we kidded him endlessly about it. Little did we know, but that would prove to be the last dance by TWO BUCK HOWIE WITH THE EXACT CHANGE. I still have the tape from that show, and one of the most hilarious moments of the evening is when Stritch, who was running the tape deck for me, yelled into one of the recording mics in the middle of “I Wanna Be Sedated” by The Ramones, “FUCK YOU, DAVE!” I still laugh every time I think of that. 

   We didn’t know that would be our last gig together, and after that I got a little used 4-track cassette recorder (only 3 tracks actually worked reliably) with the intent of using it to write some more originals together and maybe doing another album. So now we were recording at The Marzbed Club (as I had christened the flat I lived in in South Milwaukee) and various members of $2 Howie would come over and we’d lay down tracks. It was a helluva lotta fun and we came up with some good sketches for songs but didn’t really follow through on them. Oh, well, maybe some day. 

   We also continued to jam in Todd’s loft and I still have a few odd tapes from this era on which there are both weird experimental ditties (Todd, besides being a kick-ass percussionist, was an idiot savant on the keyboard) and also pretty tight versions of our repertoire. The final set of tapes and, indeed, the last time we jammed together is called “Howie’s Farewell Tour: The Last Rumble,” and is the official album of the Pope’s visit to Carollville (inside joke). Howie was way late to the jam session and showed up howling for more beer! more beer! more beer! He was in rare form that night, his banter was great, Todd and Kelly were into it, the songs we played rocked hard, there were wild singing and playing, and even Stritch tried his hand at bass even though we kept shouting at him, wrong string! try the other ones! I started slithering the fretboard of my Les Paul up and down on my amp while playing a slide part and Howie and Stritch just looked at me and said, “Where’s that been all this time?” Kelly had a new song, or at least new music, and Howie made up lyrics impromptu and they were hilarious. By the end of the evening, we were playing songs we’d never done before and that we didn’t actually know, improvising lyrics and chord changes and solos and just generally being boys behaving badly. Some things never change. 

 

Epilogue 

 

   It was a fitting end to an era. Howie left for California soon after and about a year later I moved to England. I don’t remember if I felt an acute sense of loss right away because I was excited to be moving into a new phase of my life, but I’ve often since thought about those days of playing with TWO BUCK HOWIE and Todd, Jack, Kelly, and the rest, and I wouldn’t trade a minute of it for all the hops in Yakima. OK, maybe a minute or two, but there’s no experience that is like playing in a band and getting tight with your friends in that situation. Whatever quarrels or disagreements we had, however we disappointed one another, all that stuff fades away. What mattered then and still matters is that we had a helluva lotta fun in each other’s company and came out the other end relatively unscathed. As I said above, I still have tapes from us back in those days and I sometimes listen to them and am surprised at how easily I am transported back into the Zeitgeist of those young guys having a blast learning to be a band and maybe finding out a few other things besides. Anyway,

That's my story and I'm sticking to it!

   

“For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book: And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book. And look out, there's a tiger behind you.” --Revelations 22: 18-19

Thus endeth the third 

and final installment of

“TWO BUCK HOWIE: THE MAN, THE BAND, THE MUSIC, THE LEGEND.”

Well,

that about wraps ‘er up.

If you liked what ya read,

why don’tcha click on some ads

and stuff

and earn

$2 Howie

a buck three eighty

or whatever they’re paying blog meisters these days to provide puerile pablum for the uncritical masses?

Or at least buy him a shot of cheap gin at the

National Ave. Liquor Bar,

fer criminey’s sake,

willya?

 

This is,

Damn And I Quit Drinking Too

Ah What The Heck

If Your Buyin' I'm Tryin'

Jim Hauenstein

 

And,

 

“When life gives you juniper berries, make gin!”
- Laurie Buchanan -

 

That is my story and I am sticking to it!

Like what you are reading?

Sign up as a Follower,

or leave a Comment.

If it's worthy enough,

I'll answer you in a Post.

Thanks for reading.

Be Kind To Everyone.

I'll Be Seeing You!

 

Part Deux Of TwoBuckHowie: The Man: The Band: The Music: The Legend - By Electric Dave

“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.”
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle -

 

That is my story and I am sticking to it!

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TwoBuckHowie: The Man: The Band: The Music: The Legend - Part Uno - By Electric Dave

“I love rock ‘n’ roll, so put another dime in the jukebox, baby!” 

--Alan Merrill

 

“The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else while you're uncool.” 

--Lester Bangs

  

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” 

--Rumi 

 

   Hello, my fellow Travelers and Troglodytes! This is Electric Dave, and, yes, I’m a friend of Jim’s. [Hangs head, then slowly raises head, stares out into the audience defiantly, and says:] And I’m damn proud of it! Jim recently wrote a blog about receiving a DVD of a film his brother Al shot of our band back in the 80s, and Jim was kind enough to send me a copy. I foolishly wrote back to him to thank him for it and for asking me to join his band in the first place way back in the day and lavished some other praise in his general direction. Big mistake. Basically, he’s now blackmailing me by threatening to publish my letter in its entirety if I don’t come up with some copy for his blog. So, to give you a clue, this is how this guy operates . . . . 

   Be that as it may, this will be the first installment of the amazing saga of TWO BUCK HOWIE and his musical and pharmacological exploits during the years I played guitar in his bands (roughly 1984-1989). Let me preface my remarks by assuring you, dear reader, that no matter how hideous and reprehensible Jim’s comportment was back in those days, he has since become a contributing member of society, a loving and caring husband and father and grandfather, and, as you can tell from reading his blogs, a true advocate for equality, liberty, and world peace. So no matter how sick or twisted a tale I tell, no matter what depraved and subhuman shit he might have pulled, please keep this in mind. People grow and this is America, dammit, the land of second, third, and 73^rd chances! Besides, I’m pretty sure he’s probably gonna edit out all the demonic stuff and rewrite himself into some kinda saint and sign my name under it. ‘Coz that’s how this guy operates. (Actually, “Saint Jimbo” has a nice ring to it.) 

   But seriously, I first met Jim back in the early 80s when he was the bass player in a fairly successful local Milwaukee punk rock band, Politixs. I met him through the felonious Brian K---- (now, alas, deceased), who became the drummer for that band until the Munson brothers, who formed the other half of the band, and whose ancestors were big winners during the Norman Invasion, decided to move in the direction of industrial synth post-punk techno. Go figure. Jim quickly formed another band, The Uncalled Four, with himself as front man on guitar, Boz B---- on bass, some lead guitarist whose name I can’t remember, and the aforementioned criminal, K----, on the drums. When the lead guitarist had the good sense to decide to leave the band, Jim asked me to audition for the band, and I was in. So that TUF lineup practiced together a few times and then played all of one set at Scandals in Cudahy and another gig before that band imploded into gritty little fragments of fear, loathing, and multidirectional acrimony. I wish I could say Boz and K---- went their separate ways because of irreconcilable creative differences, but the bad vibes owing to other things over which history shall charitably draw a curtain were freakin’ palpable. Boz hated Jim, Jim didn’t trust K----, K---- hated Boz, Boz hated K----, and I was sitting there wondering WTF I had wandered into. So that was that. The only good thing to come out of that was that Jim had written some originals that were pretty damn good that we played for the rest of the decade and actually recorded at Cornerstone Studio in MKE. (I’ll come back to those songs later.) That, and Jim made the hottest chili on the planet and served it up with Guinness. He claimed he made the chili with Rocky Mountain oysters, but I disbelieve it . . . . 

   Sometime later, I invited Jim to come jam with my buddies, Jack (guitar, vocals) and Todd (drums, TODD-A-TRON™) in the Mushroom Lounge (Jack’s basement) and but with no plans for forming a band or playing out, just to jam and hang out. However, I’m sure from the get-go the malevolent and evil mind of TWO BUCK HOWIE was hard at work wondering how he could bend these naive and malleable creatures to his musical will, BWAA-HA-HA! Now, Jack and Todd and I had gone through a few band names, but at that time a friend had dubbed us The Mudsharks, and so when Jim came onto the scene, we started calling ourselves The Uncalled Mudsharks or sometimes The Uncared Four as a sarcastic nod to TUF. Jack and Todd and I had mostly just covered Neil Young and some rock standards, and we did some weird originals (we wanted to be the next Couch Flambeau), and when Jim came aboard, we continued in that vein for about a year, playing house parties and mainly just goofing around in the Inner Mushroom Sanctum, as we called Jack’s basement. It got crazy down in there and I used to jump up and down while playing guitar to give a certain élan to my performance, and I used to get pretty high with my jumps (heh, heh, heh) and once Jim pointed up at the rafters while I was leaping à la Pete Townshend to punctuate a rock ‘n’ roll ending, and when I looked up, there were all these rusty, gnarly nails protruding nastily down from the floorboards, on which I could easily have impaled my head giving me tetanus and rabies and turning me into a zombie and they would have had to chop off my head or something. So, thanks, Jim, for the heads up, as it were! 

   The other good advice Jim gave me years later before one gig was to tape the lyrics of the one song I was gonna sing to the monitor, but I just sneered at him saying, “I wrote the song, Howie—I’m not gonna forget the lyrics.” He just shrugged and said, “OK.” Sure enough, that night up on stage, I got brain freeze, forgot the second and third verses, and had to sing the first verse three times. Embarrassing. 

   Jim and I started teaching Jim’s originals to Jack and Todd—remember, this was all part of his diabolical plan to infiltrate our minds--but we also interspersed them with our own stuff that the whole band composed (no, that’s the wrong term—Bach and Beethoven composed—we mainly just spewed). We wrote and performed ditties such as “Boll Weevils” (no, not that “Boll Weevils”; no, not that one, either), “How Many Eggs Do You Want, Ricky?” “Aladdin’s Hymn,” “Admarski Blues,” "Noise Suite #37," and the infamous “Lorsban 15-G,” an instrumental based on the popular insecticide. Eventually, however, Howie’s hoodoo took effect and we began playing more of his originals interspersed with some punk stuff and some 80s stuff like The Cure and The Church, but also still some Neil and other little shanties like “Steppin’ Stone” and “Sweet Jane” thrown in. We played our first gig with this lineup in the fall of 1985 at Camp Wowitan (a farm out in the sticks that had been converted into campgrounds), appearing as DEF-CON 4 because the guy who was making the posters for the event couldn’t remember what the name of our band was—he just knew it had a “4” in it--and those were the dark ages of rotary phones and only the filthy rich could afford answering machines and many peasants starved or were made into bricks by the fabulously well-to-do, who also exercised the lex primae noctis quite regularly. (Bricks, people! Historically accurate, look it up.) We played atop a haywagon—I shit you not—and I was almost electrocuted to death when my dangling guitar strings (I didn’t trim them at the headstock back in those days because it was hippy chic not to) grazed the mic I was about to sing into and a fireball exploded right in front of my face. That was back in the bad old days before three-prong plugs, and ya took yer life in yer hands just plugging in yer guitar. When the fireball exploded, the beer-sozzled groundlings thought it was part of the light show and cheered. They probably woulda cheered even harder had I actually been electrocuted, those crazy Milwaukee kids. So, with Howie fronting us, the gig went fairly well except for the near-electrocution and the weird harmonica warblings which had no place in the proceedings and we later had the guy making them excommunicated from the band even though he was a nice guy and was supposedly going to be our band manager. But bad harmonica playing cannot be forgiven, I’m sorry. I can’t remember much after that except we woke up the next morning hung over, provisionless and starving, so we went foraging up in the hills and ate some crabapples to tide us over until we packed all our gear into one wee car and skeedaddled back into the big city. 

   We started rehearsing more “seriously” (very scary scare quotes) and Jim whipped the band into shape with his wheedlings and cajolings and bon vivant encouragements whilst plying us with psychotropics, which we were nothing loath to accept. A few months later, a lean and mean rock machine, we played Club Garibaldi in Bay View, which is a neighborhood on Lake Michigan in MKE, and that was the gig that Jim’s brother Al memorialized forever in his video. Forever, people. Except for our final encore song (Alice Cooper’s “Under My Wheels,” during which Jim went into his zombie act), Jim was on point that night, which is to say he was mostly sober despite the fact that it was his 30^th birthday party; which relative sobriety I consider as a miracle right up there with the lágrimas de sangre of our Lady of Guadalupe or Soupdujour whoever. His timing, his banter, the scream on “Don’t Take the Children” (Jim’s rock ‘n’ roll screams sounded like he was being strangled and having a hernia at the same time—crude, but effective), his bass playing, all aces. One thing though—and there always is at least one thing, ain’a?-- our sound was at times hideously marred by treacherous acts of sabotage by the putrid band that opened up for us, the little bastards. After the gig, Jim explained to me as I listened, horrified, that bands did that to each other back then to make themselves look better. WTAF?! They were messing with the PA and smirking about it, and during one set, the echoes and wild banshee feedback made it almost impossible to sing, but we plowed through anyway, quite heroically, if you ask me. Miraculously, Al did not record those songs and most of the ones he did record were at tolerable levels, but the PA system, even without the dirty work of those little creep saboteurs, sucked and we couldn’t hear the monitors, which we complained bitterly about from the second song on. And yet Jim graciously thanked the asleep-at-the-wheel PA guys at the end of the night for the sound. Yeah, thanks a lot, you hoodlums! The important thing, though, is that we had people up offa their asses and dancing and having a raucous good time, so all’s well, eh? And Howie's adoring fans were half heckling him and half wishing him a happy birthday, which was pretty funny. We would consider it an insult if our fans didn't care enough to heckle us. When we were first jamming at a house party at The Mushroom Lounge, one of our friends said after we finished a song, "Hey you guys should be a band or somethin'." It was the "or somethin'" that got me. 

   And even though we weren’t The Politixs, Jim had us do some political songs. Two original songs we played were “Don’t Take the Children,” which lamented the breakdown of the nuclear family owing to drug addiction (and even has a “rap” break in the middle—white boys rapping in the mid-80s? Bite it, Insane Clown Posse and Limp Bizkit!); and “El Salvador” was an attack on the Cold War proxy militarism of the US and Soviet Union, who jointly precipitated the Salvadoran Civil War of the 1980s. Very Clash-esque. Talk about yer progressive lyricism! Never mind that many of the other songs featured and even (ironically? who knows?) valorized such disparate anti-social activities as drug-taking, drug-smuggling, cannibalism, homicide, mindless cruising for chicks, demented states of mind, the “desesecration” of nuns, the heartbreak of psoriasis, and did I mention cannibalism? Nothin’ to see here, folks, just move along. But it was all for a good cause, as all the proceeds from that night went to feed poor little El Salvadoran refugees—leastways, whatever proceeds were left after the band paid our bar tab. Anyway, that’s our story and we’re stickin’ to it. 

   Thus endeth installment one 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 thousandth of a drachma or whatever they’re paying blog sites these days to get people all riled up and whatnot. Next time we’ll deal with the parabola and apex of the Howie rock 'n' roll years when we cut our studio album, White Cars! But you'll also hear along the way about the casualties of rock 'n' roll. And lions and tigers and bears, oh my! Oh, and turn off the lights when you leave, please.

This is,

The Author Is Using A Pen Name To Protect Innocent

Bystanders

Jim Hauenstein

 
 P.S. No one was ever hurt during one of our performances.

Unless of course,

you consider destroying a few hundred-thousands of their brain cells because of the loud

MUSIC

and alcohol use.

 

And,

 

“If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD WAS MUSIC”
- Kurt Vonnegut -

 

That is my story and I am sticking to it!

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If it's worthy enough,

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Be Kind To Everyone.

I'll Be Seeing You!

TwoBuckHowie: The Man: The Band: The Music: The Legend - By Electric Dave

I am writing

The Forward,

 or as those fancy publishers like to say,

The Prologue

to the

Electric One's Novella

about those tumultuous years he spent in the mid to late 1980s with yours truly.

Yes,

The Electric Dave

has written a retrospective through an introspective of knowing the degenerative

TwoBuckHowie.

By exploring the demonology of thought

and the study of musicology in the

Milwaukee Metropolitan Area

during the

"Big Hair Decade."

So sit back in your chairs

and hold on tightly to hear a brief history in time

and the unlicensed,

unauthorized,

and

Uncalled Four

biography of

TwoBuckHowie!

This is,

Part One Of A Three Part Story Begins Tomorrow

Jim Hauenstein

 

(Side note: There was already a band in California during the same period named The Uncalled Four, as we were, so to stay out litigation we had to change our name to The Mudsharks no matter what The Electric One tells you in his blatantly inaccurate or probably spliff induced depiction of the times.)

 

And,

 

“It is a simple but sometimes forgotten truth that the greatest enemy to present joy and high hopes is the cultivation of retrospective bitterness.”
- Robert Menzies -

 

That is my story and I am sticking to it!

Like what you are reading?

Sign up as a Follower,

or leave a Comment.

If it's worthy enough,

I'll answer you in a Post.

Thanks for reading.

Be Kind To Everyone.

I'll Be Seeing You!