With the relationship between music and social media becoming even more entangled as the future looks more and more digital, young bands who had found themselves embedded within "local" scenes can easily find themselves larger audiences, intentionally or not. However, this idea is applicable for more than just kids starting out, as reissues of and articles about older, unknown-at-the-time records have led to reunion shows and even new material from bands who haven't played together in decades.
The Prefab Messiahs are an interesting band to examine this with, as they are closely tied to the "Wormtown" (Worcester, Mass) scene of the early 80s, one that also birthed the Prefabs' friend and mentor Bobb Trimble, who himself has found new popularity with the internet. The Prefab Messiahs' record, Peace Love & Alienation, has been reprinted on Gary War and Taylor Richardson's Fixed Identity label, and the group will be embarking on a short "reunion tour" in June, with a stop in New York on June 8th or 9th.
The Prefab Messiahs formed at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts in the early 1980s. How did attending school during this sort of heyday of "college rock" affect the music that you were making? Did you find the local "Wormtown" scene to be a supportive hub for bands to grow during the time?
Kris: I wasn't aware of a real college rock heyday until the mid-80s, but there were definitely some cool radio things happening in Worcester in our time ('81-'83). WCUW had a great punk/new-music block at night called "Wormtown on the Rocks", which championed imports and independent sounds from all over, and they gave lots of love to the local punk/new-music scene too. Back then, hardly anyone could afford to cut their own vinyl, and of course CDs were still a few years away.
So, they played lots of cassettes and reel-to-reel tapes -- both recorded demos and live cuts (our LP track "Beyond All That" was recorded live in their air studio with just two mics). There was some similar late-night programming at WICN with "Uncle Mark" Lynch heading things up there. As far as a "supportive hub": yeah, we definitely found Wormtown to be that, but in the beginning we were regarded with a certain amount of suspicion for being campus kids instead of home-towners. Once people realized that we were fellow status-quo rejecters, though, they warmed up to us pretty quickly.
Mike: I'm not sure that the The Prefabs would have happened in any other place or time. We embraced Worcester, explored it, wrote songs about it. It's a city that feels like a town and has a bit of an inferiority complex (I've been referring to Memphis as "the Worcester of the Mid-South" for those reasons). People in places like that don't take themselves too seriously. There's that feeling that "we're all in this together" and you can do your own thing. We would open up for Mission of Burma one week and Willie Alexander the next and the same people would usually be there pogoing and having a good time.
Prefab Messiahs sharing a bill with Mission of Burma.
Flyer for the band's gig with Willie Alexander.
What is the relationship that singer-songwriter and fellow Worcester citizen Bobb Trimble had with the Prefab Messiahs? Did you see him as a sort of mentor figure?
Kris: It was kind of hard not to see him as that sort of figure. He was the only person we'd met who had actually put out his own full-length LP. I had met him about 9 months before the Prefabs first got together, when he had just released Iron Curtain Innocence. He caught our first gig in November '81, and took an immediate interest in trying to help us out. He declared himself our manager, and after we won some studio time by making it to the semifinals of a controversial band battle, he offered his services as producer. Out of those sessions came "The 16th Track" and "Desperately Happy". We had some fun and crazy times with Bobb. The enduring memory seems to be careening around the streets of Worcester in his beat-up 70s Buick Century, which we'd turned into an art car with the leftover bright orange paint from my bedroom! He was always so distracted with having passengers that he rolled over about half of the curb corners when making turns. Fortunately, most curbs were lower and softer back then.
Fun and crazy times with Bobb Trimble.
Trimble's 70s Buick Century transformed into an "art car."
Xeth: I remember Kris took me to meet Bobb in a local pizza place just off campus (Notis Pizza: "You'll Notis the Difference!"). Bobb was wearing a thin, neon pink new wave tie, which impressed me as sophisticated. Being a rather naive and clueless young man, I was vaguely able to comprehend that Bobb was important and "connected" enough to have somehow "made a record." As time went by, I came to realize Bobb was really sort of a kind-hearted dreamer on a whole other level. His music was very different from whatever it was we were trying to do. And as a manager he was unmanagable. I didn't even remember he ever was our manager (or that we ever had any manager!). I remember sharing a number of typically oddball gigs with him, and of course the amazing painted car. I remember sitting on a floor somewhere one time talking about how you should never "go by the book." You should "throw the book away." Maybe it would have been smart to at least read the book first! But that was Wormtown in the early 80s.
"...the amazing painted car."
On the "Peace, Love, and Alienation" record (released by Fixed Identity records), there is a track entitled "Sacred Cow" that was recorded at a local battle of the bands. What is the story behind this recording?
Kris: Oh yeah -- this is the "controversial band battle" that I mentioned...the Spring Rock Showcase in '82.
Mike: We weren't trying to push anyone's buttons, but it was a side effect. The Showcase had bands of every genre from Boston and the suburbs and I'm sure some of them expected to win the night we played. We were just surprised to be up on a stage with monitors and lights. Our drummer was a tiny Casio VL-1 ("VL-Tone") keyboard set up on a garbage can, so the competing drummers in spandex were not happy or just confused. We left an old cassette deck recording back by the sound board and checked it after our set. We distinctly heard someone saying "if these guys win, that'll take the cake!" I think it was John Felice from The Real Kids. He was playing in a side project called The Taxi Boys and had been standing back there. "That'll take the cake" become one of our catchphrases.
Prefab Messiahs playing the Battle of the Bands "up on a stage with monitors and lights."
An advert for the Casio VL-1 used by the band.
Xeth: At that time we couldn't find anybody to be our drummer in the entire city of Worcester. And we literally didn't know what to do. It was another one of our habitual low points. But somehow we must have decided that one of these new-fangled hi-tech rhythm machines might do the trick. We spotted the Casio at Union Music, beckoning to us from the glass case under the cash register. So we scraped together the budget-busting price of something like $35 and bought the only thing we could afford. It could make different beats, but only two that we found to be usable -- "Rock 1" and "Rock 2". And it could make a pretty powerful 'violin' keyboard sound when plugged into an amp. I guess I was fiddling around with it because I couldn't play keyboards at all but I came up with that one-finger riff and a bunch of fairly tongue-in-cheek doomsday lyrics and Mike and Kris played along with it and that became "Sacred Cow."
The story of the Spring Rock Showcase battle is basically that we were so out of place and weird compared to the other pub-rockers in the competition that when we won our night, the contest seemed essentially derailed to some "serious" observers. The best part is that on the recording of our preliminary night there, the mic was in the back of the room and it picks up some guy from another band saying "if these guys win it'll take the cake." And we did win that night, so for once we did take the cake.
Another track on the record, "Prefab City Dub" is a 50-second experiment with the dub genre. Were the Messiahs active in recording experimental tracks? Are there other notable ones that have remained unreleased? What was a typical rehearsal/jam for the band?
Kris: We were a bit of a split-personality band, I guess. In our apartment we'd stage some spontaneous Dada/punk/performance-art things -- "Rice 4 a Sheik" is an excerpt from one of those, as is Egg Al's wide-eyed rant that we spliced onto the start of "Beyond All That". Then there was the "regular" warbly post-punk/garage-pop nuggets that we played at shows -- so most practices were to sort those out. Regarding other "experimental tracks": the out-of-print Devolver CD-R has a bunch of (mostly doughnut-themed) vignettes from the same session as "Rice 4 a Sheik", as well as a spontaneous mock sermon with toy organ called "Temple of Despair". Oh, and there's "Working Stiff" -- just a cool shuffling post-punk basement jam. As far as "Prefab City Dub" goes, we only used 50 seconds because the rest was a falling-down mess (even by our relative non-standards, haha). Long story, but we only had use of the WCUW production studio for about 15 minutes that day (to attempt the dub mix with Brian Goslow), and never went back to re-do it -- which is really too bad. The full song is almost 4 minutes long, by the way. Gary War might try his hand at a new mix of it, actually. I'd also love to hear what producers like Mad Professor, Ryan Moore (Twilight Circus), or Toshio Masudo (La Big Vic) might do with it. That could be a fun EP right there.
Mike: Some of the earliest music that Kris and I played was with Clark art students: so-called "non-musicians" who would get together on Sunday afternoons and play anything that was lying around: pots, pans, bottles, toy instruments. The Prefabs might have been playing more structured songs, but the a lot of the creative spirit was informed by those afternoons.
With this, what did the practice space for the Prefab Messiahs look like? There seems to be an emphasis on paisleys and other 60's signifiers within the clothing of the band, how important was this visual aspect for you?
Kris: The 60s signifiers were probably the most important to me, but we all had fun raiding the Salvation Army in town. Got my best shirts there for $2-3 each! Even though we were relative "outliers" on campus, early 80s college life still felt a lot like the loose-comfort-driven 70s, which itself was informed by the 60s... so there was still a certain amount of outward bohemian trappings around. Plus, a lot of our photos were taken during a hot stretch of the summer of '82, so I think that's why the sandals appear so often. We didn't expect to be under the fashion microscope -- or any microscope! -- 30 years later, haha.
Mike: Practices were often spontaneous jams in our apartment using whatever was lying around, but we did have one short-lived practice space...
We knew the Dean of Students was letting an undergrad jazz-rock combo ("Wet Toast") practice at night under the main administration building. We asked about getting a similar situation for ourselves, and were granted the use of the cramped boiler room underneath the Commuter Lounge. Hot, musty and probably full of radon. One night we turned around and a campus cop with his gun drawn was coming down the rickety stairs of the bulkhead entrance. We stuck with the apartment after that, and our gigs became chances to try new stuff.
Wearing 60s clothing and having longer hair at that time baffled some people. "Those guys are behind the times.....or are they?" 60s clothes and psych music were pretty outre in the early 80s. Both had been abandoned, so they could be found dirt cheap in thrift shops and church basements. In a couple of years it would turn out that there were bands in NYC, LA, etc picking up on similar influences.
The psychedelic fashion of the Prefabs.
What was the influence Dadaism and surrealist writers had on the band's music and lyrics?
Kris: Mike and I first met while Xeth was in England for his junior year abroad. We met (future founding Prefabs member) "Egg" Al Nidle at an experimental Sunday afternoon salon/happening that was organized by Nick Capasso, who's now curator at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum. Mitchel Ahern was there, and he's still involved in multimedia performance art. Also Creed Dew -- a lifelong musical adventurer, and my early mentor in experimental/psych stuff. They were all big into the early Residents and Ralph Records stuff, and at age 18, that was my first exposure to any of that sort of thing.
Mike: We had heard of Xerox [aka Xeth] while he was on his year abroad in England, but the first time I met him, he was the teaching assistant in a class we took titled "Hesse/Kafka/Mann" (that became one word). It was a fitting backdrop for the birth of the band and the surreality of that time. For years after that, Professor Walter Schatzberg was a running character in our conversations.
Xeth: Before I met Kris and Mike, Egg Al and I had been hanging around Worcester the summer before my fabled voyage to Old Blighty. We'd been taking courses on German Expressionism and thought we had stumbled onto something meaningful with the notion of "neo-dadaism"... basically a rejection of all that Reagan-era go-go Top Gun mentality that was on the rise. At least that was our excuse. We'd been making noise into a tape recorder as something called "The Autistiks" (taken from the Massachusetts pronunciation of "artistic")... I think we were listening to Public Image a lot, and the Ramones... Al was a painter and a writer and banged on boxes and cans and had that great maniac voice and a way with words... I was a cartoonist and knew exactly two bar chords. I became enamored of a certain hodgepodge view of fragments of 1960s culture... those were days before MTV, video, youtube, easy access to stuff...
Egg Al and Xeth.
Within the group's re-appropriation of corporate cultural symbols like Ronald McDonald and the Pilsbury Doughboy, as seen with some of the group's artwork, there seems to be a strong cynicism which predates the "mass venting" that would occur in popular culture towards the end of the 80s. What prompted the group's attitudes towards these ideas?
Kris: It was easy to be cynical at that time for people interested in the arts or progressive social ideas. That can be a negative or paralyzing mental state, but it can also spark you into deeper action (a couple of years later, lots of the bumper crop of punk albums coming out had strong anti-Reagan messages). Xeth and Al were two years older than Mike and me, and they'd already taken some post-WWI literature classes and such. We were quite entertained by their Dada-inspired carryings-on, which we connected to our experiences at Nick Capasso's salon the year before. When Xeth busted out the band name that he'd been holding onto -- describing the "friendly fascism" of corporate icons like Ronald McDonald -- we felt that we were embarking on something pretty cool.
Mike: Xeth had already done a comic strip for the student paper: The Clark Cynic and his lyrics could be both scathing and funny. (This was before David Letterman brought irony mainstream.) We liked to joke with each other by talking like curmudgeons and pessimists, but as a band we also conveyed 60s optimism. People probably found those disparities interesting (or frustrating): psych pop vs punk, melody vs drone, happy vs desperate, optimism vs nihilism. So we sang about tearing the icons down, but as children of the 70s, we were praising them, too.
Xeth: I remember visiting somebody's house and seeing some brief ancient clip of The Byrds performing on some old Ed Sullivan rerun or something... they were doing some twee little stage dance, the ben franklin specs, the hair, the whole thing. And somehow I wanted to combine it all together and say something about the wrong turn everything seemed (already) to have taken. We felt cheated out of our 1960s by the ultimate victory of Corporatism and Commercialism and Consumerism. Everything was moving to the Right. And the economy was pretty crappy then too, at least for wannabe free spirits. So when I met Mike and Kris the idea was always for The Prefab Messiahs to be somehow socially critical. We wanted to mean something. And even just our weirdness and primitiveness as performers did, sort of.
How did the songwriting process work for the Prefab Messiahs?
Xeth: Some of our earliest songs came out of jams with local artist/writer/poet pal "Egg Al" Nidle as the theoretical lyricist and/or drummer. He and I had been collaborating on ideas for a while before the Prefabs and I guess it was my idea to start a "real band" with him, and that led to the meeting with Mike and Kris. But it became increasingly clear that Al was uncomfortable as a singer/frontman. And also clear that he could never really sing (or do) the same thing twice. Which is a problem if you are trying to get four or five people to play the same bit of music. Eventually it also became clear that he had no interest in being the drummer, or keeping a steady beat, or playing the same rhythm part more than once either (and that's why much of our time seemed to involve finding a drummer).
Xeth
Anyway, I was very new to the guitar and no natural whiz on it, but everything I learned or figured out I tended to turn into a tune. So I was always coming up with chord progressions or riffs (I literally couldn't play a "lead" part at all back then). I'm a cartoonist, so my lyrics tended to be more cynical or obvious or vaguely humorous than poetic. Neither Kris or Mike was particularly driven to write songs like I was, though Mike came up with various bits that at the time we found pretty confounding... some Robert Fripp type stuff. The main influences were random 60s psychedelic and garage sounds, but sucked up in a very haphazard way.
Xeth gettin' ready to rock.
The band was always a democracy... I was never in any position technically or mentally to really be "the leader". I might come in with a rough bunch of progressions and some words and if it passed some sort of test (i.e., didn't sound too boring or too much like something somebody thought it might sound like, etc.) we would start jamming on it. Sometimes I would try to torture Kris with an idea for a particular bass riff. "The 16th Track" and "Desperately Happy", for instance. But it would always end up the way it ended up. Mike would go off and slowly piece together some lead guitar parts, increasingly getting into using crazy old effects pedals. In our respective heads we were tilting towards various muddled influences, but how it came out live and on tape was something we seemed actually to have little control over.
Video for "The 16th Track" by The Prefab Messiahs:
I'm not wearing any pants.
Posted by: Birsach Gronigen | March 13, 2012 at 01:58 PM
wow... terrible... if Hawk wind ran an abortion clinic for shit psych-rock bands that never made it, Bob Tremble and The Prefab Messiahs would be first in line
Posted by: parker | October 08, 2012 at 01:24 AM