A Jug's Life

One from my JSH Combo music blog:


Some crappy old recordings of Holland's Jug Stompers (my abysmally inept jug band from 1998-1999) are now resurrected for the 21st century via the blessing/curse that is YouTube. You needn't actually listen to them; just know that they exist and that we had a really good time torturing our hippie audiences at Berea College with our slovenly, spontaneous and unrehearsed avant-garde hi-jinks. But if you insist, you may find four of them online so far: "Hello Josephine", "Come Back to your Kentucky", "Naked on the Railroad Tracks", and "Rainstorm Creeps".

And if that doesn't completely kill any curiosity you may have had about this band, you can also read some recollections and reminiscences about those grand productive days here and also here.

("Yeah, but... but... what about the JSH Combo, JSH?", I hear you cry. Well, be warned: our latest relaunch of ourselves is underway, please stand by. "Hold on", as Paul Stanley once said, "the roller coaster is about to begin.")

New MMMB photos

Just received from drummer Ellen Bush, these are images of the March Madness Marching Band, taken live in action in Lexington last week.

March Madness Marching Band

Way back in the good ol' 20th century - 1998, to be exact - I formed a crappy avant-garde Dixieland Jug Band whose reputation for unabashed ineptitude echoed through the foothills of the Appalachias. Each week at the now-defunct Cardinal Deli in Berea, Holland's Jug Stompers randomly enlisted musicians without auditioning them, handed instruments to them which they had little or no expertise in playing, and launched into atonal sets without rehearsing. The players weren't even provided with a set list - usually I would just turn to them and announce, "Okay, now we're going to do Louis Prima's 'Banana Split for my Baby'", and watch their expressions of horror and confusion.

"Uh.... but what key is it in, JSH?"
"Mr. Sulu, you may indulge yourself. ONE, TWO, THREE, FOURRRR....."

In that spirit of fondness for low-budget raw-talent lease-breaking Creeps Music, it does my heart good to see these young whippersnappers in Lexington keeping that low gruesome sound alive with their March Madness Marching Band, which takes the whole "brass band that can't play and doesn't care" concept to even greater heights of depths.

As my old pal Mary Meehan said in the Herald-Leader, "Enthusiasm trumps musicianship". That pretty much sums it up. She goes on to say:

But that's part of the beauty of the whole thing, said saxophone player Steve Baron, who also is the owner of Lexington's CD Central.

"I literally haven't picked up an instrument in 40 years," he said. "No one is going to mistake us for a highly polished group of musicians."

But the motley crew is filled with people with pretty serious day jobs: lawyers, engineers, teachers and small business owners, said Jennifer Miller, who has dubbed herself the cruise director and says she plays the camera in the marching band. During the week, she's a lawyer.

"It's nice to have two hours in a week where you kind of have fun like when you were a kid," [chief organizer Lori] Houlihan said. "It's completely about the joy of doing it."

The March Madness Marching Band plays tomorrow at Lexington's Roots and Heritage Parade, 11 a.m. to noon. The parade route is from Martin Luther King Street to Fifth Street to Race Street. More info here. Don't miss it, my fellow Sousaphone aficionados.

(Photo above: Zachary Snyder, Alison Courtney and Jessi Fehrenbach, the March Madness Marching Band's flute section. Photo below: unknown MMMB performer, from lolliloobedoo.)

Central Rock Company

Today is CRC day, commemorating the great obscure 1980s Madison County garage band Central Rock Company, who I played with back in the day. Drink a toast tonight to all weird teenage bands that existed mostly in their own bedrooms and backyards.

Who are Central Rock Company? Historian Mitchell Newport, in his 2003 treatise That Low Gruesome Sound, described them this way:

"Central Rock Company - who took their name from a local quarry business - were two high school misfits (Shay Quillen and Kurt Adams) who performed a highly peculiar act. It consisted mostly of jumping up and down with way too much teen angst and singing mostly acapella versions of 1980s hits mixed with original tunes of their own, such as "Polka De Pineapple", "Upon Hearing That Supergirl Is Dead", and "Penis". Sometimes they were backed up by a motley gang of local kids (called "the CRC Dismembers"). Jeffrey Scott Holland also played guitar on some of their studio sessions for JLK Records, and at an infamous party gig in Shay's back yard. After a handful of cassette releases that did generate some attention in their community, CRC dissipated in 1987. Strangely, these highly adrenalin-pumped kids, whose puerile and childish antics were rivaled only by RV & OI, abruptly grew up and moved on past such silliness. At least for a while."

And what exactly is CRC Day? Well, it's an old tradition increasingly practiced only by old-guard enthusiasts of the "Creeps Scene", commemorating a line from their song "Sitting In My Room" where chants, "It's the 29th of June and I'm sitting in my room".

So now you know.

Grillo the Clown

The first reported sightings of this unique Kentucky eccentric were in the early 1990s, on the streets of towns like Winchester, Paris, and Cynthiana. Nowadays, however, Grillo is mainly found around the downtown/UK areas of Lexington, dressed in his usual outlandish regalia and masks. A self-styled performance artist, street musician, and panhandler, Grillo also has his own rent-a-clown business, but we'd be surprised if anyone has ever hired him.

There are many stories about Grillo's past but all are contradictory. Grillo himself tells radically different versions of his life story when asked. Although his only internet access comes from visits to the public library, he maintains a considerable web presence with numerous sites by and about him.

The stories of Grillo's misadventures and malfeasance are legendary and worthy of compilation in a tome of their own. My favorite Grillo story is the time he actually took up residence in the men's room of a University of Kentucky campus building, to the extent of actually bringing in chairs, lamps, books, and a TV set. Apparently this went on for many weeks, with only a few "Do not remove" signs taped to his stuff being sufficient to keep unquestioning janitors - or anyone else - from messing with his belongings. It was then that I knew Grillo really was a true performance artist!

Thinking I could harness his radioactive powers, I hired Grillo to perform his act at my Clowns in Love art exhibition in New York City and paid for his bus fare, but it was not to be: he showed up at the very end of the show in an altered state of consciousness, made a mess of the place with shaving cream pies for a few minutes, and then departed into the night with my 200 bucks and two bottles of vodka.

Oh well, that's show business.

A couple years back, my indie record label Creeps Records cut a deal to release Grillo's album Grillo Sings the Hits of the 90s (He wanted to call it Blubbering Buttsteaks of Eternal Torment). Despite the painfully low-fidelity nature of the recording we were given, and despite the fact that he's singing these songs acapella, the album is actually selling pretty well, so maybe this is a new career for the clown.

Then again, we also received a report from someone that one cassette recently purchased from Grillo on the street, supposedly of music performance by him, actually turned out to contain the audio portion of a TV broadcast of a 2003 Bengals-Chiefs game.

More about Grillo on page 99 of Weird Kentucky.