My First (and most forgotten) Band

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Madbox, New Year's Eve at the Middle East, 1992.
John Manson at the mic, Jack Guilderson on drums,
Rich Faymonville's guitar head visible on the right,
and me in back buried under six layers of distortion.

We were angry teenage boys, jacked up on Jolt Cola and Naked Raygun. I couldn't play an instrument, but it didn't matter. My friends yanked me out of mom's house, dragged me into a basement and made me practice every Saturday and Sunday for eight hours straight. They plugged me into a Fender Bassman, showed me how to use a pick, and pretty soon I was writing my first riffs for a band called Madbox.

Madbox was a mush of musical ideas. The other guys had been in a high school hardcore band called Nobody's Children (no relation to the 60s punk group) and were really into The Clash. But Boston hardcore in the late 80s was dominated by a mutant plague of skinhead jock zombies that mistook me for a punching bag. Steering clear of that, we hung with an amalgam of skate-punks and proto-goths in Copley Square, listening to the gamut of 70s and 80s underground from Joy Division to Bad Brains, and took inspiration from twisted lyrics and scratchy sounds on the first couple Pixies records and Steve Albini's notorious group Big Black. Musically Madbox realized that it only took piles of old amps and pedals to achieve the sounds we desired, and soon emerged as a bunch of kids playing noise-rock to a budding backwards ballcap-wearing grunge scene in 1990.

Friends of Madbox provoked a week-long graffiti war
with Boston street gang, The Goya Boys, resulting in
this photo-op. Goyas had our number, but not our style.

Madbox didn't quite fit in with the other bands. Suspicious of emergent emocore and clearly the antipode of Riot Grrl, we opened some all-ages gigs with Eye For An Eye who were super nice guys, but then there was the meathead thing at those shows (notably one at the Channel where Kevin [7] Seconds got knocked on his ass in the parking lot). Our noise-pop pals the Swirlies were recording in my apartment and planned to put out a split EP with us until they got snapped up by a handful of tiny twee labels and then made the unfortunate move to Taang! Records. A lot of the touring bands that a teenage me worshipped—the Amphetamine Reptile sect—turned out to be snobs, and their attitude toward us lads was summed up by a haiku review of our first record in the fanzine Your Flesh:

"tiny flies buzzing

around the distortion box

making little poops"

But a wee noise-rock scene came together in Boston around Mark Erdody's label Cinderblock Records, and Madbox found good company with his greatly heartfelt band Kudgel, and others like Spore, Slughog and Red Bliss.

Dork factor 40 outside John's parents' house circa 1991.

Notes: 1. $500 perpetually broken 1973 VW Microbus.

2. Impeccably ubiquitous "donkey" courier bag style.

3. Warner Bros. was onto our adaptation of their logo

and signed funk metal act Mr. Bungle to thwart us.

This was a crazy time for music in America: When Nevermind hit the shelves half the acts out there were suddenly scrambling to get screwed by a major label. Madbox had no such aspirations, though we recorded with some big name engineers because that was what bands did if they wanted to release records back then. In '91 we pulled a 6-song all-nighter with Tim O'Heir (he'd later work with Sebadoh and on the soundtrack for Kids) at some podunk studio in the burbs. Tim pretty much told us what to do, we did it and Cinderblock released 4 songs on a 7" EP. The next year I blew my savings on a trip to New York to record with Wharton Tiers (Sonic Youth, etc.) who raised an eyebrow when we told him we never used electronic tuners. These sessions were pretty crummy in every way: we got lost, showed up 3 hours late, played badly, sounded like crap, then our drummer wandered off to either get drunk or score drugs while Wharton begrudgingly tried to mix the mediocre recording. More records almost came out, but the test pressings just didn't sound right and got scrapped.

The CD, sounding rough
but looking slick, thanks to
Ron Regé's copy shop job.

The band was at its best right before it ended. We got a new drummer and moved out of the overpriced practice space to play after hours on the stage of a regal art deco theatre. Here we recorded 3 final songs live to 2 mics, no mixer, and no money spent. John spent time getting his vocals the way he wanted by running it through his GK amp. These raw recordings reflected what Madbox really sounded like and eventually got slapped onto a CD with everything else on Peter Selznick's Super8 label. Save yourself the trouble of tracking it down and just enjoy these tracks here:
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"Same Old Man" recorded by Tim O'Heir, Revere Mass, 1991.
John Manson vocals and guitar, Rich Faymonville plays guitar,
Misha Armartseff drums, me on bass and weird backing vocals:

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"Airsick" recorded by Wharton Tiers at Fun City, NYC, summer 1992.
Same lineup as above, plus Josh Peters on third guitar because Rich was
asleep somewhere and couldn't be found when we went for final mixing:

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"Ninth Floor" recorded by Madbox at the Somerville Theatre, spring 1993.
John on guitar and vocal, with me on bass and Jack Guilderson drumming:

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"Whalefall" at Somerville Theatre, spring 1993, just John, Jack and myself:

The young Madbox impersonates Cheap Trick at the
Middle East Café, Cambridge Mass, December 31, 1992.
Rich showed up in a suit and back there I appear fezzed.

I quit all my bands in 1993 for several reasons, a big one being the damage I saw caused by drugs and alcohol in the rock scene. Folks in bands we'd played with and loved—like Charlie Ondras from Unsane and later Kristen Pfaff from Janitor Joe (better known as the bass player for Hole)—died from heroin use. Others in our community struggled with trying (or not trying) to kick something, and gigging to drunks in bars was wearing me thin. My personal politics were changing, and musically I just wanted to nerd out about records. So when some straight-laced Harvard kids asked me to DJ at their radio station, I dropped my bass and picked up the turntables. John Manson went on to play in some great bands: The Grand Island, Neptune, Magic People, Gondoliers and Young Sexy Assassins. As for Madbox, we were just some boys funneling our aggression into noise. Not a bad way to spend a weekend afternoon.