My Year As A Swirlie

How it started: In the summer of 1992 Andy Bernick dropped by to teach me the bass parts for his band: The Swirlies. He was leaving for a year to study ornithology right as the Swirlies had signed a record deal and needed to tour. I played bass, was good friends with all the band’s members, and had endured the recording of their first single in the apartment that Damon Tutunjian and I shared, so they asked me to step in.

What I did: I helped sequence and played chimp-guitar for the Swirlies’ first full-length, Blonder Tongue Audio Baton, and appeared in the above music video (originally filmed for a different song), spliced from shots of band practice under Ben Drucker's dorm and goofing off by the Charles River. Mostly we just toured that year—a mish-mosh of awesome basement gigs booked by Ben (who, being an MIT student, knew the ways of this mysterious new thing called “the Internet”) and horrible concerts with funk/ska bands because our record label’s booking agent also worked with the Mighty Mighty Boss-Tones (we also did a college gig with the Dead Milkmen where the singer swiped my hat). The band did well to get in with the new wave of American twee pop groups like Small Factory and the Magnetic Fields who we gigged with a bit. We were young, awkward and a little obnoxious, giving reporters from Spin and Rolling Stone fake names and fabricating half-truths about the band. For me it was a year of making music and hanging out with friends.

Memorable moment: After playing at a music industry showcase in New York, we were given a hotel room. The CEO or our label shared the bed with one of his female employees while we slept on the floor and Springa from S.S. Decontrol (a long-defunct band on the same label) slept behind a houseplant. Very telling.

Why it ended: Andy rejoined the band when school ended and we played a few shows with two bass players. I was getting flak from Damon for always saying inappropriate stuff into the mic and generally being punker-than-thou. The hype around the band and spending every night on tour in smoky bars was getting me down. Then some kids asked me to be a radio DJ so I left the Swirlies (along with another band as well as my job) to broadcast myself spinning records and working on the smooth radio voice I have today.

Achievements: I went vegan when I was in the Swirlies, a coming-out experience for me, helped in part by Damon’s obsessive regimen of food-combining and Ben’s culinary generosity.

Regrets: We didn’t write any songs while I was in the Swirlies. Seana and I would get together and try for hours but nothing came of it. I also regret my snotty attitude and am truly sorry if I annoyed anyone.

Legacy: The Swirlies reform to tour every couple years and invite former members to jump on stage. I recently ran onstage during the encore of one gig to scream backup vocals into the mic hardcore style, and did double-bass duties at some others in New York and Philly. You can click here to hear this record that was recorded in my old apartment. It’s as exciting now as it was when it came out 2 decades ago.

The Bear That Borrowed My Bass

The last time my black Yamaha bass guitar got any real play was when it went on tour with the British riot grrl/queer-core band Huggy Bear for a month, circa 1994.

I'd dropped out of playing my own music a year earlier when I quit this band and that band to spin records on the radio, hoping that championing others' music would cure my burnout. It worked, especially when my friend started floating me test pressings from the label she'd started out in Olympia. One was by a trio called Bratmobile, another by some group named Unwound, and another was this 10" vinyl record that merged British punk with avant-garde aesthetics and a blazing political sincerity that I wasn't hearing in much music at the time. The friend's name was Tinúviel, her label was called Kill Rock Stars, and that 10" EP was Taking the Rough with the Smooch by Huggy Bear. It blew me away.

So when Huggy Bear showed up for their U.S. tour that next year without any equipment and Tinuviel asked me if Nikki could could borrow my bass, the answer was "Take it!" For their first show, they stuffed themselves into a tiny soundproof booth in Cambridge Mass, and the entire band played into a single DJ mic for a live broadcast on WHRB's Record Hospital (I still have the tape). Afterwards we got scallion pancakes at the Hong Kong and I learnt that Brits call scallions "spring onions."

And what happened to Huggy Bear? They were touted as Britain's flagship band in the riot grrl movement, a movement that suffered a lot of media hype in the early 90s. Yet that hype enabled their avant-political-punk music to top Britain's indie charts, often surpassing more mainstream male-fueled outfits like Pavement and Nirvana. Huggy Bear's fashion aesthetic and girls-up-front feminism has had lasting effects in youth counter-culture internationally, and they were one of the few bands with an outspoken queer boy revolutionary fervor back when such things were virtually invisible in the media—underground or otherwise.

And my bass? It's still here. I haven't played it in years.

My First (and most forgotten) Band

Scroll down to hit the sound files—Listen while you read...

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:
__________________________________________________
"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:

__________________________________________________
"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:

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

__________________________________________________
"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.

The Zine I Almost Made With Michelle Tea

What: I collaborated on a fanzine with Michelle Tea.

Where: Boston.

When: 1989-1990.

Why: Michelle and I were teenagers, still living with our fams, both working not-quite-hip minimum-wage jobs on Newbury Street in Boston. We'd each scored interviews with our favorite bands at the time—I'd lugged a boombox to chat it up with Chicago proto-grunge band The Jesus Lizard on their first tour, and Michelle had a typewritten transcription of her interview with pioneer goth rockers Christian Death. That was all each of us had, so we decided to pool our interviews and put out a zine.

What happened: Despite our collective teenage fervor, two interviews isn't quite enough to warrant a zine. Some friend of Michelle's had contributed some stupid four-panel comic about a guy getting run over by a lawnmower, but that was it. Eventually Michelle and I drifted apart and the zine never happened.

Legacy: Michelle Tea went on to co-found the Sister Spit spoken word tour and has authored and/or edited over a dozen books, two of which (The Chelsea Whistle and The Passionate Mistakes and Intricate Corruption of One Girl in America) are largely about our circle of friends who hung out in Copley Square in the late 1980s. Her work is a milestone for a generation of writers and readers interested in feminism, queer culture, sex work and memoir. Meanwhile I went on to write about Bollywood music for a couple of magazines and put out a handful of highly obscure publications under the name Cardboard Capers before contributing a chapter to the anthology Realizing the Impossible: Art Against Authority. 

Michelle and I reconnected in 2004 and she's invited me to read at the underground writers series that she hosts at the San Francisco Public Library. Check back to see if this actually happens—or if it becomes another episode in the Almost Archive.

Helped start Sunburned Hand of the Man

What: I played bass guitar, alto sax, tambura, and bunch of other instruments in the experimental psych-rock band that would become Sunburned Hand of the Man.

When: 1991-1998.

Where: At a warehouse in Charlestown, Massachusetts.

Why: The only "looking to start a band" flyer I ever answered was up on a wall at Mass College of Art where I was taking a super-8 filmmaking class. It mentioned the Thinking Fellers and Sun City Girls as influences, so I dialed the number and a guy calling himself Rich "Dontius" answered and invited me to bring my bass over to Sullivan Square where I ran it through my Blue Tube distortion and an amazing effects pedal called the Bi-Phase II. With Rich on guitar and some other guy on drums we sounded a little like Chrome or Hawkwind jamming in their 1970s heyday. A week later we got together again but the Bi-Phase II had been leant out and we weren't feeling it. I ended up in the Swirlies and remained friends with Rich, later giving his cassette release Shit Spangled Banner heavy rotation on the radio.

After Shit Spangled Banner's breakup, Rob, the bass player, started holding weekly open practice sessions in his warehouse—the same one that Rich had invited me to a few years before. I came every week, now playing alto sax, but then took a left turn into tooting my horn for Homes Not Jails instead.

Memorable Moment: Sunburned Hand of the Man's third show was at a club two blocks from my house. This one song fell into a familiar note that caused me to run home, grab an antique brass automobile horn, and then dash back to hop on stage, blowing into the car horn which was, as I suspected, in perfect pitch with the song.

Legacy: Sunburned Hand of the Man have released over one hundred albums (I think I'm playing on last year's release "The Loft Tapes, 1996-97") and done numerous tours of North America and Europe (see this impressive list of places and people they've played with). They are in part responsible for the neo-psych-folk revival that hipsters call "New Weird America" (a.k.a.: "Post-Punk Jam-Bands").

Regrets: The Bi-Phase II disappeared with erstwhile member Conrad Capistran. I leant my Blue Tube to Mary Lou Lord and never got it back. My sax is busted and rusting under the bed, otherwise I'd be the guy with the beard in the video above.

How I Joined Guitar Wolf

What: I played guitar for the Japanese noisabilly band Guitar Wolf.

When: May, 2006.

Where: Chicago, Illinois.

How: My very last night living in Chicago and Guitar Wolf was playing at a club. I’d nabbed their first two LPs (sounding like a rockabilly band recorded on broken equipment) and spun them on the radio in Boston. I loved these records. Anyway, some friends came with me to give me a proper send-off in that packed club. We were right up front against the stage and I had drawn a big “A” on one of my hands and a “♠” on the other in a plea that the band would play “Ace of Spades” by Link Wray. When the three members of Guitar Wolf came out they took no notice of the marks on my hands or that their instruments were totally out of tune. They were brilliant, a sheer cacophony of 1-4-5 riffs in total disarray. I pulled a dirty hanky from my pocket, wrote “Jack the Ripper” (another Link Wray classic) on it and flung it at the guitarist at the end of one song. It landed on the head of his feedbacking guitar. He looked at it and passed it to the head of bass player’s instrument, who then passed it on to one of the drummer’s sticks and the band played my request.

The crowd was already going nuts when Guitar Wolf jumped into “Kick Out The Jams” by the MC5. Midway through the song the guitarist threw his guitar down and came after me, grabbing me by the arms. I tried to run but he pulled me onstage, strapped his guitar around my neck and yelled the words, “Jam on it!” into my ear. He held his guitar pick in the air, slowly bringing down into my outstretched palm. As soon as I had that pick between my fingers, I struck up the MC5’s three unforgettable chords, adjusting the pitch for the de-tuned guitar while my friends danced up a storm at my feet.

Memorable moment: Saying “bye” to the drummer after the show while he was throwing up in an alleyway.

Legacy: Guitar Wolf have since launched their own clothing line and starred in the Japanese zombie horror movie Wild Zero. Check it out: