I have said it before and I will happily say it again: There was never a band that was as extreme live as the Butthole Surfers. None came even close. Not before and certainly not since. They raised the insanity bar so high with their violent, chaotic, druggy, duel-drummer götterdämmerung that they probably merit a special category of high weirdness all to themselves. Maybe someday someone will coin a term—like surrealism—to describe their potent and singularly evil—yet juvenile, often silly—art form.

During their mid-to late-80s heyday, the Satanic mayhem of a Butthole Surfers show was probably about as far as most people would have ever wanted to go in search of entertainment. For what foul-minded, dark ritual would lie beyond them? The Butthole Surfers pulverized their audience, who were often as lysergically loaded as the demonically jerking jesters onstage. One did not simply attend a Butthole Surfers show, one chemically prepared for it like some horribly fucked-up pagan ritual. Volunteering, as it were, for a very bad acid trip.

Aside from the vicious and lacerating sonic assault of the music—which was fucking loud, I can assure you—there was also the incomparably incomprehensible nude go-go dancer, Kathleen Lynch; seizure-inducing strobe lights and 16mm projections comprised of Faces of Death-type footage, cheap Mexican horror films and 1950s era shots of people with Down’s syndrome ballroom dancing. Gibby Haynes would douse his hands (and the cymbals) with lighter fluid and then stare at the flames like a drooling idiot before putting the fire out by sticking his hand down the front of his pants.
 

 
Perhaps the most legendary of their many legendary interviews was for Forced Exposure, the greatest underground music “zine” of the 1980s. Forced Exposure, like Mondo 2000, was produced erratically, so when a new issue came out, it felt like an event. The Surfers were the cover subject of Forced Exposure, issue #11 in 1987 and much of the “mythology” of the band comes from this one source. Like their hilarious “bed in” interviews (a John and Yoko parody) on their infamous home video release, 1985’s A Blind Eye Sees All, the extra-lengthy Forced Exposure interview is a masterpiece of stoned Jabberwocky and nutty road stories:

FORCED EXPOSURE: How were the shows there?
GIBBY: They were fun. They were really fun. I couldn’t tell if they liked us. We did a good job. We had fun at the show in…
PAUL: Wales?
GIBBY: Wales, yeah.
KING: Rotterdam?
GIBBY: Yeah. What a show in Rotterdam. We used to have a cassette of the radio interview that was played over the Dutch radio station.
KING: Yeah. Gibby was put on videotape putting his dick on the record executive’s shoulder from behind. For a long time. The guy didn’t even know it was there for a long time.
GIBBY: Yeah. And Kid Congo Powers was following me around ‘cause he wanted to be my friend. Then I realized that he thought I had all the money, and he was waiting for me to pass out so he could take it all out of my pocket. I was walking around breaking bottles and trying to push people over these fifty foot things ...
PAUL: Gibby took on five Dutch security guards. That was a fun night. I ended up trying to carry all the band’s equipment back to the hotel by myself. I almost left an overcoat and something else behind because I couldn’t carry them, not knowing that all our money was in the coat. Everybody else took off.
GIBBY: I didn’t take off.
PAUL: Gibby was taking on the entire bouncer scene looking for the money that I was getting ready to leave in the bushes.
FORCED EXPOSURE: You playing Rotterdam again this time?
GIBBY: I don’t know. Those people put a lot of mayonnaise on their french fries.

Continues after the jump…

 
Last week Jeff Feuerzeig, the director of Half Japanese: The Band That Would Be King and The Devil and Daniel Johnston emailed to thank me for turning him on to the Licorice Root Orchestra album. He was referring to an old DM post about the cult band Raymond Listen (aka Licorice Roots). I took a look at that old post—I think it’s one of the greatest obscure gems that we’ve ever shown a spotlight here on DM and I was disappointed to see that the YouTube counters on their videos have barely budged since that post originally went up. And that pissed me off, so here it is again. Maybe a few more of you will pick up on it this time. Trust me, kids, this one is a real treat.

*If I’d have only mentioned Raymond Listen or the Licorice Roots in the title, would you even be reading this? Probably not, right? And who could blame you? Even by obscure band standards, they’re still pretty damned obscure. Obscure to the point where pretty much no one has ever heard of them. That’s why I made the Neutral Milk Hotel comparison up front, to draw you in (For some of you, admit it, I had you at “Neutral M…”). Stay with me here, though. You will be glad you did.

Still, it’s not really that egregious of a blog “bait-n-switch” title thing, either, because if you are a fan of Neutral Milk Hotel’s classic 1998 album In the Aeroplane Over the Sea or John Lennon’s Imagine or Mind Games albums, for that matter, I can assure you that you will find a whole lot to love about the quirky low-fi pleasures of Raymond Listen and the Licorice Roots, too, in particular their 1993 debut, Licorice Root Orchestra (There was a name change after the first album from “Raymond Listen” to “The Licorice Roots,” to clarify. The leader/singer/songwriter is a guy called Edward Moyse).

I’m not going to pretend that I know anything about this band, but I’ve listened to this album, A LOT, in the past twenty years. Kramer, of Bongwater/Shimmy Disc fame produced the album and he gave me the CD when it originally came out: “This is a masterpiece,” I recall him saying in his WC Fields-esque way. “This guy is a fuckin’ genius.”

I’d have to concur. I also recall Kramer telling me that they once had about fifteen musicians onstage, all tied together (how great is that?) and that there was “one chick who just plays finger cymbals.”

When Licorice Root Orchestra came out, Melody Maker had this to say:

This, their divine debut, works as an ensemble piece. These 13 dream-dipped delights provide the perfect soundtrack to some sepia-tinted silent movie and manage to pull off the near-impossible: they are appealingly gauche but never gormless, naive but never nerdy. Most are under three minutes, their wealth of tiny details strung on a delicate, twittering frame.

“September in the Night” and “Cloud Symphonies” are pop songs like you’ve never heard them, impressionistic, hazy things that throb with wobbly, sub-aquatic strings and a piano that sounds like it’s floating up from the cellar. You can thank Shimmy’s chief kook, Kramer, for that, of course. There’s a general air of uneasiness beneath the charm, though, of Something Nasty never far away. “Lemon Peel Medallion”, for example, is full of fairground melancholy, while “Tangled Weeks” begins like the band started playing something else and then had to quickly change tack. Like most of these tunes, it moves to a strange, seesaw waltz, tinkling with glockenspiel, flute, finger cymbals, and piano.

“Licorice Root Orchestra” is a delicate work of weird genius; violet-tinted, sherbert-sweet, and lonely as Coney Island on a wet Sunday. Dip in.

Weird genius…. It’s true!

The NME sayeth:

“Syrup-sweet flute and piano ditties offer simple, magical, childlike tones.”

And like I say, it’s been nearly two decades that I’ve listened to this album a fuck of a lot. I’ve made many, many copies for people on cassette and then on CD-R. I unabashedly love the Licorice Root Orchestra album and it holds a special place of esteem (and obscurity) in my record collection. There’s something so ethereal and gossamer delicate about the sound, and then there is an element of Edward Moyse’s guitar playing that I love where he somehow always manages to sound like he’s trying to catch up to the rest of the band (and I mean that in the best possible way, he’s got an idiosyncratic guitar technique every bit as unique and off-kilter as Keith Levene’s or The Bevis Frond’s). An out-of-tune upright piano laden with reverb adds a distinctly Lennon-esque element to their sound and Moyse’s voice is a divine and languid instrument, calling to mind a blissfully stoned Marc Bolan. His/their sound has also put me in mind of Fleetwood Mac’s “Tusk” (the song not the album).
 

 
To be honest, although I listen to that first Raymond Listen album at least once a year, if not much more often than that, before yesterday, I never really looked them up on the Internet or YouTube. I was under the impression that they’d recorded just one album. There’s very little information out there about them, even the Raymond Listen website is just a few stills and no text whatsoever. The Licorice Roots website isn’t that much more forthcoming, either.

Here’s what AllMusic has to say::

What if, instead of splitting off to form Neutral Milk Hotel, the Olivia Tremor Control, and the Apples in Stereo, the original core members of the Elephant 6 collective had formed one band that incorporated Jeff Mangum’s scratchy lo-fi folk, Will Cullen Hart and Bill Doss’ trippy experimental tendencies, and Robert Schneider’s knack for clever pop hooks? The results would have sounded very much like the Delaware psych-pop trio the Licorice Roots. In fact, the Licorice Roots pre-date the recording careers of all three of those bands, but the band’s low profile, coupled with wide gaps between releases, has made them hidden treasure for all but the most devoted fans of modern psychedelia.

But before the Licorice Roots, there was Raymond Listen. Singer/songwriter and guitarist Edward Moyse and drummer David Milsom formed Raymond Listen in the college town of Newark, DE, in 1990. By 1992, organist and percussionist Dave Silverman completed the group, and in 1993 they scored the coveted Cute Band Alert blurb from the post-feminist teen magazine Sassy. Raymond Listen’s debut album, Licorice Root Orchestra, was produced by New Jersey noise pop maven Kramer and released on his Shimmy-Disc label that same year. The band added a second guitarist and percussionist for a national tour in early 1994, but split up shortly thereafter. However, only a few months later, the core trio of Moyse, Silverman, and Milsom regrouped as the Licorice Roots. Their first album under the new name took three years to complete before being released as Melodeon in 1997. A second album, Caves of the Sun, was self-released in 2003. In 2006, the Licorice Roots signed with the Chicago-based indie Essay Records and released their third album, Shades of Streamers. At the same time, Essay reissued Licorice Root Orchestra in an expanded and remastered edition under the Licorice Roots name.

Holy shit. That means there are four other albums from these guys, plus a reissued, expanded version of the one they made with Kramer? As unlikely as it seems to me that I’d never even once done a Google search for one of my top favorite albums of all time (Licorice Root Orchestra would easily be in my top 100, if not top 50 albums), I’m happy to hear more (and it’s all on Spotify). You can buy the CD of this minor masterpiece used on Amazon for as little as 70 cents, which is ridiculous.

After the jump, experience the beautiful music of Edward Moyse, Raymond Listen and the Licorice Roots….

“I’m just walking down the street minding my own business, construction worker says ‘Nice tits’...”

Chia Pet were the in-house rock group of Sassy magazine, but they weren’t all that prolific. The group was led by Sassy’s “rock and roll” editor Christina Kelly, Kelly’s then-husband Bobby Weeks, her then-sister-in-law (and fellow Sassy writer) Jessica Vitkus Weeks on bass and Mary Ann Marshall (another Sassy writer) on drums. Karen Catchpole was a second vocalist and Sassy’s editor in chief Jane Pratt contributed some wonderfully scratchy violin. They sounded a bit like The Raincoats, but if they were from Brooklyn and… sassier.

“Do I look like I’m asking for it?”

 

 
Chia Pet released “Hey Baby” in 1992, a 7” single (in both white and pink vinyl) and CD single via Koko Pop, producer Kramer‘s less difficult label (compared to his decidedly more eccentric Shimmy Disc imprint) and recorded in his Noise NJ studio. There were three original songs on that, but the only other thing they ever released was a wonderfully bored take on the Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me” that appeared on a CD compilation called Freedom of Choice: Yesterday’s New Wave Hits Played by Today’s Stars, a Planned Parenthood fundraiser where “today’s” groups like Sonic Youth, The Muffs, Redd Kross and Mudhoney covered really obvious New Wave ditties. For a while there was a dispute over the Chia Pet name with a group from Chicago, but since both groups had swiped the name from the “as seen on TV” novelty planter, neither could do much about it.

“I’m just trying to be a girl!”

 

“Sassiest Boy in America” Ian Svenonius, Jane Pratt and Christina Kelly

“Hey Baby” was “Single Of The Week” simultaneously in the NME and Melody Maker but has slipped through the cracks of musical history. This song should be way better known than it is... Unfairly obscure, “Hey Baby” should properly be considered an iconic pop culture treasure…
 

“Don’t You Want Me” from Freedom of Choice: Yesterday’s New Wave Hits Played by Today’s Stars

Above a flyer for New York Gong at CBGB’s

This just made my day: Black and white footage of Daevid Allen performing with New York Gong in Los Angeles, 1979.

Also known as the “Zu Band” because they were formed for rock impresario Giorgio Gomelsky’s “Zu Manifestival” event in Manhattan, the core musicians went on to form Bill Laswell’s Material. As seen here at the Los Angeles Zu Manifestival, New York Gong were Daevid Allen, guitar; Bill Bacon, drums; Bill Laswell, bass; Don Davis, sax, and future Shimmy Disc founder Kramer on trombone/synths. In the midst of New York’s abrasive No Wave scene, New York Gong were “Yes Wave” to the max, progressive, jazz, punk, progrock wunderkids led by the ultimate hippie

The sound quality is iffy, but that this even exists is a fucking miracle, if you ask me…
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
‘Weezy, get me some LSD’: When Sherman Hemsley met Gong

Floating Anarchy: Gong, live on French TV, 1973

Thank you Virginia Tate!

 
If I’d have only mentioned Raymond Listen or the Licorice Roots in the title, would you even be reading this? Probably not, right? And who could blame you? Even by obscure band standards, they’re still damned obscure. Obscure to the point where pretty much no one has ever heard of them. That’s why I made the Neutral Milk Hotel comparison up front, to draw you in (For some of you, admit it, I had you at “Neutral M…”). Stay with me here, though. You will be glad you did.

Still, it’s not really that egregious of a blog “bait-n-switch” title thing, either, because if you are a fan of Neutral Milk Hotel’s classic 1998 album In the Aeroplane Over the Sea or John Lennon’s Imagine or Mind Games albums, for that matter, I can assure you that you will find a whole lot to love about the quirky low-fi pleasures of Raymond Listen and the Licorice Roots, too, in particular their 1993 debut, Licorice Root Orchestra (There was a name change after the first album from Raymond Listen to The Licorice Roots, to clarify. The leader/singer/songwriter is a guy called Edward Moyse).

I’m not going to pretend that I know anything about this band, but I’ve listened to this album, A LOT, in the past twenty years. Kramer, of Bongwater/Shimmy Disc fame produced the album and he gave me the CD when it originally came out: “This is a masterpiece,” I recall him saying in his WC Fields-esque way. “This guy is a fuckin’ genius.”

I’d have to concur. I also recall Kramer telling me that they once had about 15 musicians onstage, all tied together (how great is that?) and that there was “one chick who just plays finger cymbals.”

When Licorice Root Orchestra came out, Melody Maker had this to say:

This, their divine debut, works as an ensemble piece. These 13 dream-dipped delights provide the perfect soundtrack to some sepia-tinted silent movie and manage to pull off the near-impossible: they are appealingly gauche but never gormless, naive but never nerdy. Most are under three minutes, their wealth of tiny details strung on a delicate, twittering frame.

“September in the Night” and “Cloud Symphonies” are pop songs like you’ve never heard them, impressionistic, hazy things that throb with wobbly, sub-aquatic strings and a piano that sounds like it’s floating up from the cellar. You can thank Shimmy’s chief kook, Kramer, for that, of course. There’s a general air of uneasiness beneath the charm, though, of Something Nasty never far away. “Lemon Peel Medallion”, for example, is full of fairground melancholy, while “Tangled Weeks” begins like the band started playing something else and then had to quickly change tack. Like most of these tunes, it moves to a strange, seesaw waltz, tinkling with glockenspiel, flute, finger cymbals, and piano.

“Licorice Root Orchestra” is a delicate work of weird genius; violet-tinted, sherbert-sweet, and lonely as Coney Island on a wet Sunday. Dip in.

The NME sayeth:

“Syrup-sweet flute and piano ditties offer simple, magical, childlike tones.”

And like I say, it’s been nearly two decades that I’ve listened to this album a fuck of a lot. I’ve made many, many copies for people on cassette and then on CD-R. I unabashedly love the Licorice Root Orchestra album and it holds a special place of esteem (and obscurity) in my record collection. There’s something so ethereal and gossamer delicate about the sound, and then there is an element of Edward Moyse’s guitar playing that I love where he somehow always manages to sound like he’s trying catching up to the rest of the band (and I mean that in the best possible way, he’s got an idiosyncratic guitar technique every bit as unique and off-kilter as Keith Levene or The Bevis Frond). An out-of-tune upright piano laden with reverb is another Lennon-esque element to their sound and Moyse’s voice is a divine and languid instrument, calling to mind a blissfully stoned Marc Bolan. His/their sound has also put me in mind of Fleetwood Mac’s “Tusk” (the song not the album).
 

 
To be honest, although I listen to that first Raymond Listen album at least once a year, if not much more often than that, before yesterday, I never really looked them up on the Internet or YouTube. I was under the impression that they’d recorded just one album. There’‘s very little information out there about them, even the Raymond Listen website is just a few stills and no text whatsoever. The Licorice Roots website isn’t that much more forthcoming, either.

Here’s what AllMusic has to say::

What if, instead of splitting off to form Neutral Milk Hotel, the Olivia Tremor Control, and the Apples in Stereo, the original core members of the Elephant 6 collective had formed one band that incorporated Jeff Mangum’s scratchy lo-fi folk, Will Cullen Hart and Bill Doss’ trippy experimental tendencies, and Robert Schneider’s knack for clever pop hooks? The results would have sounded very much like the Delaware psych-pop trio the Licorice Roots. In fact, the Licorice Roots pre-date the recording careers of all three of those bands, but the band’s low profile, coupled with wide gaps between releases, has made them hidden treasure for all but the most devoted fans of modern psychedelia.

But before the Licorice Roots, there was Raymond Listen. Singer/songwriter and guitarist Edward Moyse and drummer David Milsom formed Raymond Listen in the college town of Newark, DE, in 1990. By 1992, organist and percussionist Dave Silverman completed the group, and in 1993 they scored the coveted Cute Band Alert blurb from the post-feminist teen magazine Sassy. Raymond Listen’s debut album, Licorice Root Orchestra, was produced by New Jersey noise pop maven Kramer and released on his Shimmy-Disc label that same year. The band added a second guitarist and percussionist for a national tour in early 1994, but split up shortly thereafter. However, only a few months later, the core trio of Moyse, Silverman, and Milsom regrouped as the Licorice Roots. Their first album under the new name took three years to complete before being released as Melodeon in 1997. A second album, Caves of the Sun, was self-released in 2003. In 2006, the Licorice Roots signed with the Chicago-based indie Essay Records and released their third album, Shades of Streamers. At the same time, Essay reissued Licorice Root Orchestra in an expanded and remastered edition under the Licorice Roots name.

Holy shit. that means there are four other albums from these guys, plus a reissued, expanded version of the one they made with Kramer? As unlikely as it seems to me that I’d never even once done a Google search for one of my top favorite albums of all time (Licorice Root Orchestra would easily be in my top 100, if not top 50 albums), I’m happy to hear more (and it’s all on Spotify. I can’t embed the track called “Coronation Day” here, so go to Spotify and listen to to that and “Saturn Rise,” post haste!). You can buy the CD of this minor masterpiece used on Amazon for as little as .70 cents, which is ridiculous.

Some of their YouTube videos have had fewer than twenty plays! First up is “Cloud Symphonies”:
 

 
The practically unseen music video for “September in the Night”:
 

 
After the jump, more Raymond Listen/The Licorice Roots

Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang, formerly of cult favorites, Galaxie 500, began recording in 1992 as Damon & Naomi. Their first album, More Sad Hits was produced by Bongwater’s Kramer (who produced Galaxie 500’s albums, too) and is one of my top favorite albums. It’s extremely pretty, has intelligent lyrics and one of the best guitar solos I’ve ever heard. The great Robert Wyatt said of that album: “Like real water in a world of soda pop.”

Too true! I was actually a silent onlooker in the studio when some of the record was being recorded and mixed, because Kramer and I were collaborating on a screenplay and they, and I, were house-guests at his Demarest, NJ home at the same time. It was a real treat for this fly-on-the-wall “rock snob,” I can assure you.

For their upcoming release, False Beats and True Hearts, the dreamy avant-gardists have just released a new “video” by French artist and filmmaker Chris Marker.

Naomi Yang writes on the Damon & Naomi blog:

We are delighted to announce a new “video” by visual artist Chris Marker. Consisting of a single still image set to a song from our forthcoming album, the project is being hosted by the Wire Magazine.

“The song, ‘And You Are There,’ is about the way time can compress when you are lost in a memory, something I have learned a lot about from Chris Marker’s work—his films (La Jetée, Sans Soleil), his writing (Immemory), his photographs. When the song was finished, I sent it to Chris with a note—since his work had provided inspiration for the song, I wondered, might he in turn have a visual response to it? He sent back this image, with the note:

“Dunno if it fits your pretty Proustian melancholy, but I thought it could… And thanks for linking me to music, the only real art for me as you know (cinema? you kiddin’...)”

Watch Chris Marker’s “video” for Damon & Naomi’s “And You Are There” here:
 

 
Below “E.T.A”—how incredible is this song?!?!
 

 
H/T Chris Campion of Berlin, Germany!