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Head motherfucker Roy Edroso – an accomplished writer himself – has a witty and fact-filled account of life as an MF’r on his website . He was also gracious enough to answer my ham-fisted questions in an interview below. But since I have a yellowed copy of their 1989 press kit in front of me, I thought I’d let them tell their own story.
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Summer 1986: August 31, 1986: March 1987: April 1, 1987: Summer 1987: October 31, 1987: Winter 1988: Spring, Summer 1988: |
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Fall 1989 – Winter 1988:
February 1989: |
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And, umm, that’s how it went. So what happened after 1989? Well, things didn’t work out. Everybody moved on. Scum rock doesn’t last forever, you know. But the Motherfuckers still left behind a couple of seminal blood n’ guts albums to remember them by. I still play ‘em. I could just have easily picked through Route 666 (the one with the hand-sprayed cover!), but 12 Swingin’ Signs happened to be at arms-length, so let’s take a queasy, sleazy ride back to 1989. Vroom. |
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Released by NYC label Rave Records, whose motto was, simply, “Fuck that weak shit!”, 12 Swinging Signs opens with a party-record skit that suggests either Cheech and Chong or Rudy Ray Moore, then slips into a Sweet homage (“Are you ready, Skinny John?”) before the wrecked-redneck trucker-thrash of Threeway on the Freeway kicks in. Then, just when you’ve adjusted your oversized belt-buckle and steeled yourself for a big mess of grease-billy, On the Cross breezes in on queasy, lysergic wings. A 60’s exploito-psyche throwback, OTC lurches around like an overdosing grunge band and then just disappears in a puff of pale green smoke after two minutes. Up next, Love Juice In All Three Holes, one of the RMF’s klassic kuts. Leering sleaze-punk in the classic Nig Heist vein, Three Holes is menacing and half-crazy and just, you know, oozes. This is the kind of song that makes other songs sound stupid. Halfway through, Roy starts yelling about his background in art history, so that’s weird, but otherwise, this is mean and gooey and makes you wanna do something unsettling. It also ends very abruptly, possibly because the band wanted to do bong hits. Sounds like bong hits at the end, anyway. |
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No Not Me is a 6 minute space-metal grind. Hypnotic and bleary-eyed, it sounds like the soundtrack to a very druggy torture/murder scene. It’s like Mudhoney slowed down to a syrupy crawl. I think they wrote it to scare people. Side A closes with Man’s Party. It opens with some distorted dialogue: “America, where it hurts to be free…when you get to the Whitehouse, tell ‘em Charlie sent you!” Who knows? Anyway, the song is the balls, a splayed-legged mess of barely-contained malevolence, snaky doom-bass, and some crazy blurping synthesizer that sounds like your ex-girlfriend calling you at 3 in the morning. |
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Lines like “You got a full tank of gas,
but/I’ve got the keys to your car!” suggest its about revenge. I think the
whole record might be about revenge.
Side one ends with somebody blowing into the mic and a return to the party: “I’m going out for beers, I’ll be back in a second.” Side two opens up in a reasonably sane fashion with Jim, the story of a dude who sells turkey parts. It’s raw, brooding garage-rock with hand-claps and yelps. Bitchin’! Marriage Made in Hell is an off-kilter chug-fest in latter-day Buttholes vein, trumpet blast n’ all. Hanoi Hilton is a nauseous scum-rock death-ballad that sounds, if you listen close enough, like a Foreigner song with an off-center spindle-hole. Also, the guitar ‘solo’ is a series of Japanese monster noises. Total head-in-a-bucket fest. Nowhere Nothing Fuckup brings you back to the party. At this point, everybody’s tanked, which explains this woozy bit of slur-along trash-rawk. Sorta Meatmen-meets-NY Dolls-y with a little Humpers thrown in for extra flavor. You can’t really understand the lyrics, but that’s alright, cuz they’re kinda depressing: “You’re 45 and deranged!” Stuff like that. Still, good to listening to while you convulse on the bathroom floor. Radiation Generation is obviously the Reverb’s very own Sex Bomb – a 7 minute, one-chord slop-fest that will make you sound like a complete maniac if you play it in public. Somewhere betwixt the Stooges, Gaye Bykers on Acid, and the aforementioned Flipper, Radiation Generation is a fitting end to the Reverbs legacy, since it pretty much sounds like all their songs dogpiled into one spazzy, hemorrhaging noise-gasm. Stupendous is really the only word for it. It all ends with a 50’s-ish voice-over announcing a sequel. If only. Does 12 Swinging
Signs still hold up over the years? As long as there are parties
to ruin, boozy garbage rock like this wll live forever. |
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Forget the musical end of the 'movement' for a moment…who were the biggest sleazebags in the NY scum-rock movement? Bonus points if it was the Motherfuckers, but, you know, just wondering what band was the most likely to rifle through purses and such. Honor among thieves, Ken. Actually,most of those people were basically moral and even sweet, so outright rip-offs were rare. Most of the bad behavior was intermural girlfriend-stealing and such like. I can't recall anyone telling me a convincing story of outright crime. Sad but true, we were good-bad but not evil. Did you guys actually coin the term scum rock, or did some jerk at Spin or somewhere come up with it?
Did you ever play at Plato’s Retreat, that weird swimming pool swingers club where Screw used to host their parties? I don’t know why I’m asking, it just seems like an obvious gig. No. We never got the plum gigs. We mostly got asked to do benefits for squats and like that. A hard-luck crew, we were. Did you guys roll your eyes when you opened for White Zombie, or did they seem like a good idea at the time? Definitely a good idea at the time. White Zombie at the outset was a very cool ensemble. We played with them at the old Lismar Lounge on First Avenue, and they were excellent. Not particularly chummy, but I suppose that's an L.A. thing. Now I hear Rob Zombie makes crappy movies. Careerism is its own reward! Did you choose the name as a sort of built-in career-staller? Because obviously, you can only get so far in the music biz when you're a Motherfucker. The Reverb
Motherfuckers were a kamikaze mission from start to finish. Honestly, we
took perverse pleasure in working hard in an impossible cause. We went to
the NMS and CMJ and all that stuff and got all sorts of sneaky kudos from
the big wheels, but no one outside the college radio stations would stick
up for us. To be fair, we made it difficult. I remember doing an on-air
show at WNYU and offering up a track that they had to immediately yank
because of the bad words. We were so deep in our own shit that we didn't
even think about it, and we had many less offensive numbers to give. |
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Was the ramshackle sound by accident or design? Could you have sounded like, say, Queensryche or something if you wanted to? I don't know that we could have. Reverb started as a kind of accident. I've told this story before, but in the 80s a couple of us had been in a bar band that I was in charge of, doing all-night gigs at places like Nightingale's on Second Avenue, playing Hank Williams and Isley Brothers songs, and I basically alienated the other players by being an anal jerk. We continued to hang out in the rehearsal room we were renting, and used the space and time to get drunk and play whatever came into our heads. The background is outlined here. So our modus operandi was to play stuff that didn't require turn-on-a-dime arrangements because that was the kind of thing that had broken up the bar band. Even with relaxed standards, if you get talented people to play together for a long time, you'll come up with something interesting, and that's sort of what happened to us. Instead of working with charts or nailing down hard turnarounds, we made this sonic fudge and invented soft boundaries to contain it. |
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I think another word for that is "jazz."
Well, not quite -- all of us were rock guys and we naturally gravitated
toward rock structures. But if someone had offered us a fortune to make
something more mainstream out of it -- and no one did, believe me -- the
question would have been one of will, not of chops. A certain degree of
slop was written into the RMF Articles of Confederation. I can't really
say whether we could have survived a Constitutional process. Did you guys ever party with Jim Thirwell or Wayne County or Nick Zedd or the Cycle Sluts from Hell? No. We always seemed to miss those boats. I actually played on a bill with the Cycle Sluts when I was with an earlier ensemble (Rik Little & The Loose). But back then we were all unknown and playing in basements and there was nothing exciting about it except playing. I mean, Reverb played with the Unsane and Jon Spencer and Jesus Lizard and all that, but they were always the guys with the better backlines and had very little contact with us. Well, not the Unsane. We played a hot sweaty night with them at the Lismar once and it was maximum pumping all the way around. But we weren't tight friends and when the spotlight caught them they might as well have been Sonic Youth. More power to 'em. I read that you guys almost went broke after someone in the band made $10,000 worth of phone calls to a bondage and discipline hotline from your bass player’s boss’s office. Who made the calls? And was it worth it? None of us could afford that kind of action, even on the phone. |
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Did any of the people who claimed to 'get you' really get you, or did they have it all wrong? Yeah, they got it, though some of them may have forgotten. I'm always stunned when someone tells me we meant something to them, and it comes up in surprising ways. Some years back I was treading water financially and had to get an amp retooled, so I took it to Main Drag and saved my pennies. I go back to pick the thing up and the guitar tech comes out and says the labor costs are on the arm because he had feelings for what we had done. It's hard to believe anyone remembers until you run into somebody who does. One of your legendary gigs involved the liberal slathering of BBQ sauce on your audience. What sort of reaction do you get when you dump BBQ sauce on people? |
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The BBQ sauce thing was Big John's contribution. He started the sets playing bass, but in the back half I'd play bass and he'd play guitar, and when he had nothing left to say with the guitar he'd just grab the mike and wail. Being a Gator he always had a lot of BBQ on hand and one night he just stripped to his shorts and began shpritzing himself. This was about the time we were getting big ups in the Village Voice and still couldn't get a decent record deal, so we had some frustration going with that; we'd play at Limelight, for example, and most of the crowd would be clueless gawkers, so by the climax the sauce just went flying. We didn't get into secretions as part of the stage act, though. I think I can speak for all of us when I say we reserved that kind of unction for our loved ones. What broke up the band? Was there a final meeting with screaming and crying, or was it a fizzle-out? I just quit one day. I felt like I was losing my mind and keeping up the band would kill me. We had a final gig at the Knitting Factory that was balls-out great, and that was that. Except for a couple of one-offs, which will be addressed in the next module. Ever think, "Well, it's time for a Reverb Motherfuckers reunion"? And if so, could you put it together? I mean, all-original dudes. Is anyone dead? We did a few shows during the three or four years after the breakup, and they were very enjoyable. Every once in a while some of us get together -- Andy, our drummer, and Big John did a number at CBs Gallery shortly before it closed. But I spent most of my time writing these days and can't play guitar for shit anymore. I suppose I could tune up fast if a big paycheck were dangled. But that's not in the cards. The Reverb Motherfuckers lost the lottery. We can't go around like Fine Young Cannibals and play our hit. We didn't have a hit. It's probably best that we live on as a whispered legend. How often are you asked, and/or who often do you think about the MFs? See above. As for how I think of it, the ongoing job of muscling through life requires that I not dwell too much on past glories or ingloriousness. But I'm very proud of what we did. There wasn't much of anything like the Reverb Motherfuckers, and some of that was music, and some of it was balls. We dared to play what we felt, and however much top-rank musicianship is still around, that quality is surprisingly rare. Over the next year or two we'll probably unleash some of the archival tapes and detritus and put an amen to it. But if anyone does the sort of thing that we were doing, it won't be our example that inspires them. It'll be their own mad desire to go further than they're supposed to go. Anyone who makes it that far may consider himself or herself a Reverb Motherfucker. God help 'em.
-Fin-
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Listen:
Love Juice in All Three Holes Listen: Man's Party Listen: Jim Listen: Nothing, Nowhere, Fuckup |
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__________________________________________________________________________________ Back to List Home |
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I
first became aware of RMF somewhere in the late 80’s via Forced
Exposure magazine, which was basically a series of mean-spirited,
sarcastic rants written by a bunch of assholes who just happened to be
some of the greatest rock writers of that or any other time. I don’t think
they actually listened to half the garbage they championed (does
anybody really like Jandek or Sun City Girls?), but occasionally they
would unloose some skinfo about a band that was actually relevant to a
young rock n’ roll sleazebag growing up in the Reagan era. Were it not for
Forced Exposure, I may never have known the singular junk-rock thrills of
the Meatmen, Nig Heist, Pussy Galore, Foetus,
Reverb Motherfuckers, Raging Slab, Harry Pussy, Honeymoon
Killers, Peach of Immortality, or even Black Ass Bone.
Well, Black Ass Bone didn’t really exist, but otherwise, some good shit in
a completely awful decade. I don’t remember if they actually liked Reverb
Motherfuckers, but they had me sold on the name alone. Not only that, but
RMF shared the same interests as I did: garbage movies, psychotics, sex,
chemicals. And they sounded exactly like you think they did. 
As
I recall, a lovely guy named T.C. used to book shows with that name, and
that was the first I heard of it. Then Mykel Board, being an industrious
rock-crit type, picked it up for the ROIR tape "NY Scum Rock Live at CBGB."
Winners write history, losers make it. A year or two ago, I went to see
the Pretenders at Roseland, and there was T.C. handing out palm cards for
some punk rock show. Posterity has lost his phone number, but he was happy
and fulfilled. Make whatever lesson of that you will.