The Screamin’ Mee-Mees & Hot Scott Fischer WARP SESSIONS 1972-1973 Double-CD Out Now. Click For Infos.
The Screamin’ Mee-Mees
& Hot Scott Fischer
WARP SESSIONS 1972/1973
Double-CD (Gulcher 431)
Five years before they released their first EP in 1977, the Screamin’ Mee-Mees (Bruce Cole and Jon Ashline) were already making lots of racket. The two musical outcasts would get together in Bruce’s St. Louis basement and switch on the tape recorder to document their undisciplined musical madness. Jon banged on drums and homemade percussion, yelping out spontaneous lyrics. Bruce added guitar and other electronic junk to the mix. It was self-contained and must have seemed like an elaborate private joke to the duo–freaking in the basement, isolated and pure. In 1972, a little bit of the outside world entered in the form of “Hot” Scott Fischer, a local rock writer who had found underground notoriety in the pages of rock mags like CREEM and PHONOGRAPH RECORD MAGAZINE. Scott was the first writer to make the connections between Krautrock and the Stooge-garage-rock underground of the early 70s.
The first recorded session with the Mee-Mees and Fischer took place on the balcony of Fischer’s apartment. As the boys jammed their primitive Midwestern blend of the Godz and Amon Duul I, local kids showed up to gawk, and the cops eventually shut down the proceedings. Almost an hour of chaos and space-age freak-out came from this meeting: “Just Fine,” “Edge Of Space,” “You’re Now In Our World,” “Take Cover,” “The Attack Of The Intergalactic Cement Mixers,” “In The World Of Space,” and a spastic take on the Velvet Underground’s “Sister Ray.”
In 1973, the trio got together again, this time in Bruce Cole’s basement (the scene of pretty much all other Mee-Mees recordings over the next three decades). This yielded more crazed rambling and free-form jamming. The outer-space themes had already been replaced by something darker, hinting at punk-rock that was already in the air: “I Am Nothing,” “Mommy I’m Falling,” and two more originals that even had titles which would later become underground touchstones: “Final Solution” and “Another World.” No, they don’t sound like the Pere Ubu or Richard Hell songs of 1976, but what did Ubu and Hell’s Voidoids sound like in ’73? Oh yeah, they didn’t exist yet! Yes, these guys were “ahead of their time” in more ways than one.
Thanks to the ever-groovy Gulcher Records, the two WARP SESSIONS from ’72 and ’73 (released as limited-edition Slippy Town CDRs in 2000 and 2001) are now available on a handy double CD. Also included is the previously unreleased “Floorbored,” a bit of lunacy done by Bruce and Scott for the amusement of Jon, who had left St. Louis for college. Dig! [Eddie Flowers, Slippy Town]
Available Now At:
www.gulcher.gemm.com
