In a city bursting with boundary-breaking music, it’s not unheard of for a band from the past to release archival recordings, their sounds all the more remarkable for sounding fresh decades later. But it’s more improbable for such a band to have been recorded only on a boom box. Yet that’s exactly how the new — and likely only — release from Richard and the Not Shits, The Sun Comes Out Tonight (HoTard), came to be.
The album presents tracks recorded between 1997 and 1998 by a band that never played live. But for a time, the semi-regular jams by Richard Martin (vocals, harmonica, banjitar), Eddie Hankins (bass), Roger Moneymaker (drums), and onetime music writer for the Memphis Flyer John Floyd (guitar) led to some inspired musical moments. Their improvised sounds have a minimalist urgency that transcends most informal jams. And the immediacy of the recording is part of the experience. As bassist Eddie Hankins describes his approach to recording engineering at the time, “We had put a boom box up on an amp. It fell off. That’s how it ended up on the floor.”
For the chronically creative singer Richard Martin, that was an opportunity. “With the boom box on the floor,” he recalls, “I was laying down, singing right into that condenser mic. On the thick shag carpet. That’s what gave it its thick, rich sound.”
His approach to recording vocals is typical of his approach to songs generally. While the entire band was improvising, it was Martin’s extemporaneous lyrics that brought everything into focus. This sometimes makes for very dark material, a fact that an older and wiser Martin is painfully aware of today. “It’s not necessarily that I was inebriated,” he says. “I was going through a divorce, staying on friends’ couches. I was miserable, and I sang about it. It’s a sexist record, but it’s real. I don’t feel that way anymore. The other night when I played for the record release show, I said, ‘If you find yourself feeling like the man on this record, there’s a way out, if you want to contact me.’”
The lyrical howls of pain are grounded by musical beds that sound more like The Fall than a jam band, due to the players’ devotion to amateurism and DIY rock. This was, after all, the gonzo ’90s in Memphis, a time of all-gourd bands and others who thought outside the box. Even the nationally celebrated Grifters were prone to freely improvised noise chaos. Such was the milieu of the Not Shits.
“The name rightly implies that we never were a band that was actually going to play out,” reflects Martin, explaining their unique moniker. “We were jamming with Robert Hinson, who has the nickname ‘Hot Licks.’ He can play any instrument. He builds amps and guitars. When we played with Robert, we called ourselves the Hot Shits. But when these tapes came about, Robert wasn’t there, so we became the Not Shits. We thought, ‘It’s not like we’re claiming to be anything. We’re not shit!’”
Still, Hinson is very much present in the proceedings, as Hankins points out. “Every instrument you hear on the record, except drums and harmonica, is a Robert Hinson instrument. Robert built the guitar in a Telecaster style. He built the amps and the bass. He had this large piece of wood in sort of a weird, pink fish-shape. So we call it the ‘bass’ [as in the water-dwelling creature].”
One such Hinson instrument was the “banjitar,” played by Martin for noise and feedback. “It’s a crazy, made-up instrument — an electric noisemaker, a block of wood with a banjo neck on it,” he says. “I dropped a penny right on the pickups, and it created all kinds of noise. All of the guys were lined up like raccoons at the door, one head above the other.”
These days, Martin turns heads as the singer for True Sons of Thunder, with whom he’ll be playing on September 24th for a Gonerfest after-party at the Hi-Tone. And he’s still embracing extemporaneous rather than composed lyrics. “If I start making plans, my anxiety stacks up. So rather than plan anything, I just want to have options.”