PreauXX (R) joins AWFM (L) onstage at Gonerfest 19. (Credit: Laura Jean Hocking)
“One thing about Gonerfest,” remarked an old friend who’s seen many of them in his day, “it always brings great drummers to town.” We were bobbing our heads to Nashville’s Snooper at the time, and their drummer was indeed distinctive, helping to elevate the crowd’s dancing to a climax last night.
That could be said of the whole band, of course. Imagine the Flying Lizards with Keith Moon guesting on drums, all buzzed on caffeine, and you’ll get close to the feel of Snooper. Pigtailed lead singer Blair Tramel hit the stage bouncing and leaping from the start, inspiring the audience to surge toward the stage as the mosh pit reached a boil.
Snooper (Photo courtesy Goner Records)
Yet the band was anything but standard-issue hardcore, instead combining that genre’s breakneck tempos and shouted choruses with an eerie sonic onslaught of two noise-weaving guitars, undergirded by a rhythm section akin to rolling thunder, topped by the warble of Tramel’s slightly processed voice and her occasional synth blasts. It was a sound at once trippy and energizing, as the band, largely dressed in workout windbreakers, matched Tramel’s energy leap for leap.
Snooper was a blur of movement at Gonerfest 19. (Credit: Laura Jean Hocking)
The tweaked reality of the band’s sound was augmented by the unheralded appearance of larger than life papier-mâché figures shuffling through the crowd. While not quite feeling theatrical, it was a subtle bit of world-building by the band, as they knocked our conventional world askew and replaced it with a more inspired reality of giant human flies and much more leaping.
Snooper’s larger-than-life puppets (Credit: Chris McCoy)
And yet Snooper weren’t even the closers. Instead, the final band was a beautiful puzzle that inspired swaying, twisting, and head tilting more than any mosh pit. Fred Lane and His Disheveled Monkeybiters brought a bold new approach to the classic Gonerfest closing set, bringing swing rhythms and alt-jazz chops to the festival for the first time. Ultimately, the bizarre left turn the evening took at the hands of Lane et al. was refreshingly unpredictable.
While the crowd eased up from the front of the stage a bit, the Disheveled Monkeybiters turned heads around the grounds of Railgarten, and got many up front moving, as the band alternated from tightly arranged swing stompers with riffs by the three horns, to the honks and growls of freakish free jazz. Presiding over it all with a kind of anti-charisma was Fred Lane, whose Dada-ist mutterings, non sequiturs, and scat singing ranged from the fiercely animated to the awkwardly reserved.
“In my ineptitude/I don’t really deserve to be alive,” crooned Lane, neatly summing up the dark self loathing lurking in his absurdist rants. It did not make for the classic barn-burning show closer that so many festivals offer. As if to extinguish such expectations, the tenor sax player stepped up to the mic and announced, “This is art!” And those of us who listened deeply to the chaos knew what he meant.
It was a set of extreme dynamics, most apparent in the closing moments of the show, when each band member mimicked their own death as they played shrieks of noise and rhythmic fusillades. How to follow that with an encore? Have Lane perform the a capella “Oatmeal,” of course. “I sailed the China seas/In my pajamas on a raft,” he sang whimsically. “I drift into the sewers/In a miner’s hat,” and then a few perfunctory squawks and honks from the band broke the quiet.
“Oh, what a glorious feeling/Oh, what a marvelous plight/To be numb beyond feeling/Senseless, without sight,” Lane’s voice returned, almost sotto voce, echoing in the glorious emptiness. It put a fine point on the group’s darkly humorous ethos, still oddly compelling over four decades after it was cooked up by Surrealist-friendly proto-punks in Tuscaloosa’s fringe art scene.
Incredibly, those two closing set weren’t even the highlight of the day for some Goner-goers. Many were still reeling from on-point afternoon performances by local favorites like Aquarian Blood or Sweet Knives. But the day’s local hero trophy must surely go to A Weirdo From Memphis (AWFM), whose set offered one surprise after another, always topping itself. Starting with the very diggable surprise of AWFM’s live backing band, showcasing the deep ranks of musical talent in the Unapologetic collective, the set accelerated when colleague PreauXX jumped onstage. It all culminated in AWFM’s use of a series of ladders to scale the box car-based stage structure, as he sang and spit rhymes from atop the venue’s giant retro sign, Roller SKATE For Health, towering over the ecstatic crowd.
A Weirdo From Memphis on the roof of the Railgarten stage at Gonerfest 19. (Credit: Laura Jean Hocking)
After that, Sydney, Australia’s Gee Tee gave the fans a rush of amped-up, old school punk with a tweaked edge, as if the young Clash had found a Casio in the dumpster. Their catchy set caused a dramatic upsurge in Gee Tee T-shirts as the night progressed. Then, seeming to go through the history of alternative music, Austin/Melbourne/New York-based Spray Paint took us into post-punk territory, as their twin guitars seemed to redefine harmony and dissonance, matched by the urgent shouts and wails of the singer. And, throughout the day, an added perk of a Railgarten-based Gonerfest became apparent. Through all the textures of guitar riffs, synths, and impassioned vocals, another sonic element was occasionally woven: the blare of the train horn, and the visceral rumble of heavy steel wheels on the rails. That screeching guitar feedback, those gut-rattling beats, all were coming home to the urban wall of noise from which they were born. Memphis AF, y’all.
Perhaps nothing has been more indicative of how Gonerfest has grown than the moment last year during Gonerfest 18 when Abe White jumped onstage with Jack Oblivian and the Sheiks to sing Alice Cooper’s ode to adolescent confusion, “I’m Eighteen.” It was the perfect moment to celebrate Gonerfest’s coming of age, bigger than ever and still kicking.
This year, the alternative music festival celebrates its last year as a teen, though few expect it to ever outgrow its adolescent angst and experimental bent. And though milestone years are generally reckoned in even numbers, this year’s iteration feels like a true turning point, coming full circle to its earliest touchstones. The King Khan & BBQ Show, who played the first Gonerfest in January 2005, is back for its first Gonerfest since then. The Compulsive Gamblers, who set the tone for a new gonzo rock-and-roll culture in this city back in 1990, are back again as well. And ticket sales indicate that this will be the most popular Gonerfest ever.
Aquarian Blood (Photo: Courtesy Goner)
Fans and Bands
When Eric Friedl started the Goner label back in 1993, it was an act of fandom. He saw the Japanese turbo-charged punks Guitar Wolf and knew he had to get their demos out to a wider audience by any means necessary. And it shaded into his work in a band as well. The Oblivians, where Compulsive Gamblers front men Greg Cartwright and Jack Yarber joined forces with Friedl as a trio, were just taking off, and their recordings were also among Goner’s earliest releases.
That unique mix of fandom and band-dom has colored Goner’s aesthetic ever since, especially when Friedl teamed up with Zac Ives, front man for the Final Solutions, to make Goner Records a brick-and-mortar store in 2004. Gonerfest was conceived that same year, exuding the same blurred line between players and their audience. As Friedl says today, “There’s not a whole lot of separation between fans and bands and everything else in Gonerfest. It gives it a different feel, rather than seeing someone up on stage that isn’t interacting with the people at all.”
Bennett (Photo: Tommy Kha)
Friedl recalls the small scale of the festival when it began. “It was amazing that people wanted to come to Memphis to see this music. The first time I realized we were doing something more than just putting on a show at the Buccaneer was when we saw this guy with a label in Italy, walking down Cleveland in the middle of the day. I was like, ‘Okay, if people are willing to come from Italy to watch these bands over a weekend in Memphis, we might be doing something interesting here.’ That was at Gonerfest 1. We had The King Khan & BBQ Show, and they may have been the only band from out of the country for that one. And then it kind of exploded from there. People wanted to come to the festival, and they had bands as well, so it was like, ‘I’ve got a band, why not just try to play?’”
Since then, the festival’s international reach has only grown, with the notable exception of last year, when Covid-related travel complications kept the band roster all-American. Now, the entire world is returning to Memphis once more. “This year,” says Friedl, “we’ve got the Australians, a band from Switzerland, and The King Khan & BBQ Show from Berlin and Canada. We’ve got people coming from all over the place.”
Snooper (Photo: Courtesy Goner)
The Great Outdoors: Not Going Viral
In other words, back to normal for Gonerfest. Of course, last year also marked the advent of a more cautious approach. Proof of vaccination was required of all attendees. This year, Friedl says, “I’m sure it’ll be a lot looser than last year, when people really didn’t know how things would go. But obviously, if you get a bunch of people together, there’s a chance for spreading Covid. We are strongly encouraging people to be vaccinated, and we’re keeping everything outside. And Railgarten gives everyone enough space that you aren’t forced to cram into any kind of small, restricted area. So we’re hoping that is sufficient and people can stay safe on their own.”
Last year’s move to Railgarten as the sole venue, as opposed to spreading the festival across several stages in the past, was indeed a game-changer, both in terms of Covid safety and in the camaraderie of the festival-goers. For the first time, everyone was in one place. “Railgarten has worked out great,” says Friedl. “It’s a big enough stage for everybody, and there are enough sight-lines that you can be in different places and still see everything and get away from it a little bit without feeling you’re not at the festival anymore.”
Michael Beach (Photo: Courtesy Goner)
And, he adds, the venue change has dramatically increased the capacity of Gonerfest. “We had our biggest attendance ever last year,” reflects Friedl. “We just had more space to put everybody, and everybody wanted to come. So we’re right on the same pace as last year now, and we’re not close to maxing out Railgarten. Last year, we limited it a bit more than we had to, probably; this year we’ve increased the capacity a little bit, but not enough that anybody would notice. It’s going to feel the same as last year, which I thought was pretty comfortable.”
One consequence of the outdoor venue is an earlier noise curfew, but the festival carries on informally after the outdoor stage goes dark, with after-parties featuring bands at the Hi Tone Cafe, the Lamplighter Lounge, and Bar DKDC, with DJ sets at the Eight & Sand bar in Downtown’s Central Station Hotel.
Another Covid-induced innovation that will remain in place this year is the live streaming of every performance. “We constantly question the sanity of trying to live stream every performance, but it’s fun,” says Friedl. “I hope people take advantage of it. It’s a full-on video shoot over four days of long hours, with more than just one static camera. Technically, it’s challenging, but we do it in our DIY style. I really like how it turned out last year. We learned a lot. It’s its own kind of animal. And we do have a big community of people that want to be here and participate that way.”
The King Khan & BBQ Show (Photo: Courtesy Goner)
The King Khan & BBQ Show
As it turns out, the idea of community is at the heart of both Gonerfest and the many bands it brings to Memphis. This is especially true of one of the opening night’s headliners, The King Khan & BBQ Show, but the theme runs through all the performers we spoke with: Music, be it punk or simply innovative, is a kind of haven for those who can’t quite find a niche elsewhere, and Gonerfest is just such a haven, writ large.
That’s how King Khan sees it, going back to his earliest days in Montreal. “I joined the Spaceshits when I was 17, and it changed my life,” he says. “Me being Brown, with Indian parents, I always felt like an outsider in Canada. Just being someone with Indian genetics, growing up in the ice and snow was a shock. And I think I took that sense of shock to the Spaceshits. Now shock rock is such a ridiculous thing, but I think we were trying to shock the audience. I used to love getting naked and stuff. We loved to incite chaos. And having Mark Sultan and the rest of the Spaceshits, we were just a disaster!”
But that shock just built stronger bonds with the audiences, all seeking some meaning through music. “Music was my secret world,” Khan says. “But I also found my greatest friends, who were like my chosen family. And that led me also to the Spaceshits. We had this common love of being freaks and accepting freakdom. And worshipping it. We literally worshipped it.”
That was a time, in the early-mid ’90s, when Khan and Sultan first met the Oblivians, even coming to Memphis for a memorable show at Barristers. “People were throwing snowballs at each other on stage,” recalls Friedl. It was a fortuitous encounter, for when Khan and Sultan formed their duo, The King Khan & BBQ Show, featuring Khan on guitar and vocals and Sultan (BBQ) playing drums and guitar simultaneously, they had a receptive fanbase in Memphis, open to their unhinged hybrid of punk and doo-wop sensibilities. Indeed, two of those fans ran Goner Records, leading to the duo’s first commercial release on the label, and ultimately their appearance at Gonerfest 1.
And while the duo is decidedly unconcerned with traditional commercial potential, apropos of most Gonerfest bands, a funny thing happened during the social media revolution. “The elephant in the room,” says Khan, “is obviously what happened with TikTok, with me and Mark. We had no idea what TikTok even was. We just got weird messages from people, saying, ‘Hey look, this Italian astronaut posted about making a taco in space and used your song!’ I was like, ‘What?’ And it was our song ‘Love You So,’ from our Goner debut! With this taco floating in space! And other weird stuff. You know when Drew Barrymore posts it, there’s something fucked up going on. But a lot times, these posts wouldn’t say the name of the song, so a lot of people don’t even know what song it is. They just grab it because it’s popular.
“It’s funny because we released that song almost 20 years ago, we never even made a video for it. And now it’s up to almost 20 million streams. But because of the pandemic, we haven’t toured since that happened. So I’m curious to see what the effect will be in America.”
The duo will find out Thursday, when they and garage-pop masters Shannon and the Clams will headline the festival’s opening night. And while the latter band has been put through the ringer, with front person Shannon Shaw still grieving the loss of her fiancé, Joe Haener, in a car crash, they too will soldier on for the community, closing Gonerfest’s first night.
The Rev. Fred Lane
If, as King Khan quips, “the quality I love most about rock-and-roll is when it’s a secret,” then Fred Lane and his band are the perfect expression of that, for they have purposefully aimed for obscurity since their first recordings. But they aren’t really rock-and-roll.
“Since the ’80s, when Shimmy Disc put out the Fred Lane records,” says Friedl, “I’ve been fascinated with the idea of this group of people in Alabama, putting out this crazy, twisted big band lounge jazz. And learning more about the people in Tuscaloosa in the ’70s that did this, and all the wild music and art that came out of there at the time.” Yet even learning that much was not easy. “Before the internet, especially, nobody knew anything about who Fred Lane really was.”
Indeed, the group’s two releases from the ’80s seemed to come out of nowhere. The covers sported disturbing images of the Reverend himself, looking greasy with a waxed goatee and a demonic grin, his face covered in band-aids, and a list of many imaginary albums on the back cover that created an entire universe.
Lane and his cohort turn out to have been the product of yet another community, this one centered around the University of Alabama, which eerily echoed other alternative communities springing up across the U.S. (Gonerfest has brought in other bands with roots in this era, such as Akron’s X__X.) Even Memphis had a similar avant-garde, giving rise to Tav Falco’s Panther Burns and others.
One of the musicians in Tuscaloosa was the visual artist and flautist Tim Reed, who describes how the scene expressed an impatience with consumer-oriented music. “By the mid ’70s, I was getting sick of rock and counterculture music. It sounded manufactured. There was no heart in it. So I just said, ‘I’m gonna go out there and pretend I’m a really bad Frank Sinatra, and just insult people in the audience. If Don Rickles can do it, I can do it.’”
He was already helping to mount art exhibits mixed with vaudeville-like revues, and ended up writing a whole show built around his persona, the Rev. Fred Lane. “In 1976, I wrote a show called From the One Who Cut You,” he recalls. “There were different band names, but they were basically different versions of a group of us musicians who had been calling ourselves Raudelunas. We were influenced by Dada, Alfred Jarry, and the Ubu plays.” With an aesthetic somewhere between Andy Kaufman, Bill Murray’s early lounge act skits, and the Joker, he recruited musicians well-versed in free improvisation and got them to learn tunes, over which he recited and sang his surreal lyrics, often in a blazer and boxer shorts.
“I always tried to make it hard to know when everything was recorded,” Reed says today. “I’m a contrarian. If people thought the tracks were from the ’50s or ’60s, we agreed with them. That was back when nobody knew who we were. We were kind of a secret society.”
But lately, with the documentary Icepick to the Moon, and an album by the same name, the Rev. Fred Lane has resurfaced. Superfan Friedl is pinching himself about it. “I never thought I’d have the chance to see them live, much less reissue the records. And I never thought they’d have a chance to play Gonerfest. And it’s definitely in the Gonerfest spirit of things, and at the same time diametrically opposed to it. Just in terms of music. So I think it’s going to be really fun. The first jazz group at Gonerfest! With a great feeling of anarchy at all times.”
Freezing Hands (Photo: Courtesy Goner)
The Compulsive Gamblers
If Fred Lane is an outlier in the usual Gonerfest musical milieu, the Compulsive Gamblers practically defined it. For many Memphians, the band needs no introduction. Though their heyday was nearly 30 years ago, co-founders Greg Cartwright and Jack Yarber (aka Jack Oblivian) have maintained a strong presence here. When they play their 2000 album, Crystal Gazing Luck Amazing, front to back on Saturday night (full disclosure, with myself on keyboards), they’ll be evoking the kind of quality songwriting that both singers have exemplified ever since.
“The Gamblers were my favorite band in Memphis. Everything was an event. They had the horn section that was never in tune, and a violin player, and nobody was really doing that. Even in the garage kind of scene, it was too weird. A lot of those bands, once they’re in a genre, they use those genres to define who they are. But Greg and Jack had this big, expansive idea of all the music they wanted to make, ranging from Tom Waits kind of stuff to punkier stuff to more R&B stuff. It was fantastic, and the shows were just a mess. But at the same time, the songs they were writing were so good.”
Indeed, the songs hold up impressively. Garage rock aficionados can hear the nascent echoes of Reigning Sound and Jack Oblivian and the Sheiks in nearly every riff and chorus. And it will be all the more powerful in combination with Gonerfest coming full circle, back to its roots, and back to the future.
Gonerfest takes place at Railgarten, Thursday-Sunday, September 22nd-September 25th, and at various venues for after-hours shows.
