About ten years ago, I made a couple of display typefaces using some old posters/clip art books, tape, ink, and a xerox machine. One of these, Blue Baby, still lives on in various locations across the internet today. I had thought the others were gone for good after numerous computer transitions. The past weekend while digging through the contents of an old hard drive, I stumbled across the TrueType files for three other fonts — Nevada, Psycho 78, and Cowboy Dan). Some of these were for sale on a very old version of this site, and I believe Nevada was given away for free by the defunct Kiiroi magazine.

As I still get requests to use Blue Baby and see it pop up every now and then, I figured some designers may be interested in the getting a leg up on the next grunge design revival.

You can download these fonts here.

These are free for commercial and non-commercial use. If you happen to find them useful, please get in touch and send me a copy of your work. I still get a kick out of seeing the fonts get used, even after ten years.

…and California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.

 — Joan Didion, “Notes From a Native Daughter”

Photograph by Todd Hido.

Some interesting tidbits, regarding creating a visual identity that matched the sound:

This is something that’s rarely discussed or brought up, but I was always very, very conscious of networking and trying to link people up. In the same way that label would link up a musician with a graphic designer or photographer, I felt it was very important for different regional scenes, and bands in different cities to get turned on to what was going on in other cities, so the whole national scene could kind of coalesce into a more unified thing.

You say that every level needs a motif, visually. What other labels were you looking to for inspiration?

In my own mind, let’s say Blue Note, most famously. Factory Records. 4AD. And as far as the U.S. indie scene at that time, SST. All had very distinctive looks, and as somebody who had — I had also started a couple of indie record stores, I’d pretty much worked indie rock from every possible facet — what I would notice from working at record stores is that people would walk in and more times than not buy records simply because of the cover art. If there was a label like 4AD or SST that had a very consistent look, people would want to collect those records. Postcard Records from Scotland was another example. Because of the similar look, oftentimes people would want to collect everything in the series. This had a lot to do with how we packaged our singles; with the singles club, we had the bar running across the top. They became a series, and people would go out of their way to get everything in the series, and that led to a lot more record sales.

To me, the key to this identity lies in the black and white photography of Charles Peterson, which captures the sweat, hair, denim, and flannel in bipolar moments of frenzied motion or apathetic daze. His photos grace the front and back covers of almost all of the early Sub Pop releases. Pavitt discusses how the partnership with Peterson came about:

He had just finished printing life-sized photos of bands like Malfunkshun and Green River, and he had this whole showcase in his house. I looked at those photos, and I immediately knew that he was catching the energy of the groups, and combining these images with the music would work. Every record label needs a visual motif to establish [itself], and those photos would help do it.

Charles Peterson’s iconic music photography of the era has been collected in the book Touch Me, I’m Sick.

Elsewhere, Toru Aki’s blurry portraits are the antithesis of Peterson’s work — emerging from a white void, they cast everyday scenes and faces as memory ghosts. More moody photography from Lane Coder. Jamie Chung’s Project One contains black and white abstracts that are part rorschach blot and part ink on water cocktail. Be sure to follow up with her fungus photography in Project Two. (No direct links for these flash portfolios…)

More sights at Artlog in focus, but no permalinks for guests. The portfolio of the Swiss duo Fageta (via It’s Nice That) and the design & illustration of Tim Fishlock.

Felix Sockwell explains the design process behind his gorgeous icons for the New York Times on the iPhone (via Brand New). Meanwhile, some NYTimes Labs developers have launched ShifD, which could be an interesting player in the manage-your-notes-on-all-your-devices space. Old school GTD fans will probably be beside themselves at the mention of Beeswax, a curses based todo application based on Lotus Agenda. Those same people might also be interested in TwitVim, a Twitter client for Vim (of course).

Steve McQueen and a Mustang: This car chase scene from Bullitt has long been regarded as one of the all time classics in cinema. Someone has taken the time to “geo-broadcast” that scene using a site called Seero. Seero lets you geocode timeframes within your videos, and view the route in real time via map overlays. The result is reminiscent, though less grand, than the VR installations of celebrity death scenes imagined by William Gibson in Spook Country. (via peterme)

More for the machine-aided-geography set: Polipoly, from the industrious Sunlight Labs, is a compact Python library for associating addresses with congressional districts. I’d missed it before, Sunlight Labs also created Capitol Words, a dead simple website that tracks the most popular word from the Congressional record each day. They have released an API as well.

Soak in the geometric color abstractions from both Owen Gildersleeve and Andy Gilmore. Gildersleeve created a set of unique posters in collaboration with artist Thomas Forsyth. Forsyth’s spinning top auto-drawing contraption creates ghost scribbles atop the circular fields designed by Gildersleeve. Courtesy of Matthew Buchanan, the color abstracts by Andy Gilmore remind me of this poster by Otl Aicher, from his collection for the 1972 Munich Olympics. Four years earlier: a graphic uprising in 1968.

Michael Agger explores how we read online, while fewer and fewer people read books offline. RIP Cody’s. Who needs books when you can purchase an abstraction artifact of your favorite product at Daniel Becker’s Barcode Plantage?

Visuals: Lovely portfolio of Wayne Daly (via It’s Nice That). The artwork of Sandra Kassenaar. The photography of Christian Wander. A gallery of sawn in half cameras (via DF). YouWorkForThem presents ZINETWO, a PDF magazine/design flyer. Raymond Biesinger drew the icons above this paragraph, and he has a striking portfolio of vintage-styled illustration that look plucked from a Boys Life issue from the 1950’s. Pin-Up a magazine for architectural entertainment (via EG).

Featured up top, Raymond Pettibon cover art for the Dim Stars 1992 EP. Not so grim as this caped crusader poster, but a bit more subversive.

“Well I’ve failed. I failed. Yes I think that’s evident now.” He said this with what seemed great anguish. “The conception was just too huge, the parts too many. No matter how long it was let to go on, it got no closer to being done.”

“It’s a corrupted text,” Pierce said. “I believe.” There was, he now saw, another bentwood chair beside the man, exactly like the one he sat in.

“I so much wanted it to knit,” the other said. He interlaced his own fingers. “Past and present, then and now. The story of the thing lost, and how it was found. More than anything I wanted it to resolve. And all it does is ramify.

 — John Crowley, Dæmonomania

Above, the title page from French jurist Jean Bodin’s 1693 handbook Dæmonomania, used by judges presiding over witch trials. (via BiblioOdyssey)

“If you want to read it as a mystery, a clue is: the bald spot.”

So reads the inner flap to Ellen Raskin’s 1974 young adult novel Figgs & Phantoms. Raskin’s second novel (and twelfth book) wraps playful meditations on life, death, identity, family, and dreams in a mysterious romance (or a romantic mystery). Raskin created the cover, supplied several illustrations, and designed the intricate playbill and posters that add to the story.

The original edition of the book, pictured above, featured Raskin’s illustration and design on the cover. This isn’t the case of a publisher pacifying an author and letting them satisfy their visual artist dreams. Raskin was a respected illustrator in her own right — most notably creating the cover for Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time.

Mona Newton Figg is the youngest of the eccentric Figg family of Pineapple, made up of a human pretzel, tap dancer, dog trainer, walking-talking-adding-machine, and more. The legend of the Figg heaven, the island of Capri, has been handed down through the family’s history. Each member has their own notion of how to reach the mythical Capri — numbers, books, the body — and Raskin delights in tracing these paths and playing with meaning.

“That Mona Newton is a Figg, all right,” the people of Pineapple said. “Looks like a Figg, acts like a Figg. Balances like her uncle Truman the Human Pretzel. Memorizes like Romulus, the Walking Book of Knowledge. Figres like Remus, the Talking Adding Machine. Short too, like Florence, though she’s still growing — both ways. Wouldn’t be so bad if she took after her cute mother, but she’s going to end up looking like Kadota, and she doesn’t even like dogs.

“Capri,” the people of Pineapple said. “Leave it to the Figgs to have some crazy religion of their own. They think their souls will go to a place called Capri when they die. Not the real Capri, but another world altogether. Just as well. Who would want to go to heaven if the Figgs were going to be there.

Also central to Figgs & Phantoms are books. Mona’s uncle Florence Italy Figg, a rare bookseller, and searches for Capri amongst the worn pages of books. Raskin designed the playful handbills, signs, and notes using a combination of Playbill, Chisel, and News Gothic. Her copious ampersands (a running gag/symbol) are set in Garamond.

Her attention to detail in the books is exquisite — she was careful to design the books so that they were easy for children to read. This includes minimizing line breaks, increasing margins to the size of a child’s thumb, and keeping the length under 200 pages. There’s more detail at the University of Wisconsin’s Ellen Raskin site, featuring a working copy and notes from Raskin’s more famous, Newbery Award winning book, The Westing Game.

Her mysterious playfulness even pops up on the about the author page:

Ellen Raskin lives in many worlds: in the world of books, in the world of dreams, and in New York City where she writes and illustrates in an 1820 haunted house.

Ellen Raskin passed away at the age of 56 in 1984.

Above: Robert Edgar Broughton of the Edgar Broughton Band. Wasted blues from 1968 till the present, after starting as a more straight head blues band in the late 60’s, and what British rock group didn’t start that way, the Broughton Band let things get a bit looser and ended up twisting Howlin’ Wolf and the MC5 into some sort of anarchist free blues heaviness. Charting in the UK, their most popular single foreshadowed mashups of today, nonsensically mixing a cover of The Shadows’ hit “Apache” with a raw take on Captain Beefheart’s “Apache Dropout”. Here’s an ealier live performance, minus the “Apache” sections.

Speaking of 1968, the new issue of Aperture Magazine showcases famous and striking photographs from 1968.

Drawing: The Nonist digs up drawings by people suffering from various psychological afflictions. The lettering sketchbooks of Linzie Hunter. Aza Raskin’s Algorithmic Ink paints organic patterns within your browser using the Javascript port of Processing.

Some sort of disorder, or perhaps a bit too far left of wasted: hypnotizing footage of the infamous Royal Trux stumbling mightily through radio IDs. Five Dials, a magazine. Abandon NASA Photography by Richard Harrington, snapshots of decaying futures (via MB). Even more ghostly, Vincent Fournier’s Space Project channels Solaris, Sputnik, and the modern world’s vanished dreams of not so long ago.

Nina Katchadourian stacks books to creates meaning (via Coudal). A full album of outtakes for download from drone conjurer Jefre Cantu-Ledesma’s out of print Shining Skull Breath.

Easier and cheaper than a whiteboard plus a projector: transparent Post-Its (via Torrez). Guidelines for Online Success by Rob Ford, published by Taschen. Ford attempts an all encompassing analysis of completed successful online projects, I look forward to viewing a hardcopy. Sometimes it can be inspiring to see a site’s humble genesis, ink and all (via TMN).

I’ve been under the spell of Blues Control for some time now. The meandering boogie guitar adrift on seas of keyboard arpeggios, hushed with soothing tape hiss and field recordings — this duo has a take on new age that shuns the digital slickness coming out of the electronic camp. And while that has its place, there is an unmistakable grime and to this ambience coming from Queens that I’ve yet to hear attempted anywhere else. At times the groove sets in, and you wonder if the disembodied boogie riffs emanate from the vinyl or through your downstairs neighbor’s old Mountain records floating through the floorboards. When that feeling hits, it’s endless riffing and celestial keys for all.

Semi-Complete Blues Control Discography

• Self Titled Cassette (Palsy)
• Split with GN’R Cassingle (Uzi Suicide)
• Riverboat Styx Cassette (Fuck It Tapes)
• Puff LP/CD (Woodsist/Fusetron)
• Self Titled CD/LP (Holy Mountain)
• A Full Tank CDR (Managing Expectations) compiles the first cassette, split cassette, and a track from the WFMU set
• Bored Fortress #3 Split with Heavy Winged 7” (Not Not Fun)

Keep an eye out for upcoming singles due out on Sub Pop and Richie Records.

Extras: Live in the studio at WFMU, Live at Big Jar Books on March 27th, 2007, Live in Austin on March 19th, 2007, White Tapes, label run by Russ from Blues Control, Collective Voice podcast feature with Blues Control phone interview.

Above video captured by Mark Schoneveld in Philadelphia on June 15th, 2007.

There’s something that sets it apart though. An eclectic mix of sounds, the album has a charming everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach- acoustic instrumentation mixes with cello, organ, fuzz guitar, primitive percussion, and more. The analog recording adds a warmness and intimacy (which may or may not be emphasized by the source of the bootleg LP copy I own). The vocals of Angela Naylor weave amongs the mellower passages, blending with the voices of the other band members like some melancholic choir a-caroling. The song “Aslan” shines the brightest here, full of dueling guitar and cello leads it’s staccato rhythm propels it at a pace where it seems the band might fall off the tracks. Truly the most compelling of their arrangements, the intricate counter-melodies and arresting interplay in between the members found here create an a haunting urgency.

A new official website contains quite a bit of info on Caedmon form the members themselves, which may be a the first for a one-off private press cult band. The smashing of an original of their much sought, $500+ album shows they are not too interested in reliving/living off of the past, so perhaps the spirit lingers.

Elsewhere, an interview with the Melvins courtesy of Joe Preston, published in his zine “Matt Lukin’s Legs” from the late 80’s. Happy 50th, Jello. Musicogenic Epilepsy: seizing to Sean Paul. Not quite as serious, obsessive compulsive media libray cataloging.

Some photography: Cinerama, a photoset. Alexey Titarenko’s City of Shadows captures kinetic energy as ghostly shadows. More haunting images from Martina Hoogland Ivanow. Portraits of people and pouring, Meg Wachter’s Dumped!. WhereWeDoWhatWeDo collects photos of workspaces. The mesmerizing peril of Mark Thiessen’s forest fire photography for National Geographic (via Shoot!).

Magcloud allows one to publish and distribute a magazine from a PDF file. Will there be a resurgence in zines thanks to the long tail?

Bullit, a theme for NetNewsWire. The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock, a book (via We Make Money Not Art). The fabulous Mystery on Fifth Avenue, a house as clues (as seen throughout the web but worth another link).

Two interesting news visualizations: TimesMachine allows you to flip through New York Times front pages back to 1851. Big Picture, a news blog exploring the power of a single image. It consists of a large format AP photograph selected from breaking news stories.

Photos of the Titanic from the Library of Congress. The artwork of Yellena James. The photography of Cecile Bortoletti and those represented by AR Photographic Agency. Wild Light: a wildlife photography blog.

Until the Kingdom Comes: artwork by Simen Johan. The Sea Inside: psychedelic ink drawings by Maia Valenzuela. The art of David Haines, who tarnishes delicate pencil drawings with gum, mosquitoes, and blood.

An interview with John Gall on book cover design, including some of his favorites.

Alton Kelley passed away this week. Kelley’s work with Stanley Mouse and the Family Dog collective has become iconic of the Summer of Love. Their psychedelic blend of a hodgepodge of found visuals and intricate lettering graced the covers of albums by the Grateful Dead, the Steve Miller Band, and Journey as well as numerous posters and handbills.

More 1960’s counterculture, but conveyed through architecture: Drop City, Solux/Lama, the Prickley Mountain gang, etc.

Arresting retro noir and gloss photography from Alex Prager’s Big Valley exhibition. Her blending of Hitchcock peril and golden suburban sheen are currently being shown in the UK at the Michael Hoppen Gallery.

Other recent ogling: Wonderland, a magazine. Photo reps: New Blood Agency. The wooden scenes of Alison Elizabeth Taylor. The art of Graph drome.

Above, a picture of the score for composer Yoshi Wada’s November, 8th 1987 performance of The Appointed Cloud, newly reissued by Omega Point and the ever-eclectic EM Records. In this performance, eighty of Wada’s homemade pipe horns and organs were controlled via a single computer, and paired with a small ensemble playing instruments and prepared metal objects. In addition to directing the was flow of air powering the pipes, the program also had control over the mallet which struck the hanging steam pipe gong.

The Appointed Cloud was not only a performance, but also exhibited as an interactive installation which began anew every hour. Visitors could create variations on the theme via an external keypad, which was fed into the computer orchestrating the pipes.

A special artist’s edition of the release comes in a roughly legal-sized folio containing a reproduction of the colorful score pictured above. This is the second Wada reissue/release by EM, and let’s hope that it isn’t the last. Perhaps Audibility will be next.

Sarah Oppenheimer’s 610-3356 (via Life Without Buildings) eradicates the boundaries between the viewer and the museum, and viewer and the floor below. Remnants of Rauschenberg. The Vanishing Design erodes the style from a webpage while you watch.

China’s moment of mourning captured in analytics. The ghost town of Yubari, a former Japanese coal city.

Explorations in tracing time: Analogy, a typographic clock. A polaroid calendar.

Visual: Bruno Munari’s Original Xeropgraphies. The gallery of disciples. The book covers of Henry Sene Yee. The photography of Sarah Cass. A gallery of book trade labels. The seductive art of Robert McGinnis.

Piet is a fascinating visual programming language paying tribute to Mondrian. The language operates on the change in color from one block to the next. The shift and hue change dictates the instruction. An IDE is available online.

Ampersand, a blog. Kevin Drumm’s Imperial Distortion, a double compact disc. Make your own film, a photoset. Cubescape, an isometric pixel editor.

An interview with Honey Owens, who performs under the name Valet. Her newest album Naked Acid smears vocals upon whispers upon a subtle pounding. She speaks of the electric current running through her body that sabotages computers, and truth or not, the sounds are bewitching. Serious orange feathered sunset music here folks.

Finally, via the new nonist annex, Semantic Field Relationships. You really won’t find a more perplexing diagram today.

DB: Dave Blakeslee, TG: Timothy Gallaher. Interview conducted and edited by Ry Wharton in March, 2008.

First off, could you give a bit of history about the band, for those who haven’t read MRR #1?

DB: I first met Tim and Bruce when we were all enrolled in a creative writing class at DVC. I think that’s mentioned in the MRR article where I got mocked for wearing red pants. I had bought a guitar a year or two before that and spent time figuring out how to play it in my bedroom. Bruce played keyboards and we got together so that he could help me learn a bit of music. That led to a band called the Maroons, with Bruce on organ, me on guitar, a girl named Ba Powell on bass, and Tim on a real small and crummy drum kit. Tim knew Eric Lundmark through Bruce, I think. Bruce and Eric were from Concord, Tim and I were from Walnut Creek. That right there accounts for the creative tensions and irreconcilable differences within the band, a cultural rift which ultimately sealed our doom.

TG: Church Police formed out of an earlier band Dave, Bruce, and I were in called the Maroons. I met Bruce when we were at Diabolo Valley College in Pleasant Hill. He got a ride to a Dead Kennedys show with some friends of mine. He was the first person I met who was also in to the scene. I met Dave through Bruce. Eventually we put a band together. I bought a drum set and became the drummer. Bruce played piano and had a farfisa organ. The organ sound drove the band and Bruce wrote goofy type songs with bouncy melodies and fun lyrics, like one song about Ed Babar, “the greatest salesman alive,” as Bruce labeled him in the song. He owned furniture stores and always was on TV with his commercials. Another great Bruce song was “She Likes the Oatmeal” about Laurie Bailey, who played guitar in Animal Things, and how she liked oatmeal. We played a show somehow at lunch period at a High School in Concord, California. We got in to the first song and the kids went crazy. They began screaming and yelling and throwing their food at the stage. I was sitting there playing drums and those 8 Oz milk cartons were flying by my head like in slow motion. The reason they went crazy was simply because of our looks and the whole idea of a punk rock band being there. We were doing the Peter Gunn theme so it certainly wasn’t because of any radical music. It’s hard to imagine now, but back in 1980, simply not having long hair on a guy was radical and threatening to a lot of people. Needless to say we were shut down after the first song. The kids were still all riled up, yelling and screaming, so I went to the front of the stage and picked up an apple slice from the stage. It was clean and pristine so I picked it up and held it up very clearly, all eyes on this, and slowly brought it to my mouth and took a bite. The audience went wild, screaming, “he ate it!”. It was funny because it was all empty shock value. There was nothing wrong with the apple slice, it wasn’t dirty and wasn’t going to hurt me but I knew they’d freak out and they did. After the show met up with Mark Hosler, who later made Negativland, who was a senior at this high school and whom I’d known when, but not seen since, we both went to Bible study at the Presbyterian church in Walnut Creek.

We put on another show, Bruce and I, that was bigger and better. We called it Maybe Contra Costa after the “No New York compilation”. This was probably the first punk rock type show put on in the area. We were pretty young, I was 19, Bruce was 18. We got use of a hall at the Unitarian church in Walnut Creek. Bruce had an old station wagon and we went and rented a PA from a local music center.

After this show I said I wanted to start a band and call it Church Police and be the singer. Eric Lundmark said he’d be in the band and play drums. Eric was only sixteen and still in high school. He lived in the same neighborhood as Bruce, so that’s how they knew each other. Dave said he’d play guitar and Bruce bought a bass and was able to use his same amp and speaker he used for the organ. Eric played my drum set.

DB: Tim and Eric got together one day and wrote a bunch of lyrics. I guess they get ultimate credit for starting the band. They chose the name “Church Police” which came from a Monty Python skit. Either that same day or the next, they came over to my dad’s house in Walnut Creek where The Maroons would hang out and practice in the cellar, this dank little underground cavern which provided decent sound insulation. This was 1980 when there was no punk scene even imaginable in Contra Costa County suburbia. The sounds we were making were very alien to that environment at the time.

Tim and Eric showed me their lyrics so we went down into the cellar and I banged out some very elemental riffs on my guitar. Eric played the drums and Tim sang. Our first bass player was also named Dave, he was Eric’s friend. I think the songs we created that day account for about 75% of the material that the Church Police ever performed. Songs like “The Oven Is My Friend,” “Life Is Fun,” “Robots,” “Gourmet Cooking,” “Rock and Roll Bank Account,” “Holidays” and “Church Attack” were all pretty much the work of a fall afternoon. We added a few other songs later, but it was mostly one burst of creativity that set us in motion.

TG: We started playing at Sound of Music, which still had a downstairs dressing room in the back that had lockers and wigs and dresses. They’d put on transvestite shows before they started booking punk bands. This was summer 1980. We were all under 20 still and not even old enough to legally be in the Sound of Music.

You made several recordings, but no records were released. What happened to the band?

TG: We made a very early recording at DVC. It had a number of songs, including “Robots”, “Bag of Lumps”, and “Jarhead”. This was passed around among the scenesters, so people knew us from that. Back then the Mabuhay put out a schedule on a flyer that also had the Rotten Top Ten which were the top ten punk or underground records played at KUSF. We made the top ten with “Bag of Lumps” from this tape. Back then it was not easy to put out a record, but tapes were made and played.

DB: We did an early demo at Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill where our instruments were plugged directly into the mixing board - no amps. Only the drums were mic’ed. It made for a weird and unrepresentative sound but that resulted in the tape that made its way to Bruce Loose and led to us having our short moment in the spotlight in the SF punk scene circa 1981-82.

There were a few shows that got recorded and also a few practices caught on cassette. If those tapes exist, Bruce would be the guy who has them.

TG: Bruce Gauld did a lot of tape making and he did great dubs as well. He’d take our songs and dub them up. He was into dub at the time as one of his influences. Bruce Gauld and Bruce Loose always had their tapes. Bruce Loose had this tape he’d play all the time of a skip on some old funk record where it skipped and played the same funk groove over and over with the one lyric “’ollywood….’ollywood…” over and over. Bruce Gauld was inspired to get the same record and played it, and amazingly it skipped at the exact same place. There was all sorts of creative stuff going on with regard to recordings and the like that set the stage for sampling and so much of what is done routinely now.

We did the MRR compilation. We used money we made at a gig to buy time at Bay Sounds in Oakland and record a bunch of songs. Kevin Kvarme was a great friend. He was a couple years older so had been around a bit more. He wanted to go in to producing and he produced us. He calls himself Kevin Army, and from what I’ve seen he produced a lot of bands and engineered some of the Green Day stuff.

DB: We were just too inept and couldn’t get our act together. We did the one studio session at Bay Sound that has served us well for the number of records we’ve gotten out of it, I guess. But we never had much money, our equipment was usually in shambles and there was no managerial figure or anyone else to oversee us and get something organized. By the end of 1982, relationships between Bruce and the other three of us deteriorated and my personal living situation in San Francisco fell apart. Not only that, I was going through a bit of a psychic meltdown - too many drugs, the death of one of my best friends and other internal personal conflicts, I’ll just leave it at that. So I came to the end of my pursuit, my fantasy really, of being a full-time rocker.

TG: If we’d kept going we would have put out stuff – probably on SST or some like label. What happened to end the band was that Dave and his Dad decided to take a boat trip around the world on his Dad’s yacht. There were no plans for the band to end. When Dave got back after a few months we’d start up again. But something happened and they couldn’t get past Mexico and Dave took off and hitchhiked back to his Mom’s in Michigan and decided to stay there. That was that. We could have and maybe should have gone on with another guitarist, but we didn’t. I seldom saw Bruce or Eric. I decided to go to college and went down to Santa Cruz, so I moved away and that pretty much caused me to lose touch with the scene.

DB: Basically, the whole thing was just too unstable and chaotic. I think the actual break-up happened one evening when Bruce told us that he was no longer willing to drive our equipment around to shows. That was pretty much the deal-breaker right there - it just didn’t seem like any of us were willing or able to keep it going. We were having a hell of a time finding a rehearsal space - I remember looking at some abandoned beer vats where a bunch of punk kids were living and hanging out but nothing came of that. Bruce’s decision messed things up because it was our most reliable way to get our amps and drums from the suburbs to the city. I also think he was tired of the screw-ups that the rest of us had become and his musical tastes were moving in other directions too.

Most people know the name Church Police from “The Oven is My Friend”, a standout on the heavily stacked Not So Quiet on the Western Front compilation. How did that come about? It was fairly well distributed at the time– What kind of response did you receive? Have you heard the Sebadoh cover of the song?

TG: Western Front came about because they asked us. We did the recordings and they wanted “Oven is My Friend” on it. After the record came out, we did a show at On Broadway and a teenage kid came up afterward and asked, why didn’t you do “Oven is My Friend”. I really hadn’t thought about that one way or the other. But it was interesting: After there is a recording out there, people may come to a show to hear that song they like. And be disappointed if it isn’t played.

Biafra only sent one royalty check ever as well and owes all of us money I am sure.

DB: I like that recording because it is all just one take of us playing live going right onto the tape, no overdubs, just Kevin tweaking knobs, dropping instruments in and out right on the fly, which I think made the recording more interesting than if it had just been played straight. We did each song only once. It was practically like having a live show recorded because we only had like one hour or so of studio time. It was like, rush in, set up, plug in, play, then get the hell out of there before the meter flipped over to charge us an extra dollar. I had to use a really cheap crappy pawn shop guitar because my good one had been stolen when I lived upstairs from Big Al’s strip club on Broadway. (One of several sad stories I could relate from the time I spent living in The City while trying to make it in the music biz.) Which explains the horrendous feedback and gnarly texture of my guitar sound. Plus I recall being more drunk than I should have been. But that’s what it is!

Tim’s lyrics were demented… you’ll have to ask him about the inspiration for that. But yeah, I think as a “signature tune” goes, I’m good with it. I thought from the first time I heard “Not So Quiet” that our track stood out just because it was different from most everything else on the comp - loose, sloppy, funny without necessarily trying to be. A perfect capture of the mutations taking place at the time out in shopping mall territory.

TG: I never heard Sebadoh’s cover. I never heard of Sebadoh until someone told about their cover of our song. About 10 years ago, maybe more, I was working in a large lab and one of the senior scientists liked to go see shows at clubs in Hollywood. Over all these years I have had little contact with any scene, not gone to see shows, but I will still look and see who’s playing. I saw that Sebadoh had just played Hollywood so I asked this guy, “hey, did you go see Sebadoh?”. “Yes,” he said, very enthusiastically. “That was the greatest show I’ve ever seen!”. He really liked these guys. I asked if he knew that song “Oven is My Friend” by them. He said, yes. I said, “I wrote that song”. He says, “Oh yeah, I like that song too, that’s a great song”. I said, “No. I wrote that song.” Finally it sunk in, “you wrote that song?” I don’t think he believed me.

DB: I’ve really enjoyed the occasional random connection that I have with Church Police fans from places far away from the SF Bay Area. But I think Sebadoh kind of messed up their version. It struck me as too histrionic - like the guy overdid the screaming part or something. I wouldn’t mind getting a piece of that royalty check, now that you mention it.

I noticed you had put a copy of the interview from MRR #1 online. How does it feel to read an interview with yourself from 25 or so years ago? Are you surprised that MRR is still published?

TG: It is strange to read such an old interview but it also brings back memories.

DB: I have a lot of old journals and crap that I wrote from that time so that part of my life is pretty well documented for my own recollections. But it’s a different kind of memory trigger when your words are in print in an old magazine.

TG: I never thought about MRR much, but somehow it seems natural for it to be still there. I see it still and still look. Much I have no interest in, but there was an interview with Penelope Houston not too long ago and an update on the Lewd. That reminded me of Chris, their drummer with the cool 50’s wagon who was a great joi de vivre type guy.

I think MRR found a niche and stayed there. That’s its strength and why it is still there. There’s always kids coming up who will be interested in it. It’s still the exact same as before after 25 years. But again, that’s why it has lasted. It does bug me that it’s not on the web. I missed the issue that reviewed our recent release on Skulltones. I’d like to look it up and read it on the web, but they don’t do that.

MRR kept me informed to some degree about the old scene I’d left and sadly, it was through MRR that I heard about Will Shatter’s death. I was really shocked and sad to see his obituary in MRR which was the first I’d heard way back in ‘87.

And in MRR, I always like to see my old buddy Ray Lujan’s name. Ray was a great friend and a great guy. Hi Ray – long time no see.

DB: To be honest, I haven’t read many issues since those few that we were featured in. I respect their perseverance and what they’ve accomplished. I think the punk community has grown into an institution and the magazine meets the needs and interests of a vibrant community. I think I still retain a fair amount of the punk mindset even though my presentation is a lot more conventional and middle-class.

How did your plans to be a bum work out?

DB: Well I did actually hitchhike from LA to Houston in the aftermath of my failed sailing trip in early 1983, so I can cross that ambition off my list. But after a couple months of that, I settled down and went straight. I’m a father of four, a social worker by profession, married for over 23 years, got a house and two cats and a respectable standing in society. But I still nurture my inner bum when others aren’t looking.

Your sound definitely shows the influence of Flipper, and I know you played with them quite a bit. Was the comparatively slug like pace of both bands warmly received amidst your faster contemporaries? Did you go over better with more a open-minded audience, say at the Throbbing Gristle gig you played? What other bands did you consider like-minded contemporaries?

TG: We just played like we played. There was no overt attempt to sound like Flipper or any band. Not all our songs were necessarily all that slow. And, even punk bands weren’t that fast. Avengers, Sex Pistols, and Black Flag for example didn’t start out playing a million miles a minute like what happened later.

DB: I honestly think that we should not be seen as being derivative of Flipper’s sound - we had our sound before we’d ever seen them perform. In fact, the first night that Bruce Loose came out and danced around and made a big scene at one of our early Sound of Music shows, I didn’t even know who he was, but I just noticed some dude in the audience was really getting into our music. It wasn’t until after the show that Tim told me who that dude was. I think that Flipper and us had similar influences, and I think they were better at what they did than we were. We both liked Public Image Ltd. and seeing Flipper open for them at some south-of-Market warehouse was my first Flipper show, though I wasn’t particularly impressed by them at the time and I think that was even before I was in a band.

TG: I would not agree with the premise that a Throbbing Gristle audience would be more open minded. I don’t know how we came across. I remember one industrial geek arty type guy at the very front looking at me like, “what are you doing here?” A very curious look. And of course, if the audience was an arty audience like this I’d play up rock and roll. At the Kezar show I kept yelling, “rock n roll!!” just because it seemed that would bug that audience and made sure we played our rock song, a cover of Black Sabbath’s “Killing Myself to Live” (which was more of our own variation on it than a cover. In fact I still haven’t ever heard the Black Sabbath version).

DB: I know we pissed off a lot of the weekend warrior, “let’s party in the City” trendy types. Which is what I considered most of the crowds to consist of when we played the clubs on Broadway. It’s hard to get your girlfriend drunk and in the mood when a bunch of suburban teenage misfits are blasting your eardrums with atonal feedback chaos and sonic explosions from a dislodged reverb coil! The SoM crowds and kids at the other assorted odd gigs we played were just art weirdos like us who probably took the whole thing for granted.

TG: Playing more loud and slow was associated with the Pet Rock thing. Pet Rock is not a joke and if it was, it wouldn’t be funny, was the initial line disseminated about it. There was a lot of factionalization of Pet Rock side and the emerging hardcore side. The arty side was a little separate from both. Will Shatter said something well when he said that they were “trying to do artistic things without being an art band”, which was apt. Flipper definitely were not an art band and came out of the punk rock scene and that was the association. Same with us. We were not an art band. But we were in a way. In San Francisco the scene started with all sorts of bands together. Shows would have Tuxedomoon playing with the Mutants and Avengers and DOA. It just all went together.

DB: I liked PiL’s percussive style of guitar playing and the heavy bass and drums. I liked the early Gang of Four sound (Entertainment!) Wire’s Pink Flag was in that mix of influences too. Don’t get me wrong, I loved Flipper once I got more into the S.F. club scene and really enjoyed their shows and the massiveness of their sound, but I don’t think it was really a copycat thing on my part at all. At least, I could never approximate what Ted did on the guitar, in my opinion.

Animal Things were the first local Bay Area band that I got to know and love, and they helped connect us to Flipper. Peter Accident and Gaga Din were other Contra Costa bands that we hung out with. Pariah, Ray Lujan’s band. They had nice equipment that their parents bought them. There was a guy named Dave Jones who stood by us and helped us a lot. He had a short-lived band called the Wild Boys but I don’t think they ever did anything. A band from New York named Arsenal, we got along pretty well with them for awhile. And I have to mention my friends Joe Nitzberg and Julie and Joyce Jackson. They were suburbanite kids who formed a goofy little band called Yawn Moan Sigh. A fun and funny bunch. I’d love to reconnect with them.

I’ve been to Walnut Creek and some of the surrounding areas, and it certainly feels removed from San Francisco and even Berkeley and Oakland. Do you feel this isolation from the city was essential to the sound and ideas behind Church Police?

TG: It was removed and isolated but not hugely so. And to answer your question, yes it was a component, but not consciously. You are who you are. And there was an East Bay connection. I remember getting on BART in Pleasant Hill and there was Biafra and Theresa. All one had to do was take BART or drive over to be in the city. And Dave lived there for most of the band’s existence.

DB: Yeah, I think our overt suburbanness made us distinctive from other bands, especially at that time. We never really tried to fit into any of the stylistic templates of the era - no “uniforms” or punk haircuts or anything like that. Our look was kind of a proto-grunge I suppose… flannel shirts and jeans, tennis shoes. Tim would wear khakis more than jeans though. What came through our music and live shows was a fair amount of anger lashing itself out at the world - we liked having crazy fun and breaking the boundaries of what entertainment was supposed to be about at our gigs, but it’s hard to deny that we were directing a lot of hostility toward our audience, sometimes toward the other bands on the bill (just about any band who seemed too serious about trying to “make it”) and especially the club managers who exploited the bands but were vital to giving us our creative outlet.

Lyrically the Church Police material I have heard seems to veer from abstract to the mundane, and I’m curious how much of this was premeditated. The MRR #1 interview and your journal bits hint at your (Dave and Tim) literary aspirations (both producing and consuming). Where were you coming from at the time? You seem to have sidestepped blatant political posturing of many hardcore bands from the same era- was this a conscious decision?

TG: There was no conscious decision to write any sort of lyrics. I wrote whatever I thought of. Eric and I wrote “Oven is My Friend” together and it was funny. It came from another song we were writing called “Holidays” about how Holidays are stupid. It had lines like, “holidays are for slime wallowing brain eaters” and Christmas is “a trick on the poor by the Sears Corporation” and “Santa buys dust with the money he makes” which is funny for two reasons: One, Santa is smoking angel dust. But more so, he makes money off Christmas. “Oven is My Friend” came from a line I was going to put in that song about how people who celebrate holidays should go lick the oven. So I took it and made it its own song. Eric and I traded off lines and laughed.

DB: I didn’t write too many lyrics except for a couple of our later songs which never got recorded. Tim and I were both interested in literary counter-culture - Kerouac, Burroughs, surrealism, Joyce, the Song of Maldoror, Philip K. Dick, Robert Anton Wilson, Timothy Leary, stuff like that. In some ways we were probably too clever for our own good… we bit off more than we could chew in a sense. I didn’t feel like I had the grand political statement to give or the right to give it in any case.

TG: I was very interested back then in literature and other art. I was a big Kerouac fan, and James Joyce and Henry Miller. And I liked surrealism. Bunuel was one of my heroes. I liked Jarry’s Ubu Roi and other such things. City Lights was right down the street from the Mabuhay and from where Dave worked and I hung out there a lot and got to get a lot of things there.

Looking back on the band and the northern California do-it-yourself scene that you were a part of, how has it affected where you are in 2008? Are you still playing music or writing at all?

TG: I think everyone who was involved in this scene at the time was affected by it for life. It was an amazing unique time, and this is apparent more now than it was then. Just the impact and the influence of what we were doing then has permeated society in all sorts of ways. Not just music or entertainment, but everything in what is now mainstream society – for good and bad.
After the Church Police I went to Santa Cruz for school and in grad school there I did play in another band. I played bass in a band called Jimmy Jesus. We played some gigs but it was nothing like Church Police or the scene of that time.

DB: No, I don’t do music, mainly due to lack of talent. There are other things I do much better. I keep a blog and maintain an email list that discusses religion, politics and cultural stuff. I get involved in some local political and social activism. I’m part of a group that produces a local public access TV show each month. I work with kids who’ve been abused and neglected, trying to help them stay out of trouble, work through their problems and get back on track again. That’s something I feel good about doing with my life.

A few years ago two of my sons had some interest in starting a band but didn’t stick much with it. I fiddled around with their guitar, but I don’t feel the same fire to want to make music that I did in my teens. Back then it offered a hope and a direction to focus myself… sort of. Now I have plenty of other stuff to do that keeps me busy and I’m OK with that. I wish we could have kept the band together a bit longer, or at least that we would have made better use of the time when we were together. But it’s not like I’m gnawing at the emptiness within because I got out of the music game before I could make it really pay off for me. It’s a satisfying part of my personal story and history, and with the recent release of some of our old recordings, and prospects of maybe some more on the way in the near future, I don’t feel like it’s completely done and over with either. I would even be open to reuniting the band for some kind of show or recording or just the experience of it if we could work out the logistics. But it might just be a daydream. I’m okay with it either way.

TG: I don’t play anything now but wish all the time I could. I really wish I had continued on in the music scene. But at the same time I really like what I ended up doing as well. But the scene was not only vibrant and creative; along with it was a very self destructive side. Will Shatter died. I read about the troubles one of the Kirkwood brothers had and how its amazing he didn’t end up dead.

But I’d love to do music again. Any guitarists out there want to back an old punk rock singer, let me know.

More information, flyers, photos, and words from the Church Police can be found here. Dave has posted his unedited answers online as well.

Above: a video for Lau Nau’s “Painovoimaa” from her new album Nukkuu, which translates to “Sleeps”. Several years back I caught a Finnish folk caravan consisting of Lau Nau, Islaja, Kuupuu, Pekko Käppi, and Tomutonttu among others leisurely performing in an open amphitheater at a Rhode Island state park. The drones and strings resonated while audience members and musicians mingled inside and out, walking through the trees and down by the shore. That afternoon long event made such an impression, that I have avoided seeing any of the acts since, worried that a performance in a stifling, darkened club or warehouse would tarnish the open air experience. The video visuals are apropos: Lau Nau weaves her melodies as a yarn trail through a forest, allowing dirt and leaves to cling to the threads of traditional folk hymns. Layers of voice and strings, warmed with hiss build up, but are carefully held in check. All the while, we are able to follow her wayward path as though if in a child’s subtly ominous fairy tale.

More Finnish sound: Paavoharju’s new Laulu Laakson Kukista album and Laulu laakson kukasta downloadable EP take the template of Lau Nau and Islaja, but wrap them in even more gauze to create abstract dreamlike snippets that also fade into smeared electronics and player piano ghost balladry. Hypnotic Scandinavia.

A transcript of The Wire interview with Terry Riley. A gallery of classical music album covers. Japanese anatomical charts via Morbid Anatomy. Organs of the color variety. Aspen: A long defunct pre-internet multimedia magazine in a box featuring, among others, Terry Riley.

American Abstract fiction instead: Harry Stephen Keeler, the Ed Wood of mystery novelists. Meet some of his characters: Criorcan Mulqueeny, Redwayne TerVyne, Screamo the Clown, Scientifico Greenlimb, Wolf Gladish, and State Attorney Foxhart Cubycheck.

Similar repetition with micro-variations to produce complex results: a lesson from Spirograph. Looking for the missing piece? Right here, though micro-house may have yielded different results.

Mapping the human ‘diseasome’ and botanical otology. Four questions for field recording artist Kiyoshi Mizutani, whose Scenery of the Border: Environment and Folklore of the Tanzawa Mountains double compact disc is worth taking the time to track down.

The graphics language/library/toolkit/bit paintbrush Processing has been reborn in Javascript, which could lead to very interesting experiments within your (newer) browser.

World War II all the time: a poster gallery. The intricate lettering of Alex Trochut. The portfolio of Jin Jung. The illustration of Jules Le Barazer.

Finally, joyous gutter news from the anchor state as Six Finger Satellite peel off another layer of the popular pigeon puzzle in reuniting (kind of). New and old recordings imminent.