.........."In the beginning there were Drums...1962. New Orleans Saint Peters
St. Off Bourbon Preservation Hall Jazz. Me, Seven years old sitting
on a worn dusty wood floor five feet in front of a Beautiful Black Pearl
Bass Drum and Kit. A quart jar sitting in front of it with a piece of
paper taped to it reads: SAINTS $20 ALL OTHERS $5. Around it a
Seasoned Black Battalion of Feeling Master Musicians Play. I also
feeling it, drink in the music, Sweet Emma Barrett facing the wall
playing the piano banging it sweet a big chaw under her bottom lip.
Drums, Piano, a Trombone, Banjo, Trumpet, Guitar, Clarinet/Sax. All
Singing. For me, a Drumming Foundation of Dixieland Jazz a True
Great American Art Form. I revisited many times in my youth. Today
sounds nothing like it did in 1962, so has not preserved it like it was,
they play too clean not melding not having the United Sensual Soul
Passion and Emotion as the past. So to me, a Drum Kit was the
coolest thing in the world. Bottom-Line, I needed Drums. Black
Pearls...

Drums in The Theatre. 1964.  Nine years old Bickfords Automat Time
Square Broadway Musical Dad walks me down to see The Pit
Orchestra before every show I gravitate to the drums complete with
Sound Effect Devises which fascinated me. With
maybe 10 Broadway Musicals under my belt I gain a Pomp Ass
Knowledge of the “Best” in Music NYC Show Music sets the Bar.
Drums plus the best of the best.  I get my First Snare Drum for X-
mass.  Dad says if you stick with it (pun intended) for a year I will get
you a Bass-Drum ( Blue Sparkle)  and Cymbal for B-Day and X-Mass
next. And, since it was 1964 and also on Broadway I have to mention
The Ed Sullivan Show, The Beatles, Ringo playing Black Pearl
Ludwigs, The Dave Clark Five, with a Drummer/ Singer... And of
course, Charlie Watts!!! The Beat Goes On! Drums from every angle.
So that year of Television’s inspiration turned into perspiration and I
stuck with it and how. Wow. Blood Sweat and Tears Later Further
down the road a Rock n’ Roll Heaven awaited. The chrysalis is set-
Rock Music.  Flash forward.  1971.  Old enough to know better. All cat’s
are grey in the dark. Rock n’ Roll metamorphoses into Rock. “ ...We
never got it off on that revolution stuff” - All The Young Dudes. Ballad
of Dwight Frye Sunrise Alice Cooper comes wafting, slinking,
slithering seductively scrolling up the hallow out onto Florida High
Corridor where I am walking at ears length. What is that crazy music
man!?! ... Ben Wilcox is giving a Report on Rock. We meet. Ben has
all the best Rock n’ Roll Records.

Iggy Pops up The Ramones have the same last name. We play
music in his bed room with his piano for years. Trying to write songs. I
Wish It Would Rain...We need a band. Drums and Keys to the Future.
Required Stolen Rock n’ Roll Guitar ala Mick Ronson. 1972. Billy
Bob-Nut McButtsquare enters, and with a Stolen Church Guitar and
Amp via David H. Bob-Nut and Sean Bonbon Baboon. They stash
axe and rig with me on W. Indian Head Dr. to be used in Kind by Billy
to our future advantage. Billy quickly becoming one of the best Rock
n’ Roll Guitarist I’ve ever heard. Billy volunteers as Front Man,
Lustfully. Drums, Keys and a Guitar Rig..It’s gonna get Big, Watch It
Grow! The Big Rig! Watch Out! Jumpin’ Jack Flash!
Rock and Soul Music. 1974. Now We needed a Bass Player. So In
struts a True Nature Boy with a Flair and So Coming to us offa Dusty
Rhodes and Deepening the bench was Jim Ballard an Adonis With a
Pitch Perfect Soulful Voice a Paul McCartney Hoffner Bass and a
Blonde Bowl Cut like Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones. Brian Jones
Bar B. Q. and Grill was Open for business. Rock On Gordy (gorden
solly) Rock On Rick Rock on Dusty.

Look for our Grand Opening in 1979! ...Coming to The Lucky Horse
Shoe near you. Pump It Up...

London Rock.1975. Ben and I half of the future Slut Boys attend
college in London studying Theatre and Economics. Like Mick.
London theater being the only legitimate Theater out side of NYC. We
Studied Pubs and Rock Shows more though. With England Rocking
the only legitimate pubs in the world .The Hammersmith Odeon
Theater held big shows where Ben and I saw Lou Reed’s “Rock and
Roll” album Tour show and Ian Hunter’s and Mick Ronson’s Show
performing “Once Bit and Twice Shy”. Rocky Horror Picture Show on
Kings Road was Rock and Theater. In a critique of the Play I said, “ If
you have seen David Bowie this is Old Hat”. On Kings Road I Entered
Sex Where Vivian Westwood Cat Girl and Malcomb McClarion were
standing donning and selling Bondage Ware and Safety Pinned High
Courtier sic with me not realizing really what I was seeing. There
were some clues to what was to come in London in a short year but
us “hicks” as Iggy would call The Slut Boys later on at our
Tallahassee show in 1980 were already playing High Energy 3 chord
accessible songs instead of studio band crap. Also in London I saw
Kilburn and the Highroads twice , with Ian Dury Singing and Teddy
Boys attending and Ben saw Cockney Rebel, Twinks attending, all of
whom were a foreshadowing of the eventual Punk Scene. We both
missed The Pink Fairies or Hawkwind. Even though We were
regulars at The Famous Round House and Marquee Club. The
Seminal Prototype Punk Song “City Kids”, in my humble opinion, was
Released in 1973 by The Pink Fairies, who played at The Round
House often. If you’ve never heard it look It up ands see if you agree.
Flash to 1976-1979.In the Aftermath of England and Many years of
Practicing, Ben, Billy, Jim, and I were building a Mistique around town
or in our case a Mistake. Also, We were all Trisexual!?!... Always
Trying to have sex... We had finally found a place to rehearse outside
of our parents houses, having tortured them enough. It was right
across the street from Tallahassee Civic Center, Where U-2 walked
in one night after their gig and jammed with us. We dubbed it The
O.K. Club because we boarded up the window to protect our
instruments and so I sprucing up the joint painted the plywood panel
as a window looking out over a Jamaican Bay, on it The O.K. Club
backwards as if looking out the club window. We had a refrigerator
and a simple wooden Bar, which was too tall being built by Dicky, the
lead cow of our entourage, who was six foot six. People could not
understand it was our Rehearsal Space and not a BYOB Bar. Most
Practice sessions Lasted through the Night with an assortment of
friends and Seekers of Fun and Rock n Roll. People were beginning
to know our reputation as wild drunks and drug users. And
TRISEXUAL. ...Rock n Roll Party...So with our Reputation and
Identities being Infamous we had built a “Mystique”. I worked as a
Paste-Up Artist at that time. I worked the graveyard shift and had
gravitated to a small room with four light tables and a crazy cool girl
who listened to LOUD Rock Music all night long. Her name was Patti
Milnes and I later found out she was legally deaf. As she knew our
band, one night she was singing along with “Dirty White Boy” and
pointedly sang over the light table towards me,... ‘Dirty White “SLUT
BOYS”, Dirty White “SLUT BOYS”... I immediately stood up and said,
...That’s It! That’s it! We had a band name. So, Later on in an
interview in Musician Magazine, when asked what were some of the
things that Stood Out on their first American Tour, Bono said, “ We
jumped up and Jammed Wild Thing with The Slut Boys at The O.K.
Club”. The names stuck with him. Every body loved to repeat the
name The Slut Boys. Andy Warhol did with his fey voice when I told
him our band’s name. Ooing and ahhing with a sparked interest
he repeated it to Christofer Macos and Bob Colacello with a
rare giggle. I had Warhol enjoying his evening because of Patty Milnes
Improvised Genius.

I knew the Controversial name; The Slut Boys was what we were and
would serve us well as an advertising coo. Our first gig was at The
Lucky Horse Shoe Bar. Whore Shoe. Fuck me Pumps. Yeah Yeah
Yeah... Some how some feminists found out a band named The Slut
Boys were to perform at the bar. Ben liking or trying to avert a
Politically Correct Catastrophe wanted the band name to be The
Solenoids.So that day at the bar after we had loaded in and had a
sound check we noticed 5 or 6 women with anti The Slut Boys
picketing signs. They were ready to picket a Name a woman had
authored. As I remember The Slut Boys was on the sign by the door
announcing that nights booking. And the Feminists were waiting to
engage us. At this time we came out and changed the Name to The
Solenoids at which the Feminists Sighed and put down there signs of
protest. Damn, unhappy anti- fans, now wondering what to
do for the night. That’s no fun. I was disappointed and voiced my
opinion as to the name change. We drove back over the hill to the
O.K. Club to wait and fuel up for show time. I lobbied that we were
Slut Boys and should be proud of such a Perfect band name.

Somehow we grew some balls and I won out and We Knew the
Correct name was The Slut Boys. At that we raced back over the hill
and put up The Slut Boys as our Name. The Feminist were revived
and happy and picked back up their sings and as they fell into line
they fell right into our hands. Free Publicity! IT WAS ON!!! I didn’t
related to a car part but I did connect as a Slut Boy. Thank You Patti.
With a few years of upholding our reputation and hosting and opening
for artists such as Iggy Pop, Joan Jett, The Fleshtones and more we
did Tallahassee a great favor with our high energy Suspenseful
shows. How do they do that? Riotous Rock n Roll Shows. Employing
Strippers, throwing bags of dog food on the crowd, chain sawing
guitars in two, showing up late in a limo and too many pounds lost
collectively with the crowd we ruled Tallahassee’s vacuous cultural
scene. The Slut Boys had that united sensual soul passion that I had
studied listening to Sweet Emma in 1962. We were bad asses and
we new it! Dolomite!!!"
​
Donny Crenshaw is a seminal musician who helped shape the early
underground culture in a town abandoned by new ideas.  His hobby is
chasing dragonflies in the nude.

Mr. Crenshaw’s article appears here in its original unaltered, unedited
edition in order to maintain the integrity and intent of the writing.

​CA: The birth, life and death of a postmodern social/aesthetic experiment in Tallahassee, Florida (ca. 1983-1988)
 
The most hated band in the land of all of hippy inclusions (Chapter 2)
 
I don’t know why we were so hated; we were just sitting in our apartment and suddenly the villagers approached with torches and pitchforks.  Somehow we had made ourselves the most hated band in the region.
 
In all actuality, here is where the tale of The CA Band truly begins:  the local hippy community, The Tallahassee Land Co-Op, sponsored the first officially documented public CA performance.  This was some kind of fundraiser around 1983 where the local punk rock kids of hippy parents who lived at the Co-Op were producing a benefit to save the hippy orange grove from land developers or whatever the fuck the event was.  CA simply showed up, we wrote our name on the roster and inserted ourselves between other acts.  We had a set, props, and a bunch of other shit.  At this time CA was Claudia Bucher, Bill Quinn and myself.  The hippy chick organizing this event was incensed that we injected, interleaved ourselves onto the bill.  Infuriated also were some of the other acts but we simply didn’t care.  Somehow we had already established ourselves as a performance art noise band and were not well liked in the music community.  Very early on in our history, we decided that we would do whatever we wanted to, regardless.  Love us or hate us we did it all for you.  One of the bands performing at the event (Sector 4, whose drummer became CA’s bass player) had invited us; we were going on stage nevertheless.  CA landed somewhere between Communism, Nihilism, Anarchy and an amalgamation of other focused slop: No one was going to stop us from performing.  We lived on post-modern conceptual-ism and a serious punk rock aesthetic.  While our music may have appeared to been improvisational chaos, it was heavily planed and rehearsed.  For this recital, we built a set that looked like a large alien bubble: An asymmetrical geodesic dome encased Bill Quinn in plastic wrap, sitting inside and blasting on his bass.  Claudia Bucher with props in her hands, stood in front of this structure in a Dadaist costume screaming into the mica like Diamanda Galas with the flu.  I was wailing on my fiddle standing off to the side of the stage, dressed in some kind of costume.  Most of the young punks loved us, many others in attendance didn’t “get” us, the hippies hated us and we simply didn’t care what anyone’s opinion was. This was a CA Performance.  We felt like we were suddenly moving forward but had no idea what to expect next.
 
What was it like to be?  It was like living in a tiny room below your gallery/theatre/punk rock social club.  This minute chamber had a double wooden barn door that swung outwards on both sides, not fully connecting to the floor or ceiling…  So much for environmental isolation.  This became our (Claudia and my) bedroom; it had a red-clay dirt floor.  The gist of total anarchy in our personal lives was remarkable: Home became a literal “hole in the wall” where we could live and produce counter-culture events.  This, our bedroom was also CA’s workshop where we kept out tools, workbenches and did fabrications.  Our partners (Bill Quinn and Charlton Williams) lived in the ceiling crawl space of the main building, above what became the gallery/performance space.  Soon after acquiring this location, our friend Steve Devine joined CA’s core group as science adviser shortly thereafter moving into the colossal ceiling crawl space to room with Bill and Chuck.  Over time, other artists became involved in limited capacities.  The ceiling living area had had two industrial fans on either side of the edifice; these devices provided some idea of cooling to the building below by moving air through the structure.  The issue here was to be in the crawl space when the fans were operating was like living in a very noisy tornado; air-conditioning be dammed.  This was the CA Chapel, an industrial building that before we arrived had been an abandoned black revivalist church titled “Calvary Chapel”.  As we were moving our collective gear from our original venue into this, Paul Suhor from the punk band Sector 4 suddenly appeared on the roof of the Chapel.  He was painting out the letters “lvary” so the sign on the side of the building now read, “CA Chapel”.  We, CA were very much into the Cult of the Personality so this was perfect.  But, lets first back up…
 
What was it like to be…? It was like living in an open warehouse loft, 15’ above the polished concrete floor of your gallery/theater/punk rock social club complete with a skate ramp.  Our first building, the CA Warehouse had no actual heat or air conditioning.  This was a huge open and gutted structure devoid of comfort with no electricity.  Our friend “Wild Bill” created electricity for the building and well, lets first back up again and return to The Most Hated Band in the Land of all of Hippy Inclusionism.
 
Very Early recordings
 
I had access to the electronic music studio at Florida State University (FSU).  Claudia, Bill and I would arrive in the middle of the night to create sound scrapes recorded on a four track TEAC ¼” reel to reel tape recorder which was in all honestly I have to admit, truly horrible music but we didn’t believe this at the time.  We created a number of recordings that have vanished over the years; some of these sessions do survive on cassette tape.  The studio had a monophonic Moog 900 series studio synthesizer, an (original) Echo Plex tape delay that produced more tape hiss than sound repetition, a top of the line (in 1983) Yamaha electronic keyboard and other recording equipment.  We brought in guitars and junk to bang on.  I became very good at tape looping.  Claudia always had some surrealist text that she recited as we played off of it; this was all about experimenting and deconstructing the idea of what constitutes a “song”.  During these sessions and having done a number of public performances, CA discussed forming a more traditional band and it was decided that we needed a drummer.  Claudia was the voice, samples, noise, Bill was on bass and making noise, I was doing the loops, playing fiddle and guitar, but we needed a drummer.  This couldn’t be simply any drummer and Bill had a friend: Charlton Williams.  I called him “Chuck”.
 
Charlton wasn’t a drummer in the Jean Krupa sense.  He had a better sense of rhythm than any one of us even though at same time he seemed to have none.  He knew any time signature; any subdivision of a beat but seemed to refuse to keep a steady one.  While we were rehearsing, writing a song I remember arguing with him: His point was, “Why does this need to be in a 4/4 time signature?” My response was always, “How do we know where are in the track?”  Perhaps, CA didn’t need a timekeeper; conceivably, he was right.  A huge man, tall and obese with a commanding presence even though he was so gentle and kind, he wouldn’t kill a butterfly.  We needed a drummer and no one had a kit.
           
The Water Cistern
 
Following the Land Co-Op gig that we invaded, Claudia Bucher, Charlton Williams, Bill Quinn and I met to discuss becoming a more serious band/collective while sitting mid day on top of what appeared to be a bazaar architectural abomination.  Claudia and I met Chuck for the first time meeting at a buried, partially exposed forgotten city structure with Bill.  After a long conversation, Chuck was “in”.  We were convening on the upper structure of an underground water cistern burred in the middle of what appeared to be an empty grassy lot, surrounded by governmental buildings in the heart of Florida State’s Capitol. I’m not sure who of us knew about this location but it was suggested that we meet/interview Chuck and rehearse in this structure.  Suddenly, the most hated band in the region was a quartet and we had a rehearsal space: “So… You say that the hatch is not locked, we can climb in that thing and get down there?” 

The four of us had no shame; we met at the structure in the middle of the afternoon on a workday.  Opening the hatch, a ladder descended into a dark abyss. One could not see into the structure more than a few feet seeming as if we were descending into a black hole; light from the afternoon sky was simply absorbed by an abandonment of illumination into nothingness.

I was the first to descend to the bottom of the structure and shouted to the others, “HEY GUYS, THIS THING (the ladder) IS ONLY CONNECTED AT TWO (not four) POINTS!” As you climbed into the blackness, the rusty ladder swung, torqued back and forth, left and right with each step descending into the abyss.  The ladder had also lost a few runs due to rust and decay so when you missed a step and almost lost grip, this made the downward climb even more interesting.  While climbing down the ladder, one couldn’t actually see the “floor” until one was standing on the lowest part of the structure; eyes being so dilated that they filled your face.  The bottom of the edifice was arched upward in a convex direction so that the center curved upwards, remaining dry.  The lower part of the structure around the edges captured a troth of rusty water, about a foot deep.  The interior walls were covered in oxidation, corroded, it was beautiful, this became our monastery.  We couldn’t see the exterior of the structure because well… The cistern was 300’ underground.        

By our second rehearsal, we had brought some rope that I borrowed from work to lower in whatever instrumentation we were hammering on, we hadn’t considered electrical power for lighting or guitar amplification for our first meeting; this one was simply a jam session, an exploratory expedition plus, we hadn’t yet realize how easily we could steal needed power and utilities from the State Government.  Beginning now, CA turned out to be a bunch of little thieving bitches with no conscious; what we needed to take in order to make something happen, we simply took it from whatever source was convenient.  We never stole from an individual but the State, corporations, businesses, these were free gain and the liberation of our needed materials was executed with no sense of guilt.  Entitled? We sure were.

One thing that people never knew about us is how fearless we were.  We fully understood the consequences of getting caught but the stress of this drove us.  If we wanted something, needed something that we didn’t have in order to make an event happen, we found a way to obtain what we required.  This was like what it was to be: A post-modern artist; this was post-punk industrialization.  What was it like to be CA? There was a legitimization, wanting to be respectable citizens, a legal non-profit collective that applied for state grants, city licensing and at the same time saying, “Fuck you…” to governmental authority and sociological etiquette because our means did justify the end.   Lets again return to the most hated band…

The cistern structure was hidden by an empty grass covered lot surrounded by unsecured government buildings.  For the remainder of our time there and after borrowing some high-density extension chords form my work place, we simply walked into a government building, plugged our “stingers” into an outlet and ran these cables a few hundred feet across the grassy noel.  Suddenly we had electricity for the cistern.  We had an odd, inflated, baroque, perhaps naive sense that we would never get caught in these nefarious actions because we were doing something aesthetic, for a greater cause, for art.  I know as messy as this sounds, “for art”, we believed in this ideal and simply put, we were lucky.  I don’t truly feel this was a sense of entitlement, we clearly understood the consequences but it was more an idea of knowing what we needed to risk in order to make something happen, we were willing to take that chance.  In reality everything we did, we did it for us. 

Our first rehearsal at the cistern after hazarding the ladder and arriving at the nethermost of this thing, we were in shock; once eyes adjusted to the darkness, it was like being inside of a forbidden hermitage.  We explored the furthest recesses of the cistern, slowly walking in concentric circles.  Someone started chanting, we all began making verbal noise.  In this moment, Joan La Barbra would have had an organism.  Someone instigated banging on something percussive.  We had one of those shitty 8 bit portable cassette recorders and this became our first official “band” recording: Just press play and see what happens.  Now, lets rehearse that same thing over and over again.  With no sense of the passing of day into night while caught up in the process, we were in the structure for at least 8 hours.  Suddenly we were a quartet, the most hated band in Tallahassee, Fl. not because we were a bunch of thieving jerks but were unknowingly in the wrong geographic location at the wrong point of time. 

Before CA (with later cistern rehearsals and performances) pirated power from the State Capitol, we were working in the dark with the only illumination coming form the porthole at the opening of the structure and a few candles paced throughout the apex at the bottom.  This truly was our underground monastery.  Little did we think that some jackass could have simply closed the hatch and locked us in, forever.  We would have been eternally gone, forgotten, the most hated band in the region never to make a noise again.  Four unidentified mummies discovered when the cistern was years later dug up and replaced with another useless government building. These were the unknown risks we took. 

By the next second cistern rehearsal, we realized that there was always an open window in the state administrative structures adjacent to our meadow covered rehearsal studio.  We simply hoisted ourselves through an administration window, located electrical outlets in an empty office or hallway and with a few hundred feet of extension cords, now had power for lighting and amplification.  Being careful to avoid the water in the lower crevasse where a troth of ageless moisture remained, we lowered in a small guitar amplifier and hung a few lights.  We somewhat secured the ladder and started having afternoon concerts with an invited audience.  We now seriously established ourselves in the art/music community.  The only complaints at this time were not that, “We were the most hated band in Tallahassee” but, “That we had no chairs for our concert attenders.”        I remember Paul Rutkovsky (a friend of CA and art professor at FSU) commenting to me after one of our afternoon cistern performances that we should, “Better secure the ladder…” 

One of the precepts of conceptual-ism is to put your audience in the conscious mind-set of the event.  This event or to simplify it, “art” does not have to have bodily substance or physicality but there has to be a psychological effect on the attendees; those in witness to a said event.  A lasting idea, readdressed by those in witness long after they have exited the event.  Having spectators transverse the process of descending a rather dangerous ladder and joining CA in the experience of performance, it worked.  

After abandoning the site for some time we went back with the idea of creating another public concert at the cistern.  Arriving at the structure, we found the hatch now bolted shut as were the windows in the surrounding government buildings, no longer allowing entree to our first rehearsal studio or access to appropriated lights and power.  A few years later some Land Co-Op hippy approached me in an aggressively confrontational manor.  I was greeting the band 7 Seconds as they arrived the CA Chapel for their show that same evening. The hippy rushed me screaming, “CA has screwed up access to the water cistern for everyone!”, and wanted to know why we, in his mind, we had purposely had done this: “screwed it up for everyone…” Well too fucking bad, that was our performance workshop, not anyone else’s. However, there were many other post modernists who explored the cistern well after we left our monastery, before the hatch to CA’s stupa was forever locked.  One can’t really blame us for the reservoir being anchored shut; this was most likely a very good decision on the city’s part. CA had already long known the end of the bliss of having access to this transformational and very dangerous underground crypt.  I do have to say that it was a bit disappointing when we went back to the structure the last time in all good intention and left with a “No Access” stamp across our foreheads.
 
Noise
 
The CA Band…Yes, I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: We never used “The” or “Band”, but for some idiotic reason our punk/post punk community did.  To us, we were CA which according to Claudia was the name of the snake in the Jungle Book, or some Eastern term for “Life” or according to others half of the word “Shit” but never an abbreviation of the name California.  CA began as music collective with the idea of pushing  “Pop Music” to an absurdist level and presented this within a theatrical context. 

We had all of the traditional rock and roll elements:  A singer, bass, guitar and drums.  Being informed by John Cage, New York No Wave, Harry Parch, non-western and industrial music, post-modernism and base deconstruction, our percussion battery did have a snare drum, roto toms but also: a banjo became a side drum, two racks of tuned vehicle break drums and other found objects (usually metallic) were also percussive elements.  These and a detuned/prepared bass were the rhythm section.  A good deal of our music-incorporated samples, tape loops and prepared electronics.  The guitar was discordant and the singer was…how do you describe noise so beautiful that it is impossible to understand?  Some of our music that people would sit through were de-constructions of current pop songs: CA’s redefining of Madonna hits such as Like a Virgin became “hits” for us.  People would actually request these soundscapes, from the most hated band in the land of…

Chariton Williams (drums/percussion) and Bill Quinn (bass, percussion, film and visual effects) were truly two of the worst musicians I have ever worked with.  Claudia was our front person so whatever she did was pretty goddamn interesting.  For a time Paul Suhor, a physically tiny guy with a remarkably gigantic intelligence who could play any instrument with a determined passion became CA’s bassist, shifting Bill to percussion.  Then there was me, a classically trained music conservatory dropout who was at this time was studying theater/film production and playing fiddle in punk bands just prior to the birth of CA.
 
What it was like to be… Bill was the greatest bass player I ever worked with.  He had absolutely no concept of meter, rhythm or tonality.  His is bass was never tuned to any logical eastern or western intonation.  Regardless of how much we rehearsed, I was never really sure what in key we were playing in (according to Bill’s bass tuning) and this worked for us.  He put paper clips on his strings, intertwined drumsticks between strings and either thumped in a “funky way” or only played harmonics.  At times he would break a string and not replace it. Regardless of how much we rehearsed, I never really knew what to expect from his performance, it was never exactly the same twice. He was a brilliant bass player. 

I will never forget a night where Claudia and I were dozing off to sleep, listening to Bill improvising.  This was pre-CA; he and I were roommates at the time, our bedrooms sharing an adjacent wall.  It was then that I knew listening to his non-tied, funky noise based discordance that I needed somehow to play with this guy.  The three of us became CA, which lead to our first documented performance at the Tallahassee Land Co-op. “The CA Band” began as a three piece and shortly Chuck became our percussionist.  As mentioned when Paul became our bassist, Bill shifted to join Chuck on “found” percussion. Claudia was the voice and I provided the substance.  In performance we went for a full multi-media onslaught: Bill edited together and projected found 16mm educational films from the 1950’s that were projected onto us, there was always some type of “set” or environment on stage.  Paul and Claudia were in the front, the remaining three of us in the background.  I always seemed to have equipment milt-downs during performances and in raging frustration smashed my equipment “Keith Moon style” on stage as the others continued performing.  The destruction of my equipment became part of our show as Bill and Chuck would step over to help me destroy my gear.  At the first CA Festival, Paul walked upstage and began whacking my amp with his bass as the beat went on. The five of us drove this car like a drunken guy racing to pick up a prostitute.  This was a CA performance, the most hated band in the land of all of hippy inclusion-ism.

The Swans first record had just hit the streets of Tallahassee and based on a review, I bought it.   Their song, “Raping A Slave” became an anthem to us. We, CA, were listening to a lot of at the time was considered post modern experimentation: Stockhausen, Cage, Bird, Crumb, The Pop Group, The Birthday Party, The Raincoats,  Galas, Partch as well as a lot of non western music.  For us, “anything went” because anything that could make a sound became a musical instrument and any sound was a beautiful angelic song. Suddenly, we were the most hated band in the region but people who did not even like us personally showed for our events.  They brought torches and pitchforks but like any beautiful fiend, Frankenstein’s Monster, The Wolman and so on, we could aesthetically kick anyone’s ass.  I loved it when we would finish some noisy assault and the audience would just glare at us, not responding.  When this happened, we looked at each other and smiled.  We had succeeded at, something.  The more people hated us, “The CA Band”, the more we had accomplished because as mentioned, we simply didn’t care what the audience thought.  We always did this first for us and if someone “got it” (there were many who did), well… aren’t you lucky.
 
George Barker
CA Laboratories International
Vice president, Music Director, Event Programmer
1984-1988
 
Next:
 
CA: The birth, life and death of a postmodern social/aesthetic experiment in Tallahassee, Florida (ca. 1983-1988)
 
Birth: CA Labs International/CA Productions  (Chapter 3)

 September 5, 1986

I went to the Developmental Research School, aka Florida High School from 7th
through 12th grade. Florida High was technically part of Florida State University
(FSU), not the regular public school system. There was a waiting list to get in. The
school sat on the university campus in the shadow of FSU’s massive football stadium.
There was a designated smoking area for kids on the edge of the school dubbed Freak
Corner. Our school mascot was the Demon.
 
In 1983, my younger brother Jimmy and I were Junior Seminoles. That meant we got a cheap ticket and McDonald's Happy Meal for each of the FSU home football games. We also got away from our parents for a few hours, more often to make mischief than to actually go watch football.
 
One day in the summer of 1983 my friend James, who lived nearby and was a fellow Junior Seminole, had returned from his vacation in Southern California, so Jimmy and I paid him a visit. I was thirteen years old. James brought a cassette into the back yard and slapped it into his boom box. “Check out this music,” he said. I asked what it was and he answered “Dead Kennedys”. How could I not want to hear that?

[HIT: PLAY]

The pace and intensity of what came next was unlike anything I’d ever heard. But the
vocals and lyrics – about Nazis, hyperactive kids and vaguely familiar names like Jesse
Helms – were every bit as compelling as the music. I wanted to hear more Dead
Kennedys and find out more about this music called hardcore punk.

Before long, I’d scraped together enough money to buy albums by Dead Kennedys,
Sex Pistols, Circle Jerks and Black Flag. I also picked up the We Can’t Help It If
We’re From Florida compilation (from Vinyl Fever, of course) after hearing about it
from Lee, who also happened to be a fellow Demon and Junior Seminole. Like many,
the first time I ever heard bona fide Tallahassee hardcore punk was listening to the
mighty Sector 4 and Hated Youth on that record.

Being a student at Florida High, I was able to attend one of my earliest and most
memorable punk gigs by skipping class and walking a few hundred yards to see Sector
4 play on a weekday afternoon at the FSU Union Green.

[HIT: REWIND]

I had been drawn to the drums from a young age and was a drummer in the school
band starting in 6th grade. But once I heard punk rock, I became determined to learn
how to play a drum kit. My mom hooked me up with private lessons from a highly
credentialed local drum teacher with a jazz background. The lessons were at his house
in Indian Head Acres. I don’t remember his name.

At my first lesson, he encouraged me to transcribe the drum part to any song I liked and
bring it back for him to critique. I went home and transcribed Black Coffee off Black
Flag’s new album Slip It In, then showed up for our next lesson with the record and it’s
iconic, highly suggestive album cover.

It was about then I noticed prominent religious wall hangings and displays in this dude’s
house. Things became a little uncomfortable as he examined the record and placed it
on his turntable. “It’s the SECOND song!” I insisted, not wanting to subject him to the
title track.

[HIT: FAST FORWARD]

September 5, 1986. It’s my senior year and I’m about to perform at CA Chapel, the
premier venue and nerve center for Tallahassee punk at the time, as the drummer for
Gothic Playground. One of my band-mates is Damien, who had also been both a
Demon and a Junior Seminole. He was the one who introduced me to
Maximum RockNRoll, a milestone moment for any punk back then.

The night of September 5, 1986, though, was momentous because Gothic
Playground was warming up for Maggot Sandwich and Stevie Stiletto and the
Switchblades, two of my favorite bands who also happened to hail from North Florida.
The wild show that night inspired Maggot Sandwich lead singer Vik Kaos to write the
title track for the band’s debut LP, Get Off The Stage, released in 1987. You should
check it out.

[HIT: FAST FORWARD]

A few years after I graduated from Florida High I heard that Freak Corner had been
abolished, and the school nickname changed from Demons to Baby Seminoles. From
what I was told, a devoutly religious principal had taken over the school and couldn’t
handle having a Demon represent the school as its mascot.

[HIT: FAST FORWARD]

During the Reagan years it was a big deal when well known touring
bands like Bad Brains or Black Flag played our town. But looking back now, what
stands out most from those years were the gigs like September 5, 1986. The touring
bands played all over, but where else could you see North Florida punk legends like
Stevie Stiletto, Maggot Sandwich, Sector 4 and Tallahassee’s godfathers of punk
rock, the Slut Boys?

As I sit here in Southern California 35 years later, Freak Corner, the Slut Boys and
CA Chapel are just echoes from the past but the impact of growing up punk rock in
Tallahassee, Florida is still reverberating loudly for me.

[HIT: PAUSE]

Jon Bleyer
Trouble Dolls (1985-86)
Gothic Playground (1986-87)
Panhandle Punk Productions (est. 2018)

What was it like to be CA? (introduction)

Before this blog/book appeared, I had done internet and other research
searches for CA Labs, International (our legal non-profit title) Tallahassee, Florida
ca. 1983-1988 and may have missed something but came up with absolutely no
information on the subject, which is both exciting and a bit depressing. This tells me
that anything you may find in this blog, book or however you come across the
following ramblings could be very well completely confused and inconsequential
bullshit; in other words lies… Lies that have been vetted by the editors. Where
are the references, citations to support any of the allegations published in this
compendium? Is this assemblage simply musings of the sick, wanting to formulate
writings in order to subdue and seduce the reading populous? In this way and
regardless of what information pertaining to CA I was hoping to come across, I was
eager to find a number of badly written, mis-informed posts from people who barley
if at all knew us. I was wanting to find comments from people who rarely if ever
attended our events yet claim to have been present for the social chaos we provided;
to find a of CA history from people who did not know us in any way yet claimed to
be insiders. My investigation showed that there was nothing; I found naught/zero
information on the organization as if, we had never existed. This seemed like a clear
negation of a community’s collective history yet, why would anyone write about an
incomprehensible social/aesthetic experiment that occurred in geographic
obscurity way too many years ago? In the course of constructing this blog/book, I
was hoping to find someone else’s memory long forgotten memory regarding CA
and hopefully, a conflicting reconstruction of what I report in my articles.
Of the core group there were originally four of us: one dead, one dis-owned,
one who now couldn’t care less and one who cares too much. Decades after the
organization finally passed away, I kept getting asked by a few who did care, “What
was it like to be CA?”

When invited to put together this blog/book with Leslie Baker, I was
flattered but actually don’t know how interesting any of this will be to anyone but
‘us’. CA (the band) and CA Labs International were both postmodern experiments
in Communism and Idealism; we believed that we could come together as a
collective, creating an experimental workshop that the local aesthetic community
would respond to in a supportive manor. To an extent, we did achieve this and at
the same time, we failed horribly simply because our community failed us and in
addition, one might say that the core members of CA failed each other. I know that
this statement contradicts itself however; the contents of this writing will clarify any
illogicality.

In the putting together of this charge, Leslie Baker and myself have contacted
many of the key players of the Tallahassee Fl. alternative culture scene from the
early to later-1980’s, in order to get their perspective not only on
punk/post modern culture movements in this isolated southern American town but
most specifically, how CA Labs International fit into this puzzle. Contributors to
this blog/book include Mark Henson, an important journalist who aggressively
supported Tallahassee’s alternative culture and Donny Crenshaw, the original
drummer for The Slut Boys, an early Tallahassee punk-neo garage band who
inspired and supported our fledgling alternative community. Donny was also
responsible for bringing major alternative acts such as Iggy Pop, The Psychedelic
Furs, Joan Jett and others to perform at a small club in a tiny southern town where
these young gods would have otherwise, never considered appearing. These shows
happened at Tommy’s Club, the same venue that CA Laboratories International as
a production organization had its birth. Other contributing writers are artist
Paul Suhor, the drummer for a seminal Florida punk band Sector 4. Paul was also
the first bass player for CA (the band). In addition, Gary Strickland from Hated
Youth and record/website producer of Panhandle Punk Jon Bleyer, a remarkable
curator of the North Florida punk history (also drummer for Gothic Playground),
provide in-depth insight to underground/alternative culture of this time.
Leslie Baker who was just a “wee punk rock lass” during this time and I provide our
insight to CA’s history and our personal experience during this controlled chaotic
period. As we move forward, others will provide their account and observations
regarding the development of postmodern aesthetics and Tallahassee counter-
culture during this period. These afore mentioned contributors will help reconstruct
my forgotten memories and perhaps as mentioned, hopefully contradict what I
claim to be true.

There will be a few who have their own story, perception, and insight into
not only north Florida punk but also more specifically, CA that were asked to
provide their story and couldn’t be bothered to or on the other hand, others not
asked for whatever reason to contribute to this blog/book. We apologize if we
missed your account, well, too bad for you and better luck next time. As time goes
marching on, perhaps even you might have a say in what we publish. If you feel like
you have something to report regarding this period of time, place and the culture
contained, let us know.

CA: The birth, life and death of a post modern social/aesthetic experiment in
Tallahassee, Florida (ca. 1983-1988)

What was it like to be CA? (chapter 1)

What was it like? These ideas are so deeply imbedded in my lower brain
stem even though it was a-zillion years and the width of the county between then
and now it still feels like, life. What was it like to be CA? We began as a free form
improvisational noise/industrial band, somewhere around 1983. At this time,
(1983-1986; the dates of the core group), we were the only collective in this
geographic area (South East U.S.) working in the genre of aesthetic dissonance.
Living in some horrible southern American town which had not only two
Universities but is also the state capitol, one might think that the inserted
inteligencia of these institutions of higher learning combined with a few museums,
an “Industrial Art Park” where artists and manufacturing corporations shared the
same zip code, and with the only major civic center in the region… That this might
have sparked a cacophony of cultural deviation. Yes, one would have thought so…
This was Tallahassee Florida, not Oakland, San Francisco, New York, Atlanta, Berlin,
London or, wherever else progressively artistic thinking flourished. At the time, we
didn’t know that like being stranded on a dessert island after the tour ship sinks,
how isolated we were. We felt that we were creating something new, fresh,
inventive. Coming together with compassionate aesthetic aggression we had each
other, at least in the beginning. CA was the only collective, group, ensemble, band,
production organization doing what we did in this region of the country at this time,
creating something unique if not freakish for the community we were wanting to
engage.

There was a void in this municipality and we set out to fill in that emptiness.
We looked to other collectives who had in the past or were at this time were doing
something similar, creating postmodern non-sense as a community while providing
a canvas for aesthetic experimentation and deviation.

We simply wanted to do the same yet something different, to create an
environment for creation and research/investigation that did not exist in this
region. We felt like we were creating simply for us (yes, we were a bit selfish) but
more importantly for our community because nothing like CA had materialized
before “us” in this shit-hole town. At the same time, we believed our community
would rise up in a positive response to support us; perhaps this hope was a bit
delusional.

Connecting like a jigsaw puzzle, the members of CA were individually
imbedded in separate intellectual communities that we brought into our collective
process. These varying backgrounds and disciplines allowed each member to have
an equal and cooperative voice regarding operations and community. We learned
early on in the organization to “agree to disagree”; how to make a disparagement
work for the benefit of the organization and our community.

But first was the band, CA…The CA Band. A term we never used and as a
matter of fact, hated. It pissed us the fuck off when people called us,
“The CA Band”. Perhaps this simply helped some idoit separate the idea of the
music ensemble from the production group but, these people, we, CA were always
one in the same. The most hated “rock band” in Tallahassee was simply CA, and we
on a larger spectrum and later including an expanded core group were
CA Labs International. We saw no difference between the two.

NEXT:

CA: The birth, life and death of a postmodern social/aesthetic experiment in
Tallahassee, Florida (ca. 1983-1988)

What was it like to be CA? (Chapter 2)
The most hated “rock band” in the hippy land of inclusionism