SOME OF MY FAVORITE SLEEVE ART OF ALL TIME -- A PERFECTLY GRIM REFLECTION OF THE MUSIC THEREIN.

PIC(S) INFO: Spotlight on the BLACK ARMY JACKET/NOOTHGRUSH split vinyl 7 inch, released jointly under Reservoir Records as RSVR-019 and Monkeybite as Monkeybite 01 in 1997. From the private collection of Yasuhiro Yoshitome (@yasuhiro_1623).

Part 1 of 2 -- Source: www.picuki.com/media/3150367847729726683.

Dystopia, Assück, and Grief interview scans from MonkeyBite magazine issue 2

Two Boys in Texas

two boys in the bed of a dented chevy off a dirt road to nowhere

– somewhere in texas –

first touch, like a fawn stepping into the dappled sun of springtime

shuddering

in the golden light of pleasure unborn

– of pleasure promised –

kisses stolen, flavored by heat and youth

the peculiar taste of clove cigarettes tingle and spark

shivering in the warm of near-evening, pulling each other as close as

clothes and skin allowed, watching nyx pull her quilt and darken the sky

– to a blue-black monkeybite –

two boys wondering at the spark and tingle that leapt like heat lightning

from fingers, to lips, to places that never saw the light

-- S. E. De Haven

New Music: Monkeybite - GLOW

New Music: Monkeybite – GLOW

GLOW explodes into a gigantic widescreen tune after a delicate acoustic beginning, then dipping down into bass-driven sections that showcase soloist Nick Marino’s honest lyrics. The refrains are pierced by a soaring guitar lead until snare rolls mark the falsetto-laden bridge, which is followed by an acoustic guitar and Marino tenderly crooning the song’s last words. Monkeybite are the real deal,…

View On WordPress

EP RELEASE FT. HILLARY

do you have any good suffixs for sun and monkey?

before I start;

Sunstrike is the best name for Sun- and the fact she was under-used in canon upsets me

that being said

Sun -

Suncloud

Sunfrost

Sunrunner

Sunpetal

Sunblossom / Sunbloom

Sunstalker

Sunnettle

Sunsong

Sunspot / Sunspots

/

Monkey -

Monkeypounce

Monkeytail

Monkeystep

Monkeychaser

Monkeyclaws

Monkeyfang / Monkeybite

Monkeyhop

Monkeybelly

Monkeyscratch

Monkeyshine

/

hopefully these help!

"Amazingly, here is the glorious (long-delayed) follow-up to Fred Lane’s 1988 Shimmy Disc LP, Car Radio Jerome. In the wake of that surreal masterpiece, Shimmy announced an LP called Icepick to the Moon, but it took 31 years to wrestle this slab of bacon to the mat. And you’ll be glad we did.

Icepick takes up where Jerome left off. As inhabited by visual artist, Tim Reed, “Fred Lane” (I’ll drop the quote marks after this) is a lounge crooner with smoothly classic vocal chops and a taste for lyrics shaped by Alfred Jarry’s proto-Dada writings. Fred Lane is a creature of the ‘Pataphysical South, inhabiting the same pocket universe as Bruce Hampton and Eugene Chadbourne. And we guarantee his music is as deeply fried as anything you’ve ever heard. Or eaten.

The roots of Lane have been explored in Skizz Cyzyk’s great documentary, Icepick to the Moon (to which this is not a soundtrack LP), and are traceable back as far as high school in the late ’60s, where Lane and the late guitarist Davey Williams had a weird-o cover band. A couple years later, they both ended up in the Tuscaloosa Alabama student/hippie ghetto (near the University), where some older artists — Craig Nutt (aka “Ron ‘Pate”) and a few odd others — had formed an art collective, Raudelunas, to do all the whacked out stuff interesting people like to do. This included art, free music, film and so on, all incorporating a decidedly Dada/Surrealist perspective. This was the beginning of a long Alabama Surrealist tradition that includes LaDonna Smith, Anne LeBaron,Wally Shoup and many others.

Anyway, at some point, Reed brought his Fred Lane persona to the party — an accretion of totally insane lyrics and performance tropes, set to what almost sounds like swinging cocktail music until you start noticing the bizarre detailing and avant-garde highlighting. Coming at the same early ’70s moment that lounge retro was functionally hip (Manhattan Transfer, Asleep at the Wheel, Capt. Matchbox, etc.) the results were a complete mindfuck.

The rest of the story you should know. Several albums were generated by the Raudelunas cartel on their own Say Day-Bew label, and much related madness was done on Davey Williams’ and LaDonna Smith’s label, Trans Museq. But this music was mostly a regional and sub-sub-underground secret until Shimmy Disc issued Car Radio Jerome in ’88, then followed that up with a reissue of its predecessor From the One That Cut You) in ’89. Those records blew a lot of minds on a variety of levels. After that Lane more or less disappeared back into the art world, where he applied the same brakeless aesthetic to different forms. Whirlygigs, anyone?

Icepick was either a long time in gestation or it wasn’t. The music, penned by Reed with Roger Hagerty (aka Dick Foote), played by a band with Williams (aka Cyd Cherise) on guitar, is unbelievably fine. Sadly, this was Williams’ last recording session, but the instrumental inventions are a wonderful extension of Jerome (which was notably more sophisticated, sonically, than earlier recordings). And the lyrics just get wilder the more you listen. Still, it’s hard to fathom there hasn’t been a new Fred Lane album in 31 years! I mean, Reagan was president then, and I had a full head of hair!

Regardless, we’re now well into a new century and Lane’s back to finish the job he was born to do! America, prepare to meet Fred Lane. One more time." -Byron Coley, 2019 (c/o Feeding Tube Records)

THE AURAL EQUIVALENT OF FRENETIC BRAIN REARRANGEMENT IN 1997.

PIC(S) INFO: Part 2 of 2 -- Spotlight on the BLACK ARMY JACKET/NOOTHGRUSH split vinyl 7 inch inlay illustrations, released jointly under the Reservoir and Monkeybite labels in 1997. From the private collection of Yasuhiro Yoshitome (@yasuhiro_1623).

Source: www.picuki.com/media/3150367847729726683.

Easily one of the best photos I’ve ever taken. Thank you @lidiagiaquinto and @ibusandra for letting me play #photographer during your stay. #love #monkeybite #kisses #kiss #pride #vacation #beautiful #family #happiness #kitchenwitch (at Fairview, California)

BOYS

#ubud #monkeybite #monkeyforest Adding my story to the list. Exciting times in the Monkey Forest, and almost as exciting (though in a different sense) in a local hospital. Great thanks to my friend who made me go get vaccinated and to our local acquaitance, who basically babysitted me through all the steps. Got two shots and 'looking forward' for another two back at home. To top it, I was in my 'Monkey Forest' t-shirt, like a true fan that I am. Still a fan, and still think monkeys are amazing, even though their bite is worse than their bark.

1 December 2019: Icepick to the Moon, Fred Lane and His Disheveled Monkeybiters. (Feeding Tube, 2019)

If you don’t know Fred Lane, this will take some explaining. Like most people outside Tuscaloosa, Alabama, I found out about Fred Lane when avant NYC label Shimmy-Disc reissued his two mid-’80s albums a few years after their original self-release by Lane: From the One That Cut You and Car Radio Jerome. I’d seen these titles in Shimmy catalogs and wondered what on earth they were like; my beloved shop Record Swap in Champaign, Illinois, got in a shipment of Shimmy-Disc remainders that included a copy of From the One That Cut You. I couldn’t believe my luck. The front and back of the cover seemed to reveal a fully-formed world of characters, a bizarre mythology presented in a way as to be nearly inscrutable. Lane himself was presented as a deranged crooner—the liner notes credit him with “stripmine crooning”—and he’s accompanied by an array of no less than 20 backing-band members, apparently part of something called Ron ‘Pate’s Debonairs, with names like Abdul Ben Camel, Shep Estrus, Motor Hobson, and so on. The back cover shows about two dozen tiny album covers, most credited to Fred Lane, but many to Ron ‘Pate and other members of the Debonairs and with titles like Get Outta My Gal, Donkey Bugs, and Them Two’s Sisters—is this back catalog real, it made you wonder? If so, who are these people? The front of From the One That Cut You features an ominous, barely literate ransom note signed by Fuear (it leads off with ”I hope the paine is gone/This is the one that cut you?”); he’s got his own albums in the collection shown on the back. This madness continues on follow-up album Car Radio Jerome, its cover carrying on the design continuity; I never found a vinyl original of that and had to make due many years later with a CD reissue. You could enjoy Fred Lane just by looking at these album covers, but playing From the One That Cut You is a whole other matter entirely: that 20-person band is a hell of a swing outfit, if a very loose, drunken one, a horn section blaring while Lane croons warped lyrics to songs like “I Talk to My Haircut.” There are surf instrumentals, there are country-tinged numbers. This is obviously someone’s big inside joke. I enjoyed the anonymity of it all; it is a treasure of my pre-Internet life, where information and explanations were not a click away. You couldn’t find anything about Fred Lane: who he was, if that was his real name, or what the concept behind his whole cosmology was about. Somewhere in the 21st century, 20 years after buying From the One That Cut You, I dug up something online about a man named T.R. Reid. He was a folk artist from Tuscaloosa. He had been Fred Lane.

Lane and his albums became a minor cult for an odd assortment of record collectors. Others figured out that this T.R. Reid was Fred Lane, and a few years ago a crowd-sourcing effort was made to finance a documentary about the Fred Lane story, called Icepick to the Moon. I didn’t donate—I am halfway surprised I didn’t—but I watched the updates for several years, eager for the time when I could see this film and hear the back story. Slowly it crept across the country with screenings at minor film festivals. It was announced that Fred Lane and the band would perform live for the first time in over 35 years, in Birmingham, Alabama. I entertained the idea of flying down there to see it. Finally, a screening of Icepick to the Moon was announced in Chicago: not at a film festival, but a screening at local music venue The Empty Bottle. Then the pandemic hit and the screening was cancelled. But then DVDs were made available from the filmmakers and I got one. 

Lane and all the others had been creative outsiders in Tuscaloosa, most studying at the University of Alabama, a hotbed of football coached by the famous Bear Bryant and greek student life. Their rough assemblage of musicians and visual artists, which they dubbed Raudelanas, found ways to do things like officially infiltrate the homecoming parade—you can imagine how angry locals got, in this town where conformity ruled. Raudelanas needed a frontman and somewhere they found Tim Reid, who had a knack for going into character and seemed fearless on stage. Raudelanas made a few albums, and Shimmy-Disc later dug up the ones credited directly to Lane, leading to me getting a copy of From the One That Cut You.

After Car Radio Jerome, plans were made to do a third Lane album called Icepick to the Moon. They never got around to it, but in the wake of the documentary it finally got recorded, over 30 years later. It’s got five musicians on it, down from the 20 on Cut You; from what I can discern, only one aside from Lane hails from the original Raudelanas collective, but with all the bonkers pseudonyms it’s hard to tell. I was quite excited to hear this. Truth is, it’s a little too polished compared to the dangerous-sounding mayhem on the earlier records. Until I got accustomed to the modern, refined Lane sound, I cringed a bit because it almost reminded me of parodic lounge singer Richard Cheese, a guy whose shtick gets old before he’s done with one song. It grew on me a bit, but it’s a strange epilogue to Lane’s musical career. I’m not fond of the band name appended here (Disheveled Monkeybiters), but I do like that the art design continues where the previous Lane records left off. Reid still makes his whirlygigs and, from what I saw in the documentary, is still quite an eccentric character. It’s easy to see how he slipped so naturally into the guise of Fred Lane. And I should add, while this new album shares a title with the documentary, it is not a soundtrack to the film.  

Way up at the top we have the front and back covers of Icepick to the Moon. I’ve also included a photo of From the One That Cut You, originally released in 1983.

Below are both sides of the new album’s inner sleeve and both labels.

facts about monkeys