FRESH FLESH With The Flesh Eaters

FRESH FLESH With The Flesh Eaters

Gregg Turner

by

There’s a scene in Roger Corman’s Bucket Of Blood where the poet Maxwell, beard-and-shaded, commands the attention of hipsters tightly assembled at the local hang-out. “DEATH TO JIM, JOHN, JOE, JERK” he bellows. “LIFE IS BUT A SEA IN THE MULTITUDE OF FISHES. ART IS; EVERYTHING ELSE—/S NOT.”

Go ask Chris Desjardins, Flesh Eater frontman and resident existential guru (of sorts), whose riveting focus on life-on-Earth most definitely IS. Chris D’s vision by way of the rockin’ F. Eater metaphor transforms the wildest of visceral psychic PAIN (his) into anguished rhapsodies of horror, blood, death, guilt, love and fear (ghouls and “Class I” zombies too).

“Basically everything I write is motivated by hope, giving myself hope, maybe instigating hope in others as a by-product,* he explains. “The world is such a pit, everything’s a real nightmare. We’re in this animal flesh, complete with all the really horrible things that go with it. The message I try to get across is that of transcending the pitfalls—rising above with the spirit of intelligence in our physical bodies. It’s so great, you know?” Each syllable breaks clear and fluidly succinct, the sentiment elucidated so effortlessly and candid in its unrepentent awe and cloaked in mysticism, one gets the • feeling that a strange sort of sincerity adheres tangent to the stream of thought. It’s this perceptual nature of the words and

“message,” coupled with the searing sound of the band’s highly explosive Stooges-meetSabbath attack, that testifies to the significance of Flesh Eater legacy and tenure on the L.A. scene.

Axe-man Don Kirk, native of San Antonio, Texas, blisters with hell-bent fury from a six-string Fender. This cat’s a virtual^ dynamo of balanced aggression—seething Ron Asheton-type craziness tampered with restraint the likes of a mean Fred Sonic Smith! Lead playing, in fact, is very reminiscent of Peter Laughner, and a mentality not

Music is better than sex. — Chris Desjardins

far from Cleveland’s legendary Rocket From The Tombs. Citing NY5s Chain Gang as “inspirational,” Kirk admits to the Flesh Eaters as the first and only band he’s “ever wanted to be in.”

Robyn Jameson on bass (bom in Belgium before relocating to Houston, Tex) combines with the powerful Chris Wahl (drummer since 12) to form a formidable rhythm section and foundation for exploratory formulations live and in studio. Back-up voice for

shows, Stephanie Heasley, rounds up the 5-person ensemble—certainly the most versatile and sound-synergisfic of all Flesh Eaters lineups.

There have been several, and the historical synopsis of the band reaches out with affiliations spanning much heralded turf. With the impending release of their 4th LP, A Hard Road To Follow, Chris and the Eaters have carved an indelible notch in the aesthetic sequence of events subsequent to L.A.’s initial underground explosion somewhere in ’77; time traces back to the Masque (Hollywood’s basement stage and center circus of lst-wave punk: Controllers, Eyes, Bags, Skulls, X) and the history lesson goes something like this:

“In 1977 I’d started writing for Slash magazine and at the same time tried to. get a band together,” muses Desjardins. “I was -§ just starting this new job in the fall of that year, teaching English at this combination “ jr. high/high school down by the airport. I taught English to 8th, 9th, 10th and llth‘ grades. That lasted for six months before I finally got fired for being too strict.” While disciplinarian Chris cracked the academic whip (as it were), incipient Flesh Eaters (alternate names: Screaming Target, The Hammers, The Sins...) emerged. Early venues at the Masque near Christmas featured Tito Larriva (of the Plugz) and Stan Ridgway (Wall Of Voodoo) entered the picture in April of ’78. Tito takes off, Stan splits, “then everyone leaves in June except me,” proclaims the author of two (as yet) unpublished novels (one called Sacred World) and an early anthology of beatnik verse called Bongo Chalice. “So I got three guys who were in the Flyboys and that lasted until September of ’78. With that lineup we released an EP on my own label, Upsetter Records (“Radio Dice,” “Screaming,”

“Twisted Road,” “Disintegration Nation”) but soon after, the band fell apart and we didn’t have a performing lineup for a while.”

Enter Exene and John Doe. “I knew them both from around the spring of ’77, when I was still married. I bumped into them aroUnd this time via the Beyond Baroque poetry workshop in Venice. They had just met each other and I really didn’t become friends with them until X started up in ’78.” But soon after “we recorded some stuff with John Doe and Don BoneBrake, and that made up most of what was on Tooth And Nail and No Questions Asked—our first album.” (Tooth & Nail, it should be noted, was the first of many scene-samplers— Yes L.A., No N.Y., etc.—to follow in furious fashion).

So time marches on with the consummate (final) Doe/D./Bonebrake collaboration and a long-playing nod to “negro spirituality.” This, entitled A Minute To Pray A Second To Die, sported the mugs of aforementioned X’s plus Blasters Dave Alvin and Bill Bateman on the back cover. “I’d written all the words beforehand; I’d been listening to this African witchcraft ritual stuff and Jamaican voodoo incantation chantings.” That and the usual black influences—James Brown, Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding, Screaming Jay Hawkins, “Ann Peebles,” spurred John, Don and gang into high gear. “We were all really into that whole spectrum of sound, by fooling around with different choices it evolved into a project that everyone contributed to as far as arrangements and ideas. The album was conceived from this process.”

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Which brings us to Forever Came Today and the current 4-piece aggregate raved about earlier (together since the Fall of ’81). This, the only enduring Eater mainstay of musicians lineup-wise, promised at once a continuity and consistency heretofore unrealized. Desjardins adds (L.A. Weekly 7/82) “It’s amazing what you’re able to do once you have a steady line-up. The way we compose songs now is different than when we first started. The music on this record is more mainstream rock ’n’ roll. Forever Came Today just sounds so much more solid to me, my singing is light years beyond what it was on A Minute To Pray...

His singing warrants comment—and there are two schpols of thought: YES (“incredible, demented, jolting, sensual”) and NO' (“putrid”) with critical consensus alluding to “strangled werewolf commercials” somewhere the middle ground of Jim Morrison, Arthur Brown and E.T. What’s it all mean? If lyrical twists and turns seem (at times) elusive and unusually twisted and turned around, vocal acrobatics add to the convolutions—and to maybe the general confusion of your average Toni Basil aficionado (“hey Chris D. you’re so fine...”) and all the Toto-dodo’s expecting Bobby Kimball. “Those tuned in to my wavelength Understand,” maintains Chris: Shrieks and screams become cumulatively torturous as do the waves of rebounding guitar distortion; tuning in to this “wavelength” necessitates digging a very real element of spiritual passion—and if you think that that’s just a crock of shit, if you doubt the sincerity of emotion then check out what the man says in earnest. “Often when I feel like I’m racing towards death, the music’s the one thing that keeps me alive. I love it so much,

I love to sing it, to listen to it. It’s better than really anthing I know of. Better than sex.” Point is, conviction runs hand-in-hand with conception (lyrics) and execution (performance), the totality of which sums up plausible in a better-than-sex reality somewhere between here and Venus.

“The songs are very personal songs to me,” waxes Chris. “They’re about how useless I feel life is. And how pointless life

is to me. The things that have happened to me personally in my life have been real disappointing, particularly with regard to male-female relationships. But although most of the stuff seems pretty morbid on the surface, it’s really not. There’s this underlying optimism and non-gratuitous humor running through each song as a • constant theme.”

Tracks from the upcoming A Hard Road To Follow include “Hammer Hits The Nail,” “Eyes Without A Face,” “Life’s A Dirty Rat,” “Buried Treasure,” the happening “Fistful Of Vodka,” “Poison Arrow,” A1 Green’s “Rhymes” and an assortment of others too gruesome to mention. This is an album in the classic sense of the word—a collection of tunes musically and metaphysically glued together. I could venture comments about a psychedelic commune of sound and subtle liasons cut-to-cut but I, uh, won’t. Suffice to say this effort dishes out generous portions of fresh Flesh Eater maneuvers and related hijinx: Chris’ hyena-to-banshee fever pitch sparring with Don’s guitar left hook; Wahlly and Robyn ceaselessly holding down the fort, girl-chanteuse Jill Jordan (ex of Castration Squad) yapping double harmonies alongside Mr. D.

The album’s due out this summer, on what label is up for grabs. Slash Rec’ds, hot on the heels of a lucrative WEA distribution deal (retroactive for all product) considers Fear and The Dream Syndicate prime vinyl alongside Rank And File but not the Flesh Eaters—meaning the band and record have essentially been excommunicated from internal affairs. A strange twist of fate considering Desjardins’ daytime job as the label’s art director/producer and head honcho A&R man for Ruby Rec’ds—Slash’s budget subsidiary home of Dream Syndicate and all previous Flesh Eater vinyl. So it appears (for the moment) Hard Rdad’s Upsetterbound—and a mixed blessing perhaps in that funds and distribution lost are decisions and destiny gained in one big autonomous quantum leap.

If an MTV-pointed “Weddihg Dice” video is indicative of the shapes of things to come, look for a continuum of mind-altering events. Way better than the art-damaged thorofare of popular “new wave” staples, (Puran Duran, etc.) and lots tougher than the hard-rock entrees, Flesh Eater celluloid pays homage to horror movie abstractions—love/revenge, blood/guts, homicide/death and a couple zombies thrown in for kicks. Desjardins’ production, no doubt calling on past experiments with film (earned a M.A. in film-school from Loyola), traipses through plots and subplots—all in vivid juxtaposition with songsynch & colors (lots of red and orange). “Wedding Dice” is thus transformed into a very visual story-line perhaps a bit too intense or overpowering for the average Joe (don’t expect tribute next year at the AVA’s).

“I’m a big fan of horror films,” he once explained. “The good ones understand where the horror is coming from to begin with. It’s got to do with primal fears, like not being able to get outside your physical self, being trapped in an animal-like world that’s totally animalistic—that is, reverting to the animal.

“There’s a psychological and a really poetic context where the nature of all this stuff falls into. It’s a spiritual thing.” ^