A LIFE OF CRIME

A LIFE OF CRIME

GIMME PAGE

From the upcoming book on rock ’n’ roll’s nihilistic kings, Laughing Hyenas

Steve Miller

When we think of bands that were devoted to a bloodthirsty and unrelenting commitment to rock ’n’ roll, we need not look much further than Laughing Hyenas. Formed by vocalist John Brannon of Negative Approach and guitarist Larissa Strickland of L-Seven, the band, which also included drummer Jim Kimball and bassist Kevin Monroe, was among the pack of emerging indie acts that would set the table for the ’90s. Uncompromising, a brutal assault on the senses, Laughing Hyenas almost had it all—the look, the sound, the dedication, and the songs to match. They remain one of the top cult bands of the era, worthy of a reissue of their back catalog and a live LP that hits in November, both on Third Man, and a book, The Laughing Hyenas (J-Card Press), that is available now. This is an excerpt from that book, detailing the band’s early tours with Sonic Youth.

Sonic Youth wrapped recording Daydream Nation, a double LP, in August 1988 and the album was slated for an October 18 release. The band had just returned from ten dates in Europe and were much like the Laughing Hyenas in that each of the four members were advanced, accomplished, and diligent in their craft.

Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley was raised in Midland, Michigan and was an enthusiastic fan of Strickland during her time in L-Seven, while Thurston Moore was an admirer of Negative Approach, the Hyenas, and Brannon.

They’d already made the drive to see the Hyenas play a house party in Philadelphia earlier in the year and were sold. They asked them to support them for a series of shows, with Sonic Youth headlining, Die Kreuzen in the middle for some of the dates, and the Hyenas opening.

This time, the touring finance mechanism was set. Each Hyena got $5 a day to live. There would usually be a meal provided at the venue, so the money had to cover breakfast and lunch, as well as cigarettes and beer, if the gig didn’t provide it.

“WE WENT OUT TO DINNER [WITH SONIC YOUTH] ONE NIGHT AND ME AND KEVIN PASSED OUT IN OUR PLATES OF FOOD.”

-JOHN BRANNON

Strickland lived on apples and Marlboros, while Kimball saved his money from his pizzeria job so he wouldn’t be scrounging. Monroe was a nimble shoplifter, which extended his per diem. Brannon, while savvy in most ways, was feckless when it came to basic survival.

“We’d be in New York and breakfast was $2.99, which was too much for John and Larissa,” Kimball says. One night in New York, Kimball and Brannon headed out to get a slice of pizza, and while they were walking down the street, they looked in the window of a higher end Italian place.

“Oh my God, look, that’s Roland Gift,” Brannon said, peering both at the singer of the Fine Young Cannibals and the chicken tetrazzini on his plate.

“It was unreal how John could spot things like that," Kimball says. “We’re hungry. Who notices that?”

The connection with Sonic Youth was also helped by Strickland’s ability to talk shop— touring, recording, marketing—with the band. She was engaged in art and business, and did a good job, most of the time, with both.

“One of our first gigs was with Sonic Youth, in Detroit,” Brannon says. “We were already friends. So when they asked, ‘Do you want to tour?,’ we were like kind of the new young hip band. That’s when we cut our teeth touring. I’d never been exposed to that kind of touring. Before, we’d been doing live things but always sporadic shit. [Sonic Youth] were just coming up, everyone knew who they were, but the venues were bigger.”

They started with a Friday night at the Ritz in New York, with a 2,500 capacity.

“I had never heard of Sonic Youth before we played with them,” Kimball says.

The tour moved upstate to Syracuse, then down to Columbus and Cleveland, Ohio, Toronto, Ontario, Detroit, Chicago, Madison, and wrapping in Minneapolis. Almost every venue held at least 1,000, and most of the shows were sold out.

“At that point, for us as a new band just starting out, for them to take us under their wing, because at that point we were like, ‘Fuck we got this record out and nobody knows who the fuck we are,’ they really exposed us to the whole indie rock college circuit,” Brannon says.

The money was fair, with advance ticket prices running between $8 and $13. The Hyenas got between $300 and $500 a night, the most they would make during their existence. They added merchandise money, selling T-shirts for $12 a pop along with copies of Merry Go Round.

“They were paying us,” says Brannon. “I don’t remember slumming."

Sonic Youth was also willing to overlook the band’s habits, which Monroe was not immune to.

“We all went out to dinner one night and me and Kevin passed out in our plates of food,” Brannon says. “Then we came to, and Kim Gordon was just sitting there, eating with a smile on her face like nothing happened. They knew we were fucked up. They were just like going on like nothing was nothing. They were very nice to us. You know, it couldn’t have been that bad ’cause they asked us later to do part of the Goo tour, too.”

Their relatively good life on the road was a different story once they got back to Ann Arbor. The Hyenas went from playing for up to one-thousand people to scratching out a living among people who just thought they were weird.

Their work was spotty, although being in a college town made it easier to get fleeting, temporary work. Monroe kept busy through Manpower and got a job as a cashier selling textbooks at a campus bookstore. Kimball hung in at the pizza place he’d worked for the past couple years. Strickland and Brannon went back to their jobs, making minimum wage.

Kimball still didn’t know of the drug habits. He stayed to himself at the house the band shared, even keeping his food in his room. A loner by nature, Kimball took long walks with his dog and kept close with his family, which lived nearby.

“I lived with this guy for like three or four years,” Brannon says. “I never remember one point where I had a beer with him sitting at the couch. But he is a great musician.”

For Brannon and Strickland, keeping themselves medicated helped them maintain their creativity, for the time being. They fed into the more prolific Monroe’s ideas.

“I’d always been in bands where I wrote a lot of the music,” Brannon says. But he started hearing the rest of them come up with songs that were better than his.

“They just had all these ideas, these really great ideas,” he says. “So I just concentrated on the lyrics and the singing. I threw some music in there, but Larissa and Kevin were writing some really good things. Kevin was coming up with great basslines.”

Songwriter publishing was never a consideration, although it’s the crux of so much litigation down the road, usually once a left-out band member learns of the financial possibilities.

For the Hyenas, there were no songwriting credits other than the group.

“It’s not who writes it, it’s the people playing it,” Brannon says. “At the end of the day, one person maybe comes up with the riff or the beat, but everyone throws down to make the song. With the Hyenas, it [was] a layering thing. So we’d never do a ‘written by’ thing."

The new LP was being pressed but the band was busy in the basement, their laboratory, cooking up new material.

Hyena sets were getting longer to accommodate the new material, and they were starting to headline more shows, slowly growing a regional base. Shows in Detroit, Lansing, Kalamazoo, and Ann Arbor were becoming events, social occasions with a dramatic, powerful musical backdrop.

They were poised to become much bigger.