VOTD 8/21/2024

 Snakefinger: Live in Melbourne (Secret)

Purchased through mail order, limited edition #232/300

As I probably have written before, in 1981 I was off to study at the conservatory at Carnegie Mellon as a first year student, but had also started to become a Ralph Record fanatic. I had ordered some of their records directly from the source, later fueled when I discovered Jim's Records in Bloomfield. I could buy most Ralph titles there for $4.99. 

There was something great and distinctive about each of the artists, united only by being original and...weird. Too easy a word, but it cuts to the point. 

Imagine my thrill that Snakefinger was to play the Electric Banana in April 17 1982, the weekend of Spring Carnival at CMU. Imagine my disappointment that I was only 19 at the time and had no assurance I could get in. Thanks to my friend Dustin, with who I played in the George Gee Make Believe Ballroom Orchestra, he helped me find a WRCT friend of his who had a New Jersey driver's license that was valid but without a photo. (Thanks Chris, wherever you are!) I emptied my walled of anything but that license and cash. I walked in behind Dustin, and....they didn't check. He shook my hand. The graduate student behind me, clearly older, was carded though. No problem for him. 

I missed the opener, The Cardboards. Dustin said they were missable, but thankfully I saw them several times later. In between bands a projector was set up (16mm?), and the Ralph Records music movies were projected on a white sheet. That was amazing: pre-music video videos by The Residents, Yello, MX80 Sound, Tuxedomoon, Snakefinger, and (best of all) Renaldo and the Loaf. They're all great. 

And the band was great. I saw the same group two additional times: on my honeymoon in San Francisco in 1986 at the I Beam, and a Ralph Records tour in Cleveland within a year of that. (Those two shows were almost note-for-note identical, including between song patter.) 

This three-sided LP comes from an earlier time, March 5 1981. It's a quartet on this performance, more-or-less 4/5 of the band I saw, and the band on the third Snakefinger album Manual of Errors. Phillip his real name) played Pittsburgh in 1981 with Carsickness opening, and Eric Drew Feldman was with them at that time. I have that from Chris Koenigsberg, who was playing with Carsickness at the time. Eric most famously played with Captain Beefheart, and is supposedly the music director of The Residents now, since Hardy Fox's departure. 

I like the first two Snakefinger albums, but the Residents' (hence Hardy's) fingerprints are all over them. It sounds like The Residents but more pop-rockish, and lead by Phil's guitar and voice. 

I enjoy how grungy this album is. Inside the cover it reads, "This is a live from 1981!" It's a very good bootleg, hardly studio quality but very listenable. And maybe it benefits from the grunginess. Unlike the first two Residents-produced LPs, this is Snakefinger's band sounding like a rock band. 

The program is largely what I remember his playing live, including a cover of Tuxedomoon's "Jinx", given a nasty ska groove here. It's faded out, and I would have preferred more. There's an uncredited version of Ennio Morricone's "Magic and Ecstacy" from the Exorcist II at the tail end of one song, and one piece I don't remember: the ska-flavored "Corrupted Man." 

It's a shame Phillip died so young at 38. I know through friends that he had congenital heart disease, and had one heart attack prior to his fatal one. I was told that despite this, he'd still eat steak for breakfast, though he was always pretty trim. Ticking time bomb I guess. 

He was trying to branch out, his Snakefinger's History of the Blues, writing and recording a boppish jazz tune, playing with the Club Foot Orchstra, it's all a clear indication he had some higher ambitions than being a Residents satellite. I'm enjoying this album a lot for its rawness. This was a great playing band.