WillChatham.com   I am a geek.

Playing more drums, and I love it. Last night I had an old fashioned bang session with my buddy Craig on guitar, and this dude Owen on bass, who turns out to have been the previous bass player for the Butthole Surfers during their Electric Larryland tour. Turned out to be a fun night, and I hope to keep rocking out soon. I can’t get enough, and I feel like it’s been pretty quick getting my chops back (and then some). The new drum kit helps!

I went and rocked out tonight, and boy, was it awesome. I ran into Josh Haddix of Greasy Beans fame last weekend, and mentioned that I was looking for people to play drums with. He said he was putting together something electric and needed a drummer, so tonight we met up with a couple guys he works with at Musician’s Workshop. WOW, it was great. Everything seemed to click, and the tunes were great. After one evening, we already have 5 songs in our pocket.

The style has a southern-ish hard rocking edge ala Neil Young or even some Wilco. I’m looking forward to more of this.

In a previous post I wrote titled Searching For Songs, I lamented about not being able to find a song from an 80’s punk band about a kid getting trapped in a refrigerator. Every few months I would do a Google search to see if anything new had been indexed by that wonderful tool of discovery.

I finally hit the jackpot. Through some amazing eruption of forgotten information from my sub conscience, I recalled a line of the song and was able to locate this post by a guy named Glen Case. The song is called Refigerator Heaven, as it turns out, and the band that recorded it is called The Freeze - an outfit from Boston. Moments later, I had obtained the song from the iTunes music store.

How happy am I to finally be able to hear this song again after 22 years of absence? As happy as a baby Psychlo on a straight diet of Kerbango, dog!

On a side note, Mr. Jeter was able to supply me with the other long lost song I had been searching for. I need Mr. Jeter to contact me with his address so I can send him his LP’s back, along with the digitally converted versions from my USB turntable!!!

This week we return to that late-80’s Washington, DC sound. In the early 90’s, I was so into the DC music scene that I could tell you the member of just about every band going back to 1980, and I could count on one hand the number of Dischord Records releases I did not own, and had not spun at least a dozen times.

When I was playing with Substance in 1987, we had the pleasure of opening for this DC band I’d never heard of called Soulside, an insanely intense band driven by the things that made “that DC sound”: emotion, politics, and passion about playing music that meant something. The show was outside of Louisville on the back of a flatbed trailer by a barn on a farm in southern Indiana. It was hot, it was loud, and it was fun.

I had another chance to open for Soulside at Tewligan’s Tavern in Louisville, when I was in Cerebellum, which to this day remains one of my favorite shows of all time.

This tune comes from Soulside’s second record, Trigger, which is in my all-time top 10 list of favorite albums. Enjoy.

Soulside - Trigger.mp3 - from the Trigger LP.
Click arrow to play, or right-click and “Save As” to download

In 1991 I was playing drums with Crain, having just recorded our Speed LP, and heading out on a month-long, coast-to-coast, book-your-own tour in a big-ass 70’s Dodge Ram extension van.

Our first stop on the tour was in Washington, DC, where we had some studio time at Inner Ear Studio, and where we were to meet up with the band we would be touring with, Circus Lupus.

I had seen this band about a year earlier when they came through Louisville, and I knew the singer, Chris Thompson, from the band Ignition and other DC-based punk acts.

Anyway, this song, Pop Man, comes from the then-unreleased LP they had just recorded, Solid Brass, which happened to be produced by none other than Joan Jett. This became my favorite song by Circus Lupus, and I always ended up singing along from beside the stage each night when they played it. It’s catchy, it’s edgy and raw, and of course, it rocks.

Pop Man by Circus Lupus, from the album Solid Brass.
Blue arrow to play, right-click and Save As to download.

If any of you ex-Circus Lupus folks stumble across this, drop me a line!

A post over at TechCrunch pretty much sums up my feeling of the music industry today. Things have gotten completely ridiculous, with the RIAA now suing their customer base, strongarming them into settling out of court, and doing all of this based on IP addresses, for crying out loud.

People want music the way it should be - free and good! When will they understand that?