On the Anniversary of Dr. Kamikaze's Final Show in 2005
Eight years ago today, Dr. Kamikaze and the $35 Sound (that's my band; we made a bunch of noise once upon a time) played its last live show. So in the spirit of pointless nostalgia and celebrating myself, I thought I'd post a little retrospective of Kamikaze recordings.
When Dr. Kamikaze and I (he being the Dr. Kamikaze half of the band, me being the $35 Sound half) were just scrappy 18-year-olds, we played our first show at a Battle of the Bands which we had organized and which we also won 3rd place. We also counted the ballots (wink*). Technically, Dr. Kamikaze and I had previously performed in bands together including Postersoup (named after the Andy Warhol Campbell's prints), Melkbox (pronounced "milkbox" and named after Midwesterners' penchant for pronouncing "I"s as "E"s, which I've since noticed is subverted in the south; "Kin ah borrow a pin?" when someone wants a writing utensil), and The Knight's Who Say "Ni!" (after the Monty Python bit). All of those bands were under-rehearsed and mostly fell apart because, at the time, all I really wanted to do was play depressing Pink Floyd covers.
We billed the band as a "performance art duo" and would do things like pass out cookies during our set, prop up a blow up doll (our "third member") against a keyboard with taped down keys so it droned endlessly throughout a song, produce feedback from our instruments with electric back massagers and various vibrating devices ordered from adult websites, and, of course, wear costumes (dresses, masks, goggles, capes, surgical attire, etc.). The above excerpt has Dr. Kamikaze reading study hall notes written by our classmates which we had throughout the year found abandoned, in crumpled balls under a stairwell, in the elevator, or being kicked down the hall. In true Futurist fashion, we read them to piss people off. Actually, to be honest, we read them to get laughs. We pretty much knew no one mentioned in the notes would be in attendance. And we changed the names. Still, kind of a dick move.
The above snippet is from a recording made in Dr. Kamikaze's living room at sunset during the Summer Solstice, 2002, mostly because we thought it'd be cool to have a recording we could say was influenced by ritual magick and pseudoscience. The $35 Sound was always a hodgepodge of nods to various forms of artsy pretentiousness from Futurism to spoken word to minimalist and postmodern composition with a tongue in cheek--satiric, if we wanted to sound fancy--approach to cover the fact that, in reality, we absolutely loved all that stuff.
The break near the end of the song is Dr. Kamikaze answering a phone call for his sister. I remember almost being frustrated in the moment, knowing that if it had been my home and my phone ringing, I would have ignored it rather than interrupt the recording (the ringing probably too quiet under the racket we were making to be audible anyway). Of course, pausing needlessly to answer a phone call for someone who wasn't even home ended up being the most Kamikaze-esque moment on the recording.
For a couple of shows we performed a rip off of King Crimson's rip off of Gustav Holst's "Mars" from the Planets suite (also ripped off by John Williams for the Darth Vader theme). Ours was simpler and messier.
Throughout college, the $35 Sound played our respective campuses, drunken house parties, and more and more campus gigs. But our first college gig was actually returning to our high school to, again, play a Battle of the Bands. We had just finished our freshman year of college and were living back home for the summer when I received a call from a kid two years behind us (who had always been kinda a jerk to us even though, in the past, I'd let him borrow my most valuable possession, my four-track machine, to record Jimi Hendrix covers) saying that he had taken over organizing our town's battle of the bands and had failed miserably because the show was that night and all but three bands had backed out and would we please come play. We hadn't played together in over a year and we had no rehearsed material, but there was no way we were passing up an opportunity to be the homecoming heroes. So we called up our buddies, Eddie Dirtnap and Stevert Enson, who agreed to come improvise a set with us. Six hours later we arrived at the high school where we were informed that most of the bands that had backed out had since un-backed out and that our services were no longer required.
We insisted on playing anyway. Living at home back with your parents after a year of freshman-freedom, we hadn't had much excitement in the past few weeks. We needed this, we pleaded. We were told to keep it to about ten minutes. Stevert had forgotten his drum sticks so he found a tree and broke off two large branches, about three-feet long each, which he proceeded to pummel his kit with until nuts and bolts were flying into the crowd. Twenty minutes into our ten-minute set, he'd smashed through several drum heads and his cymbals lay demolished strewn across the riser. And that's when the power was cut and we continued to play for another five minutes or so. We were big-time college kids and had, apparently, earned the right to be jerks.
Dr. Kamikaze and the $35 Sound Do Business in Outer-Space was recorded in Chicago over a three-day weekend in the summer of 2008 during which the $35 Sound also attended not one but two concerts by one of our favorite bands, Polvo, met the guitarist from one of our least favorite bands, Stained, who went on a diatribe about how much Polvo sucks before asking if we wanted to "roll" with him, offering us some ecstasy (we declined, but, classy guy as he was, he later found a homeless man to gift the tabs that were meant for us to), and attended a midnight showing of Dario Argento's Mother of Tears. And, for some reason, I also remember a lot of discussion about the merits or lack of merits to new-on-the-scene Sasha Grey's "work."
The Literacy Program was my other band at the time. One of the staples to our set was an ode to Dr. Kamikaze I wrote (appropriately titled "Dr. Kamikaze") because of, you know, our bromance and all. I'm obligated to mention that the lyrics about him failing chemistry are just for the sake of the rhyme scheme. He actually failed calculus.
We could've just done a cover of this song to get the same point across though.
You can listen to and download most of the Dr. Kamikaze recordings at the links below.
The Sun Is Up; You Must Get Up Too
fickle is where the heart is...
Diametric Correlator and the $35 Sound
it'll work, and nothing will happen: the lost tapes
That last one was recently remastered from the original four-track tapes and features recordings of our high school friends giggling and saying stupid stuff in "altered states of mind," guitars played in dorm communal bathrooms, an Iraq war protest that turned into a slight riot, girls yelling about monkeys, people playing beanbag toss, a story about a stuck-up jerk I met my first year of college who was probably just trying really hard to fit in, Dr. Kamikaze's recollection of accidentally spilling chocolate milk all over his pants in front of a girl he liked, Stevert beating his drums to a song about a whale who dies and goes to heaven but can't fit through the pearly gates, and me being over-enthusiastic and coming off as a jerk making fun of Dr. Kamikaze for not being able to sing or whistle.
And the cover image is of an empty platform and a mirror where a girl I knew once, on a whim, got naked, covered herself in balloons, and posed on and off of a rocking horse and asked me to take photos of her. The whole thing made me nervous as hell and after the photos were snapped she went home for the weekend and I went and got greasy Friday night spaghetti in the dorm cafeteria. I'd liked her and think she'd liked me, but the whole scenario that might have led to something freaked me out and we both became really awkward around each other and then she transferred after the year ended. All of that (along with the fact that those recordings had been lost and then found after a year, and that, out of some sense of what I thought was nobility but was really some sort of fear of ever feeling that awkward again, I threw out the rocking horse-naked-girl-balloon negatives) seemed to fit the title, it'll work, and nothing will happen.
In conclusion, Dr. Kamikaze and the $35 Sound has, since my teens, functioned as a record of my most embarrassing and awkward and pretentious moments. And somehow, through documenting those moments so that I can easily access them and share them without shame via handed out cassettes, Bandcamp downloads, and now blog posts, they've become some of my most fondly cherished memories. Dr. Kamikaze and the $35 Sound: the greatest substitute to therapy I've ever known.
