The name of this band is Instant Kafka

I guess I'm playing a gig in September!  Come on out if you're in the area.

I was outside coppin' a smoke and a guy I was in a band with 30 years ago saw me and pulled up and basically told me that a band I co-founded was playing in September and asked me if I wanted to join, at least for a song or something.  Abso-fuckin-lutely I do!

It remains to be seen if I can get a handle on the material and get my chops up before the show.  We got together last Wednesday to practice - three of the original members including myself are present, along with this dude who is an actual professional musician playing drums, and the aforementioned guy who saw me on the side of the road laying down guitar (really call it guitar 1 - my old position but he can play the shit better than I can these days).  A lot of stuff came back pretty fast, but I threw a lot of mud on the sound with mistakes and shit, and had to go easy on a lot of stuff, playing single notes instead of chords - some of this shit takes serious wrist and hand musculature to play and I'm just not there any more.  But after busting my A string late Wednesday, I managed to restring my SG last night, and I've been playing regularly, so I think I'll be there when it's time.

This band was so weird and so much fun - I was pretty young at the time, playing with these guys from about age 16 to 19.  Some of them were about ten years older, and served in some ways as mentors.  All of these people were dear friends.  I am probably the biggest impetus for the band getting together in the first place, and also probably one of the biggest reasons it disintegrated

- though there were lots of reasons for that, some of which I cannot take any credit for -

If I remember right I wanted to call it Pennywise at first, after the clown in It, but we found there was a band with that name already.  I honestly can't remember how we wound up with Instant Kafka, except that both I and the singer were both into the Beatles and Franz Kafka and the name was a play on Instant Karma.

Anyway, the band got started with myself, a guy named Ed Nichols doing vox and keys (and who wrote most of the material; what he didn't write I did basically), a guy named Ian Cook who was jazz trained but played death metal on drums, and a dude named James Keller on bass.  Sadly, James passed some twenty years ago now - poor bastard had what he thought was a persistent cold and it turned out to be metastatic melanoma.  He was a hell of a bass player, but was drinking pretty heavily at the time and wound up dropping out to get himself together, and Ian left for New York (where I think he's involved somewhat with the avant-garde jazz scene).  Before they left, we were joined by a second guitarist, a pretty blonde girl named Leanne who was a hell of a musician.  She never had a boyfriend and I tried to sleep with her every so often, but she would shut me the fuck down, doing so utterly without rancor and with no awkwardness afterwards.  She was awesome.

After Ian and James left, we brought in two other guys from a metal band I was in concurrently, Scott McDaniel on bass and Jim Svoboda on drums.  I think Jim had played with us at least once live - we were insane live and often had two drummers - and there were a host of other folks who would stand in for one or two tunes, playing everything from sax to mandolin to fucking corrugaphone.

This band did a lot of studio recording, first in a 16 track 2" tape analog studio with Ian and James, and later in a 24 track ADAT studio with Jim and Scott.

Quick note, these came right from the masters, I think, so you get drum lead ins for time and sometimes after a song there's some empty space.

So without too much further ado, let's throw wide the vault doors!

A fairly short one to start with, punk pop.  I like the lyrics to this even though they are simple,  James hauls ass on this thing.  There's also a final stab by the whole band that was one of those happy accidents.

 

Instant Kafka · Gypsy Song

A Devo cover.  Need I say more?  Probably not, but I will - Scott's basswork and Jim's drums are super solid on this and Ed's bent key sound is dead on:

 

Instant Kafka · Mongoloid

This is a little slice of our live approach, doing one song into another into another without stopping.  If you are interested you can hear a snippet of the vocal track in doG sI nataS played in reverse on the main soundcloud.  Remember - rock music is full of satanic backwards messages that lead children astray!  Leanne does a nice little lead in this:

 

Instant Kafka · It's A Beautiful Day / doG sI nataS / I'm So Tired

From one Beatles cover to another.  James is smokin' during this, especially the back half, it's soft but man listen to to the bass at around 3:00, and I am actually quite proud of the lead work I did on this.  It features a corrugaphone at the end:

 

Instant Kafka · Dear Prudence

This is one of my favorites.  Probably one of the more technical pieces we did, I like the Slayer-esque guitar harmonies and the diminished scales in this.  Originally the break in the middle was something Ian and I put together after listening to too much Naked City.  He originally played part of it on a child's toy xylophone with wheels, beating the absolute hell out of it.  I don't know how we wound up mashing that together with the main body of the song, but we did.  The eponymous Hot Babe in the song is apparently named Tammy, by the way.  Don't recall where that came from either:

 

Instant Kafka · Hot Babes

This thing is inspired a bit by The Who Sell Out, it's a commercial for a nonexisistent product (we did a few of these). Leanne's guitar is masterful. James basswork is CRAZY - he hits the single highest note in this whole thing - check out 2:26, holy fuck. The best thing I contributed to this is the lower-pitched laugh in the middle of the thing, right after Ed says "I told you we should have gone to the police."

 

Instant Kafka · Little Freddie

And finally, this thing. This is ten minutes in the studio, one take, and I think we were all pretty altered, I distinctly remember the backup singers doing whippits out of a cannister while recording. I thought about putting this first, but ten minutes is a lot to ask of people on the internet.  On stage, this could turn into a half an hour of seething, churning, wonderful chaos, waves of sound building, cresting and breaking over and over.  Leanne and I meshed really well together on this thing, she's in one speaker and I'm in the other (pretty sure I'm panned right and she's panned left but it depends on how you have your headphones on I guess - I am playing the guitar with a little touch of flanger on it).  Fuckin' James just goes nuts on this thing, though he's hard to hear sometimes - but for a taste, check out 6:55.  Audiences sort of came to be expect us to play this when we played live (which is a weird phenomenon).  We always had two drummers for this live and it's one of the few we recorded with two drummers in the studio.  It starts and ends with a Three Dog Night cover of all things:

 

Instant Kafka · Shamballa / As Yet Unaimed

There's plenty more of this stuff on the soundcloud, and I'll be uploading more over the next couple of weeks.  It's the first time I've had my hands on any of our music aside from the album - oh yeah, there's an album, you can find it on youtube if you are interested - some of the stuff here is on it, but there's plenty of other material there; it was uploaded back when YT had time limits, but the whole thing is basically one piece.