(BSM “I’m In Jail” 12-inch single)
IKKY SHIVERS: There are no mistakes.
MR. REALITY: In 1968, Ikky Shivers was the last remaining keyboard player of the Strawberry Alarm Clock.
COLE COONCE: 1968 was the first incarnation of the Sound Machine. Ikky Shivers had just left the Strawberry Alarm Clock. He was actually the one who was the grocery clerk who sang on their hit, but was never featured on the album, which is a true story.
MR. REALITY: He is most noted for his 90-minute, uh, organ solo, “Keifer Sutherland.”
GIA DE SANTIS (VJ): “Keifer Sutherland,” that was pre-Julia (Roberts) break up.
COLE COONCE: I reached out to Reality and Ikky and the three of us started jamming to a drum machine. The idea was Reality would play heavy metal Black Sabbath bass, Ikky would get out his old analog synthesizers and drum machines and he would be cranking out NWA-style drum beats with atonal synthesizer noodling.
The lead singer was merely a construct. So it was going to be braindead and it was going to be a sound machine. So we called it Braindead Sound Machine. The night that we played at Raji’s opening for Blackbird we had prepared four songs which we figured was good for about 20 minutes. That seemed to be about the right length. We took a voice message recorder and use that for tape loops and those were the lead vocals.
I’m in Jail (Coonce, Croyle, Murphy) All Rights BMI, Nitronic Research. ℗ Braindead Muzick Dir: Cole Coonce Photography: Kirby Onaga Edit: Cole Coonce CO2tv BRAINDEAD SOUND MACHINE: Vocals: Jenny “JenJen” Homer Guitars, Alesis HR-16: Cole Coonce Japanese Nitronic Bass: Mr. Reality Korg MS-20: Ikky Shivers Vox, Vibes: Bones Murphy Sample Chucker: Prince Num-E-Num
*****
The Braindead Sound Machine started with a drum machine. A Roland TR-505. It is pretty simple to program.
After I figure it out how it works, Reality and Ikky come over to record some stuff at my black hole of an apartment.
It is decided we will be a trio. We call ourselves the Braindead Sound Machine because we figure the only way to connect with the culture is to, as Ikky puts it, “get as braindead as possible.”
We get a gig in Hollywood. The venue is a punk rock dive with a completely incongruous Middle Eastern name. We rehearse once.
Ikky has some old synthesizers that are twenty years obsolete. Approximately.
He can’t read music, which is okay, because we are in mute agreement that we are doing isn’t about music.
Ikky understands. He contorts and pulverizes electrons through filters, oscillators and envelope generators. He is the right man for the job. What he is creating is not music.
Reality has borrowed my Japanese bass. Except in matters relating to the consumption of chemical effluence, he is a fiscal conservative, and an out-and-out tightwad when it comes to giving any facet of the music business any money whatsoever. Ergo, the borrowed gear. He runs the Japanese bass through a series of Ikky’s transistors, nanotubes and micro-signal processors, a functionality ultimately turning every thing Reality does into one big square wave. He only hits two notes per song, but he makes it sound like one.
Reality has a binary approach to playing the bass. Square wave on = one; square wave off = zero.
I start the drum machine and then chink-a-chink ala Fela Kuti and King Sunny Ade on three guitar strings, as trebly as possible.
Nobody wants to sing with us, so we figure that for the gig we’ll have the Missing Eyebrow, our hippie soundman, run cassette loops of Tammy Wynette through an answering machine for us. He will raise the Tammy Wynette phone machine fader whenever he feels the tune could use a vocalist. (“When is the right time to raise the fader?” he asks. “There are no mistakes,” Ikky tells him.)
During the rehearsal, Ikky makes meticulous notes and precise markings about the filters, oscillator and envelope settings.
After he leaves, as a prank, Reality and I dumpster his notes and replace them with pieces of paper that read, “skronk, screek, woop! boop boop boop! sshrree-AAAHHH! gack gack bleep”… This is what his music sounds like.
The next night, we set up onstage. No sound check. Ikky notices the onomatopoetic scrawl from Reality and I have replaced his crib sheets. Ikky will have to improvise. He shrugs.
I start the drum machine. We play for twenty minutes. We stop playing. I turn off the drum machine.
There is an awkward silence in the darkness, then some righteous applause. Ikky shrugs.
In our collective history of notes and dots and chords, this is our finest moment.
After the gig, Reality and I walk down Hollywood Boulevard to a liquor store. People pass by, roll down car windows and yell things — positive things. “That was cool.” Sundry encouragement. Apparently they saw the performance and then left, ignoring the bands they actually paid to see. On a night when Ikky, Reality and I tried to do nothing right, we could do nothing wrong.
Reality and I laugh. — (excerpted from Come Down from the Hills & Make My Baby)
COLE COONCE: I was helping Ikky engineer the “Keifer Sutherland” track when Chip Kinman from Blackbird called me up and said he looked for a very apocalyptic opening act. And I talked to Ikky and I said, “Well, look, I know your career’s on the skids, but why don’t we just set out to destroy music?” And we embarked on such as an instrumental trio, opening for Blackbird at Raji’s. We failed miserably. Uh, people actually kinda liked us, which was a little frightening.
MR. REALITY: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
COLE COONCE: We didn’t have a singer and we figured we could just hornswoggle various L.A chanteuses to do lead vocals and they wouldn’t even have to have their picture on the record cover. It was kind of like C&C Sound Factory and Black Box.
JEN-JEN: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
COLE COONCE: So then we decided to search for a, a pure tone. We enlisted a variety of vocalists. Uh, JenJen is probably our best vocalist. We found her at the House of Pies Franklin in Vermont – in the Pacific Rim. And, uh, it’s been all downhill from there. Actually, I think we should have stopped when we did fail to kill music.
Braindead Sound Machine 