25
April 2010 No Comment
by Shane Scott-Travis
The story of the
Nihilist Spasm Band is the story of a band that will take “no” for an answer.
Their maxim is one of inspired improvised madness. The NSB began and remains a
precocious child with many proud and protective papas.
Born during the rise of
the counterculture and the delivery of a social revolution—the Sixties. Echoing
out of ultra-conservative
Though already
performing together for a couple of years, it wasn’t until 1967 that the
Nihilist Spasm Band released their debut album, No Record, on an unsuspecting
public. Their influence would best their fame as originators of an avant-garde
genre never before gleaned.
No Record roars to life
quite literally, becoming 50 minutes of, well, something no one had any context
for. Was it abstract sound, agitprop, clamour,
ear-splitting nausea, poetry, or an inoculation against boredom? And what
exactly do you call it?
The answer is both yes
and noise.
“We had no money so
buying instruments wasn’t an option,” muses John Clement (bass, guitar, and
drums) on the early days of the NSB. “So we just made them ourselves. We took
the same attitude to music and thought we’d just do it ourselves and not worry
about the fact that none of us had much by way of formal music training.”
They were nothing more
than a group of artists, intellectuals and functional non-conformists. The spur
that urged them on was rather meek and mild considering the cacophony it would
ultimately create.
“Our friend, the late
artist Greg Curnoe, made a film that needed a
soundtrack,” says John Boyle (drums, kazoo, thumb
piano). “He consulted with his friends and we decided to toodle
on kazoos—chosen because they were black and red—the colours
of the anarchists and the nihilists.”
“One of our friends,
Hugh McIntyre, showed up at my art studio with a small kazoo in one hand and a
metal funnel in the other,” enthuses Murry Favro (guitar). “He wanted
to know, could I join the two together somehow to make it into a big kazoo?
Greg got very enthusiastic about us making our own kazoos and forming a kazoo
band or using other instruments we’d made.”
Inspired by the spasm
bands that egressed out of New Orleans in the late
nineteenth century—bands that made their own instruments out of everyday found
items, like jugs and pipes—and the anti-authoritarian tenets of nihilism, these
iconoclasts were cast.
“Shortly after doing the
soundtrack we began playing regularly in Curnoe’s
studio in 1965,” says Boyle. “We persuaded the owners of the York Hotel—where
we drank beer after playing—to let us play there.”
“Monday night was quiet
with very little business for us to drive away,” recalls Clement. “Mo and
Eddy—the owners of the York Hotel—were fond of music. Mo, who played clarinet,
had trouble tolerating the noise we made, but he loved the crowds that
developed on Monday nights and the increased beer sales that went with it.”
“We played there for
five years, during which time the
While the venue has
changed over the years, Monday night performances have become a bona fide
tradition, now being held at the Forest City Gallery in
“This tradition is fun
and has gone on since 1966,” says Favro.
“We used to take the
summers off but now we play year round,” adds Clement, proudly.
In this way the Nihilist
Spasm Band emerged, absorbing what was in their trundle and turning it into
that rare thing—something disparate, provoking and entirely playful.
The needle drops,
emitting a hiss and a crackle through well-worn speakers, landing in its
congruous groove as the vinyl spins. Suddenly a voice—erupting in a flush and
campy timbre—shatters the calm, confessing repeatedly: “The Nihilist Spasm Band
is the greatest band in the world! The Nihilist Spasm Band is the greatest band
in the world!”
Even newly minted their
records sound beautifully broken.
The voice belongs to
Bill Exley, a voice that, like the man behind it,
lands somewhere between Robin Williams, Captain Beefheart
and your favourite teacher from middle school. This
makes sense, as Exley was a secondary school teacher
in
“Bill’s songs are never
sung the same way twice,” says Favro. “Recently, in
In Zev
Asher’s documentary from 2000, What About Me: the Rise of the Nihilist Spasm
Band, Exley is asked what the NSB’s
relationship is to punk. Exley deadpans for the
camera, “why, we’re the uncles of punk.”
It isn’t just punk
rockers who share an aural acquaintance with these garish geezers. The NSB were
invited to tour with experimental noise rock progenitors Sonic Youth in the
late 1990s, and have since shared the stage with SY’s
Thurston Moore and Lee Renaldo on numerous occasions.
“It was great to play
with Thurston and Lee and others, like Joe McPhee,”
says Boyle, chiming off some of the impressive names that have shared the stage
and made noises with the band. “Most recently we played with Einstürzende Neubauten’s
Alexander Hacke and Blixa Bargeld and had a great time talking and jamming.”
Who knew that these old
fogies would cause such a ruckus? In
“It was a shock to learn
that there were lots of people there who love our noise,” says Boyle blithely.
“
It’s fitting that
“We indulge in a bit of
a free-for-all of sound,” says Favro, “until
something emerges from the chaos and we go in that direction with the sound.”
What is it about noise
that people find so compelling? There can be no definitive answer, which is in
keeping with the NSB’s manifesto. Not that they have
a manifesto, but if they did it would doubtlessly appear in black ink on red
paper—the letterhead of agitators and renegades.
“Three of us know we’re
basically artists,” says Favro. “The others don’t
know it yet. They think they’re things like a retired teacher or a retired
doctor or even a retired plate-maker. Being an artist is an attitude as much as
an occupation and you don’t retire from it.”
“I’m a visual artist, a
painter,” beams Boyle. “To my own amazement I’ve been able to support myself
exclusively from this for 42 years. I’m proud of that.”
Boyle may have the
outward appearance of a cardigan-clad codger, but he’s got a reputation for
being, on occasion, a confrontational artist and novelist, never one to shy
away from contention or sexuality in his work.
Clement—a retired doctor
who used to practice acupuncture—also busies himself with less nihilistic pursuits.
“Motor cycle racing, wine making,” says Clement,
listing off what he’s been up to lately, “oh, and helping with my wife’s
exceptional garden.”
Not to be outshined, Favro, too, has been making more than just noise in his
spare time. “Learning to fly an aircraft with skill,” Favro
explains, has made him particularly proud. “However, I had to give it up
because I never caught on how to land the things!”
A flippant and
irreverent sense of humour and love of the absurd is
par for the course when teeing up with these guys.
“To someone who’s never
heard us,” ponders Art Pratten (“pratt-a-various”,
water-pipe), “the short answer is that we’re an adult kindergarten rhythm
band.”
“I think it was 1967 or thereabouts,”
recalls Boyle slyly, “we booked a studio at CHLO—a radio station a short
distance south of London-O. The engineers miked us
and the take began. We started nicely and within a minute we were cooking. For
reasons unknown, Bill decided to probe his throat with his index finger to find
out what kinds of sounds he could elicit from his inner depths. I could have
told him they’d be retching sounds and they were. Everybody laughed and played
all the harder. Bill got excited, too, and probed deeper and deeper. Suddenly,
the inevitable happened and Bill vomited on the microphone. The disgusted
engineers shut off all the equipment and rushed in to assess the damage—they’d
never seen anything like it. We just laughed all the more and kept playing
until we were ushered out of the studio. The piece was later titled ‘the
Sweetest Country this Side of Heaven’—the flexidisc
of which became a valuable collector’s item.”
Over the years the NSB
has released over a dozen LPs and appeared on numerous compilations and box
sets. Original vinyl pressings are sought after by collectors the world over.
And these aren’t just Lester Bangs-style connoisseur elitists or anti-social
antiquarians, either.
“Well, people in
And while those who
follow the NSB are a devoted flock, the band still remains relatively obscure
on their native soil.
The Nihilist Spasm Band
may be one of the most stable conflux of functioning artists that have ever
been. That they’ve been recording and performing for 45 years is astounding,
how many acts, forty years in to their careers, are still making their most
relevant material?
Did these brazen and
garish virtuosos really think their bizarre art project would live so long a
life?
“We didn’t think about
it at all and I think that’s the main reason we’ve lasted,” says Pratten,
matter-of-factly. “The future to us was next Monday night, and we never thought
beyond that. We never thought of the band as a career, we each already had a
‘life’ and weren’t looking for another.”
“We’re friends, we
believe in community,” suggests Clement. “We have no leader and we share the
task of keeping it going.”
“I attribute our
longevity partly to the fact that we have no leader or direction,” adds Favro. “This is an internal view that explains why we
tolerate one another and persist as a band. On the outside I’ve no clue as to
why we still have others interested in our music or noise.”
Noise exists
aesthetically in all musical forms, and the standard in which we gauge and
value such things adheres to no hard and fast rules. How could it? Even ambient
noise and found sounds can alter one’s appreciation towards pitch and tonality.
And for some, the edicts of noise can have almost religious implications.
“I show up every Monday
night to make noise and see what’s going to happen next,” says Pratten,
conveying something akin to child-like wonderment.
On the surface of things
it might seem like the NSB live in slumber, architects of their own Elysian
Fields, and why not?
“How
the whole band decides to choose a place to eat is the same way we perform,”
Clement says, “we all mill around. We discuss the options until we form a
consensus and then we all go together to that place or not. Sometimes one or
two of us will go off in our own direction, like when we play.”
Their art is play and
their play is noise. Noise can differ for each listener, for some it may wax
and wane. For others, our awful language betrays emotional feelings. Noise is
an attempt against this betrayal, an attempt at emotive and unprompted beauty,
a map without a territory.
“No doubt the future
holds for us—as it does for everyone—slow decline and eventual death,” says
Boyle. “For a brilliant musician it might mean loss of dexterity, touch,
virtuosity, perhaps a descent into noise and chaos. But that is where we begin,
and I expect where we will remain.”