"Surfin' Cows" was one of three cow-themed (or rather, cow-named) surfy instrumentals from Jon von's old Boston band the Sacred Cows, brought with him when he headed out to California after college. The others were "Skatin' Cows" (which wound up on the Night Shift album the year following this) and "Hang 4" (get it?) which I don't believe we ever recorded but which we used to play all the time in The Early Years. Sometimes we'd play all three in a row in fact, because Alex the drummer liked playing them and was the guy who started them out, so he'd charge into them serially and there was nothing we could do but play along. I suspect that may have been too much of a good thing all at once for our sparse audiences but it was by no means the only thing we did that was probably too much of a good thing for them.
We, shall we say, "challenged" our audiences in all sorts of ways. Like good, standard-issue "punk rockers" we were offensive inadvertently or on purpose, but mostly somewhere in between the two.
The fact that a song from an early 80s Boston punk band wound up on a little home-made record that people still remember over 30 years later, by a band named after the star of the A-Team that is still playing is about as unlikely as unlikely gets. I knew Jon from KALX radio and from Disorder Records, which was a little mail order record business Jon did as a sort of hobby: he'd put an ad in MRR listing the punk and hardcore records available from Rough Trade, people would send in orders, our buddy Max would pick them up at Rough Trade, and then Jon and Kenny Kaos and I would meet up once a week to pack the orders and drink beers. I had a sort of "band" at the time (which I was calling The Visine Eye, in my head and on the cassette recordings we'd sometimes make) with no ambitions beyond personal, imaginary, momentary glory at occasional "practices" in our drummer's parents' basement in Burlingame. Somehow Jon started coming to these -- I knew he was a member of this "band" when after the second practice he left his amp there.
Soon, somehow, to my not inconsiderable befuddlement, we were playing little shows we arranged ourselves and, a bit later, spending a weekend at the cheapest recording studio we could find and recording what would become this album. That was all Jon's doing. I was just standing there going: "wut?" I guess he'd figured out how to do that stuff in Boston with the Sacred Cows and just did it all again out west.
Result: the record "came out", and we became world famous in Berkeley.
I've got more to say about those early shows and the first recording sessions with Kevin Army, which I've been thinking a lot about recently because I've been trying to organize and inventory the mountain of tapes in my apartment and get a handle on what's there and what's missing. In the process I've come across lots of brain-jogging stuff. But that will have to wait for another "minor secrets" session.
I know nothing at all about the video other than that it was made by bass player Byron's neighbor (along with a similar one for "At Gilman Street" which I will minor secrets presently, Odin willing.) Pretty cool-looking though. And that isn't a bad guitar solo, really, for a guy who had no clue what he was doing.
I'm putting this on the "official and semi-official music videos" list because basically it's as semi-official as things get, so you can check them out here. And while you're at it, go to my youtube channel, subscribe, and like everything.
So, see ya next week on Wotan Wideo Wednesday.
Posted by Dr. Frank at March 14, 2018 06:26 PM