Foetus

Two doors down from the dorm room I shared with Eric in high school lived Bob and his roommate, Don. Bob and Eric and I were all pretty tight, but I didn’t really get to know Don until he moved in with Bob. Don was an interesting character. He was fiercely devoted to the heaviest hitters in the romantic music arsenal and would regularly get into long, protracted arguments with other music heads about which version of Mahler’s Das Lied Von Der Erde was superior. That was one of the beautiful things about Interlochen. Don could argue heatedly about the merits of one orchestra over another with the same passion and intensity as other kids his age arguing about whose basketball team could kick ass and not have his own ass kicked for it. It was a freak haven, and Don fit right in.

He was also very serious, and disapproved of us pulling Bob out for the occasional night of illicit revelry. We’d often invite him along, but he’d always sneer and turn back to his Sweeny Todd score. He wanted to be a conductor more than anything, and could often be found flailing his arms to Stravinsky, cueing the invisible strings and scowling at the ephemeral oboes. I got used to seeing Stokowski Jr. when I went looking for Bob and hearing the heroic strains of Wagner thundering through the halls before the RA (Resident Alien) made him turn it down.

We got along well, each thinking the other was a freak, but a pleasant and benign freak. I’d roll my eyes at his musical excesses, and he’d gleefully grill me about what weird bands I listened to. Each peculiar name made him chuckle in wonder. The Buggles? (isn’t that some kind of snack food?) Haircut One Hundred? (what about Haircut Eighty-Three?), Talking Heads (as opposed to Walking Feet?). But the one he loved the most was the Flying Lizards. He’d shriek with laughter every time he heard the name and then repeat it to himself incredulously. The Flying Lizards? Ha ha ha ha! Then he’d want me to play some, so I’d drag out Summertime Blues or Hands 2 Take and he’d burst out laughing all over again. The Flying Lizards? Ha ha ha ha.

One day, in the dead of winter (and winter used to die a long and painful death in Michigan), I went looking for Bob and knocked on the door. Don it open with a flourish and stood there beaming in his Hawaiian shirt, nodding to the cheesy lounge pop of Brazil ’66 blaring from his speakers. He invited me in while hula dancing around the room. He had lived in Hawaii for a few years (you’d occasionally hear him say, “you could score free board!” in a lazy Hawaiian slacker accent, and then hurt himself laughing), and explained that, while he was there, he had developed a fondness for exotic '60s island flavored cheesy-pop. The bleak February snow had gotten to him and he just had to have a few moments swaying in the tropical breeze before putting his black sweater and Beethoven back on.

Years later, out of the blue, he called me in Brooklyn. He was just back in the states for a little break from his European conducting tour and was visiting an old mutual friend and my name came up so they tracked down my number and gave me a call. During the course of the conversation, he asked me if I still listened to the Flying Lizards, and I chuckled and said that I had moved on to…I quickly searched my mental database for the most aggressively off-the-wall band name I could think of…to Scraping Foetus off the Wheel. He nearly choked with laughter.

Foetus is a perfect example of running across the right band at the right time. I was halfway through my second year at Hampshire and starting to have serious doubts about my college life – the same kind of doubts that precipitated my leave three years earlier from the University of Chicago. I had started asking the fatal question, the one question you must never ask at college. I had started wondering why again. Why was I here? What was the point? Why did I have to learn this stuff? Who thinks it’s important? What the hell do they know? Are they really teaching me something important or are they just teaching me how to be a sheltered academic like they were?

I was disillusioned and angry. I fought with my professors. I resisted the assignments. I fantasized about dropping out. I got stern warnings from my mother about the impossibility of help going back to school again if I dropped out of a second college. I fussed and fumed and fretted. And then somebody lent me Foetus’ album Nail, and it soothed my soul like a broken glass salve.

I always think of the capsule summary of Foetus that I read in the Trouser Press Record Guide, which states, “thank goodness for rock ‘n’ roll – otherwise what hope would there be for people like Jim Thirwell.” Amen. Foetus is some of the most breathtakingly aggressive music it’s even possible to imagine. He takes the raw energy and in-your-face attitude and self-destructive violence of punk and combines it with an awe-inspiring palette of symphonic and industrial sounds and explodes it into a thrilling, terrifying mushroom cloud of sonic terrorism. Many Foetus tracks build up such a crushing momentum that it’s all you can do to curl up in a ball and hope you’ll resurface when the gruesome aural tsunami finally washes back out to sea, leaving you weak and panting at the overwhelming power of this force of nature.

I can’t exactly say what Foetus is like because Foetus isn’t exactly like anything else. But for an angry, bitter, disillusioned, and lost student flailing away at Hampshire, it was exactly what I needed. I used to turn up my headphones all the way (those were a dark couple of years without proper speakers) and grind my teeth and thrash around while Thirwell screamed “I can do any goddamn thing I want!” over a punishing bed of scraping metal and earth-shattering symphonic chords.

Always abrasive, Foetus used to change its name slightly with every release, searching for just the right flavor of thrilling disgust. Foetus Under Glass. Foetus Uber Frisco. You’ve Got Foetus on Your Breath. And each album title would be some short, provocative, disturbing four-letter word. Hole. Nail. Rife. Ache. He would growl his dark, twisted lyrics from some primal hell. It was the fascination of the abomination. The inability to look away from a car crash. The twisted orgasm of flesh and steel.

Lilith is taken from Sink – a collection of the best of Foetus, and, coincidentally, the longest CD in my collection, topping out at a few scant seconds short of 80 minutes, the absolute limit of a CD. Why 80 minutes? Because when the engineers were working on the format, the question arose as to how long a CD should be – how much musical information should they be built to hold? They tried to think of the longest piece of music you’d like to have on one disc. One of the engineers complained that he hated having to get up at least twice to listen to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. So it was decided the CD would be long enough to fit all of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony on it, and the longest recording of the symphony they could find was 74 minutes long, so the standard CD was built to hold 74 minutes of music. Later, the envelope was pushed slightly to 80, where it now sits, thanks to physical constraints.

Anyway, Sink is pretty much more Foetus than you’ll ever need. Lilith represents the lighter, happier side of Foetus. At least in that the darkness isn’t magnified by the crushing beats shredding terrifying vocals singing nightmare lyrics that usually grace Foetus tracks. Setting the scene right away, this soundtracky piece starts with dripping water and menacing strings. Tension builds as more layers and effects are added. Before long, demonic monks in fire-red robes are moaning some unholy Kyrie while the possessed orchestra swirls around them like sulfurous smoke. The ghastly procession winds its inexorable way closer and closer, sucking the very light from the room until the whole relentless mass explodes in an oppressive thunder of kettle drums.

I don’t often need the severe comfort that Foetus offers, but when I do, thank goodness it’s there. Otherwise, what hope would there be for people like me?