Severed Heads

It is a rare occurrence for me to run across somebody with a comparable music collection to my own. There are plenty of people that have larger collections than me – mine currently hovers somewhere between 1500-2000 CDs and about 1000 records – but almost nobody has the same tastes in music that I do. One of my mom's old boyfriends had a giant collection of jazz records that filled an entire hallway floor to ceiling, and I used to marvel at the sheer size and scope of it, running my fingers along the spines like Tom Sawyer playing a picket fence with a stick. But that was before I had my musical awakening and, even after that glorious and grateful event, my fondness for jazz remains pretty limited. I have seen whole houses filled with classical recordings, and happily perused the gigantic collection of a music critic acquaintance (a friend of a friend of a friend) who got seemingly everything released, but only kept the 5000 or so discs he couldn't live without. Even in that collection, when I had carte blanche to borrow anything and everything that struck my fancy, I was only able to find a handful of CDs worth borrowing (mostly Bill Nelson solo stuff – and most of that wasn't really worth borrowing, as it turned out).

But in my final year at college, I did run across somebody who not only liked a lot of the same kinds of music that I did, but had, I must confess, a superior record collection. This was a bittersweet experience. On one hand, it was great to have a nearby font of previously unknown coolness to peruse, but it was also a bit of a blow to my ego. I was constantly trying to reciprocate and offer him some tasty nugget he had missed, but he always had whatever I was pushing, no matter how obscure. This posed a problem. Although we were friendly, we never became friends, and I was wary of being too much of a mooch. The more that I could offer him, the more comfortable I felt borrowing his stuff. But since the only thing I was ever able to turn him on to were the Fats Comet singles (he did have the first, ill-conceived Tackhead album, Tackhead Tape Time that collected some of them, although in an almost unlistenable format) and Mark Stewart + Maffia (yes, with two effs), perhaps the most grating and difficult of the Tackhead pseudonyms), I felt obliged to not pester him too much.

His name, as it turns out, was Chris. I like to joke that when I was a kid, I was the only Chris I knew, and now it seems about half the people I meet are named Chris, so in another 30 years, the logic goes, everybody will be named Chris. I was, as I said, in my final year at Hampshire, so I was one of those scowling, pale spectres dressed in black and snorting derisively at the incoming class that had so intimidated me four years earlier when I was an incoming freshman (er, frog) being scowled at by pale specters dressed in black and snorting derisively. Most "upperclassmen" (we shied away from such distinctions at Hampshire as being too classist) move out of the dorms and into the "mods" (communal apartments) that dotted the campus as soon as they could, but I was in no hurry. I liked my room, and I especially liked not having to worry about meals and keeping a common area clean. I had lived in New York with roommates for a year, I knew what that entailed, and I knew that's the way the rest of my life would be, so I might as well hang on to as much service as I could for as long as I could. So what if the food wasn't that great in the cafeteria, at least I didn't have to buy it and cook it and clean up after it (they once announced on the menu board that dinner that night consisted of "meat" balls (quotes included), which prompted me and my friend Geoff to take our dinner at the Tavern that night).

At any rate, his name was Chris and that was about the time that my future wife (Chris) and I started hanging out, so I would frequently get messages on my door that said:

Chris,

Chris called.

Chris

And when my friend Christian came to visit and we went out with Chris and her best friend Kristen, well, you can just imagine the hilarity that ensued.

So, one day, I don't remember why, Chris (the neighbor) showed up at my door with a Severed Heads album he thought I might like. I had never heard of them (damn him!), but I eagerly and graciously accepted it and took it into my room to digest. The album was called Since the Accident and was filled with some of the most bracingly experimental music I had ever heard. Typical for many such albums, there was very little information available on the disc. I figured out that they were from Australia and worked at a place called Terse Tapes, but that's about all the information they were willing to print. Most of the album consisted of layered and manipulated tape loops mixed with the occasional keyboard or vocal embellishment. One of the tracks, Dead Eyes Opened, was a pretty straightforward bit of synthpop – surprising in the context of all the noise that surrounded it – although it was tempered a bit by the narration that runs through it about throwing a dead man's head onto a fire and seeing the eyes open. I liked the whole album to varying degrees. Some of the tracks were exhilaratingly aggressive in their unfriendliness – Gashing the Old Mae West, for example, runs a brutal tape loop over and over again until you think you're going to scream. But there was one track that really stood out. Called Brassiere in Rome, it is an 11+ minute collage full of thick and rich choral loops intricately interwoven with the sounds of church bells ringing and, every now and then, somebody (apparently, the pope) saying what sounds like "brassiere in Rome". The piece uses a gorgeous sonic palette to pull the listener in. There are thick, arpeggiated sequences overlapping breathy vocal samples, all washed over with gallons of reverb until it becomes a provocative, swirling wind of sound. It is no less experimental and unusual than A Relic of the Empire or Adolf a Carrot (that's a cheat – Adolf a Carrot is on the After the Accident CD but not on the original vinyl pressing) but the creamy nature of the sounds made it a lot friendlier than many of the other tracks. About halfway through the piece, the layered tape loops start to shift and then get played forward - up until then, you realize, all the source material has been played backward, although it's so layered that it's hard to tell. Then the voice that has been droning "brassiere in Rome" starts up going forward, and what he's actually saying is "Lord, we praise you". When I heard that, I almost fell off my chair laughing. This was at the time that the dreaded PMRC (headed by Tipper (what kind of name is that?) Gore – wife of the inventor of the internet) was desperately trying to censor popular music, with especially pernicious and laughable concerns over "backwards masking", a technique at least as old as the Beatles which consists of embedding secret messages in songs by recording vocals and laying them in backwards. These phrases, which are usually claimed to be something along the lines of "Satan our lord and master we beseach thee" or something comically gothic like that, are supposed to be picked up subconsciously by stoned teenagers who then become programmed to kill their parents or their high school or themselves. It is, needless to say, completely ludicrous. For starters, there is no reliable way to hear something backwards and be able to translate it – consciously or not – and just because somebody tells you to do something, doesn't mean you must do it – especially if you are a sullen teen. Anyway, the debate was raging on and causing such strange media events as Frank Zappa and Dee Snyder (Mr. Twisted Sister himself) testifying before congress. So to come across a backward masked message that transformed "Lord, we praise you" into "brassiere in Rome" was too sweet.

Beyond the wonderful irony of the title, I loved the glorious sweep of sound embodied in the piece, and for a couple of weeks, it's all I wanted to hear. In fact, I seriously considered making a tape of just that song over and over again, I liked it so. The only other song I considered doing that for was the second movement of Brian Eno's Music for Airports, which features a similar breathy vocal sound.

After After the Accident, I was hooked on Severed Heads, and I borrowed Chris's other albums (he had City Slab Horror and Come Visit the Big Bigot and Bad Mood Guy). I loved them all, even as the methods and sounds changed. But there were dark clouds on the horizon. As with numerous other musicians, Tom Ellard, the driving force behind Severed Heads, suddenly decided that all this great tape loop, sampladelic, experimental sound collage work he was doing was okay, but what he really wanted to do was SING! It is, I'll admit, a powerful seduction, one that I myself have, unfortunately, succumbed to. And while everybody might like to sing, not everybody should be heard singing, and Tom Ellard, for all his good qualities, is one of those people. I tried to keep the faith through the later recordings, through the Rotund for Success and Gigapus years, but the ratio of cool experimentation to pinched vocals on top of sleepily clichéd electronics got to be too unbalanced for my tastes. Too bad, too, because some of those early tracks are phenomenal.