Tin Huey
(Smog Veil)
Lots of very strange bands have come from Ohio - proto-punks like Dead Boys and Pere Ubu, conceptual new wavers like Devo. Still none was stranger than Tin Huey, whose baroque conglomeration of jazzy saxophone, abrupt tempo changes, joke-infested lyrics and funk-punk feral drive outweirded even inspirations like Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa.
The band, formed in Akron in the early 1970s as the Rags, initially included Mark Price on guitar, Michael Aylward on bass and Stuart Austin on drums. Harvey Gold joined soon after on organ, and Ralph Carney (future Tom Waits horn player) in 1974. The last core member, Chris Butler (also of the Numbers Band and the impresario for The Waitresses), came on in 1978, and somewhere along the line, Price and Aylward switched instruments.
A new compilation, Before Obscurity: The Bushflow Tapes (Smog Veil; www.smogveil.com) assembles 14 tracks recorded at the height of Tin Huey's mad creativity, just before and during the band's unlikely stab at major label success. (They were briefly signed to Warner and delivered one record, 1979's Contents Dislodged During Shipping, before being dropped.) There are also four live cuts laid down at an live gig in 1973, apparently before Ralph Carney joined the band (there's no saxophone), that give an inkling of Tin Huey's earlier, more propulsive punk sound.
None of these tracks have been released before, though some are alternate versions of album cuts, b-sides and recordings by related bands. (The best-known versions of "Heat Night" and "The Comb" were recorded by the Waitresses, and "Hoseanna" by the Swollen Monkeys.) One cover - a live take of "I Wanna Be Your Dog" - honors Iggy Pop's birthday.
Even if you know Tin Huey, then, The Bushflow Tapes are full of unexpected gems. The album includes the first-ever recording of "The Comb" with Patty Donahue trying out the bratty, pouty girl-punk vocals that would later define big hits like "I Know What Boys Like" and "Christmas Rapping". There's an early live take on "Slide," twitching with slap and pop bass and diving vertiginously into its blues-funk chorus. "Heat Night", with its twining, late night saxophones and snarls of proggy guitars, sounds almost like a manifesto, with its verse, "Stop! And reverse the wires, switch the ground, something's crazy here got twisted around, what got into that anyway, who threw the rules away? Who tore the boundaries down?"
Nostalgists for the 1970s will enjoy a spattering of contemporary references - the Vonnegut nod in "Ice 9 Hop", a call for ERA passage in "Pink Berets," and an aside about long-time Ohio State football coach Woody Hayes in "Closet Bears." One of the album's most difficult, multi-parted Prog tracks, "Right Now, Betty White" calls out the perky star of Hollywood Squares and other game shows, in between flights of Farfisa fancy and tangled time signature shifts. Ordinary signifiers of American popular culture are framed by musical difficulty - robot keyboards that sound like Devo, the skronk and squawk of detuned sax, abstract post-classical spasms of staccato chords.
And that's not just in the lyrics. Little bits of conventional music - lite jazz, musical hall strut, even country - get wrapped into atonal cacophonies. The weird and the ordinary jostle for your attention.
The four closing songs on the disc are, as mentioned earlier, from a live gig in 1973. Though not very well recorded (the sound fades out pretty drastically on "Zebra Operation"), they give an intriguing glimpse of Tin Huey's infancy. The sound is far more straightforward than in the later material, following just one rhythm per song and putting the bass and drums to the front. It's also a more conventional rock band set up, with no horns, kazoos, whistles or other instruments. Not as arch or complicated yet, but still plenty interesting, the band's early incarnation sounds a bit like Michael Yonkers in his prime.
The Bushflow Tapes are nicely though not elaborately packaged, with contemporary photos, decent notes and a long essay by Robert Christgau and Carola Dibbel. It's hard to imagine a better way in to Tin Huey, and if you're already in, there's plenty here that you haven't heard before.
Standout Tracks: "The Slide" "The Comb" "Heat Night" JENNIFER KELLY
