Enormous Richard

Bong hits, donuts, coffee, and Enormous Richard's Almanac

2010-12-06T17:55:00.000-08:00

We have been slow to promote our digital re-issue of Enormous Richard's Almanac, because we are old and it is painfully boring to self-promote your twenty-year-old-basement recording. But the reviews are rolling in! And they are really good!

A friend from Nashville writes:

I'm finally sitting down and really listening to The Enormous Richard's Almanac this morning over bong hits, donuts, and coffee ... hilarious! I remember hearing this stuff many years ago, I think while I was in the Boro maybe? Carter had it? Maybe you played it while we were recording at Alex the Great or something? dunno ... but I love it!!!

If I had to pick a fave, it'd have to be "Steve Pick, Music Critic"... then again, "Steady Dick" and "Promising Young Republican" make me laugh ... ok, it's all fucking hilarious!!!
But really, to me at least, this album is a far more positive addition to the greater omnibus-compendium of American music than a bunch of sad-bastard-shoe-gazing-emo-shit!!! The more I listen to it, the more attached to it I become!

I am sure those bong hits, donuts, and coffee didn't hurt, either!

Digital Almanac Now Available

2010-11-09T16:36:00.000-08:00

Direct links and some free downloads coming soon. Meanwhile, check itunes, amazon, etc. It's there!

The First Almanac Review

2010-11-05T21:05:00.000-07:00

We finally found this, first published in Spotlight, Dec. '90, written by Dean Minderman. Sums it up pretty well.

Enormous Richard: the critics quoth

2010-10-31T12:14:00.000-07:00

The Enormous Richard archive has been plundered for quotes in support of the pending worldwide digital release of our 1990 debut cassette, Why It's Enormous Richard's Almanac. According to yellowing documents mouldering in a Missouri basement, the following things have been said in print about Enormous Richard.

'exuberant, haystack-hiding, mischievous'

"The rope burns on their hands aren't so bad that they can't play their instruments. Mixing the bluesy twang of their kissing cousins like the Chickasaw Mudd Puppies and distantly inbred relatives like the Flat Duo Jets, Enormous Richard boasts a hearty dose of bluesy country twang and tongue-in-cheek, good-ole pickin' and grinnin' fun, like if Mojo Nixon fell clear off the Louisiana Hayride and landed plum on his head. It all breathes with an exuberant, haystack-hiding, mischievous boyish charm, like they know they shouldn't be saying or doing the things they're saying and doing, and they know they'll get their mouths washed out with soap for it, but that's not about to stop 'em at all from having their fun."
- CMJ (College Music Journal) New Music Report, Jan. 18, 1991

'humor, political discourse and charm'

"Bedded beneath the sheer insanity of the group's words lies a rich layer of humor, political discourse and charm. They speak to the small and large aspects of daily life, dissecting everything from the curiosities of Christ to canines in traffic - plus various girlfriends and their new haircut."
- Thomas Crone, Riverfront Times, Dec. 5, 1990

'a breath of fresh, reality-rooted air'

"In an era when even out-there "alternative" bands are more concerned with their haircuts and marketing plans than writing songs about stuff that matters, Enormous Richard is a breath of fresh, reality-rooted air."
- Kevin Roe, Sound Views (New York)

'funny as fuck'

"Enormous Richard, a funny as fuck six-piece "skuntry"-rock band from St. Louis, sing like Michael Hurley, sound like they tour in a haycart with one loose wheel, and give away free condoms in concert."
- New York Press, Oct. 2, 1991

'they'll accept food'

"The band's home-taped cassette probably costs a few bucks, but I think they'll accept food, gifts, girls' phone numbers or really earnest compliments."
- Orla Swift, Meriden (Conn.) Record Journal, June 4, 1991

'rare in these days of money-grubbing'

"Bands like Enormous Richard are rare in these days of money-grubbing, musically calculating and world conquering bands."
- Jeffrey Lee Puckett, Louisville Courier Journal

'stonking bouncey fun'

"You want stonking bouncey fun? Go for Enormous Richard, who claims he "Answers All Your Questions" and offers 50 minutes of Pogues-powered reel-around-the-maypole mayhem."
- Alternative Press

'swirling, frenetic crock-pot stew'

"A swirling, frenetic crock-pot stew of yelping Johnny Thunders-style rockabilly stomp, quirky Chilton-ian edgy pop and songs about stuff you never thought to write a song about."
- Kevin Roe, Sound Views (New York), April 1993

*

Polaroid is of Elijah Shaw (in Skeletor mask) and John Minkoff jamming in an Enormous Richard tour van.

Reunion Recap; CD's available

2010-07-27T15:12:00.000-07:00

The gigs happened. We certainly got a kick out of them. There's reason to believe the audiences did too. Thanks for coming if you came. Here's what Roy Kasten had to say about it.

In case anyone's wondering, the digital 23-song Almanac is on its way, hopefully some time in the next couple of weeks. It'll be on Amazon, itunes, the usual. We'll post here when it's up.

If you prefer cd's, we have those. We'll be getting them into at least one St. Louis record store shortly. Update on that soon. If you want to do mail order, email johnminkoff AT hotmail DOT com. We didn't make too many, but we'll mail them out while we have them.

That's all for now. The skunk thanks you.

Free Skuntry: "Almanac Extras"

2010-07-13T17:36:00.000-07:00

Single-click on a song to start. Player will run through full song list from there.While songs play:Use forward/back buttons to go forward and back in list. Click inside player to return to list.

We're putting out a FREE DOWNLOAD collection called "Almanac Extras". It consists of eleven tunes we couldn't get onto the Almanac reissue proper (That release will be not free but reasonable. See previous posts for more on it and our 7/23-24 reunion gigs).

Use the player above to sample 7 of these "extra" songs. Click the above "Almanac Extras.zip" link and you'll go to our "4shared" site where you can easily download the whole thing. There are four songs not heard above but included in the download: these are classic cover songs(of a variety of musical legends)from the original Almanac.

Song notes from Chris King below.

It's a poor dog (who can't wag his own tail) (Little Richard)

This song we learned from a Little Richard tape, the kind the drugstores sell, is a marvelous testament to the value of putting No. 1 first.

Edwin Bricker

Written from press accounts about a whistleblower at a defense plant in the Pacific Northwest. I corresponded with the tight-lipped lawyer Thomas Carpenter in this story. My first taste of a good lawyer's chronic wariness of publicity.

Goodbye is good by me

One of those simple plays on words the mind is always looking to make. The story is all made up.

Manny, don't sing

I am really proud of this lyric, though the band never quite got the performance right and I lose fights to make more of this song than we do. The subject is the U.S. invasion of Panama and the secret service's callous betrayal of their client, Manuel Noriega. Since writing this I have read much more about this sort of international espionage thing, and in this song written as a clueless kid I really think I got it right ... everything but the "Federal Bureau of Intelligence".

When you were mine (Prince)

One of Prince's finest. Always a fan favorite for us at live shows. Dear Prince, please ask us to take this down if you see it and don't like it. No need to go legal, friend.

Lab rat

A howler of a Richard Skubish confession song. He actually did allow scientists to extract a small muscle from his leg in a research setting in exchange for cold cash!

Cello

Wow, this is misogynistic. I thought it was funny at the time.

They're moving father's grave

Got this from the folklore stacks in the Wash. U. music library. Totally love the acerbic Brit working man humor.

Sorrows of young Pippin

There was a young man named Pippin on campus, and after failing to get over his name and really boring people at parties with my bad improv routines about it, I got it out of my system by writing this song, which I never needed to hear again.

Gospel ship (Carter Family)

Carter Family! "No Depression," indeed! Matt Fuller brought this to this band. I would later write 100 songs with Matt where he was using sly little picking patterns like what he copped from the Carters.

I'll sleep when I'm dead (Warren Zevon)

Not one of Warren Zevons better songs, and a horrid performance of it, and a little sad now that Warren is, in fact, dead. God bless the dead and their music.

--Chris King

This just in...Selections from "Enormous Richard's Almanac", remastered for your listening pleasure!

2010-06-25T11:56:00.000-07:00

Use player in the upper right to hear 3 songs, freshly remastered, from the forthcoming reissue of our 1990 cassette! Notes on these 3 as well as some others, and individual song links below.

Enormous Richard, a throwback from the early days of the St. Louis indie rock and alternative country scenes, will have a reunion weekend this summer, with gigs Friday, July 23 at Jacobsmeyers Tavern, 2401 Edwardsville Rd. in Granite City (trading sets with the house string band, early to late); and Saturday, July 24 at The Duck Room (8 pm Lettuceheads, 9:15 pm Karate Bikini, 10:30 pm Enormous Richard).

The occasion: the first-ever reissue on CD of Enormous Richard's first recording, Why It's Enormous Richard's Almanac, originally released as a 90-minute cassette in 1990 - the same summer Uncle Tupelo released its first record on LP, No Depression.

Enjoy these songs and stories.

Dogs with their heads out the window

This is the only song where we actually figured out something that other people can use. Countless people have told us over the years that they helplessly hear this song in their heads whenever they see the limit case of experiential freedom that is a dog with its head out the window of a car.

River of sadness

Another Big Toe hand-me-down, that takes a rather tired metaphor on a float trip down the Missouri scenic riverways.

Timmy Todd

True story from the headlines of the day. Brian Henneman, formerly of Chicken Truck, used to open for ER when he was being a guitar tech for Uncle Tupelo, before he started The Bottlerockets. He is from Crystal City, very near Festus, Mo. (home of Mr. Todd). After sitting through a performance of this song that had been prefaced by saying Timmy Todd was from Brian Henneman's hometown, Brian provided a detailed lecture on the differences between the two neighboring Jefferson County towns.

Little Hiawatha

And another one grabbed from the headlines, about a Navajo boy sold black-market to a Mormon family whose custody got tied up in court. The poet Scott Niklaus took The Almanac with him on a teaching sojourn in Navajo country and loved this song in particular, but never felt comfortable playing it to people on the res, because "Little Hiawatha," unbeknownst to us, is an insult in Indian country, along the lines of "Little Black Sambo".

I'm not religious

In many respects, this song launched the band. Richard Skubish had come home to Granite City, Illinois, after getting a chemistry degree at an expensive East Coast private university, and instead of getting right on the job market as a chemist, he took his acoustic guitar to Laclede's Landing with his old grade school buddy Chris King. At one point Skubish began pronging into the air, slashing his guitar, and singing, "Hare Krishna!" The rest of this song popped right out of King, and their fate was sealed.

We're not R.E.M.

Camper Van Beethoven sent up the early twang revivalists with "Cowboys from Hollywood"; we took a swipe at the countless REM clones. The shout-out to other local bands, however, was pure affection; they were not included in the intended satire (as I had to explain once to Tony Margherita, then manager of the name-checked Uncle Tupelo, and now of the world-famous Wilco).

Tribal Rachel

Rachel Leibowitz was a passionate music fan and friend to all of the good campus bands of our era at Washington University. This song was written by the campus band Big Toe, one of the musical tributaries that became Enormous Richard. Steve Pick, music critic (see below), once quoted admiringly the lyric, "Her record collection, or so they say, is as big as her heart / She'll loan to you from either if you respect the borrowed part".

Steve Pick; music critic

Steve Pick caught the first ER show at a Rock for Reproductive Rights benefit and promptly wrote up the band in the daily paper. During the interview, our first, upstairs at the old Cicero's, he noticed that we had a number of portrait songs, like "Tribal Rachel" (see above). We told him we would write a song about anyone, upon request; he requested, and we cobbled this song together from the very few things we knew about him.

All the greatest matadors were fascists

Enormous Richard would evolve into the band Eleanor Roosevelt, then the band Three Fried Men, then the field recording collective Hoobellatoo, and now the arts organization Poetry Scores, which translates poetry into other media, starting with music. "Matadors" is the deep pre-history of the Poetry Scores concept. It sets to music both a scrap of language from George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia (the hook/title) and one of William Blake's Proverbs from Hell (the outro).

(I'm gonna) kill Mr. Bill

Utility multi-instrumentalist Elijah "Lij" Shaw, a rich kid studying at an expensive, elite university, was at the mercy of a rather unpleasant manager whenever he went to work at a local movie theater. The manager's name was Bill - that's Mr. Bill, to you. No relation whatsoever to the Saturday Night Live puppet character. Fernando Pinto, who booked ER into The Moon (R.I.P.) in New Haven, Connecticut, rushed to the stage after one set, gushing with his expository insight into the song structure: "The solo! That is when you are actually killing Mr. Bill!"

Why it's an Enormous Richard reunion and "Almanac" reissue!

2010-06-19T09:28:00.000-07:00

Enormous Richard, a throwback from the early days of the St. Louis indie rock and alternative country scenes, will have a reunion weekend this summer, with gigs Friday, July 23 at Jacobsmeyers Tavern, 2401 Edwardsville Rd. in Granite City (trading sets with the house string band, early to late); and Saturday, July 24 at The Duck Room (8 pm Lettuceheads, 9:15 pm Karate Bikini, 10:30 pm Enormous Richard).

The occasion: the first-ever reissue on CD of Enormous Richard's first recording, Why It's Enormous Richard's Almanac, originally released as a 90-minute cassette in 1990 - the same summer Uncle Tupelo released its first record on LP, No Depression. Here is a draft of the liner notes for The Almanac reissue.

Why It’s Enormous Richard’s Almanac

In the summer of 1990, a campus band from St. Louis crossed the Mississippi River and descended into the basement of a modest home next to a hair salon in the dwindling steel town of Granite City, Illinois. The hair salon, somewhat improbably, had a giant pair of wooden scissors jammed into its front lawn, by way of advertisement, which became part of this band’s iconography when they were surprised to find they liked their farewell recordings enough to release them. They released 30 songs, out of 34 recorded that weekend in the basement, as Why It’s Enormous Richard’s Almanac: 30 Skuntry Hits, and its hand-drawn cover featured tiny drawings that evoked the odd subjects of the songs and circumstances of the recordings.

This band, Enormous Richard, sprang up as a diversion for graduate students at one of the most elite and expensive universities in the Midwest, Washington University. Their first excuse to play together was a Rock for Reproductive Rights benefit organized by the frontman, Chris King, a graduate student in literature, like the core of the band. That performance, under-rehearsed as all of the band’s performances would be, was observed by the rock critic for St. Louis’ daily newspaper, Steve Pick. He decided to profile the new band in the newspaper, at a time when there was not such a glut of new bands playing their own odd songs as there is nowadays. This unexpected attention both bolstered the confidence of the band to keep going beyond their initial, one-off benefit gig, and inspired the first in a series of portrait songs that would help define the band’s sets and, eventually, The Almanac: “Steve Pick, Music Critic”.

The grad student core of the band, which also included Marshall Boswell on guitar and Joe Esser on bass, needed to dig into the campus undergraduate rock band scene to round out the lineup. Elijah Shaw, one of the most talented musicians on campus, was enlisted with the promise that he could learn new instruments, essentially, on stage – as he proceeded to do, picking up harmonica, banjo, fiddle, melodica, and a smattering of accordion over a hectic year of local gigs. Matt Fuller, from the legendary campus band Butt of Jokes, by then defunct, joined up for only the one gig. When the one gig yielded press attention that provoked further performance opportunities, Matt stayed aboard for “one more gig,” an agreement that was extended and compounded, gig after gig after gig. He ended up staying with Enormous Richard, in large part, because they were so much better at getting gigs than what he considered to be his primary band, Frog Punch, which was fronted by the shy rock guitar firestorm, John Minkoff. Eventually John, too, drifted into Enormous Richard, when he finally came to the conclusion that they had good songs and what he described as a “messy hilarity” that he found attractive, but stood badly in need of some twangy electric guitar licks.

Indeed, they did need that. Though Elijah Shaw was an inventive guitar player, he was busy in this band playing other instruments he didn’t know how to play. Marshall Boswell was a fine guitar player – a fine acoustic rhythm guitar player. The band had another musician, Richard Skubish, who was an adequate guitar player – an adequate acoustic rhythm guitar player. There was never a need for two acoustic rhythm guitar players, except when you are a local band that is in it, mostly, for the free beer and the good times, in which case you don’t strategize too much about your sound or the band in general. If you are still getting gigs, then the band must be working out just fine. It helped, or hurt, that Enormous Richard mostly played local venues with shoddy monitors or none at all, so they never really heard how good, or bad, they sounded. But they were young guys and wrote songs as fast as an undergraduate in his first apartment cooks eggs, and they performed their songs with a messy hilarity that (it must be admitted) kept the girls dancing and drinking long enough to go home, for the night, with the boys. And, if you can help a bar sell beer and young people find temporary mates, there will always be a gig for you.

The silly songs were always the most successful, as might be expected for a band such as Enormous Richard. “Dogs with Their Heads out the Window” could be defended as a song about the limits of human freedom, but most obviously it provided an opportunity to dog-howl into a beer-soaked bar. “Hanging out with Jesus” could be analyzed as a new synoptic gospel, told from the point of view of one of the thieves crucified next to Christ, but the first thing you noticed were the sacrilegious, scurrilous jokes at the expense of the Son of Man. “We’re not REM” could be understood as gimlet-eyed rock criticism, sending up the countless REM clones cluttering the indie rock band scene, as Camper Van Beethoven had parodied the first twang trend with “Cowboys from Hollywood,” but the thing people remembered was that the drunken band was stumbling around onstage singing that they were not REM, they were not REM, they were Enormous Richard, they were Enormous Richard – which was itself, of course, a ridiculous band name: Little Richard, only bigger; or a pompous way to boast of sexual endowment, depending on how you heard the pun.

But these were thoughtful young men blowing off steam (and paper-grading gruntwork) in the beery bars of St. Louis, and there were serious songs embedded in their set list and the murk of their unrehearsed musicianship. Two fan favorites from the band’s earliest days, “Little Hiawatha” and “All the Greatest Matadors were Fascists,” both told harrowing stories with catchy hooks. The Navajo boy adopted by a Mormon family in “Little Hiawatha” is called an “apple,” which sounds like a throwaway line, unless you know that “apple” is the American Indian variant of an “Oreo” (an insult for a homogenized black person): red only on the outside; all white inside. And the storyline of “All the Greatest Matadors were Fascists” is ripped right out of the highest tradition of 20th century literary reportage, George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, which indeed reports the phrase used as the hook of the song verbatim in a crucial moment during the Spanish Civil War. Other early Enormous Richard lyrics were pulled from the headlines of the day to make catchy pop (and turgid folk) songs out of current political events: “Ku Klux Kourt” bemoaned President Ronald Reagan stacking the highest court with heartless conservatives; “Promising Young Republican” reminded the new right wingers that they shared political convictions with mass rapist and murderer Ted Bundy; and “Afraids” (somewhat prophetically) parodied the straight male who was cocksure he would never contract AIDS, so long as his many unprotected sexual conquests don’t “whore or score”.

Marshall Boswell left the band first, to focus on his graduate studies and to write books, as he has gone on to do quite successfully. John Minkoff stepped into his spot, and what the band lost in Marshall’s sense of rhythm and soulful singing voice was more than compensated for with actual electric guitar licks, you know, like all the other rock bands had. Johnny, however, was the next to go after his graduation, and it was his leaving St. Louis for more urban pastures in Washington, D.C. that provided the impetus for the two days and nights in that basement, recording the band in Granite City. (The dying steel city across the river was Skubish and King’s hometown, full of unassuming houses with basements where rock band noise could be made, day and night, without irritating the neighbors.) Like the band’s first gig, meant to be their last, their first recording session also was intended to be the only – it was just an attempt to record their songs as future keepsakes. But the band that had never rehearsed away from the stage and had never performed with adequate monitors was amazed to hear itself, for the first time, playing back on the cassettes they recorded in that basement, with Johnny’s spidery guitar lines adding character to the messy hilarity. They were highly surprised to like it, in spite of everything. They decided to print it up and share it and see what happened.

They crammed every available inch of a 90-minute cassette with “30 Skuntry Hits,” using an inside joke for their music – “Skuntry” – coined by Marshall, which has other reference points, but is best parsed as a mash-up of skunk (the band’s malodorous musical totem) and country. For Enormous Richard did play a role in the country rock revival (otherwise known as alternative country, or twang) of the late 1980s and early ‘90s. The summer of 1990, when Enormous Richard’s Almanac was recorded and released, also saw the release of the first record by the very best indie rock band in St. Louis, now remembered as iconic, since it splintered into Son Volt and the world-famous Wilco: Uncle Tupelo, with their debut No Depression. For reasons best known to the writers of those tomes, Enormous Richard has not appeared in the history books written about this minor musical movement, though their ties to Uncle Tupelo – hailed as pioneers – were pretty close. The Almanac was released the same summer as No Depression, which was titled after a Carter Family song (and went on to name an influential magazine), and The Almanac also included a Carter Family cover, “Gospel Ship”. The Almanac was recorded in Granite City, just a few towns over from Belleville, Illinois, which Uncle Tupelo put on the map. The bands knew each other and played together. They appeared together on Out of the Gate, consummate scenester Rick Wood’s compilation of the country music revival in St. Louis that predated almost anything else like it anywhere. Enormous Richard even bought the first Uncle Tupelo van, Old Blue, which they finished driving into the ground, years after the release of The Almanac caught the eye of the mighty Cabaret Metro in Chicago and sprung the upstart Skuntry band out of St. Louis, putting them on the road for years and years of completely unexpected and amazing gigs and experiences.

Along the way, Enormous Richard evolved into Eleanor Roosevelt, and under that name appeared on several national compilations – including one of the first volumes of “Insurgent Country” music released by the seminal Bloodshot Records in Chicago. As Eleanor Roosevelt gradually petered out, the core of the band shifted into a field recording collective, Hoobellatoo, which was profiled on the BBC and still survives today as the non-profit arts organization Poetry Scores. Improbably, the original songwriting core of this funny country band of graduate students trying to run away from literature now sets long poems by the world’s greatest poets – Les Murray, Ece Ayhan, Paul Muldoon – to music, as one would score a film, and releases these “poetry scores” on CD. These scores then provide the starting point for silent zombie movies written, shot, and edited to their music. Twenty years after The Almanac was recorded and released, as its first reissue on CD was being prepared, the first Poetry Scores silent zombie movie, Blind Cat Black, was being readied to screen in Istanbul, Turkey. These lucky dogs who stuck their heads out the window of graduate school in St. Louis twenty years ago, looking for some fun and open air, now find their music roaming the streets of Istanbul in the skins of blind black cats, still exploring the limits of human freedom, still looking for a warm, crowded tavern where they might yowl away the night.

-- Chris King