Newsletter No. 38: WE WILL MAKE A FRIEND OF YOUR ASS Far more surprisingly, it became clear that, despite his air of humorous regret, [he] was a violent man...Violence, triumphally outlandish and unreal, is an ancient category-error-except to the violent. The error having been made, both men would know that from here on in it was endocrinological: a question of gland-management."-AMIS "[THEY] WERE GOOD FOR PARADES. SARTORIALLY, THEY WERE WELL PUT OUT. THEY WERE WELL-ARMED HAIRDRESSERS."-TEDDY LEPKIN The malevolent glee. That's what we noted first. The hysteria passio that accompanies any move from a lower to a higher order. The nameless love of chaos. He was exhibiting all of these symptoms as he recuperated and strolled from the land of the static to the palace of the ambulatory and with it a partial return in his abilities, as they were. His specialties. Backstabbing, cuckolding, degenerating, exploiting all with a redoubled, well, yes, glee. There really is no other word for it. Because we are on The Pleasure Planet and since being cash poor is not particularly pleasant our fun is made in the currency everlasting of human sinews, actions and activities. And he noted that no matter how many times he let the world know this, the world still didn't quite believe that the he owned it and not the other way around. Not yet. So The Asshole can walk again and we here at Planet OXBOW are minorly amused that fate and fortune to zig, as well as zag, is ours once more. We can go anywhere. We will go nowhere. We have to do what has to be done: comes to those who call. And for those of who missed your golden opportunity to lay him low, woe to you. PICTURE PERFECT 1) If you remember the Tour Diary story about the drunken barefooted German, you can now see him. Barefeet. Beer in hand. Dreaming about the next 1000 years. http://www.kuehnmail.de/photos/pics/20030709/oxbow.html 2) Live video from the FUTILITY FESTIVAL, which we still can't bring ourselves to watch on account of the mystery orange dust that Eugene huffed, and how that changed the show dynamic from dangerous to really, really dangerous. http://www.tubevision.com/futility.html THE WIRE WILL GROW TO REGRET THEIR DECISION THE WIRE, London's preeminent modern music magazine recently contacted our own EUGENE expressly to ask him to write an EPIPHANY column for an upcoming issue. And it went a little something like this: WIRE: We think it'd be cool to have OXBOW in the mag again. OXBOW: we know what you're talking about but in the future you will find your grandiose sense of predestination just a bitter reminder of a time when you could afford illusion. WIRE: No seriously. We think you're the perfect one for this type of thing. OXBOW: well we actually agree. But if history is any guide, becoming involved with Oxbow is usually quickly followed by a down turn in the interested parties fortunes. Sort of like what happens with black cats, the number 13, and tuna fish from an open salad bar. The PUNCHLINE? Eugene's tribute to DEAN MARTIN will be appearing in an upcoming issue. SEX SEX SEX http://www.sfweekly.com/issues/2004-03-17/listenfeat2.html/1/index.html THE FUTURE LOOKS BRIGHT AHEAD. SO BRIGHT IT WILL MORE THAN LIKELY BLIND ME, LEAVING ME TO WANDER HEADLONG INTO CONTINUING DESPAIR AND REGRET. IT'LL BE GREAT!!! YOU'LL SEE. ACTUALLY YOU WON'T REALLY SEE. SO SORRY. LARADUS: I hope that this reaches the men of Oxbow. OXBOW: It has. LARADUS: My name is Laradus OXBOW: Nice to make your acquaintance, sir. LARADUS: And for what may be only a year and a half but seems so much longer I have had the pleasure of having Oxbow corrupt my psyche, and from there on, my waking thoughts, via Balls In The Great Meat Grinder Collection all the way through two copies of Evil Heat and Music For Adults. OXBOW: Ah. So things aren't going that well for you then? Well, good. Better that than all of that goddamned joy we hear people talking so much about. LARADUS: Discovering Oxbow in a random (and single) purchase of the Wire Magazine opened a flood gate of misfortune in the form of paranoia, distrust and selective vigilance, all the ingredients of a long and healthy life. OXBOW: Indeed! At least the way we choose to live it. LARADUS: The first time I played "Balls," I was driving the car and put my new CD in the car CD player. I was accosted by a pure noise that I had never experienced before (my first "noise-rock" purchase but not my last) (I fucking hate using quotations). After squinting my way through track 1 I was rewarded with Track 2, which was less noisy yet somehow made even less sense. I almost began to regret my purchase and high hopes (who am I kidding) when Track 3 began and the unmistakable sound of Lydia Lunch (whose voice I had never heard but immediately recognized somehow) reassured me that everything-or nothing-would be alright. From there on I became more and more immersed in Oxbow, feeling the music without having any idea of the lyrics. I eventually made my way through Serenade In Red (which I reviewed 2x on Amazon.com. And both of which are now immortalized on your website). Evil Heat (1st copy), Let Me Be A Woman, White Tornado Meets Oxbow, Music For Adults and Evil Heat II. Slowly I sunk into the world of Oxbow and everything around me began to lose significance (but not in a big dramatic way that I am making it sound so fuck it). Live music lost its pleasure and I basically became more and more self-centered (the last ingredient of immortality). OXBOW: These are all good things. Good for you, bad for the world. We've been much happier since we stumbled in here a few years ago. LARADUS: The fact that no one else seems to understand why I gave a fuck about this weird-sounding band didn't make any sense. OXBOW: Those "some one else's" are feces eaters. LARADUS: But the problem was me. I was fighting it. I was stuck in between the world I started in where everything is clear and sensible and right and wrong matter, and where Oxbow had opened me up to, devoid of clarity and hesitance and sensibility where what feels good doesn't feel right but the more you do it the less you think about right or wrong. So I gave in (not completely, I'm too paranoid to give anyone that much control; I don't even like typing this. OXBOW: Not as much as we don't like reading it.... LARADUS: I gave up expecting pleasure and reassurance from the things that I genuinely am apathetic towards (you don't need specifics). This fucking sounds stupid like I want a pat on the back or some shit. OXBOW: In an Oxbowian universe a PAT on the back is probably the LAST thing you should expect. LARADUS: My only point is that Oxbow means something to me that makes me ramble and lose touch with rationality and love the pointless journey. Every time I feel an impulse that, for the good of society, I should stifle I think Oxbow. (isn't that fucking poetic!) I don't have a point. That's not what any of this was about. Thank you. THE SCROTUM MORE THAN A FEELING "Listening to AN EVIL HEAT again makes me hungry, even though I just ate. It's like a gutenburger surrounded by the sloppiest pulled pork west of the Mississippi and crammed into a cornbread roll with coleslaw. Add lots of spices and a pharmacopoeia recovered from Artaud's grave. Serve cold with a lot of light beer on a hot night. Sleep uneasily. Awaken to the purity of hate and start anew... when are you guys coming back east?"-knuckles, Boston OXBOW responds: We half-suspect you are mocking us but that's OK. We deserve it. RADIO, RADIO "Hi. This is WFMU Music/Program Director Brian Turner here in New York. I am an enormous fan and wondered if you had any plans for a NYC show in the future. I would love to see if the band would ever consider performing in our studios (my pal at KFJC hosted an amazing session a few years back with you.) We have great, fully equipped studios that have handled the largest and loudest of bands and good engineers, and we reach a massive audience in New York and worldwide as well (we stream on the net). Many thanks for reading this, and the amazing music. PS: I played the hell out of your last disc and hyped it to many. It would be an honor to have the full Oxbow experience when it happens.-Brian Turner, WFMU Music/Program Director DAN ADAM SPEAKS!!!! "By the way, if I may ask, what kind of bass is the good Mr. Adams using? It sounds fucking beautiful."--Axel OXBOW speaks: "Hello Axel, You have asked a difficult question since the body of the bass came from a garage sale and has no markings on it. It was a 4 string P-bass copy of some sort, and the body is very heavy. It had a fretted neck which had been cracked and glued together by the previous owner. I ripped the frets out, made a 5-string bridge (simple p-bass style � bent sheet metal and grooved cylinders to support the strings) and nut and added a 5th tuning machine to transform the thing into a 5-string. When that neck finally gave out, I bought a p-bass neck with an ebony fingerboard from Warmouth and set it up for 5-strings. The pick-ups are passive, from Bartolini, set-up for 5 strings at the jazz-bass-ish spacing, which resulted from placing 5 strings across a 4-string neck. If you don't care about all the details, sorry for being long-winded. I am amused by the whole thing since I built the bass with little knowledge or planning and it suits my ear almost perfectly. So call it an Adams. If you want on, I'll sell you one for $75,000. I'll glad you like the sound, Dan" QUESTIONS FROM AN ENGLISHMEN Q: Was FUCKFEST meant to be the beginning and the end of oxbow? A: Yes. But the devil works in mysterious ways. Because you see if ONE record made sense in the way that it was intended to make sense there would have been no more than ONE. But there were more. Why? To reward our life-saving vainglory, perhaps. Q: Why do you bother trying to communicate what you are saying to what is, by and large, a world that doesn't care about oxbow? A: hahahahaha....Well the world is just returning like to like. Q: I presume that Oxbow doesn't just stop when you aren't out touring or recording, so do you have a bunch of material-music, lyrics--when you start constructing the songs? A: Well we don't have a BUNCH of anything. We're not Prince. There are no basement tapes. I mean when you hear an Oxbow record you're hearing 2 or 3 or 5 years of rehearsing the songs that you're hearing on the record. And that's rehearsing withOUT vocals. I listen to those songs for as long as we rehearse them but I don't sing them until the studio....so if we have 9 songs on a record well THAT'S what we've been doing. Some might call this economical. Q: Do you get some enjoyment from it, some satisfaction at least? A: Um. Yes. I think if we had to hang it in balance it pleases and amuses us more than anything else. But the reasons could be inorganic. I mean I could be just pleased that the deli tray had sausage that night. Or a good wine. Or my cock in a welcoming mouth. Insofar as pure music and pure performance, well I don't have a sense of this. I mean OXBOW doesn't perform a lot. And when we DO perform we do short tours...3 or 4 weeks...but because we are insane we will play EVERY night of those 4 weeks. And so unlike "bands" for whom touring is part of some kind of grand "career" plan that will get them from ill-defined point A to poorly conceived point B and happens all the time, our live shows are very clearly all about completing a song cycle that starts with me writing words that conceal from the public the very real fact that they are really very much about my life and ends with the prayer of show. And then it's over. We never play the same set because we're not playing to duplicate an experience for you. We play to have an experience that might advance our understanding of who we are and how we are when we're here. Here? On the Pleasure Planet. And yes, it is satisfying. NEXT MONTH: LET US SHOW YOU THE MONKEY IN THE PIPE TRICK [ Newsletter ]