“It’s a sad and beautiful world,
and life is not a movie,
and I am not a star.”
– Ed Hall, “Sad and Beautiful World”
It may be fashionable for the artists of today to act as if they don’t care
whether the audience responds to their work, but Ed Hall has persevered for too
long to continue playing that game. “We want people to like us,” insists
Lyman Hardy, Ed Hall’s wide-smiling drummer. “We want to quit our day jobs.” For bassist Larry Strub, who helped start the band in 1985, the impending
release of La La Land is zero hour. “I’m definitely ready to sell a few
records,” he says. “If it doesn’t, I’ll be ready to quit Ed Hall and do
something else. I don’t know what the watermark would be, but we ordinarily
sell 5,000. I’d like to sell 20,000, but I’m not holding my breath.
“I’d like to have a little money so I wouldn’t be part-time. I wouldn’t mind
not having to worry about making payments on the van. I wouldn’t mind having a
paid-for practice space. I’m getting there with this band. I’ve been in this
band a long time. It’s not just the band, though. I’m ready to move out of
Austin, move out of Texas.”
With a solid U.S. and European tour to support it, La La Land just
might have the potential to reach Strub’s “watermark.” However, trying to
predict the whims of the music-buying public is no safe bet. Ed Hall has
certainly been around long enough to see many “Next Big Things” skyrocket
within spitting distance of widespread recognition only to fall back to day-job
reality, all in a matter of months. But regardless of the new album’s fate, Ed
Hall is not a band that can easily be washed off the face of Austin music, and
in a town that gives birth to new bands every day, that has to stand as some
sort of accomplishment.
At home, Ed Hall tends to be eclipsed by many of those new bands, but after
four albums and a lengthy tour in support of their last album,
Motherscratcher, they are perhaps Austin’s best known alternative
export. Once, when my band Noodle was broken down and penniless in South
Florida, a traveling shoe salesman from Boston asked us if we knew Ed Hall.
When we said yes, he let us drink all his beer and crash on the floor of his
motel room. Now that’s a satisfied customer.
And despite evidence of their popularity on the alternative club circuit, Ed
Hall is eager to break out of the shoestring tour/day-job shuffle. There seems
to be consensus among the band members that La La Land, their fifth
album, could prove to be pivotal in that respect. While La La Land does
not exactly reek of breakthrough accessibility, the band has clearly refined
its songwriting while maintaining a capacity for the distorted, spaced-out jams
that has defined the band musically as much as their Germs-style punk sludge,
heavy psychedelica, and penchant for Seventies hard rock theatrics. Most of
all, however, the new album is a highly stylized presentation of Ed Hall’s
development as a musical unit since the band’s inception a decade ago.
Ed Hall Rises
from the Sludge
During their youths, Strub, Hardy, and guitarist Gary Chester all did time in
the culturally vacuous suburbs of Houston, which may explain a lot. The Ed Hall
sound complements H-town like gin complements tonic water on a sticky August
eve; it’s the frightening and cacophonous sound of modern industry working
against you. And beneath the urban rumble, Ed Hall opens your ears to
underlying melodies and patterns that burrow in your head like some computer
chip planted by the Merry Pranksters. But one doesn’t just drop out of the womb
ready to engage in such hijinks. For Chester, KISS was the point of musical
conception.
“I came home from school and I was watching Gilligan’s Island and the
KISS commercial for Alive! came on,” recalls Chester. “I was totally
blown away. After that, I had to have a guitar. I was 11 years old.”
At approximately the same time on the other side of town, Lyman Hardy was
experiencing a similar pull toward Kids in Satan’s Service. “I was in sixth
grade, and I was either gonna join band or choir so I could be in a rock band
like KISS,” says Hardy. “Drums were the only instrument you could convert to
rock, and I couldn’t sing.” For Hardy, the early exposure to KISS indirectly
led to starting a band in high school called Customer Parking Only. “We did
several Hawkwind covers, a few originals, some Joy Division and Who covers,” he
says. “It was pretty eclectic. Our first gig was for the YMCA. We played this
swim meet with all these seven-year-olds and their parents. Then there was us
doing Hawkwind covers.”
Meanwhile, Chester was attending Westbury High School and bulking up on a
diet
of Yes, Black Sabbath, and UFO. “I started jamming with people from jazz band,”
he says. “We had two guitar players and a drummer. We never even had a name. We
played all these covers, but no one would sing. We just had dueling solos.”
However, Chester’s most salient early influence was Escobarb, a mysterious rock
band/secret society that existed at his school around 1980.
“There was this guitar player when I was growing up named Sean Kelly,”
Chester
relates. “He was this total rock god, but he never graduated high school. Then
he decided he never wanted to leave his house. We thought he was the head of
this supposed underground cult conspiracy called Escobarb. They played this
music that was really weird, like Gong. They had all these really weird lyrics,
and they were supposedly all these popular figures at the school with secret
names. They would send their tapes to Sean’s house in a carved-out book wrapped
in Munsingwear underwear like some kind of spy thing. It got really intense.
Then, they sent a book called Escobarb R.I.P., saying they had become
the New Zandergroids. The book had pictures of every person who had ever been
in Escobarb and my picture was in there. No one ever figured out what Escobarb
was or where the tapes were coming from.”
After graduation, Chester attended the University of North Texas in Denton.
“I
wanted to study music at North Texas, but I went up there and there was nothing
but classical and jazz, so I decided to study art because it seemed a lot more
freestyle,” says Chester. “Some weird things happened to me while I was there.
I ended up having this affair with my English teacher, but she moved away and
then I had an affair with her roommate. She wanted to go to school in Austin
and that was how I got to Austin. I’d never even been here before.”
Ed Hall: A Banal and Generic Guy
Larry Strub, who had moved to Austin in the early Eighties to attend UT,
had managed to steer clear of rock bands until age 21, when he picked up the
bass at the advice of John Buron, Ed Hall’s original drummer. “John just said,
`C’mon, let’s do it!’ and we started practicing,” says Strub. “I’d seen people
who did shitty music, and I thought to myself, `Even if you don’t know how to
play music, you can do better than that.'”
The band was christened “Ed Hall” by Buron after he created a character named
Ed Hall in a game of Exquisite Corpse. “John thought Ed Hall was a great name
because it was totally opposite of the Butthole Surfers, Scratch Acid, or the
Dead Kennedys,” explains Chester. “It was just this totally banal, generic
name.”
Chester met Strub through the Art Student’s Association at UT, a
university-funded interest group whose leader was resourceful enough to divert
funds into throwing wild parties where Ed Hall played many of their early
shows. Chester and Strub also had a “Botany for Gardeners” class together.
Yet it was Dong Huong, a Vietnamese restaurant cum punk club on North
Loop (currently occupied by Arafat’s Middle Eastern Cuisine) that allowed Ed
Hall, and other local groups such as the Pocket FishRmen, ST-37, and
Thanatopsis, to develop a mid-Eighties underground punk scene. “I ate there
once,” says Chester. “She didn’t have anything on the menu. She brought me this
soup that was terrible, and then asked if I’d like an egg roll. She then
brought me a pyramid of egg rolls, at least 16, more than I could ever eat. I
had one and she took the pyramid away.
“Then I asked if we could do some shows there.”
Dong Huong had an atmosphere not unlike the Cavity or, more recently, the
Blue
Flamingo. It was a gathering place for musical outcasts who were either too
weird, too scary, or too incompetent to get a show anyplace else. The open-door
booking policy gave new bands a constant place to play and grow in front of a
small-but-enthusiastic audience of open-minded fellow travelers, as well as
folks who were just too loaded to have anything but a good time.
The class of Dong Huong was documented on a locally released cassette
compilation called The Polyp Explodes. It was through this tape that Ed
Hall came to the attention of Boner Records’ Tom Flynn. “We hardly even knew
how to sing when Tom heard the tape and said, `You guys want to do an album?
I’ll give you 500 bucks!'” says Chester.
Boner released Albert in 1988 (which featured the anthematic opus
“Babies”), and Love Poke Here in 1990. Both albums were produced on a
tight budget by Brian Beattie. While a slew of good reviews in the indie-rock
rags and a mini-tour with the Butthole Surfers helped improve the band’s
visibility beyond Austin, signing with Trance Syndicate in 1991 gave Ed Hall a
greater degree of wherewithal to establish themselves nationally. Ed Hall’s
spot on the Trance roster was musically appropriate, since all three members
were big Butthole Surfers mavens, a fact that comes through loud and clear in
the band’s sound. Beyond that, Chester and Trance founder King Coffey were
longtime neighbors who took turns babysitting each other’s dogs.
It was at Coffey’s suggestion that the band went into Butch Vig’s Smart
Studios in Madison, Wisconsin, to record their third album, Gloryhole.
The album featured a cleaner production aesthetic and confounding song titles
like “Rachel Hourglass,” “Hortense Buttermilk,” Luke Flukenstock,” and “Sandra
Gubernatorial,” which is actually former drummer Kevin Whitley’s mutilation of
KISS’ “Beth” (recast as “Deth”).
Hardy joined Ed Hall when Whitley (who had replaced Buron) left the band to
focus his efforts on playing guitar for the Cherubs. Hardy had met the band in
1989 while serving a one-year, nine-month stint in the Army and attending
classes at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas.
“The plan was always to move from Manhattan to Austin, but I didn’t really
have a job or anything,” says Hardy. “I didn’t have any money. I was living off
of these free pizza coupons. This place called Falsetto’s Pizza had put a
coupon in the paper for a free slice of pizza with no expiration date. It was
in the free college paper, so I went and collected all the college papers I
could find. I ate pizza for like two months.” In between slices of pizza, Hardy
also booked bands. After hearing the same tape that got Ed Hall a deal with
Boner, he called the band and invited them to play. “It was the best show of
their tour,” Hardy says. “They made $250, and we had this great party
afterwards. I gave them some Falsetto’s pizza coupons.”
Hardy returned to Houston for a brief period after leaving Manhattan and
played drums with Sugar Shack and the Bayou Pigs. Shortly after moving to
Austin in 1991, he was asked to join Ed Hall, and had to hit the ground running
to learn the band’s songs in time for the Gloryhole tour dates.
“I
was terrified,” says Hardy. “It took me a tour to learn the parts, and it took
me another tour to feel like I was in the group because they play so weird and
different. You can’t just jam along with Ed Hall because the music has this
kind of constant flow to it. Actually, it’s more like an engine with each
person fitting together. At least that’s what it feels like to me.”
From his end, Strub also had a hard time with the transition from Whitley to
Hardy. “It kind of took us a while to be comfortable,” says Strub. “There were
a lot of times where we weren’t quite jibing. In general, we were, but not on
the little details. I think it was because I kind of came up with Kevin and we
had an intuitive thing.”
At any rate, the band didn’t sound like they’d missed a step when they
debuted
with Hardy at Liberty Lunch in the spring of 1992. By this time, Ed Hall’s
penchant for rock theatrics had grown more advanced and elaborate; their shows
were now played against a backdrop of films by Luke Savinsky or gigantic,
much-larger-than-life marionettes of the band. The band also developed its most
effective visual by painting themselves in fluorescent colors and bathing the
stage in black lights. Since Chester and Hardy both studied painting in
college, the idea was a natural for Ed Hall. “I got an art degree and that’s
how I use it,” asserts Chester. “I had to use it for something, so now I paint
myself and I paint houses, too.
“Early on, we used acrylic paint, and it was only me painting up, but
sometimes, Larry painted up, too. Then we started covering ourselves in flour,
but we found out that was explosive. The flour dust can ignite and blow up
everybody like those grain elevators. Plus, the sound man always got pissed off
at us when we did it.”
Obviously, Chester’s boyhood KISS fetish also figured into the “paint
schtick.” “When I was in eighth grade, and we all dressed up like KISS for the
Sadie Hawkins dance, we did win first prize,” says Chester. “We also had
lots of girlfriends in eighth grade for doing that.”
Today, the band uses Jazz non-toxic tempera paint exclusively. They order
Jazz
wholesale from the manufacturer, and hope the company will one day extend tour
support and product endorsement opportunities to the band. “Jazz is the best,”
says Chester. “It tastes the best, smells the best, and feels the best. Crayola
really hurts when it gets in your eyes, but Jazz just melts right off, and you
can’t really feel it.”
After years of practice, it only takes about 15 minutes for the band to paint
up for a show. “It used to take an 45 minutes to an hour, but now we do more
abstract kinds of stuff,” Chester explains.
Painting Europe
and La La Land
With Hardy reasonably comfortable on the drum stool, Ed Hall decided to try
its hand at the grueling brand of non-stop touring by which independent bands
live and die by. They received their first big mouthful of this life by
supporting the Dwarves and Flipper for seven weeks immediately after spending
five straight days recording their fourth album, Motherscratcher. The
experience provided ample grist for a song (the groovy-bottomed “Flipper”), but
that’s where the positive aspects of the tour end.
“It was harsh, man,” says Chester. “It was totally harsh. Flipper was
partying
full-on, and the Dwarves were kind of on their demise. It was a bad vibe. We
were with them seven weeks in a row, though, so we had to become friends with
them.
“We were the opening band, but we had this major production with the black
lights. Then the Dwarves would come on and play maybe 20 minutes, and then
Flipper would come on and scare everyone away except for 20 or 30 hardcore
Flipper fans. We came back changed people. We never wanted to do that again.”
On the greener side, Ed Hall also ventured to Europe for the first time during
the Motherscratcher tour. They played everywhere from squats in the
Czech Republic to the Peel Sessions studio in London to a club in the
Netherlands called Gibby’s.
“We’d never been to Europe, and our albums are poorly distributed there, but
people showed up, and we were usually the only band on the bill,” says Chester.
“I was glad we painted up every night. People were digging it, especially at
the end of the night. I’d give my guitar to some person just to jam at the end
and they were loving it. For a first tour, it was awesome.”
After spending seven months of 1994 on the road, Ed Hall went into Music Lane
to record La La Land with Adam Bryan Wiltzie, who worked with the band
on Motherscratcher. Since there were no pressing tour plans to worry
about, the band had more time to record La La Land. In addition, they
mastered the album themselves. The result is a warmer, dirtier sound that
brings out the band’s predilection for gee-whiz studio effects in a fun way.
However, the recording of La La Land was no scot-free affair.
As
the band was mixing, the studio was ominously struck by lightning. “We were
recording and not backing up all the mixes on floppy disk,” recalls Chester.
“All of the sudden, there was this loud bang and the board just freaked out. It
went into this random light pattern and all the meters peaked out. The computer
went into this shredding mode, and started erasing four months of the studio’s
fader mixes, but we endured. It came out pretty good, but I sure as hell
wouldn’t want to do it again.”
La La Land is an intense affair that slaps you in the face repeatedly
before leaving you wallowing in an ambient den of casino sounds that’s designed
to calm you down again. The collective rhythmic turbine of Strub and Hardy
weaves dangerously in and out of the foreground like a drunken couple trying to
dance a forgotten waltz. At the same time, Chester’s guitar heroics hover over
the proceedings with a twisted direction that is impossible for the listener to
plot. Listening to La La Land from start to finish is the aural
equivalent of being in a room with someone you don’t know very well, who
manages to convey a frighteningly complete spectrum of emotion in a matter of
hours before both of you pass out from exhaustion.
Perhaps the album is more effective because it is more oriented toward songs
than jams. “There are still a lot of songs on the new record that come from
jams, but we’re definitely writing a lot more songs these days,” Chester says,
who adds that the band never even wrote songs the first two years of its
existence. “Now we’re trying all kinds of things to write songs. I’m constantly
coming up with riffs, but you have to know what you can use with the band
arrangement. If you’re coming up with violin parts and you don’t have a violin
player, you do something else.”
Hardy feels the new album benefits from the newfound synchronicity between
himself and Strub. “I think we really got it together on the
Motherscratcher tour,” he says. “Larry and I really have a groove now.
Motherscratcher was a guitar riff-oriented record, but I think this new
one is more groove-oriented. It’s a little shake-your-booty record.”
Ed Hall’s Multi-Sensory Exercise in Futility
When the band emerged victoriously from the studio after recording La La
Land, they were greeted with an invitation to headline the Austin Music
Awards. Ed Hall’s presence at the awards show was played up in the media as
some sort of symbolic changing of the Austin music guard, but Chester said the
reality was not quite as glorious. “We were having fun and partying,” Chester
recalls. “We met Jimmie Vaughan and tried to get him to play guitar on
“Flipper,” but he said he didn’t know the material.
“We had this huge production. We painted up and we painted up Margaret Moser,
and a whole bunch of other people. Then we got on and all these people started
leaving in droves and we were like, `Who cares?’ It was like the booby prize.
It didn’t make us feel like heirs to anything. It was more like the dregs, but
at least it looked good on TV. You couldn’t see people leaving in droves.”
Yet, during South by Southwest a few short nights later, Ed Hall presided
majestically over a Trance showcase that was chock full of superlatives. The
night featured a cameo by Bob Mould, a bread-chucking bonanza at the
mischievous hands of Crust, and the unveiling of Sixteen Deluxe to the world at
large, but it was Ed Hall’s performance that defined the tone of the evening.
From the time the fluorescent paint-coated trio began bobbing about the stage
to the tune of “Pollution,” the consummate, multi-sensory weirdness of their
performance captivated a good portion of the audience. By show’s end, the sweat
and orange paint-drenched denizens were left dawdling wild-eyed about the
Terrace lobby, chattering incessantly about the Ed Hall spectacle they’d just
witnessed.
The fact that a large venue like the Terrace was full of people from all over
listening to an all-Texas lineup of music that had previously been relegated to
the periphery was impressive. The fact that Ed Hall could dominate such an
event shows that they just might be on the brink of something even better.
“It started as this dumb idea and this is where it is now,” muses Chester.
“It’s just this exercise in futility of seeing how far you can take
ridiculousness.”
Projectionist Luke Savisky
This article appears in May 19 • 1995 and May 19 • 1995 (Cover).
