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The Lowdown: Boogie Oogie Oogie Breakdown
by Al Larsen
(originally appeared in Careless Talk Costs Lives #12)

Been there? Done that? Yeah, right, I bet. Listen here: "The Lowdown are so deliriously misguided it makes everything seem possible again." Been there? Done that? Yeah, right, I bet. Listen here: "Logic goes out the window when broken souls make broken music with broken toys". I mean, this is a band that PLAYED A SHOW IN A TREE! (Okay, I made them play in the tree but they still did it [until the drums fell out...]). It's almost a crime to write about this band and describe their ideas secondhand... they become catalogued, quantified, turned into a gesture ("ohh... that whole lowdown thing...") when they can only be described, when they should be experienced. Who cares if John Cage sat at his piano for a couple of minutes and did nothing while the sounds of the world crept into the concert hall? Yawnsville, right? Wrong - I WAS THERE AND IT WAS RAD! Similarily, Joseph Beuys locked in the art gallery with the wolf and a felt blanket until they made peace, I mean, don't talk to me about "boring, unemotional conceptual art" -- it was real and I still have some of the wolf shit on my jacket! Their first single was free - a set of 14 x 7 manifestos and cartoons folded into a plastic bag with a junk thriftstore single (mine was Kenny Rogers, "The Gambler", talk about junk...). Their second single was 3D Zoviet France style electrical wire and electrical tape spiral cover with THEIR OWN MUSIC INSIDE. Around this time the head of an international music imprint was pumping me for news from the youth so I tried to enthusiastically describe this trio from Santa Cruz that sounded like "KARP powered with casio beats, if you know what I mean". After a long pause: "Actually I have no idea what you mean". And for once in my life I had the good sense to keep my mouth shut and just shrug. This is not a band you want to see commercialized.

Live - a loud sufferance of trying to keep up with the robot beats - this is industrial music as Charlie Chaplin would have made it - all about the tramp not able to keep up with the assembly line, not able to get anything out of the cellphone aside from beeps and whistles, digital distortion and stern admionitions to hang up and try again. I once saw this band, THIS IS NOT A LIE, play in a junk-strewn parking lot, as it was getting dark, and a jet was flying overhead, shooting fireworks out its tail, and cops were driving by, DRIVING OVER THE EXTENSION CORD, oblivious.

Inevitably an lp followed: the aggressively unlistenable "Revolver II" that elevates amp buzz to the level of an instrument. That is as comically and gorgeously flawed as the most comically and gorgeously flawed Fall record (personally, I'm thinking of 'Slates'). And things would have been perfect right there - they could have been ignored into oblivion or even compartmentalized as the loverock flowering of the Pussy Galore legacy but now there's something new: a cassette single (excuse me, who in their right mind does cassette singles in the era of 50 cent CD-Rs? - Oh yeah, right, exactly) and I think it means that oblivion for the Lowdown is not really an option. The song is "The Lowdown presents: the Magical House" - a DEMENTED sort of theme song about a group living situation and a chore wheel that sounds so damn strange and upbeat I can only think of Gorky's Zygotic Minki, with thankfully, only the most limited instrumental competence. When the bad 8-bit sampler is keyed to emit "house" in a low slowed down voice, you know the corporations are going to rue the day they ever let cheap samplers into the hands of children. No, you can't dance to it, but then again you can't dance. Well, you can, but you know what I mean. You can shake around to it as well as you can to something with a consistent beat!

But lest we get too focussed on the band and not the ideas, know that the Lowdown is just the canary - or rather, they represent just the crumbling bits at the entrance to a vast coalmine of possibility, but the eyelash on a single face of a many-headed hydra. Orbiting near them are the Comets on Fire, a heavy Blue Cheer-style combo that would make an old grunge-rocker weep bitter tears for wasting their youth on colored vinyl and Butch Vig production values when the truth is in bent strings and levitational bass vibrations - for which Lowdon drummer Noel plays echoplex - not echoplex guitar, just echoplex, and center stage too. And the b-side of Magical House by the artists known as Lady Fingers & Laura Lymes... all polemics and mystery... probably the best song recorded in America in the past 35 years, not that you need to hear it. Stuff like this just isn't supposed to happen in Santa Cruz.

Go ahead, buy their records, be disappointed. Catalog their innovations so you can become uninspired and immobilized by them and move on to the next topic uninspiring, immobilizing topic.

Or, just know this -- their is underground hope in America, there is an energy community that's high on possibility. Even in the midst of a mess their is a creative impulse bigger than the latest fashion shoved down our throats, hypnotized into our minds ("Puff Daddy is now P. Diddy repeat after me Bjork is wearing a swan to the harps and choir global warming sit-in. repeat after me..."). And even ignorant as you are and should probably remain of the particular sounds and faces of the Lowdown, you too can touch this wild misguided energy and ride it almost high enough to see where you're going. And you don't have to buy anything, ever again.

Been there? Done that? I bet you have, and yet...