by Chris Eaton
Unfortunately for the band, Harmony Records still had the rights to release the records, and legally owned the masters. So before pressing Freak, Harmon essentially re-produced the album with his own trademarks again, even going so far as to remove most of Willie Collins – and all of Davis’s takes on Asshole – from the mix. There was a brief lawsuit filed on behalf of Chris Eaton by the lawyer of her new boyfriend, a descendant of the Kroger family whom she would later marry and move with back to California. But it became clear from earlier contracts that Harmon was completely within his legal rights, and Chris Eaton essentially retired from music-making as an unknown. It was only later, when one of her albums was rediscovered and a song licensed for the film The Hunger (2001) that the true wonder of Chris Eaton began to spread in the new indie music circles. And we are proud to re-release it here, so that even more people can experience it.
Whether real music fans benefited from Harmon’s historical revisioning has been the subject of many debates. This reissue includes both versions, working with Giallombardo and Collins to restore the songs to Chris’s original vision, so you can decide for yourself.
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Be sure to check Otolith’s final reissue of A New Asshole, originally released in 1971, where we visit the long legacy that Chris Eaton has left on popular music, including her influence on Cleveland bands like DEVO and The Eagles, the meteoric rise of bass player Willie “Bootsy” Collins to band leader for James Brown and then frontman for his own funk masterpiece, Parliament/Funkadelic (Collins has claimed in several interviews that Chris Eaton was the inspiration for his song, “The Bomb”), as well as the wider reach she has achieved in recent years with new indie bands across North America and Switzerland.
His family encouraged him to continue his studies at Kent. But the pain was too great. He couldn’t hold a pen without pain cramping his entire right side. Even oral examinations proved too stressful. And eventually he just moved back to Milford Haven, where the local Texaco refinery took him in as a favor to his father. They even arranged it so he could work from home, meaning he was nowhere near the place for the big explosion in ’94. That was when Tony finally met his maker. Wasn’t even supposed to be there. It was his day off. But he’d gone in to pick up his paycheque so he could put down the last payment on his truck, and the blast was so severe that they found his truck two counties over.
Lucky Tony.
It also meant no one was really monitoring him. And no one was likely to fire the company cripple. So he was able to pursue his other dream of crafting custom Star Wars collectibles. He had missed the first film, A New Hope, when he was in his coma. But the way his friends talked about it only fuelled his obsession. And when the third of the trilogy was released, the new slate of figures was so woefully inadequate that he decided to make his own. It was amazing what you could achieve with old model paints, breaking open the plastic bodies and replacing one figure’s head with another. (The main heroes, Luke and Han Solo, were basically the same, anyway, with their hair painted different colors.) By carving out Darth Vader’s helmet, and replacing his head with Luke’s, he was even able to anticipate a younger version of the Dark Lord, with removable mask, long before Kenner and Lucasworks got around to it.
The toy giant eventually keyed into this collector mentality and began releasing limited runs of the more obscure figures. But by then, Chris Eaton had already established a following by focusing almost exclusively on the second film in the series (his Star Wars wasn’t the episode of youth, which he could barely remember and hardly associated with himself, but the episode of new beginnings). When people contacted him with other requests, he often had to gracefully decline.
Then he received a call from the lawyer of billionaire Travis Cohen.
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Because Travis Cohen had amassed his fortune so early (some said hula hoops, others claimed antiseptics for treating gonorrhea, and still more figured oil), there was nothing left for him to do in 1959 but start accumulating things most people would have no use for. That was how Travis Dara Cohen (using his middle name here so as not to be confused with the comedian, or the young boy from North Carolina who enjoys playing fantasy card games) made his name, not for Jefferson’s bottle of Chateau Lafitte that he acquired in the sixties; not even for several greater wines owned by several lesser Presidents, one of which he even shared at a party with the President of the day and a Senator from California (although he would never disclose when and with whom); not for his trio of Buggati ’41s, painted in red, white and blue; or his collection of vintage Stella guitars; nor his art collection, which concentrated mostly on the Nouveau Réalisme Movement of the sixties, including all signatories of the original group manifesto but ultimately zeroing instead on the movement as it spread from France and Italy to Bulgaria and Argentina (Christo and Varea) as well as England, Portugal, Czechoslovakia (Hardie, Canto, Svra). Those artists were the ones he felt were more successful in capturing the goal of collective singularity, revealing the similarities of life through the differences. And he acquired them largely by inferring himself into their inner circle, via the brother of a fellow New Yorker, a writer who threw popular parties, and the writer, who had been working on her same masterpiece for over ten years and kept reminding them of such, sniffed at Cohen flashing his money at a party thrown by Varea and said loud enough for everyone to hear: He doesn’t look like a Jew. The collection also included: a Dürer gouache once owned by Raphael, thought to have been lost but which he purchased from the Estate of King Farouk along with some rare coins; a study illustration for Raphael’s own The School of Athens (he very nearly purchased the actual fresco from the Vatican, too, until it was deemed to be a load-bearing wall); Caravaggio’s reclining John the Baptist and a Magdalene (a remarkable self-portrait in drag) that the Church sold him instead, because they were never supposed to have them in the first place, acquired by the Knights of Malta on the artist’s death and offered to the Pope in the early-1800s when they relocated their headquarters to Rome, but because of their illicit nature, Cohen had to keep them hidden away, anyway, and he later traded the former to a Munich businessman who owned several refineries near Dresden for the original shutters and frame for Arnolfini’s Wedding Portrait by Van Eyck; a drawing by Da Vinci which, when turned topside, still resembles the artist but smiling; some Titians; a Veronese; a Giorgione; dozens of Rembrandts, signed by him but actually painted by his students; more Van Goghs than were worth mentioning; a room full of others that he couldn’t even remember; the Willem de Kooning supposedly erased by an American artist, for which Cohen bragged at parties he paid extra “for my word that I wouldn’t tell anybody!”, and similarly, the original complete set of Goya’s Los Disastres de la Guerra prints that a pair of British artists had claimed to have defaced in the early-twenty-first century (cowards); and a contemporary painting by Sheri Canto, daughter of the aforementioned Alberto Canto, from whom Cohen had acquired much of her father’s work, depicting herself and Cohen as she hands the collector a perfectly duplicated work by Courbet. He was not known for his collection of early Diners credit cards, with the names of some of the first members on them, including Harry S. Truman, Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando; the Adidas worn by Jesse Owens in Berlin and the waffle iron used to make the first pair of Nike treads; his signed memo from J. Edward Day ordering the reprint of the Hammarsköld invert; not even for the ruthlessly vicious ways that he amassed them, running men into the ground financially when they wouldn’t deal, as he did with E. I. Stronach in order to acquire his political cartoons; or when they were particularly entrenched in their businesses and collections, making deals with their trust-fund children, like Read and Vanier Scott-Haroph, sons of Joseph Haroph, the military aircraft mogul, and the great-great-grandsons of the man who started the Scott Standard Postage Stamp Catalogue, who eventually inherited the generations-old philatelic collection and signed it directly over to Cohen in exchange for one lump payment to cover some old gambling debts. He
was not known for buying the one red shirt worn by every dispensable character in the original Star Trek series from Forrest J. Ackerman; nor for the magnificence with which he showed no discrimination in his viciousness, using equally harsh tactics on fourteen-year-old boys at sci-fi conventions across America, where he switched briefly from collecting to hoarding, dredging up more 12” dolls and playsets from Planet of the Apes and The Six-Million Dollar Man than he knew what to do with, the full set of biker helmets and the original eye patch from No Blade of Grass, the lighting gels used in The Andromeda Strain, and the original sloth suit from the first Sloth vs. Manatee. That was when he realized he was in a league of his own, and needed a new challenge, with his live chess board that included genuine puffed Henry VIII armor for all sixteen pawns, and wild Sorraia horses for knights; or his full tea serving of Yuan Dynasty china; or his set of mint rookie cards for the first Baseball Hall of Fame inductees at each position; his collection of infamous exhumed moustaches, including Nietzsche and Dali, military figures from Hitler and Stalin to Lord Kitchener and Sgt. Floyd Pepper, and the true pièce de resistance, the last moustache of seventeenth century trendsetter Jakob Amman; or a collection of forgeries of Shakespeare’s signature, many of which he had had traced back to equally famous writers of their own day, and had managed to increase their value to greater than the originals. After all this, he realized that his wealth was so immense that it was only a matter of deciding what to own and he could have it, that everything had its price. This dampened his pleasure and sense of accomplishment in acquisition considerably. And he decided instead to create collections that, before he thought of them, would never even have existed, owing their entire existence to an idea borne from his own imagination.
This was how he came into his arrangement with Chris Eaton, after seeing some of his work at the 45th Annual Science Fiction Worldcon in Brighton. After coming to the Star Wars series late, just as Chris Eaton had, with Empire, missing the first film entirely because he was obsessed at the time with digital watches, snatching up the original 18-carat gold pulsar LED prototype at an auction in London, as well as the futuristic clock it had been modeled after, made for the film 2001: A Space Odyssey (the film that got him interested in science fiction in the first place). Cohen had his people bring him an illegally obtained copy of A New Hope, and then, attracted to the idea of a new acquisition, had another set of people acquire the original twelve figures, along with the double-telescoping lightsaber version of Darth Vader, and then the additional nine, including Boba Fett with working missile, Luke Skywalker with hair that was too yellow, and the misinterpreted tall blue Snaggletooth. He purchased the twenty-nine Empire characters as an expensive set at Worldcon 42, and prepared for the thirty-one Return of the Jedi figures by buying entire crates straight off the truck as they arrived at Sears, still cheaper to sift through them than waiting until the other fanatics swooped in and set their arbitrary rarities. This failed to satisfy him, though. What he wanted from Chris Eaton was a complete set. Not just the characters the toy company had produced, but a toy for every character in every film. He still had hundreds of extra bodies from his Jedi purchases to use as fodder, and all he needed was someone else’s expertise. The lawyer who approached Chris Eaton said money was no object. He also said: Heck, son, he has so much money he can probably even make you walk again.
Cohen also wanted him in New York where he could watch him more closely. So he quit his job and packed his bags. And in America, they worked in tandem, with Cohen watching and rewatching the films and Eaton manning the molds and variable-speed Dremel. The two became very attached, perhaps even more attached than Cohen was to his own wife, whom he had met at another sci-fi convention in St. Petersburg in 1971 where she was appearing as part of the cast of Star Trek (easily ranked as top ten hot nameless nurses in the original series, smiling at the captain as she passed by with a clipboard in the episode with the grey fog). Their union had produced a daughter, whom his wife had insisted on naming Ocean, to which Cohen had reluctantly acquiesced. The little girl was his pride and joy, but still Cohen began claiming Chris Eaton was like the son he never had. And as the young Brit put the finishing touches on the last of the Imperial army, modifying dozens of generic Force Commander figures – with a little acrylic enamels on the hair and rank insignia – into everyone from Admiral Veers and Piett to Captain Roehvarr Deshto, Cohen would hover over Chris Eaton’s shoulder and say, with a sweep of his arm, that all of this would one day be his.
That was when he fell in love with Trish.
She was amazing, everything he’d been looking for, especially her firm stance against progress. She refused to get a cell phone or even use the Internet. And her reasons for hating capitalism and technology were as wide and as varied as his own. When his grandparents first moved to Maine from England in 1938, the state was in such lovely disrepair. Homes once used for soldiers holding the border against the British in the War of 1812 had discovered the slimming effects of remaining vacant. Settlements that had once been the pride of their colonial forefathers, where ships were loaded up weekly with monies for the monarchy, were competing to see who could reach Population: 0 first. And the ones that remained created an entirely new fashion out of remaining indifferent. A style that would eventually overtake the entire country. Cracked fence posts. Peeling paint. Houses rallied for the best weeds on the block, if there was a block, which was never. Children and dogs roamed the streets with abandon, and no one cared who owned’m. Charming, it was.
Then “The War” came along and ruined everything. GIs returned from across the pond bearing government grants, a bonus for the employees after so much profit, to either pay for education or buy property, especially in the relatively untouched, pristine areas of the country that threatened to become such a global embarrassment. The war in Europe had shown America the effects time could have on the past, with their overturned French palaces and dilapidated Dutch windmills, so susceptible to bomb and artillery fire and neglect. Or was it disdain? What if a war were to ever break out in New Hampshire? Or Alabama? Would they really want the rest of the world to see that? America was the land of the Future. The land of Perfection. Science and technology. Skyscrapers and motorcars. It was time they started acting like it.
Suddenly, becoming a landowner in Maine was like falling off a truck. Or catching a cold. It crept into their lungs like a virus, and evolved into competition. Porches were replaced. Eavestroughs were repaired. For those who’d shirked their patriotic duties and faked nearsightedness to avoid battle, it was remarkable how a new coat of paint made all of that forgotten. Then people started building additions, or ripping down their old homes to make room for new ones. Communities on the verge of extinction regained their hamlet status, then village, and bang, they were towns again. When Ford started mass-manufacturing Model T’s in 1908, everybody had to have one. New boats were bought, and the lobster and fishing industries really took off…
…which would eventually place almost every species of marine life in danger by the turn of the next century.
Neha’s parents had moved to Maine to speed up the immigration process from India. They were advised during their application process that the have-not states would be more likely to accept them right away, and they would only need to remain for a few years before joining relatives in Boston. So they dug up a list of the coldest, poorest, most remote places to live in America (minus Alaska, of course), and even then, Maine was their fifth choice. Still, they decided to make the best of it, settling in Ellsworth and purchasing a motel, as many Indian immigrants were doing at the time, because her father failed to get one of the twenty medical placements offered to foreign-born doctors each year.
Somewhere in their third year, her father made the acquaintance of a British travelling salesman who regularly stayed with them on his rounds, regaling them with his stories of automotive and electronic fuses, for industry or for the military, surface mounts and semiconductors, the accompanying cable ties and c
ircuit breakers, thyristors, varistors and distribution blocks. All of those things were fascinating in their own right, he said, but it was the seemingly inconsequential, slow-burning MDL – not as small as an automotive fuse, but still less than an inch long – that helped him see the light; and that light came from inside a pressed wood cabinet about the size of a sleeping sheep, shining through a thirteen-inch black-and-white standard resolution monitor. What was he talking about? A surprise, the man said. And on his next visit, he made his big reveal: a table-top issue of Pong – a game where a dial on each side allowed the player to manipulate a virtual game of ping pong with a bouncing ball of light. Neha’s father’s mind was blown. Who wouldn’t love this? So he took out a second mortgage, and he and the salesman, whose name was Maynard, became partners, dealing in dreams, purchasing several dozen tables to rent to other motels across the state and letting people play the hero for only twenty-five cents. Pong led to Space Invaders, Asteroids and Breakout, which meant the revenue was no longer based on a set time but on the skills of the players. The price to play Pac-Man, Centipede and Donkey Kong remained the same, but the complexity of these newer games meant the length of play became even shorter. And with the addition of miniature dramas between levels, which would eventually lead to spin-off games like Ms. Pac-Man and Donkey Kong Jr., patrons spent hours trying to reunite Mr. and Ms. Pac-Man, or Mario and The Princess. They sold the motel entirely and opened up genuine arcades, in Ellsworth and Portland and Bangor and Augusta. They couldn’t sell beer any more, like they could in the motel lounge, but the profits from the games themselves had begun to replace that income anyway. And besides, his partner assured him, there were other things that kids might buy that could provide them with even greater margins. Neha’s father, no idiot, turned a blind eye. Everything was perfect.