by Camden Joy
Taken along with their first three albums, Sonny was an album that was critical to the success of the No Depression revolution, yet also shows why Souled American could not live with the results.
Chaos, a Theory Called Souled American
Imagine a world without the European Community. Now imagine a world without Souled American. What if I told you that the second was indispensable to the first, that without Souled American there would have been no united federation of free European democracies forming a continental congress? Yes, now that Jimbo the Glickster has leapt the monodimensional fences of standard linear science to prove that without butterflies there wouldn’t be no rainstorms—I speak here of Chaos, our acclaimed-est of theories, that most ab-fab of lab rats, and this notion that forecasts themselves contribute turbulence (pitchfork bifurcations, stable lines breaking in two, then four, then eight; the appearance of chaos itself; and within the chaos, the astonishing geometric regularity): Cause and Effect merrily take turns atop one another’s shoulders in this world swept by disoriented winds of havoc—Henceforth, hey! It is a given that Most What We Do whenever will affect Past and Future equally, that Most What You Read will end your life, that no things make sense (what with the terrible taste most you Johnny Boy linearity adjutants possess, your sick cars pulling out at all hours and payphones ringing with product surveys, your linear kids on the Straight Sidewalk of Squares hurling their hellos and delaying my milkman!) and embracing this escalation of contingencies and post-deterministic prognostications we grow unable to admit or deny that without the 1988 release of Souled American’s Fe: George Bush wins in 1992, Barbara Bush dies suddenly, George Bush remarries Anna Nicole Smith who, thence reknighted as Evita, poisons Bush’s inner organs on national television with a crew of faith healers, employing solely astral projections and implied karmic interrogatories. If everything did not occur Exactly As It Did we wouldn’t happen to be standing right here right now! Right on! If Souled American hadn’t arrived in small-acknowledged Fulda on 15.Oct.92 to play an unassuming nightclub called Kreuz . . . Ist sie den Liebenden leichter? Ah! take flight, precious certainties! We lose our ability to know for sure that Mobutu contracts prostrate cancer, the Bulls win 72 in a season, the Human Genome Project continues apace, life expectancy soars despite Reseda earthquake 17.Jan.94, we can even debate whether I would still arrive at this idea for a poster! And so I pen my pleading Mrs. Missive to you Johnny Boys aiming to convince you this is a band over whom we must chant devotional incantations, alighting incense and shrines alike, hugging monitors to our breasts in an incensed madcap mayhem of machismo, bent of knee in supplication, petitioning them with prayerful entreaties, humbled and roaring, grateful of consequence! Praised Be Thou, O souled A merican, Mayest Surges of Pride Press Thee, denn das Schöne ist nichts als des Schrecklichen Anfang, den wir noch grade ertragen—the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity!
Nebraska, Neuopren, and Souled American
Someone just asked me: yeah, what happened to them, to Souled American; and he spoke this recoiling in horror. “I bought a used CD of theirs for $4.00. And it’s terrible. And they used to be so good!”
What could I say? I haven’t heard them in years.
And for me, they come with such complicated associations.
My story begins near the acclaimed Liver Transplant Unit where, in our organ-rich state, we had grown giddy, taking good news for granted; plasma exchanges, immunosuppressants, chemoembolization, decreased organ rejections . . . heck, why not beat up our innards with toxins if those age-old fears of cirrhosis, hepatomas, lymphocytes, and complete liver failure had now been consigned to the past, easily fixed courtesy of the Med School’s retransplantation successes?
And so into the medicine cabinet we strode, linked to the newest in narcos by Boyce Canton, a Year 3 med student who could obtain anything for us. Neuopren’s sweet release brought the oblivion of the cadaver, skin waxy like apples and all. Ketamine’s teetering awe brought the exuberance of the stupid, an incessant blind flight of wonder. Neither alone would enlighten but blended tenderly to make a “Slammer” (souLed AMERican injection) we became slow giants with quick minds, brains dancing in lumbering benumbed bodies, erratic in our brilliance and paused in our appreciation, open enough to comprehend yet closed enough to (somewhat) communicate. A little entrance, a little exit; a little up, a little down. Our gleeful, mocking thoughts escaped, while messy toxins pooled in those readily replaceable livers of ours.
We did slammers in college in Nebraska and found it a good enough state in which to listen to the radio. Which is the only place where I heard Souled American. To me, in this particular condition, they were our very own potentates of glum, falling through each song in a brave, ageless way I’ve never heard since. They seemed infatuated with reproducing the sorts of rhythms one feels on a boat at night, an uneasy slope, a bit of creaking to and fro, a wooziness, the chill ocean black and vast. It was fantastic music, an hypnotic bummer, a giant of cinema, but exactly not the kind you could ever share with anyone who wasn’t into slammers. It had too much of that ‘been-up-all-night-can’t-get-warm’ feeling. It reminded us: we die so fast; fifty, sixty years. Sometimes eighty years. Sometimes just thirty.
And how like us seemed their unsustainable enterprise, our spirits too crawling like low clouds close to the earth, lacking viability, visibility, speed.
“I want to kiss you and never be there,” croaked somebody in a song I heard recently who wasn’t Souled American, in a song that for me pretty much summed up the hide-and-go-seek of those Souled American college years.
So, what happened.
We gave up slammers when Boyce suffered a sudden “neuronic occurrence,” losing use of the more interesting elements of the lobe anterior to his medulla.
I had my hands full with other stuff. I never went back to Souled American.
Notes While Listening to Notes Campfire
the sky blackens suddenly
the trash flies down the street
the clothes dance wildly on the line
a bicycle falls over
the room darkens
the sky rumbles, clouds flash
leaves are flattened to the branch.
Almost as an afterthought
it begins to downpour.
Pressing Importance
Ten years ago I worked at a record pressing plant in Firebaugh, California (small town, outside Fresno). Some of what we manufactured came by way of San Francisco. Souled American’s Fe—I remember when we received the master plates for that from Rough Trade.
Most of the time we pressed sets of Dick Clark and Casey Kasem doing their top forty shows. We performed this chore almost all week long, every week, over and over. These men had recorded their supposedly spontaneous Sunday radio broadcasts far in advance, perhaps months before. These were the shows that told America’s kids what to buy.
Records were stamped out by an automated press. Black vinyl goop squirted in, finished LPs shot out the side. When we were making Fe, the press expressed some weird maladjustment. Excess goop kept clogging the innards. This actually happened a lot, it wasn’t anything special. You’d open up the press to scrape it clean and it was like performing surgery on an extraterrestrial, this dark cavity globbed-up everywhere with melted rubber, like strolling into a machine that makes licorice-flavored taffy. Sometimes I considered this, how the press after all did make candy for the airwaves.
But mostly I was far too busy working.
The Casey Kasem and Dick Clark operations were very involved packages. These were three-hour radio shows mailed out in four-record sets. We’d sleeve the records, stack the sleeves in these standard jackets, then ship each boxed set priority UPs to one of five hundred radio stations. A lot of things relied on our dependability. Across the country they’d put the needle to these same four LPs at the same time each week. Do they do this still? Doubtful. They use satellites to syndicate things instantaneously nowada
ys. And now there’s CDs, after all. What I’m describing hearkens back to the dying age of vinyl, when a couple smooth-voiced DJs narrated the contest between the best-selling 45s like some dramatic horserace between recording celebrities.
There was this once when I put some Rough Trade records in a Casey Kasem sleeve, in the American Top Forty jacket, in the box addressed to KVEN in Ventura. Souled American’s Fe was one of those I included. I had fun imagining how this would recalibrate the taste of America’s teenagers, how, come Sunday, they’d get a sampling of that tongue-tied and soft-spoken sound of Souled American, full of radiant shadows that defy explanation, like their first glimpse of the girl they will always wish they’d married.
But then I chickened out and put the right records in their proper sleeves. This was my job, after all, and I needed the money.
Interview, Part Two
A: Somebody in San Francisco was talking recently about raising money through a bunch of benefit shows to get Souled American to come out and play in the Bay Area, because there were so many people there who loved them. But no, Souled American weren’t a laugh-and-share-the-joke kind of thing. I got the feeling they were a very insular group. Whenever I talked to people in Chicago at the time who had links to the music scene, they rarely knew anything about Souled American. There was a specific group of people I think that was very attached to the band and that was it. The band would play regularly at this one place, the Cubby Bear, just down the street from Wrigley Field. I got the sense they were very much apart from other things that were going on. A scene—a microscene, maybe—unto themselves.
Q: So this wasn’t a terribly forthcoming band?
A: No. Stoned, I would say, is the word. They were sorta stubborn and sorta stoners. Basically pretty nice, rather shy people, I think.
Q: Did you see enough of their shows to get a sense of how they differed, show to show?
A: Well, they certainly had different modes. I suspect that it had a lot to do with how much pot they’d been able to smoke before they went onstage. I’m serious. The draggy tempos and such, I think that has a lot to do with that. Sometimes they were incredibly stretched out and yet still . . . perfect, you know? Their timing was still perfect; it was just incredibly draggy.
Q: They were always listening to one another.
A: Right. And then at other times it could be quite uptempo. What makes them unusual is, I think, is . . . it’s funny, there are loads of examples of reggae bands doing covers of country songs, but only Souled American went the other way around. If I remember right, Chris and Joey had been in a reggae covers band (it could have been more than that, it could have been all of them). And once when Souled American played a show in New York which I guess was really . . . it was before the deal was signed, a showcase gig, and I think they played two and a half sets, or two sets with a really long encore. They moved on to playing covers at a certain point and I remember they did a really great chug-along uptempo version of a Bob Marley song—not a classic Bob Marley song, more a pop Bob Marley song. “Could You Be Loved,” I think.
Flubbing It
The 1987-1988 sessions at Chicago Trax yielded Fe, the debut album. Fe was named from band jargon, “fe” being their name for “feel.” It was picked up by Rough Trade U.S., and received rather widespread praise. A legion of fans sprouted up around the country. Unfortunately, as they returned to Chicago Trax in 1989 to record their sophomore work, Souled American had no way of knowing that they would never be this popular again.
Why did it turn out so? It’s high time we floated a few theories. They obviously didn’t “play the game” as regards their look or their set lists or whatever. Their sound, for example, prominently featured rather unusual choices. The drums were never again as loud and voluble as they were on Fe (midway through their discography the drummer departed, and was never replaced), and without drums people won’t tap toes, dance, or (for the most part) hear your songs on the radio; the lyrics grew less frequent as the band experimented with sonic uncertainties and distended tempos, riddling their hallucinatory aural space with echo, amnesia, and regret (an aesthetic not terribly distinguishable from that practiced—to opposite effect—by today’s most popular techno and electronic acts); they never wrote a “big hit” and for a time, in fact, shied away from even performing their own compositions; in short, though with each subsequent outing their brilliance and bravery remained audibly intact, they truthfully never made another record as direct as their first. After the first album, their access points closed up, sealed over with mystery and gunk, a submarine lost at sea. Their sporadic touring slowed to a halt; no one in America recalls seeing them since 1991. Their record company went bankrupt immediately after the release of their poorly distributed third album; their fourth album eventually came out only through the British arm of the label; their fifth and sixth albums were released solely in Europe.
But one must return to the basics: at the height of their notoriety, as they finished up the tracks for their second album, they had a choice to make, they had to decide what to call it, and they went with the name Flubber. It should have been obvious how this would turn out. The name—perhaps they knew this, perhaps they didn’t—was that of a failed toy from the early ’60s.
As the magazine Stay Free just recently reported, Hasbro had developed a product called Flubber, a rubber and mineral oil substance that could bounce like a ball and take imprints, to tie in with the 1963 Walt Disney movie Son of Flubber. After it had been on the market for several months, the company began receiving reports that Flubber was causing a rash. Tests on prisoners subsequently revealed the product could irritate hair follicles. A mass recall of the Flubber product was instituted. “Thousands and thousands of balls were consigned to the city dump. The next day Hasbro execs received a call from the mayor of Providence, who informed them that a black cloud hovered over the dump; the rubber would not burn properly. Merrill Hassenfeld of Hasbro called the Coast Guard for permission to weight the Flubber and dump it at sea. Permission was granted. However, the next day the Coast Guard called to complain that Flubber was floating all over Narragansett Bay. After paying the Coast Guard to sweep the ocean, Hassenfeld took the mess and buried it in his backyard.”
Could this have not been an omen? What a Flubber-like path they came to travel—Souled American, bouncing like a ball, gathering up impressions, a briefly celebrated toy—“product presently unavailable”—persistent, determined . . . but essentially ending up buried in some backyard somewhere.
Il Duce Wore Adidas
Sometimes it seems they are daring to make the worst possible play on words—so many clumsily punning lyrics are layered in with the earnest sentiments as to be a defiant policy of avoidance on its own—consider their very name, you envision them deciding to title themselves after the slogan “Buy American”; throwing that out in a few seconds for its complete opposite, “Sell American”; smoking dope and pasttensing that name soon enough into “Sold American” which they misspell, as a joke, at their first gig, to become “Souled American”; the name is terrible, awkward, unfunny. It’s as if they were invented by us, twelve writers with nothing better to do than make up an obscure group with a stupid name and put up posters celebrating them. Why believe they exist when their first four releases are available nowhere and their subsequent two available in one store in America (415-647-2272)? “Sold American will not be Sold in America”—could this have been the aim all along?
Considering their homophonous loves, it becomes relevant to consider how they came by their individual names. Take the bassist, Joe Adducci. It has been well-documented that the khakis campaign (Castro wore khakis, Khruschev wore khakis) left its mark upon the sarcastic psyche of Southern Europe, but few are aware how—in response—graffiti arose facetiously declaring Mussolini’s endorsement of athletic shoes. “Il Duce Wore Adidas” announced every wall Souled American saw during their first perambulation about the continent. The drummer read the graffiti aloud to the band, snic
kering, whereupon this rapid fire exchange occurred: “Il didas,” the guitarist freely associated. “Il didas,” the bassist quickly added, “Joe Adducci.” Swiftly, the singer concluded it: “Joe Adducci for Elitists.” From this series of cockamamie sound-alikes evolved the bassist’s “name”—Joe Adducci.
Then there was the Brit yelling at them, “Christ, Bugger Off!” which, after a fashion, led to the singer’s “name” Chris Grigoroff; there was their jargon for the bassist’s style (“like a Scottish Tuba”) which led to the guitarist’s “name” Scott Tuma; and there was the band’s affection on tour for calling out “J’ me in the barnyard!” (as in, pass me a marijuana cigarette, a “joint,” to allow me to endure these crude lodgings) which became, after a few slurrings and stretchings, the “name” for their drummer, Jamey Barnard.
To the Tune of “Who Killed Davey Moore?”
Who killed Souled American
Why, who’d do such a thing?!
Not I, said the music critic, ignoring their CDs again
I had my hands full
serving the smart-aleck patrol
sarcastic! ironic! unfeeling and dull!
policing what’s hip, deciding what’s cool
paid to promote some pretty young sell-out
a “proto-anarcho femme fatale” no doubt
justifying those I hated last week
first I can’t stand the kitchen, now I cheer for the heat
in commentaries oh so wry
it wasn’t me that made them die
Blame distributors, blame managers
industry apparatchiks
recording engineers
Blame the band’s oh so stubborn desire to hide
it’s obvious this was suicide