Three for Thursday with Steve Brown

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Today starts a new feature on the Circus Posterus blog called Three for Thursday. Every so often on a Thursday, we will ask some of the Circus artists and fam a question picking their brains. The premise is simple, Ill ask a question wanting three answers. (yes this is a throwback to the days of zines)

For the fledgling entry, we have the yo-yo master and a man behind many scenes at Circus Posterus, Mr. Steve Brown.

Today I posed this question to Steve, “What three albums changed your life?

Now we let Steve tell us:

It’s absolutely impossible for me to do a “Top Three”. So many albums have changed my life at so many different times and places…Jawbreaker’s “Dear You” bled in to “Orange Rhyming Dictionary” by Jets To Brazil which led me to “Board of Rejection” by Gunmoll and those three albums kept me plenty sane at different points. How do I pick which album by The Clash meant more…trying to negotiate between “Sandinista”, the first album that made me really understand how much a band could push themselves even within the constraints of a major label and “London Calling” which was my first taste of white boys digging in reggae, and “The Clash” which was one of the first 3 punk rock albums I owned…it’s just impossible.

So here are three releases that meant a lot, but not until later. They didn’t rip the skies apart and change my world the second I heard them…but over the years I’ve gone back to them over and over and all of them have taken at least a decade for me to figure out how important they are to me.

In no particular order:

 Dead Kennedys – Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables

The first DK album I actually heard was “Plastic Surgery Disasters”, and it was loaned to me my freshman (sophomore?) year of high school by Sean Mahan. I don’t think Sean realized the impact that he had on me in high school, probably because I never told him. He was one of the coolest people I’d ever met. There was a weird little trio of him, Patrick Billard, and Todd Blumenthal. Those guys had already forgotten more about music than I knew, and I would desperately eavesdrop on their conversations and furiously scribble down band names to look for later. I would beg, borrow, and steal to scratch up money to go to Einstein-A-Go-Go (an all-ages indie rock club at Jacksonville Beach) on the nights I knew they were going, to see bands I’d never heard of. I wanted to be cool so badly, it hurt. And those guys were just effortlessly cool.

So one day, Sean loaned me two cassettes…one was “Scratch N Sniff Car Crash” by the Swamp Zombies (I will maintain to this day that their fourth album, “A Frenzy of Music and Action”, is still one of the best albums ever released) and “Plastic Surgery Disasters” by the Dead Kennedys. He did this after my very disastrous attempt to strike up a conversation with him and Todd about some band that I was pretending to know something about in order to fool them into thinking I was cool. Todd was a hilarious guy who was also deeply sarcastic and could sniff out bullshit a mile away, and he quickly called me out on mine. Sean, I think, just felt bad for me when he saw the flush of burning humiliation creep in to my cheeks and he kindly rooted around in his backpack and handed me those two cassettes, saying only “I think you might like these.”

He was right. I did. I absolutely loved them, in fact. So much so that after my first listen that night, I wrote and dispatched letters to both bands’ record labels asking for a catalog and more information about those bands.

Doctor Dream Records informed me they were out of the first two albums by the Swamp Zombies, but sent me a catalog and some stickers. Alternative Tentacles sent me a loose cassette of “Fresh Fruit”, a catalog, some stickers, and a note that said “The case for this was smashed, but the tape works fine. It’s DK’s first album…if you like a band, always start at the beginning.” It wasn’t until years later that I saw someone get an autograph from Jello Biafra and recognized his signature…and realized that he’d written me that note and sent me the tape.

I played that tape until it died, and then bought it on vinyl and then again later on CD. And to this day, any time I hear a band I like, the first thing I do is hunt down their first release. Always start at the beginning.

Click More for the remaining two albums that changed Steve’s life

Hot Water Music – Eating The Filler

For the first half of high school, I was of the impression that Ian Mackaye peaked with Minor Threat. Then someone gave me a copy of “Steady Diet of Nothing” and when the bass line strolled in at the :15 mark of “Reclamation” I realized I was very, very wrong and this was something that needed to be reckoned with. With my induction into the legion of Fugazi fans I was also introduced to the nom de plume “post hardcore” which sounded pretentious and stupid to me then (and still does, frankly) but was used to describe this new music I was hearing that I simply referred to internally as “punk for people who read books”.

I grew up in Jacksonville, Florida (for the most part) and on my way out of high school (and my way out of Jacksonville, I moved to Tallahassee in 1995) I started to hear rumblings about Gainesville and the music scene that was happening there. I heard about Less Than Jake, and saw them live a few times and they were great guys and a fun live band. And I heard there was a “post hardcore” band in Gainesville called Hot Water Music and I said “Seriously? Some guys in a band named themselves after a Bukowski book?” and I was immediately interested.

Because let’s face it, Bukowski was brilliant and despicable and not exactly the go-to guy for band names….that would be Vonnegut. How many shitty high school bands were named “Slaughterhouse 5” or “Catch 22” or “Harrison Bergeron” or “Monkey House” or any number of other not-very-subtle Vonnegut references? Bajillions. But Bukowski? There was nothing romantic or clever there…Bukowski was fuckin’ scary business. People had heart attacks and got their pricks bitten off by motel hookers and got thrown out of cars and beaten up in alleys and did all of this while drinking themselves to death. It was a scary place, Bukowski-land, and to name your band after that corner of hell was either really bold or really pretentious. Florida doesn’t do well with pretension, generally speaking. It’s really hard to be pretentious while hawking tickets to an alligator farm to see an 18-foot crocodile named “Gomek”. Not that people haven’t tried, but it’s really hard.

I digress.

So in 1995, someone traded me a copy of HWM’s Eating The Filler 7″ (for a pack of cigarettes, ha) and it pretty well blew my face off. I hit the local record store (RIP, Vinyl Fever) and they didn’t have anything from this band so, in typical Steve fashion, I wrote myself a note to look for more and then promptly lost the note. Then my record player died, then I ended up homeless for a while, and then I didn’t really worry too much about music because I was busy with that whole “scrambling for food/shelter” deal. So long, Hot Water Music.

Time passed, and I got myself together and found another job and got a place to sleep that was actually covered and had walls and eventually I stumbled back into the creature comforts of life. I started throwing yo-yos for a living, which means I had money to go to shows, which is how I met Derron Nuhfer.

Derron was, at the time, a Gainesville resident who was playing saxophone for Less Than Jake. He was a nice guy, and he traded me a fistful of LTJ merch for a fistful of yo-yos. We started hanging out whenever he was in town, and then at some point I made it to Gainesville with a buddy and Derron started introducing me to people. “This is Chuck, he’s in a band called Hot Water Music.”

Oh fuck. I totally forgot about them. They’re AMAZING!

So I picked up a copy of “Forever and Counting” which had just come out at that point, and when I heard “3 Summers Strong” I realized that I needed this band. And I met George and JB and Wollard and they were great guys, making great music, who became good friends. They came to my wedding (the second one, ha, ugh), they crashed at my house when they were on tour, and in getting to know them I realized I was doing it all wrong. Those four guys are seriously like some kind of scruffy, bearded Florida Voltron. They’re each amazing in their own right, but when you combine them the sum is greater than the parts. They are bottled lightning, and hanging out with those guys was my first true realization of the power of collaboration. See, before Hot Water Music I always assumed that great things came from great people. Individually. I always assumed that when you saw something amazing, ONE person made that happen and likely just dragged along a few accomplices to handle the detail work. I was arrogant, and pretty ignorant of how the world actually worked. Forgive me, I was young. But the four of them are nothing alike, and are each constantly pulling in opposite directions and when their movements align and they all end up pushing in the same direction for a little while, incredible shit happens. The push/pull between Chuck and Chris is incredible. Chuck is a burly little dude, Chris is tall and almost willowy. Chuck breaks strings just by looking at them, where I’ve seen Chris fall of the stage and land with his guitar still in tune. Chuck growls and snarls, Chris pleads and howls. Nothing alike. JB hangs out and plays Cure bass lines. No joke. You’d think that has no place in this gruff, throaty Gainesville rock but there it is and it works perfectly. And hiding in the back, George holds it all down, like the calm at the eye of a hurricane, almost at times oblivious to the unmitigated anarchy that’s happening up at the front of the stage. And it all works.

Before Hot Water Music, I assumed that I needed to find people who were just like me if I wanted to put together a team of super-friends to get something done. I couldn’t have been more wrong. What I needed in my life was diversity, I needed antagonism, I needed people to push and challenge and straight-up humiliate me sometimes in order to get the best out of myself. Listening to their albums, hanging out with them I realized that they had figured out a valuable life lesson that I was still years away from being able to put into practice. And every HWM song reminds me of this and for that and a million other reasons, they will always be one of my favorite bands.

 

Iggy and The Stooges – Raw Power

I love everything about this album, and there’s absolutely no story behind it. It’s just amazing to me, and I can listen to it for hours on end.

Seriously, that’s it. I know, I usually have all these long-winded motivations for everything and all these weird, deeply personal, tenuous connections that build this unconscionably weird scaffolding of bullshit that I hang everything upon but really….this album just makes me want to drink and fuck and fight and scream and dance and eat dessert first. It’s beautiful, and everyone should own a copy.

Thank You Steve!
Keep checking back for the next installment of Three for Thursday!

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