All Ages Show CD Rerelease
Year: 2004
Label: Pink House/Elemenopee
Location: The Pink House
Comments: This was our first official full-length release. We recorded the entire thing on Tascam 4-track and 8-track cassette recorders in our basement and my bedroom. We released the tape at a benefit for the Povarello Center - called Povstock - in 1994. That night is also the night that the Roxy Theatre on Higgins Avenue burned down in dramatic fashion a block away from the venue. A night to remember for sure.
We re-released this album on CD in 2004 on its 10-year anniversary. The CD includes both Ginger and Stain, two songs that appeared separately on different versions of the original cassette tape. It also features Telemerketing and Drunk from the 1995 Humpy/Oblio Joes Split 7".
From Andy Smetanka's liner notes:
I hated the Oblio Joes the first time I saw them. For about five minutes. Then I loved them for another five minutes. Then I hated them again for about three minutes. And loved them for eight. It wasn’t a song-by-song thing, as you might infer from these numbers—then, as now, they played a stellar show from start to finish. It was just that my band, Humpy, was playing the same show and the Oblio Joes were making us look like idiots for flopping around in our own silly outfits, trying to strike manly rock poses and generally sucking our way through the eight, maybe ten songs we’d learned so far.
This was Halloween, 1993, at a house party on Spruce Street close to the railroad tracks. Surviving photographs reveal a room full of people done up like wizards and shamans and all the usual things that hippies in Missoula dress up as to greet the coming of Samhain with LSD gargles and reeking pots of mushroom tea. (I chose to abstain from everything but the beer that night, which might explain why there are photographs to study in the first place, instead of puzzling shots of potted plants and wall tapestries that appeared to be breathing at the time. I took that picture on the cover, by the way.) I wasn’t in a very good mood because our show was so awful—easily the worst of the half-dozen or so we’d played up to that point, and if you remember Humpy from way, way back in the day you know that’s really saying something! The Oblio Joes came dressed top to toe in midnight black, faced painted white and wearing signal orange watch-caps, and I wasn’t having any of it. But against my “better” judgement I stayed and watched as they showed up, set up, dropped their heads and just plowed a heavy-ass furrow through song after song after song. And I do mean plowed—they sounded quite a bit different back then and played a lot more slow, dirgey, hypnotic numbers about suicide and armed robbery. At the time I’d never heard a local band that sounded anything like the Oblios. It was—and still is—one of the most enlightening shows I’ve ever been to.
And, like I say, I hated them for it—for being so good when my own band sucked so wretchedly. Or rather, I should say I tried to hate them for it—sour grapes, I know, but what can I say? The more I watched and listened, though, the harder it got to prop up my artificially hostile attitude. Gradually, the fits of sneering disdain (Hey, I was punk, dude!) I managed to work myself up to got shorter and weaker while the intervals of slack-jawed infatuation got longer and longer. The Obes don’t know any of this—or didn’t know it before now, anyway—because by the time their set was over I’d completely forgotten about my plan to act cordial but reserved (and possibly just a little dismissive) toward them if some post-set mingling came to pass. Instead I turned all glassy-eyed and quiver-lipped the way people usually do when they suddenly find themselves meeting famous rock stars and movie actors and noticing to their horror that they can’t think of a damn thing to say.
But that’s how it started for me. It was shortly after this—fall of 1993—that Humpy and the Oblio Joes ended up on the same bill quite a lot at Jay’s Upstairs, where the metal curtains had just begun to part and local bands that didn’t fit under the general heading of “butt rock” nonetheless starting getting invited to play some opening slots. The friendships that blossomed at the time laid the foundation for the Oblio Joes/Humpy record that saw the light of day a few years later—without question, the unlikeliest juxtaposition of styles on a split seven-inch in the history of Missoula rock, and probably the rest of the world’s rock as well. John “Jonny Joe” Brownell also recorded the nine-billion song Humpy demo in the basement of the Pink House over on Missoula’s homey Westside—in the unlikely event that you own a copy, you can hear Jonny’s demonic whisper on “I Pray to the Devil.” Thinking back on it now, I’m surprised that Humpy ever got into Johnny’s basement or that the Oblios ever made it out, because you had to load all your stuff straight down through a trapdoor the size of a phone book. There was talk of swapping songs for another joint release (or maybe it was just a show), but that never really happened. The official excuse was that the Oblios couldn’t play fast enough. We didn’t take it personally, though—few Missoula bands did at the time, or even really tried for that matter. Still, the Oblios’ trademark “My Way” took many a reverent bludgeoning at Humpy practice. And on stage, too—most notably the time when both bands set up on stage at once and ran it to ground with two drummers, two bassists and four guitarists.
Those were some great times, I tell you. And even while most of the action in town was quickly gravitating toward Jay’s, some of the most memorable shows from that era in Missoula rock took place outside the Jay’s orbit in other, far more unlikely venues. Like out in the woods behind Mount Sentinel the time Humpy, the Oblios and the Fireballs of Freedom played on a flatbed trailer at a “Rites of Spring” party organized by the same guy, Jon Richter, who lived in the house by the railroad tracks where just a months earlier I’d been duking it out with the green-eyed monster. Or in a delicatessen that used to be in the same building as the office where I’m writing this—crammed nuts-to-butts with people who paid $5 to see something like nine bands give it up in a rock blowout to raise money for a local homeless shelter. That was Povstock ’94 (named for the Poverello Center, where the nun was like “Well! That sounds like a neat idea!”), and at the time it probably represented the biggest Ghostbusters-style crossing of local rock beams Missoulians had ever witnessed. I don’t think many of us even really grasped how many bands were forming in Missoula until we saw them all the same place at once—and it was great! We made a few hundred dollars for the Poverello, and we drank a few hundred beers in Dave Humpy’s shit-brown Volkswagen bus while the movie theater across the street went up in flames. Arson was suspected. The inferno seared the momentousness of the evening into our minds: Povstock, or the Night the Roxy Burned Down. Actual date: February 19, 1994.
Considerately enough, the anonymous firebug who torched our dollar theater at least provided us with a handy way to remember the night that All Ages Show was first released, in cassette form. The first copies contained transparent plastic crack-n-peel stickers of the cover art—far more durable than their paper equivalent. For years, one of these stickers held on through rain and shine on a garbage can in from of the old Kinko’s location on Higgins Avenue, bubbling in the summer heat and shrinking from the winter winds howling out of Hellgate Canyon. It might still be there, in fact, but I always avert my eyes when I walk past. I’d much rather just keep on thinking it’s still there—though now probably shrunk to the size of a postage stamp—than know conclusively one way or the other.
It seemed like things were just getting rolling between our bands when I left Missoula for a year in August, 1994, but when I came back in the summer of 1995 it was like I never even left. The other Humpy members—Dave, Denis and Yale—had more or less “waited for me” in the virginal, high-school-sweetheart sense, and although the only job I could find was a shitty dishwashing gig at a motel restaurant, at least I got to work with Felix and Stu. Aka drummer Dan Strachan and guitarist Scott Simonson—or “Danny Joe” and “Scotty Joe,” as they appear in the tape’s personnel listing. By this time, the Oblios had honed their noisy, pounding pop to a knife’s edge and, along with the band that would soon change its name from Honky Sausage to the Fireballs of Freedom, garnered a rep as one of the best bands the town had to show for itself. You didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that women dug the shit out of Oblio Joes, either—they descended on the shows in sweet-smelling flocks. Invariably, the front row at an Obes gig would be chockablock with pretty girls doing the signature Oblio-dance to songs like “Dezerae.” Chances are you’ve never seen this little jig because its most devoted adherents have long since moved away, making it as much of a lost Missoula folkway as the moribund Humpy tradition of pouring beer down each others’ pants. But in case you missed it, the dance looked a little like this: Head down and bobbing gently, knees limber, feet shuffling in place, loosely-packed fists making a reeling-in motion suggestive of someone trying to skein up an endless strand of yarn. Trying to symbolically reel in dreamboat guitarist Stu, more like—a guy with the tousled, sleepy good looks of someone who always goes around looking like he just woke up from a long nap. Did any of us have a girlfriend who didn’t immediately coat herself with drool at the sight of Stu onstage with a cigarette poking out of the corner of his mouth, screwing up his face during the climactic note-bend-o-rama of “In Love and Insane?” I doubt it. The single men of Missoula, I can assure you, heaved a collective sigh of relief when Stu finally got together with his future wife, Angela.
But membership has its privileges—even in a rock scene as permeable and refreshingly clique-free as Missoula’s, being on chummy terms with the Oblio Joes had a way of raising the value of a brother’s stock portfolio, if you catch my meaning, squire. And, my famously effervescent personality notwithstanding, I secretly know I have the magic of songs like “Dezerae” and “In Love and Insane” to thank for really sealing the deal with at least one girlfriend. Life-affirming is the only way I can really think to describe some of those shows. You could turn up in just about any mood and hear something that really spoke to what you were feeling. Usually, though, you just ended up being happy. For me, the key moment was always the squalling chaos—sometimes five minutes of it—that signaled the beginning of “In Love and Insane.” It was like being wiped clean of whatever was troubling you and having it replaced with some inevitable happiness, surrounded by your friends and flooded with the helpless joy gushing out of that bone-simple tune. In those moments you felt like anything could happen. It’s easy enough when you’re young. The older you get, though, the harder it gets to find those head-over-heels moments when nothing, nothing else matters beyond those five or ten minutes of not being able to feel the ground with your feet.
Of course, no one can help getting older—and it certainly beats the alternative. Nowadays, hanging out with the Oblio Joes, you’re more likely to get invited to a baby shower or a toddler’s birthday than a party where you bring a case of eleven-ounce Pabst stubbies that actually becomes part of the architecture once it’s been drained of its contents and autographed. Humpy is long since scattered to the four winds, and not for the usual “artistic differences,” either: When our drummer Yale moved to Denver in the summer of 2000, it never even occurred to me to play with anyone else. Humpy was all about making a big ruckus with good friends, never about fretting over how to “make it,” whatever that means. In that respect, at least, we definitely took our cues from the Oblio Joes. We stayed together for almost eight years, losing one guitarist and gaining one bass player for a net loss of one member. The Oblios gained a new bassist and added a keyboard player for a net gain of one member. Things come up, you know? Real world things. But in both cases, those numbers bespeak friendship as a powerful force in keeping the two bands together for so long. It sure as hell wasn’t the money.
I spend far more time writing about music now than I ever did playing it. No great loss there, I admit, and honestly, I don’t miss it that much. Too much standing around waiting, not to mention the heavy lifting.
But I certainly spend a lot of time thinking about those glory days when it felt like Oblio Joes and Humpy and a handful of other bands in town were charting our own course, making up our own rules as we went along. Or just saying Screw the rules—rules are for other people. The Oblios are still charting their own course, and it’s served them well for over ten years.
Listening to All Ages Show again, I remember a lot of the old faces that have since floated away on the great sea of humanity. I know I’ll never see most of those people again, and it’s times like this when I’m saddened by the realization that in spite of good intentions, people just kind of drift out of each others’ lives. All the time. Ten years is damn good when you think about it.
I also think about some of the shyer girls who always looked painfully awkward in their own skins anywhere besides an Oblio Joes show. I always wondered if, as Jonny Joe sings on the title track of All Ages Show, some of them were really secretly learning to play bass guitar. On the rare occasion when the Oblio Joes play these old songs, I can still feel ghostly hands on my knee and the arms of old friends draped around my shoulders, and “In Love and Insane” still tears me up.
Andy Smetanka
August, 2003
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Song List
| 1. |
Into The Sun
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| 2. |
Desiree
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| 3. |
Falling
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| 4. |
How Do You Know?
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| 5. |
Stain
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| 6. |
My Way
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| 7. |
In Love And Insane
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| 8. |
My Name
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| 9. |
All Ages Show
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| 10. |
Goodby, Sunshine
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