R.U. Sirius, publisher, author and musician, was signed to Trent Reznor's Nothing Records in the early nineties with his buddies Scrappi DuChamp and Simone Third Arm as Mondo Vanilli. Sadly, due to issues regarding commerce and commerciality, their sole album, IOU Babe, never saw release, at least not via any official channels or mediums. It was made available for download as a collection of MP3s quite some time ago, yet despite the saying that nothing ever really disappears from the internet, finding the album proved to be quite the task, so I went to the source, R.U. Sirius himself, and his being the gentleman that he is, he gave me a copy of the album, answered all my questions and participated in an e-mail interview for The Unheard Music! What follows is that interview, several downloads and links to where you can download Mondo Vanilli's IOU Babe right now for free! In about a month you'll even be able to purchase a deluxe edition of the album on CD with a bunch of extra tracks, so if you like what you hear you've gotta hit them up!
UPDATE: The album is now available for download via Archive.org (which has FLAC), the SoundCloud set at the bottom of the interview and via torrent at The Pirate Bay right now, all for free!
TUM: How was Mondo Vanilli formed?
R.U. Sirius: First, there was the Sgt. Peckerhead project. It was 1987, the 20th anniversary of the release of Sgt. Peppers. In a burst of inspiration... or idiocy... I wrote a bunch of song lyrics that sort of corresponded to the themes and overall vibes of each song in that album. It was more in the style of The Rutles or maybe Dukes of the Stratosphere than The Beatles. (The lyrics are long lost, unfortunately, except the three that got recorded.) Anyway, I decided to try to find a musician to compose and record music to the words and then maybe release it as a flexi-disc in High Frontiers magazine. High Frontiers was the predecessor to Mondo 2000 magazine, more psychedelic oriented, and I was publisher and editor in chief. I was introduced to Dave Fleminger. (He would later become Scrappi DuChamp.) Someone had told me he could compose in any genre or combination of genres. Like you could say, “Give me a song that’s like Jimi Hendrix meets Kate Bush, only make it disco” and he would come up with the perfect tune. So he loved the idea and he could write “Beatles songs”... so he wrote music for the first two songs, Merry Tweekster World Mutation Day and Sufi Sales. He recorded it at his home studio and then we went to a commercial studio that operated out of some guys’ home in San Francisco with some of Dave’s musician friends and a High Frontiers enthusiast named Fred Blinman who played saxophone, and more vocals and music was added to the mix. This was entirely Dave’s musical project. I just wrote the lyrics and kibitzed.
Of course, the usual occurred. High Frontiers couldn’t afford to do a flexi-disc insert, so the songs never really saw the light of day and the larger project was dropped. The songs can be heard here and you can read Dave’s version of the story.
Cut to 1990. By now, I’m having some success as editor and co-publisher of Mondo 2000 – loosely known as a “cyberpunk” or “cyberculture” magazine. I’m in the midst of a culture that is talking and obsessing a lot about the idea of “virtual reality” and about the idea that we have long lived in a media simulacrum, that our senses of self and reality had been completely restructured by living surrounded by media, with little or no reference to the real. I’m sitting outside at a coffee shop one morning reading the local newspaper and there’s a big fuss being made about Milli Vanilli. Their Grammy award had been rescinded because they had been caught lip-synching at their performances. To my Virtual Reality-bent brain, this demand for authenticity seemed completely ludicrous. First of all, this was obviously a prefabricated band making the most absolutely crappy, bland corporate music imaginable, so why did they get a Grammy in the first place... and who fucking cares if they lip-synched?
So I had the concept right then and there, Mondo Vanilli, a Virtual Reality band that would proudly lip-synch, or maybe not even pretend to play live music on stage, perhaps we would exist totally in Virtuality, or else we would do other, more original types of performance to our music. Wasn’t a bunch of guys standing around with guitars or synths a really boring old cliché, even if you had a theatrical front man or woman?
Anyway, I’d remained friends with Dave and he agreed to embark on another project. Neither of us really knew exactly what we were going to do… how this notion of a Virtual Reality band should be realized, but I had a bunch of old song lyrics laying around and some songs I’d done with an earlier band, Party Dogs, that seemed futuristic when I wrote them back in 1980 but seemed contemporary now so we decided to record a bunch of songs under the title Read My Lips. This was, of course, a reference to a George H.W. Bush campaign promise that he had just broken, so we were already playing with this notion of falseness on multiple levels just with the title and the band name.
Anyway, I figured, as the Mondo 2000 man, the music should be appropriate to the cyberpunk reputation, so I gave Dave a list of industrial bands, along with a bit of acid house, to listen to. And he listened to it all and hated about 99% of it, which was a perfect way to start recording something that would take that genre and do something disrespectful and different with it. I have to admit, I didn’t care about most of it either, although I absolutely loved Pretty Hate Machine.
Anyway, we started off writing songs or reworking old Party Dogs songs (and a version of I Am The Walrus) and recording them in Scrappi’s home studio on a four track or in other studios that gave us little bits of time because of my reputation with Mondo. I was doing most of the vocals at this point.
Some time a few months into this, a friend of mine told me about this girl named Simone, who was, I think, 19 years old and very attractive and he told me about how she did this really wild performance art and that I would really like her. So we met and I did really like her... not in a sexual sense, I didn’t think that was the vibe between us, but I liked her sense of humor and her theater of the ridiculous ideas. So I asked her to join Mondo Vanilli as the sort of performative aspect of it.
TUM: Did MV exist prior to meeting with Trent and Nothing?
R.U.: Well, yeah. Not that we had performed anywhere yet, but we had actually offered the tape titled Read My Lips for sale through some underground sources, probably sold a couple of dozen. As I just described, we were recording music and we were brainstorming a lot about what a Mondo Vanilli performance would be. Dave had become Scrappi DuChamp. I can’t remember if Simone had already been calling herself Simone Third Arm before that or not. It became very abstract. This music theory professor from Canada, Elliot Handelman was hanging out with us a lot and he used to theorize about using copyright laws to kill the notion of original music, that taking musical copyright to its logical conclusion, all combinations of notes and rhythms could be sectioned off by copyright. And he objected to the fact that we were actually writing songs and thinking about performing and felt that the Mondo Vanilli stance should be in opposition to anything productive or constructive. Anyway, there was a lot of theorizing and imagining what our performances would be, if at all.
Anyway, we did exist nominally as a recording group with a tape that was available. And, in fact, we took little Xeroxed Mondo Vanilli promotional booklets and some fairly professional demo tapes with us to L.A. to shop them around. That was when we met Reznor, quite by coincidence.
TUM: Who were the main members of MV and what were their roles in the group?
R.U.: Dave Fleminger aka Scrappi DuChamp pretty much composed and played all the music. He also did some of the vocals and lyrics.
I was responsible for most of the lyrics and, by a slight majority, most of the vocals. He’s the one with the melodic voice and I’m the one who is more in the Iggy Pop meets Alice Cooper dimension.
Simone Third Arm was brought in mainly as the performance aspect but she wound up contributing lyrics, including a story and vocals also. She was great at coming up with one-liners that improved my own lyrical contributions.
We were all sort of conceptualizing what this band would become as a performance phenomenon. There was this sense, in the technological edge culture, that we would have full virtual realities and multimedia online any moment now, so there was some talk of just existing online, which was really premature, obviously.
There were only a few performances, ultimately. I think mostly Simone’s concepts ended up being used. And in the performances where there were live vocals (breaking our own rules), it was mostly myself on vocals.
TUM: How did the band tie in with Mondo 2000?
R.U.: Well, if we’re speaking about the ideas and spirit of Mondo, it tied in pretty well. I’ve already described its origins in terms of virtual reality and notions of living in a simulacrum, which were themes at Mondo magazines. And again, we were trying to incorporate some contemporary technological musical modes into what we were doing, industrial musical elements and so forth. Perhaps more importantly, neither Mondo 2000 nor Mondo Vanilli marched in a straight line. In other words, we didn’t self-consciously stay within the stylistic or aesthetic or even content boundaries of what people expected from a cyberpunk magazine or band. We did whatever the fuck we wanted to, whether in text or design or in music, and strayed as far from audience expectation as we wanted to. So there was a quirkiness to both projects and both had a sort of pranksterish attitude that we were at play in this simulacrum. And if you took us too seriously, we were going to paper you over in glib quips.
In terms of the interpersonal and business relationships to Mondo 2000, it was an awkward fit. I suppose being a magazine editor wasn’t glamorous or promising enough for me, to be real honest. We were getting an extraordinary amount of media attention from around 1990 to 1993, I was, particularly, and we had a real social scene going. So I wanted to catch the wave by doing other medias. I was also pursued about the possibility of a Mondo-based television show by two different companies and was flown to Hollywood several times to meet vague people in the film industry about vague possibilities.
I think Queen Mu, who was by now the majority owner of Mondo 2000, was barely putting up with my Mondo Vanilli project, and she suspected that the Hollywood flirtations that were being thrown at us were a waste of time, and she was right about that. But when she saw a Mondo Vanilli live show, she loved it, so it wasn’t all black and white. (Most of the audience absolutely hated that show. In fact, that was pretty much the case for all of them except when we actually played live music along with the theatrics.)
It was a very chaotic and intense time for Mu and myself and all of us at Mondo 2000, being at the center of a cultural wave and a lot of media hype and still losing money. It’s weirder, more difficult than it may seem from outside, until you experience it.
Actually, IOU Babe was recorded almost immediately after my splitting with Mondo 2000 and a lot of the lyrics and the sort of vibe of the whole album was influenced by that. I’d also been in relationships with, and was still having flirtations with, and just plain hanging out with quite a few women who were, or had been, part of the sex industry at one level or another which was quite new to me. So a big part of my lyrical contribution to the album is, in some sense, me vomiting up some unprocessed feelings and thoughts about both those things. At the same time, it didn’t come out that way due to a self-conscious attempt to use certain themes. The lyrics just sort of popped in my head and, to me, the first time I looked at them, they were all funny. They all seemed ironic to me. Later, I would listen to the whole album and think, jeez, this is some warped shit. Some people are going to take this seriously.
TUM: I know the story of how you met Trent has been told before, or at least some of it has. Could you give the details again? Anything you want to expand on?
R.U.: Well, people can read the story of how we met Trent here. The story involves Timothy Leary and Sharon Tate and Gibby Haynes and The Penguin so I encourage your readers to check it out. Briefly, we went, with our friend Timothy Leary, to a housewarming party for Trent that he gave in his new L.A. house, the house that was owned by Roman Polanski, in which his wife, Sharon Tate and other people were killed by Charlie Manson’s followers. And that party resulted in us giving Reznor our demo tape and him offering us a chance to record for his new record label, Nothing.
A bit later, maybe a couple of weeks, he came to San Francisco and visited the house where Scrappi and I lived. He sat on a bean bag chair in the living room and talked about having a different kind of record company that didn’t screw over the musicians. I think he wound up hanging out with Simone for a couple of days, or that might have been another time. He had this big dog that he loved to death that went everywhere he did.
As for personal interactions with Trent after we started recording for him, we saw him only once, after one show in Oakland where he was really friendly but freaked out about the recent suicide of Kurt Cobain. He said something about “pulling a Kurt”. He was approached by what appeared to be a mother with a young daughter, I would say she was 13 or 14, and the presumed mother pulled the girl’s mini-skirt down to show off the Nine Inch Nails tattoo just above her butt crack. Sorry, but it was kind of the most memorable moment of being backstage. He invited us to party with him back at his hotel but I had a bit of a flu and begged off. I think even Simone wasn’t in the mood. That was the last time we ever saw him in person.
TUM: Could you share any details about Nothing's goings-on around these times? You said there were other bands signed that didn't get anything released. Any of those bands that you can remember? Any stories about John Malm, Interscope, Atlantic or other record people?
R.U.: Well, the first thing that hit us in dealing with Nothing was the recording contract. By a coincidence, we had a contact named Cara Burns at a very high-powered entertainment law firm, Manatt, Phelps and Phillips. I don’t remember who exactly they represented, but it was people at the level of Barbara Streisand or George Lucas, and only the most major rock stars. And Cara basically agreed to rep us legally. If I remember correctly, she did it for free or on spec because, based on what Trent had told us, she assumed we would get a nice, friendly, uncomplicated contract to record a single album or maybe two, and it would be this easy thing that she could do in her sleep. And then we received this contract to record six albums for Nothing. I think it came on an Interscope Records letterhead. And we send it to Cara and she freaked. She said it was a typically terrible record industry contract of the sort the big record companies usually gave to new artists, maybe it was even a little worse than average. And you can imagine Malm and all those people getting a response from Mondo Vanilli’s representation: Manatt, Phelps and Phillips.
Anyway, somehow we got word that Trent wanted us to find a producer and a studio and get ready to start recording and we’d all deal with the contract later. We would have 90k to record it. So we scheduled recording time with Jonathan Burnside at Razor’s Edge studio. And then Malm got in touch and he didn’t want to commit to the full album. He wanted us to go into the studio with 10k instead and record two songs and “see how it goes”. So there was clearly this attitude with Reznor’s management that we were sort of “Trent’s folly” or maybe all of the Nothing artists were viewed that way, except probably Marilyn Manson, since he already had a pretty big following in Florida. So we recorded Gimme Helter and Thanx!, not the same version of Thanx! that’s on the final album, which is a whole other story I won’t go into right now. This was a very fast and hard-edged version. Anyway, the two songs knocked everybody’s socks off. So we were given the go ahead to record the whole album.
As to your question, I understood that Trent had “signed” five other recording artists for Nothing Records, but I don’t remember who they were besides Marilyn Manson and Trust/Obey. I remember having the perception that the rest of them were pretty straightforward industrial bands... errr, I think Peter Christopherson was probably under contract, since he was hanging with Trent at that house a lot. Coil was probably one of the bands...
We never had any contact with the other bands so it’s hard for me to comment on what was going on with them. I think around this time Interscope was under attack in Congress for Death Row’s output and there were even some politicians complaining about NIN lyrics, so there may have been some political pressure on Interscope through their parent company, I think it was Warner, if I remember correctly. Nothing Records was really just a boutique label offered to get Trent to sign with Interscope. It was several steps down the corporate shit ladder. There was no way Trent was going to get to run a groovy, artist-friendly record company.
We finished the album right around the end of 1993. In fact, the timing was such that we went to a NIN show in Oakland and handed in the final product in person to his management. This time, we weren’t invited into the dressing room and Reznor never came out to speak to us. I think it was maybe a few weeks after that Tony Ciula from Nothing Records told us that Interscope was making Nothing drop all their artists except NIN and Marilyn Manson but that we could have the album gratis. But when our lawyer asked for a formal notification of this, the Interscope lawyer told us that they weren’t going to give us the rights to the music unless some other record company paid off their full bill... and I think they had some other demands as well. In our position, we would have had to have gone to small indie labels, so it was pretty much impossible.
TUM: How was the album recorded? How long did it take?
R.U.: It was largely Scrappi and producer Jonathan Burnside hunched over computers. It was not a rock and roll experience, although I would slug Jack Daniels when I came in to sing. I don’t even remember Simone and I being in the studio at the same time. It was definitely a virtual experience of creating music. My previous experiences were basically rock and roll.
I did come in to the studio to listen and kibbutz quite a bit. And Scrappi would also be generating patches of music and sampled sounds at home at night, so I’d hear it all getting put together. I would always come in to hear the final mixes of each song to comment on them and so on. I definitely got the strong impression that some sort of very weird masterwork, a very tweaked sort of concept album, was emerging. It took nine months, just like life. Some songs were re-recorded at the end when we became paranoid that the samples were too obvious. That’s what happened with Thanx!
TUM: You replaced one of the songs from the original album with another one. Can you tell me why that happened?
R.U.: Originally, we recorded this song Wraparound World, which was mostly my lyrics, but aside from that, it was all Scrappi’s show. It was part of the original package we sent to Nothing Records. It’s a pop song, and it’s a really dense and ambitious song musically. Anyway, as good as it is, Scrappi can hear that it’s flawed and needs to be reworked. So after Nothing blew us off, we recorded another song, The Ballad of Brent Buzzkill and replaced Wraparound World with it. Brent rhymes with the first name of a certain rock star so obviously, errr, actually maybe nothing is obvious since I’ve never had one person listen to the album and voluntarily note the existence of a parody of our former benefactor. I mean, I’d hate to imagine that people think we’re serious when we shout out in angst, “Don’t you tell me to do my homework/I don’t want to do my homework”, but whatever.
TUM: Any details on why Nothing/Interscope passed on releasing the record?
R.U.: Like I said, they dropped virtually everybody. We never heard whether Reznor liked the album or not. I’ve never heard from him since, although I’ve made attempts to get in touch. I like Trent and I like NIN, so it’s disappointing. Malm told us something to the effect that Trent really liked some of it.
TUM: Did you try to get the record released elsewhere?
R.U.: Well, we waited a couple of years and somehow got the impression that the Nothing or Interscope people didn’t care any more what we did. If I remember correctly, our lawyer couldn’t get a response to various complaints and counteroffers and she finally sent notice that if we didn’t get a response, we would assume that they were no longer interested in us and we could do what we wanted. And I think that was the case. I think Nothing was dissolving, or at least there were various crises going on, and everybody at all levels of that company didn’t want to deal with anything related to it. And we had never actually signed a contract.
But when I tried to get it heard by some small indie producers and labels, it was so weird. I had some reasonably good contacts with alternative music types. I don’t think anybody even listened to it. It was like we entered some kind of weird void, particularly like I entered some weird sort of void. All at once, no one wanted to know about the recording.
You know, I had this period of a few months in the mid-90s when the potential recording career died, a television series pitch for something called the R.U. Sirius Show that I’d made in collaboration with John Sanborn and Colossal Big Pictures was rejected after coming close in a process with PBS, and this very ambitious, multileveled, avant-garde, collaborative novel I put out, How To Mutate & Take Over the World was released and tanked. So basically, I had expectations that I would either have a career in music or in television and that I would continue to get big advances for high selling books (as had happened with the Mondo 2000 User’s Guide book) or some combination of all of the above. And it all kind of collapsed in a very short burst.
Of course, looking back, I wasn’t axiomatically entitled to successes in any of these areas, but when you’re in the middle of something like that, it feels like you’ve just been smacked repeatedly with a baseball bat. A few extra painkillers were definitely required over the next few years.
Meanwhile, I was still getting invited to all the parties and giving lectures and interviews about cyberculture and getting mentioned in local gossipy columns. So, to some extent, I continued to have a sense of entitlement that didn’t prove to be grounded in reality. But I couldn’t seem to connect on anything related to the works that I actually cared about. It really was weird.
I’ll never completely understand it. Of course, regarding Mondo Vanilli, once people have you categorized as a writer or magazine editor they can’t bring themselves to listen to your music. There’s this assumption that it’s some diddly vanity side project. I started singing and writing song lyrics back in the mid-‘70s. I wasn’t ambitious enough to make anything happen with it then, but I was always pretty good at it.
TUM: Any documents of your live performances available?
R.U.: Scrappi has some video. And my wife Eve has a hilarious video of a little reunion show that was just me and Scrappi with some other musicians. Some of it may be made available at some point.
TUM: I know you're still in touch with Scrappi, but do you know what's happened with Simone and Burnside?
R.U.: Last I knew, Simone had a collaborative music project called Tekrah and she was living near Las Vegas. After living, I think, in Europe for quite a while, I believe Burnside is back in the saddle at Razor’s Edge studio in San Francisco.
TUM: How did you get in touch with Link C?
R.U.: Link C sent me email a couple of years ago asking about Mondo Vanilli. We sent him some mp3s, which he liked. Scrappi supplied him with some elements of our mixes and he otherwise just worked off the completed pieces to remix Thanx!, Love is the Product, and Bummer.
TUM: Is Link C still going to remix the whole album?
R.U.: He does plan to remix the whole thing eventually.
TUM: Could you tell me about the band you fronted in the early eighties?
R.U.: Party Dogs. I often think it was the best thing I ever did.
We were in the college town of Brockport, New York and used to play nearby in Rochester. We were the closest thing in Rochester to a punk band, but really we were just a punk-influenced rock band. We did lots of originals, but to show how un-punk we really were, besides doing Sex Pistols and Iggy covers, we also did Rolling Stones and Bowie covers. This was during the period when hardcore was happening in a lot of cities, so we were actually really far from that. I think some of the guys from Party Dogs did more hardcore punk stuff later on.
It was a great band. We recorded eight original songs in a Rochester studio. There was one guy starting a “new wave” label there at the time and he was deciding between releasing us or a band called New Math. He told us our album was better, but New Math would draw about twice the crowd to Scorgies, the local new wave club. He went with New Math and I moved to Berkeley, California. I still have the reel-to-reel and one day when I have an extra few hundred dollars I’ll get it transferred into more useful mediums. Meanwhile I have mp3s of four of the songs which are taken off of a cassette. They’re like copies of copies of copies of the original reel to reel recording. Given that, they still sound pretty good. Here’s two of the songs (check the bottom of the page). There’s a small glitch in one of them, but still...
Three of the guys who were part of the Party Dogs are now in a band called SLT (actually they’re reunited after a long hiatus, long stories from the twisted lives of old men). I wrote two song lyrics for their recent album, Gone Dead Gone, and they re-recorded one that we’d done in Party Dogs. You can check them out here and there’s a free download of one of the songs I wrote there called I Should’ve Been A Guru. I guess that kind of says it all.
TUM: Do you have any thoughts on the digital distribution model for music nowadays? Do you like the idea of being able to get just about anything whenever you want it? Any thoughts on how to improve upon the model?
R.U.: In terms of accessing pretty much any music instantly – whether free or pay – it’s fantastic, of course, although I tend to be more of a stumble upon guy than a seek out sort of guy. I’ll usually look at videos and listen to music when I see them being offered up on one of my favorite sites. Sometimes, I’ll look at all the videos on the Dangerous Minds home page, for instance. Occasionally, some artist from the past that has become more obscure than they deserve to be will pop into my head and I’ll go seek something out, Pearls Before Swine i.e. Tom Rapp comes to mind as an example. I also like stuff like Last FM where they will play an unpredictable set of songs, a radio show, basically, based on your tastes. You wind up getting a nice mix of your favorites and stuff you’ve never heard but like.
In terms of models, is there a model now? There seems to be a near infinity of distributional models and ways to get music... free or pay. What's complicated for an artist now is finding your natural audience of having them find you amidst the clutter. I don’t really have a suggestion. I think it’s one of the many things that can’t be resolved until and unless we arrive at a generous social agreement about how to treat people in a rapidly technologically advancing society in which a lot of activities are being rendered economically superfluous and various “content creators” are being disintermediated.
Which brings us to free... In terms of free music and so forth, as someone who has been associated with hacker culture and open source and the idea that stuff that can easily be shared should be shared, as a creative person, I'm in a peculiar position. When I was younger, I thought we were all just heightening the contradictions of media capitalism and that we would force society -- broadly speaking -- to come up with a solution for how creative media people could survive after their media creations became easy to copy infinitely and distribute. I counted on a broad social generosity toward both media producers and consumers. That’s not happening... at least not yet. I think we may still get there, but it's taking a long time. Personally, all I can do is temporize. If I can get people to buy some stuff that I do, that allows me to do the stuff I want, instead of the stuff somebody else wants.
TUM: Any thoughts on music, film or other media that has thought to have been lost to time or legalities finding a new life online, whether legally or not?
R.U.: Yeah, that's just awesome. One of the sucky things about copyright law today, which has been pointed out by Lawrence Lessig who started Creative Commons, is that there's lots of creative stuff out there where there’s a situation that there's nobody living who has an economic interest in exploiting it as a product, but it's all still presumed to be copyrighted. It’s in this sort of permanent memory hole where it can’t be used legally. But, of course, people make a lot of it available anyway.
Massive thank you to R.U. Sirius for all his time and energy! You can download IOU Babe at Archive.org, where you can get the album in FLAC, or the Mondo Vanilli SoundCloud page right now, both for free, although you'll be able to purchase a copy in the near future which will come with bonus material for your listening enjoyment. Also, R.U. was kind enough to provide me with two Party Dogs songs for you to check out, so you can grab those below. But first, go to the Archive.org or SoundCloud page or check it out below and get IOU Babe! It's an hour of headf*&kery that will entertain ruthlessly! You'll get the industrial thrust of Gun Cereal, the Bowie-esque glam of Clones Don't Have To Be So Cold, the psycho-pop of Love Is The Product and so much more. It's incredible stuff and very deserving of your attention! Enjoy!
Party Dogs - Glad Handed / I Politician
IOU Babe by Mondo Vanilli
No comments:
Post a Comment