the radiators dot org

Dedications: Ed Volker

In fond remembrance of Thaddeus Jones, that scholar in khaki, who's at last in a place where he can ask Louie and Jelly Roll for all the real inside dope (not to mention Earl) ...

DOWN AND DIRTY THIRTY

It’s hard to believe we’re still standing (well, leaning, anyway). So many souls have gone since the Radiators first jammed together in that Waldo Dr. garage, full of burlap and fiberglass-family and friends who are no longer with us as well as great homegrown musicians like Earl King and Fess. And, weeping wizards, here we still are! Fate’s an inscrutable thing and these years have been filled with much adventure. When I stop and reflect upon my crazy band mates, I ask myself: how lucky can one man be to get to play for 30 years with his favorite musicians?

WILD AND FREE is a hodge-podge, a crazy quilt, by no means exhaustive, but a suitably salty, peppery gumbo that covers live performances, studio sessions, and the odd rehearsal from June 1978 to March 2008.
The earliest performances come from Luigi’s Pizza, a joint on Elysian Fields, frequented by professors and students from the nearby UNO (as well as all manner of lakefront losers) and managed by Wesley Schmitt, a redoubtable bon vivant and host. Every Wednesday night, when the feasting families had finished their pizzas, the tables in the back would be cleared away and before you could say “Willie, burn your shirt!” musical gear would spring up like mushrooms after a spring rain, and that’s when the party would start. The gig had been originally scored by the Rhapsodizers, but when Camile, Frank, and I exited that aggregation and joined forces with Reg and Dave, the Wednesday night duties gratefully fell into our fins. The Rads played there from ‘78 through ’82. It is arguable whether the real gig was in the parking lot, and the music sets merely served as “breaks” from the exhausting, higher pursuits that went on out there.
As is the case with some of the other tracks here, the songs from June ’78 were recorded on an Akai reel-to-reel deck I bought in ’73 with the last $200 I ever begged off my Dad. I’d just hang two Shure mikes from the ceiling above the stage and hit start. These reels, stored in a closet in my Mom’s basement, were submerged in floodwaters from the May 9, ’95 flood, and I considered them unplayable (but couldn’t bring myself to throw them out). Well, despite the crud and mildew, lo and behold, they’re playing like a son of a bitch!
So, from June ’78: ALL MEAT, the earliest incarnation of LAST GETAWAY, and the medley of KING SOLOMON DON’T MIND into RED DRESS. The sound gets pretty dicey here, especially the medley, which comes at the end of the first set that night, the decibels getting fearsome, but we thought for historical (hysterical?) considerations these early staples of our gigs should be included.

Throughout ’78, the band bartered session work for studio time at Knight Sudios in Metarie. Camile was a session engineer there and would sit out when he recorded us, then overdub his part later. CUPID, never before released, and ONE-EYED JACK come from there and then. All of the Rads, in various configurations played on a lot of different sessions at Knight, backing up everyone from Jean Knight and Eddie Bo to less heralded luminaries, such as Jesus’ Little Preacher Boy.

The first public performance by the Rads was at a little bar about a block from Tip’s-Ford’s Place-which was the watering hole for local cabbies. It was a pass-the-hat situation and one of the cabbies kindly offered his cap as a collection basket, a strategy discontinued when the cap kept coming back with less money than it started out with. There are cassette tapes floating around of these maiden gigs, but they’re way too sonically challenging to listen to (unless you’re of a certain state of mind) (or so I’ve
been told).

Originally, Tipitina’s was the 501 Club and was just the place for staging live music events, the Gator People figured. The Gator People were a loose assembly of uptown goodtimers who wanted to hear Fess and the Meters and Booker, not just at Jazz Festival, but all year round. The 501 was a sleepy bar that had once catered to sailors during the heyday of the Port of New Orleans and whose only client in the early seventies was the Klan, who held meetings there on occasion. Once the Gator Balls got rolling, it wasn’t long before the Gator People formed the Summa For You Too corporation and renamed it Tipitina’s in Fess’ honor, Fess’ deep carnival groove and prodigious keyswork constituting something like the spiritual sparkplug for all the musical rebirth that was happening in the city at that time. The Rads had the distinct privilege of playing with Fess on the 501 stage on a number of occasions, and nothing will ever beat those golden days when Fess was still alive and the music flowed so sweetly and freely.

From the stage at Tip’s, we offer LOVE TROUBLE, from early ’79. This tune has devolved into an excuse to jam in recent years, but, as you can hear, it was a mean little machine in its youth.

The first recording released by the Rads on their own label, Croaker, was a 45, SUCK THE HEAD, SQUEEZE THE TIP. We cut up the original performance, putting what we called “Part 1” on the A-side, “Part 2” on the B (the oldest school in the book). It was recorded by Terry Bickle on a 2-track situated in his van parked out in the Luigi’s lot. Here’s the entire performance, along with a HARD CORE, hardly out of short pants, before it morphed into the juggernaut it was to become.

SUCK THE HEAD, SQUEEZE THE TIP was the name of a Saturday night event at Tip’s, back in the days of the Rhapsodizers. Of course, it’s a phrase describing in capsulated fashion the proper way of eating boiled crawfish. That Saturday night I was catching a ride to the gig with Rhaps’ bassist Becky Kury and I just started making up the song, singing the words with a swampy groove-feeling, And sometime in the course of the night, I just whipped the thing out and we all got on it and dug it. (Sometimes things just come, like they got a mind of their own, no matter what you say.)

Ah, the Dream Palace. The Rads probably played more gigs at the DP than they played anywhere else in NO (and I’ve got a mass of hardly playable cheap cassettes to prove it. I just ain’t got the heart to toss ‘em). The Palace had its own impresario, Allen Langhoff, a sky-diving Mr. Natural of sorts, and its own social club, the Krewe of Kosmic Debris. The place truly was a palace of dreams. I just wish I hadn’t woken up-I can’t remember a bit of it! But the mildewy tapes remember and we managed to extract these fine versions of HARD ROCK KID, MY HOME IS ON THE BORDER, and DOCTOR DOCTOR, when it was still an amorphous work-in-progress and hadn’t been nipped and tucked by Epic Records. It was around this time that two team members of the local band, Remedy, joined forces with us. Percussionist Glenn Sears was with the Rads for many years-he even claims to remember some of them!-filling out the rhythm section and throwing the odd dash of color here and there. Another Remedy alumnus, soundman Ken Samuels remains today, as he has for many years, steadfast at the wheel of the soundboard, working what sometimes appear to be miracles.

Also from the Dream Palace, from a board tape, LIKE DREAMERS DO and HARD TIME TRAIN in their more fulsome, pre-Epic derangements, and some rarities, STAND BY ME, BABY and HOUSE OF BLUE LIGHTS, a song inspired by a roadhouse outside Austin, Texas, where the whole band went to dig (and dug enormously) Delbert McClinton’s band on a smoky Saturday night in the summer of ’79.

Speaking of dreams, at Southlake, another Metarie studio, where we recorded two of our Epic efforts, we also had the pleasure of recording some demo sessions. Among them-a never released FEVER DREAM, a song, it’s been said, that speaks for the condition of the more fervent fish head fans, lost in the heart of a Rads’ gig.

The first time we played New York City was in the summer of 1980 at a venue called The Eighties. We were supposed to be backing up Earl King on Friday night, then sharing Saturday night with a Texas group, the Cobras. Friday was Friday the 13th and Earl went to the airport but, being of superstitious bent, never got on the plane. What chu gonna do?! We played…and, over the years, we’ve kept coming back to the Big scabby, crabby, glorious Apple, playing at the Lone Star Café and Tramp’s. Expanding crowds in the late ‘80’s led us to larger venues, such as the Ritz, where these board tapes feature: OH BEAUTIFUL LOSER, GREEN ARROW, and the sizzling HAVE A LITTLE MERCY.

Well, time marches on, and our career was only briefly of Epic proportions. But the music called us on and the krewes did, too. The Krewe of Snafu came along just at the right time, helping pull us out of a bad case of Post-Epicmatic-Stress-Syndrome. They made us tapes of our old tunes and urged us back into the more carefree and expansive way of music-making we enjoyed before our songs got domesticated by Epic’s corporate approach of trying to fit our big old fish head foot into a little silk radio-friendly slipper. The Snafoids, from all over, graduated TU IN ’91, ’92, but still reunite under the aegis of Grandmaster Kingsley Stoken every Jazz Fest for themed Rads gigs that always stand out as being some of the most memorable of the year.

I hope I’m not giving the impression that Epic was a bad thing for us-it wasn’t. It was a great opportunity and we had a good run with them while it lasted, and we learned bunches of things from the producers we worked with-Rodney Mills, Jim Dickinson, and Joe Hardy. But the way (you might say) it straightened up some of our bent places and bent some of out straight places was something of an awkward development and it was refreshing when we were free, to let the music on stage breathe again, and to let the songs and grooves unfold in a somewhat less hell-bent manner.

The longest running krewe, outside of the Krewe of Moms, which hosts the Moms Ball during carnival weekend each year, is the Krewe of Dads in Minneapolis. Dads was originally spearheaded by an alien who goes by the name of Mike Starnes but whose real name is Elmo the Magnificent. Elmo’s torch has been nimbly passed to Todd Baker, who isn’t an alien but who enjoys playing with matches. The Rads have been playing the Twin Cities for over 25 years and the krewe is still going strong. These gigs always feel home-away-from-home. In ’92, we recorded several nights at the World Theater in St. Paul, Minnesota, some of which became Bucket of Fish. Here’s some unreleased rarities from those nights: STRANGERS and SONGS FROM THE ANCIENT FURNACE.

Someone once said that the Rads have forgotten more songs than most bands ever learn. Well, we’re just like most bands, only different. From the Fountain Bay rehearsal room, in ’98, TEAR MY EYES OUT, a rousing take on the Oedipus myth. Onward to Magazine St. Sound in ’99 and a tune with Dave and Zeke sharing vocals, THE FOREVER MAN. In 2000 Barney Kilpatrick brought us into Trent Reznor’s Nothing Studio in NO where, with Jim Gaines producing, we recorded an effort released as THE RADIATORS (but which everybody calls The Black Album). Here’s two tunes we left out (don’t ask me why): WILD AND FREE and a ditty penned especially for a Moms Ball of yore, WHEN HER SNAKE EYES ROLL.

To cap it all off, we went to the Music Shed on Euterpe St. in NOLA. With Lu Rojas at the console, we cooked up two never recorded favorites, GIRL WITH THE GOLDEN EYES and a tune that asks that most vexing of questions, WHERE WAS YOU AT?

After Zeke had gone through the reel-to-reels and a small fraction of cassettes, we all rummaged through various possibilities, till we came up with this worthy concoction, which we then trucked over to Bruce Barielle, who really mastered the hell out of it (and this is not said lightly, believe me). John Parker outdid himself with the eyefuls, and Jay Rosenberg is overseeing the nuts and bolts as I speak, but I’m gonna shut up in two seconds…None of this would have had a chance if it wasn’t for the helpful support of all the executive producers who bankrolled this insanity (you all are CHAMPS!). There’s a whole lot more where all this came from and God (or his honorable adversary) willing, we’ll be sharing it with you in Radz releases to come. Anyway, for now here’s some of our adventures. We hope you find some pleasure and joy from all these many times and places where WE were at…

ZEKE FISHHEAD


	Ed \| Dave \| Reggie Dedications: Ed Volker In fond remembrance of Thaddeus Jones, that scholar in khaki, who's at last in a place where he can ask Louie and Jelly Roll for all the real inside dope (not to mention Earl) ... DOWN AND DIRTY THIRTY It’s hard to believe we’re still standing (well, leaning, anyway). So many souls have gone since the Radiators first jammed together in that Waldo Dr. garage, full of burlap and fiberglass-family and friends who are no longer with us as well as great homegrown musicians like Earl King and Fess. And, weeping wizards, here we still are! Fate’s an inscrutable thing and these years have been filled with much adventure. When I stop and reflect upon my crazy band mates, I ask myself: how lucky can one man be to get to play for 30 years with his favorite musicians? WILD AND FREE is a hodge-podge, a crazy quilt, by no means exhaustive, but a suitably salty, peppery gumbo that covers live performances, studio sessions, and the odd rehearsal from June 1978 to March 2008. The earliest performances come from Luigi’s Pizza, a joint on Elysian Fields, frequented by professors and students from the nearby UNO (as well as all manner of lakefront losers) and managed by Wesley Schmitt, a redoubtable bon vivant and host. Every Wednesday night, when the feasting families had finished their pizzas, the tables in the back would be cleared away and before you could say “Willie, burn your shirt!” musical gear would spring up like mushrooms after a spring rain, and that’s when the party would start. The gig had been originally scored by the Rhapsodizers, but when Camile, Frank, and I exited that aggregation and joined forces with Reg and Dave, the Wednesday night duties gratefully fell into our fins. The Rads played there from ‘78 through ’82. It is arguable whether the real gig was in the parking lot, and the music sets merely served as “breaks” from the exhausting, higher pursuits that went on out there. As is the case with some of the other tracks here, the songs from June ’78 were recorded on an Akai reel-to-reel deck I bought in ’73 with the last $200 I ever begged off my Dad. I’d just hang two Shure mikes from the ceiling above the stage and hit start. These reels, stored in a closet in my Mom’s basement, were submerged in floodwaters from the May 9, ’95 flood, and I considered them unplayable (but couldn’t bring myself to throw them out). Well, despite the crud and mildew, lo and behold, they’re playing like a son of a bitch! So, from June ’78: ALL MEAT, the earliest incarnation of LAST GETAWAY, and the medley of KING SOLOMON DON’T MIND into RED DRESS. The sound gets pretty dicey here, especially the medley, which comes at the end of the first set that night, the decibels getting fearsome, but we thought for historical (hysterical?) considerations these early staples of our gigs should be included. Throughout ’78, the band bartered session work for studio time at Knight Sudios in Metarie. Camile was a session engineer there and would sit out when he recorded us, then overdub his part later. CUPID, never before released, and ONE-EYED JACK come from there and then. All of the Rads, in various configurations played on a lot of different sessions at Knight, backing up everyone from Jean Knight and Eddie Bo to less heralded luminaries, such as Jesus’ Little Preacher Boy. The first public performance by the Rads was at a little bar about a block from Tip’s-Ford’s Place-which was the watering hole for local cabbies. It was a pass-the-hat situation and one of the cabbies kindly offered his cap as a collection basket, a strategy discontinued when the cap kept coming back with less money than it started out with. There are cassette tapes floating around of these maiden gigs, but they’re way too sonically challenging to listen to (unless you’re of a certain state of mind) (or so I’ve been told). Originally, Tipitina’s was the 501 Club and was just the place for staging live music events, the Gator People figured. The Gator People were a loose assembly of uptown goodtimers who wanted to hear Fess and the Meters and Booker, not just at Jazz Festival, but all year round. The 501 was a sleepy bar that had once catered to sailors during the heyday of the Port of New Orleans and whose only client in the early seventies was the Klan, who held meetings there on occasion. Once the Gator Balls got rolling, it wasn’t long before the Gator People formed the Summa For You Too corporation and renamed it Tipitina’s in Fess’ honor, Fess’ deep carnival groove and prodigious keyswork constituting something like the spiritual sparkplug for all the musical rebirth that was happening in the city at that time. The Rads had the distinct privilege of playing with Fess on the 501 stage on a number of occasions, and nothing will ever beat those golden days when Fess was still alive and the music flowed so sweetly and freely. From the stage at Tip’s, we offer LOVE TROUBLE, from early ’79. This tune has devolved into an excuse to jam in recent years, but, as you can hear, it was a mean little machine in its youth. The first recording released by the Rads on their own label, Croaker, was a 45, SUCK THE HEAD, SQUEEZE THE TIP. We cut up the original performance, putting what we called “Part 1” on the A-side, “Part 2” on the B (the oldest school in the book). It was recorded by Terry Bickle on a 2-track situated in his van parked out in the Luigi’s lot. Here’s the entire performance, along with a HARD CORE, hardly out of short pants, before it morphed into the juggernaut it was to become. SUCK THE HEAD, SQUEEZE THE TIP was the name of a Saturday night event at Tip’s, back in the days of the Rhapsodizers. Of course, it’s a phrase describing in capsulated fashion the proper way of eating boiled crawfish. That Saturday night I was catching a ride to the gig with Rhaps’ bassist Becky Kury and I just started making up the song, singing the words with a swampy groove-feeling, And sometime in the course of the night, I just whipped the thing out and we all got on it and dug it. (Sometimes things just come, like they got a mind of their own, no matter what you say.) Ah, the Dream Palace. The Rads probably played more gigs at the DP than they played anywhere else in NO (and I’ve got a mass of hardly playable cheap cassettes to prove it. I just ain’t got the heart to toss ‘em). The Palace had its own impresario, Allen Langhoff, a sky-diving Mr. Natural of sorts, and its own social club, the Krewe of Kosmic Debris. The place truly was a palace of dreams. I just wish I hadn’t woken up-I can’t remember a bit of it! But the mildewy tapes remember and we managed to extract these fine versions of HARD ROCK KID, MY HOME IS ON THE BORDER, and DOCTOR DOCTOR, when it was still an amorphous work-in-progress and hadn’t been nipped and tucked by Epic Records. It was around this time that two team members of the local band, Remedy, joined forces with us. Percussionist Glenn Sears was with the Rads for many years-he even claims to remember some of them!-filling out the rhythm section and throwing the odd dash of color here and there. Another Remedy alumnus, soundman Ken Samuels remains today, as he has for many years, steadfast at the wheel of the soundboard, working what sometimes appear to be miracles. Also from the Dream Palace, from a board tape, LIKE DREAMERS DO and HARD TIME TRAIN in their more fulsome, pre-Epic derangements, and some rarities, STAND BY ME, BABY and HOUSE OF BLUE LIGHTS, a song inspired by a roadhouse outside Austin, Texas, where the whole band went to dig (and dug enormously) Delbert McClinton’s band on a smoky Saturday night in the summer of ’79. Speaking of dreams, at Southlake, another Metarie studio, where we recorded two of our Epic efforts, we also had the pleasure of recording some demo sessions. Among them-a never released FEVER DREAM, a song, it’s been said, that speaks for the condition of the more fervent fish head fans, lost in the heart of a Rads’ gig. The first time we played New York City was in the summer of 1980 at a venue called The Eighties. We were supposed to be backing up Earl King on Friday night, then sharing Saturday night with a Texas group, the Cobras. Friday was Friday the 13th and Earl went to the airport but, being of superstitious bent, never got on the plane. What chu gonna do?! We played…and, over the years, we’ve kept coming back to the Big scabby, crabby, glorious Apple, playing at the Lone Star Café and Tramp’s. Expanding crowds in the late ‘80’s led us to larger venues, such as the Ritz, where these board tapes feature: OH BEAUTIFUL LOSER, GREEN ARROW, and the sizzling HAVE A LITTLE MERCY. Well, time marches on, and our career was only briefly of Epic proportions. But the music called us on and the krewes did, too. The Krewe of Snafu came along just at the right time, helping pull us out of a bad case of Post-Epicmatic-Stress-Syndrome. They made us tapes of our old tunes and urged us back into the more carefree and expansive way of music-making we enjoyed before our songs got domesticated by Epic’s corporate approach of trying to fit our big old fish head foot into a little silk radio-friendly slipper. The Snafoids, from all over, graduated TU IN ’91, ’92, but still reunite under the aegis of Grandmaster Kingsley Stoken every Jazz Fest for themed Rads gigs that always stand out as being some of the most memorable of the year. I hope I’m not giving the impression that Epic was a bad thing for us-it wasn’t. It was a great opportunity and we had a good run with them while it lasted, and we learned bunches of things from the producers we worked with-Rodney Mills, Jim Dickinson, and Joe Hardy. But the way (you might say) it straightened up some of our bent places and bent some of out straight places was something of an awkward development and it was refreshing when we were free, to let the music on stage breathe again, and to let the songs and grooves unfold in a somewhat less hell-bent manner. The longest running krewe, outside of the Krewe of Moms, which hosts the Moms Ball during carnival weekend each year, is the Krewe of Dads in Minneapolis. Dads was originally spearheaded by an alien who goes by the name of Mike Starnes but whose real name is Elmo the Magnificent. Elmo’s torch has been nimbly passed to Todd Baker, who isn’t an alien but who enjoys playing with matches. The Rads have been playing the Twin Cities for over 25 years and the krewe is still going strong. These gigs always feel home-away-from-home. In ’92, we recorded several nights at the World Theater in St. Paul, Minnesota, some of which became Bucket of Fish. Here’s some unreleased rarities from those nights: STRANGERS and SONGS FROM THE ANCIENT FURNACE. Someone once said that the Rads have forgotten more songs than most bands ever learn. Well, we’re just like most bands, only different. From the Fountain Bay rehearsal room, in ’98, TEAR MY EYES OUT, a rousing take on the Oedipus myth. Onward to Magazine St. Sound in ’99 and a tune with Dave and Zeke sharing vocals, THE FOREVER MAN. In 2000 Barney Kilpatrick brought us into Trent Reznor’s Nothing Studio in NO where, with Jim Gaines producing, we recorded an effort released as THE RADIATORS (but which everybody calls The Black Album). Here’s two tunes we left out (don’t ask me why): WILD AND FREE and a ditty penned especially for a Moms Ball of yore, WHEN HER SNAKE EYES ROLL. To cap it all off, we went to the Music Shed on Euterpe St. in NOLA. With Lu Rojas at the console, we cooked up two never recorded favorites, GIRL WITH THE GOLDEN EYES and a tune that asks that most vexing of questions, WHERE WAS YOU AT? After Zeke had gone through the reel-to-reels and a small fraction of cassettes, we all rummaged through various possibilities, till we came up with this worthy concoction, which we then trucked over to Bruce Barielle, who really mastered the hell out of it (and this is not said lightly, believe me). John Parker outdid himself with the eyefuls, and Jay Rosenberg is overseeing the nuts and bolts as I speak, but I’m gonna shut up in two seconds…None of this would have had a chance if it wasn’t for the helpful support of all the executive producers who bankrolled this insanity (you all are CHAMPS!). There’s a whole lot more where all this came from and God (or his honorable adversary) willing, we’ll be sharing it with you in Radz releases to come. Anyway, for now here’s some of our adventures. We hope you find some pleasure and joy from all these many times and places where WE were at… ZEKE FISHHEAD