reverb motherfuckers

(please)

I remember hearing Twelve Swinging Signs of the Zodiac in 91. It kind of reminded me of Monster Magnet with joke tendencies. I was all over the noise/pigfuck/grunge thing at the time, and the Reverb MFs didn't do much for me.

1st LP (Route 666) is WAAAAY better than 12 Swinging Signs. That isn't to say that it's great or anything, but it definitely has its moments. Very early Monster Magnet might be a reasonable reference point, but so are Mudhoney, the Butthole Surfers and even Gaye Bykers on Acid, with traces of goofball pop "punk" in the vein CVB and the Dead Milkmen. Heavy, fuzzy, psychedelic hard rock with LES sleazeball spirit and lots of random noise and samples vommed oertop. A number of linking/filler tracks are straight-up (if rudimentary) found sound collages. Supersoupy lo-fi production appealingly emphasizes nerdy pop over musclebound rawk. Nice silkscreened & hand-colored covers.

Fondly remember "Want Girl" and "Peace Man": both heavy, noisy proto-grunge blues punk, but both pretty damn catchy, too. Nice watery bass sound on the former and a hellish sampler abuse death march introing the latter. "Who Got the Crack?" was once kinda funny in a similar vein, but probably sounds terribly dated by now. Throw in some jokey biker rock (the embarassing "Highway to Hojos" and the entertainingly degenerate "Thrillseekers"), and an entertaining cover of "Suspicious Minds" and you got yourself an album. Worth tracking down if you're into the goofier fringes of late 80s American post-punk rock.

Thanks, sounds up my alley. Will keep eyes peeled.

a band that was absolutely jaw-dropping on stage but couldn't capture their sound on wax. the records are excrutiating but around the late 80s / early 90s they were rock n roll fire live.

so sorry you missed them.

also, they were nothing like early monster magnet or the buttholes, though I guess the albums could sound like laughably substandard takes on that school of thought.

on a good night they sounded like the modern lovers getting assraped by halo of flies after mainlining thin lizzy.

and many other rockcrit cliches

there used to be a live clip on youtube, can't seem to find it now

One of the ex-members, Roy Edroso, runs an excellent political blog at

http://alicublog.blogspot.com

and is also an online columnist for the Voice now, making fun of right-wing political bloggers on a weekly basis.

Never saw 'em live. To hear EdIII tell it, I'm sorry to have missed the chance. Anyway, I've only got the albums to go on. Monster Magnet/Buttholes sounding only in a distant, as Ed sez lesser-than sense. Also a bit like Urge Overkill, in the jokey appropriation of classic rock moves. Can see fans of a powerful band that was hating the goofy, thin-sounding 1st LP, and it's undeniably kinda crappy, but I like it anyway (or like parts well enough to defend it overall).

12 Swinging Signs was a real disappointment, though. Similar overall sound, but no tunes to speak of and the weird tangents are scaled way back. The last couple tracks ("Nowhere Nothing Fuckup" and "Radiation <somethingorother>") are okayish, but the rest is a wash. Then again, it's been a while...

I remember reading edroso's band history years ago, unfortunately it doesn't look like he ever finished the tale

Ballad of the Reverb Motherfuckers

part one

part two

part three

part four

there's a sound clip there, too

more here http://www.edroso.com/tunes.html

and here http://www.sleazegrinder.com/flashmetalReverbMotherfuckers.htm

it's weird how much more accomplished they sounded live than on record

also, I've never seen a drunker band.

they sounded less accomplished the drunker they got, but that was part of the fun too, watching them slowly devolve over the course of a set into some howling half-naked two chord bashing thing.

Dunno about accomplished (xpost), but the guitar on "Love Juice In All Three Holes" is a lot cooler than I remember. Too bad they didn't up "Radiation Generation".

Ballad of the RMFs is great -- funny & endearing. Even kinda inspirational. Thanks for posting it, Edward. Hope Edroso finishes it up some day, as I'd love to read the whole thing.

considering he wrote them between may and sept 2002, that trail has probably long gone cold. maybe if someone sends him a link to this thread he'll get it back in gear.

that last entry ends the story right as I started paying attention to them, when andy was the drummer, roy sported a leo sayer style 'fro, and they were playing maxwells and cbgbs.

They sound like quite a spectacle. Wonder why the records came out so controlled/contrived (not necessarily in a bad way), if they were such a primitive noise machine live?

supposedly there's a 3rd unreleased album called goodbye cruel world.

John Terhorst from the band (voice, guitar, bass, production, etc.) is a close friend of the family; I'm gonna send him the link for this thread and see if he has any input he can share. (We were just talking about the RMFs a few months ago at a party, actually, though the only record by them I currently own myself is the "LSD-25" 45 from 1991. My wife's got a later CD he did, c. 1996 -1998, as part of a project called Electrophila vs LSD 25; they do a pretty cool cover of DNA's "Blonde Redhead" on it.)

haha, so he can read me repeatedly slamming the albums he "produced"! wunderbar!

that's cool if he turns up for a q&a tho, I've long wondered if any of those shows circa '90 were taped. cbgb's did a lot of board recordings and a few of those got released back in the day (live skull's don't get any on you, the frogs live at cbgbs), it would be great if a reverb mofo's one saw the light of day. I know there was video footage - aside from the short clip that surfaced and disappeared off youtube, I remember seeing something on a video comp at the time.

urge overkill comparisons work from an attitudinal perspective - that jokey/tweaked angle on classic rock - but urge had the opposite problem of the rmf's in that their albums were a whole lot better than the live experience. urge never seemed to dig themselves way down into what they were doing in the way the rmf's did. I remember seeing urge back in '89 and they had on their matching smoking jackets and sunglasses and it was like cool look, but where's the beef? whereas the rmf's looked like a gang of goofy dorks but they knew how to lay down some serious pipe, almost like a half japanese kind of thing. I never saw urge live during their later AM radio phase, tho.

Based on what I've heard here, would love to see some live footage.

Saw Urge only once, circa Americruiser, and they tore it up pretty good. Loud, fucked up, half locked in. Maybe I just got lucky? Anyway, love the very brief live track mentioned upthread, but it's a tease. Sounds like a freaked-out, psychedelic spookshow version of the Honeymoon Killers, which is awesome, but it goes on for not much more than a minute. Rip!

Listening to the five 12 Swinging Signs tracks supplied by the pages EdIII linked, I find that I like the songwriting/production a LOT more than I remember -- "On the Cross" is fantastic, "Man's Son" (or Man's Party, or whatever) is almost as good, "Love Juice..." is funny and stilted and weird in a good way, and "Nowhere Nothing Fuckup" is way better than "okayish", up there with the best stuff on the debut. Maybe I was just too into Route 666 to give the follow up a chance. I dunno, but it seems I was wrong to trash it. Wanna hear the whole thing again.

Used to see Terhost around town in various places, in particular downtown Brooklyn. He does something with animation for TV. Think he has a kid now.

Saw the RMFs put on a great show for about 40 people at some deserted basement cafeteria at UMass one night in 1988 or 89.

He does something with animation for TV. Think he has a kid now.

Yep on both counts. (My wife has worked with him on the TV animation front, actually.)

Did your wife work on Blue's Clues, xhuxk?

Yes.

From John Terhorst, via email:

You might post the below for me to the discussion.


The two records listed on the site there are at least 3 albums of material recorded in studios perhaps more. The third record Goodbye Cruel World was a selection of songs that would have comprised a third album and was complete with artwork prior to the breakup of the band.

Available on media.

"RMF" the first album recorded at Toxic Shock Studios with fantastic Engineer Jim Forniautus. - Vinyl (about $35 on ebay)

"Twelve Signs of the Swing Zodiac" Recorded by fabulous Wharton Tiers. Vinyl, Casette and CD

"LSD 25" Single - Engineer Jim Forniautus

About 20 compilation tracks including the Shonin Knife Comp, and Alice Cooper Comp. all engineered by Jim Fornuatus

We performed a 35 minute music piece for the Bill Coleman Dance Troupe this was also recorded and the final Performance at the Lincoln Center of Canada was professionally videotaped. This included stunt men covered in blood bags being beaten by baseball bat welding dancers. The band was also on stage.

Someone posted that our records did not capture our live shows and this is true although they were done at the same volume with the same equipment with few overdubs or studio enhancement like double tracking. In some ways I would like to think it was like the Who whose records were great and the songs really got the opportunity to shine, but their live shows were so much better. We always planned on doing a live record at some point but I think that the performances were best captured on video.

There are many live videos of the band performing including some very nice ones by Rick Little (about 10 shows) who had a show on Manhattan Cable TV. There has been some discussion with Rick about him putting some of the video on YouTube at some point in the near future. Most of these shows are also board recorded.

The Hard and Heavy video I believe was pulled from You Tube due to fact that the copyright is held by some big media conglomerate. It was not posted by the owners.

As far as live shows almost all were recorded on Cassette many of high quality and are board recordings. There are about 10 studio level recordings done with more advanced recording equipment at clubs like CBGB's. We did this as we expected at some point to select tracks from different times and shows for a Live album. Most of these have been transferred to digital and sound great. There are many radio station full length live shows including six or seven live shows in the WFMU archives and one at WJUL. These were very high quality.

There are no real plans to put any of this material out at this point but the band owns all the rights to all of the recorded material and there are no contractual issues. I doubt there is any more of our music available on the internet other than what is up on Roy's site.

There are also no plans for us to get together and do a reunion of any type, although we have gotten together and jammed from time to time for our own amusement and the band are all still friends. Abet older and very busy with lives that are filled with things other than music.

We are all still musically active; Andy Malm who plays in bands upstate, Race Age who plays in Jazz Fusion bands in NYC. Roy played bass until last year with Lach in his band the Secrets with Billy Fica. John McDermott plays with Glenn Branca.

I have been in several bands since the Reverbs. Most recently playing with the late Steve Parrino in Electrophilla vs LSD 25. I have had a new CD available at Art Basel each year for the the last three years two are available for free as podcasts on itunes under the name LSD25

And a slight ammendment from John, to the above:

Rereading this I think I could be misunderstood on the amount of studio material. The amount is pretty profound, towards the end we just recorded all the time and documented almost all of the original songs. As well there were large number of sessions for the second album only a small amount of the recorded material was ever used.

The multi-track tapes fill about 10 milk crates and there are about 3 banker boxes filled with cassettes, videos and DATs I have yet to get too. There are three albums that were complete and mixed that I mentioned in my previous post I would estimate 4 additional albums of studio material without using multiple versions of songs, covers, rehearsal demos or live recordings.

I was listening to a cassette of a live show from Hank's Crystal Palace on the Bowery with The Willies the other night and it was a lot of fun not very hi-fi though. I think if there is any interest I might get Roy to sign off on me letting folks hear a MP3 of it. If I can figure out how to get it hosted.

John T

wow, thanks for the info chuck!

tell john to slap those bad boys up on archive.org's live music archive

it's free with no restrictions

http://www.archive.org/details/etree

holy crap.

hi

Shit! I have from V.a. NYC hardcore&more video show only 1 song live circa 1989 and otheer live song from V.A. mouthful of sweat video show,I'm looking for other live shows of REVERB MOTHERFUCKERS and other NY scum punk,I have ed gein's car,letch patrol,false propherts&more,if you have any footage or NY noise-punk please write see a partial list I have at www.freewebs.com/almudeno69,recently got SCUMFEST 1988 CBGB in DVDR

thanks

RIP John McDermott -- really lovely tribute to him and his memory by Falling James here:

https://www.facebook.com/falling.james/posts/2862567657141222

RIP

Feel like there was a third manJohn associated with this band I met at some point but kind of hard to verify.

This other guy, John or not, played guitar with them for a while, but moved to Austin at some point.