In the ‘80s, long before mp3s or MySpace, bands hunkered down with cheap gear, cranked out demos, dubbed them onto shitty-bias cassettes and passed them around to friends and fan-zines. Sometimes they saved up enough scratch to press an LP, but more often than not a group would poke its head out of the primordial soup just long enough to blurt, “We’re here,” then sink back into obscurity. Case in point: the artifact at hand, originally issued in 1986 on the Old Age/New Age cassette label. Ohio’s Tommy Jay worked with musicians such as Mike Rep (whose fuzzy production and tape manipulation appears on albums by Guided By Voices and Times New Viking) and underground bands such as Nudge Squidfish, Ego Summit and the (Ohioan) True Believers. Jay cut most of Tom’s Tall Tales Of Trauma’s 21 songs in the early ‘80s, and as a compelling, lo-fi documents of Buckeye State ingenuity, they’re profound. You get everything from chugging garage rock (“Accept It”), twisted folk (“The Bugmen”) and Bevis Frond-like jangle (“I Was There”) to a guitar/flute/congas take on Joni Mitchell’s “Dreamland” and a sensual version of Lou Reed’s “Ocean.” Bonus Material: Eight tracks, including 1979 True Believers single “Accept It.” [www.columbusdiscountrecords.com]
—Fred Mills
