The Vulgar Boatmen are an archetypal cult band. Those of us who love them really, really love them, but the three albums the Indiana/Florida band released between 1989 and 1995 never reached a wide audience. So, the reissue of debut You And Your Sister, bolstered by a pair of new remixes and three previously unreleased tracks, is a gift. Dale Lawrence and Robert Ray wrote strummy, propulsive tunes that could recall Good Earth-era Feelies, the Velvet Underground or Stax/Volt soul. The band will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our new Q&A with Lawrence.
Jake Smith: Jim Copp wrote, performed, produced and distributed a series of children’s phonograph records during the 1950s and 1960s. These records reveal Copp to be an overlooked master in the art of multi-tracked studio production in the magnetic-tape era. Recording in his home with early multi-track tape machines, Copp wrote and performed his own original scripts, using self-taught overdubbing and editing techniques to create comic scenes, wistful sound poems, surreal fairy tales, quirky songs, fantastic soundscapes, and an unforgettable cast of characters. Copp’s only assistant was his partner Ed Brown, who provided some of the voices for the recordings. The resulting LPs were released on Copp and Brown’s own independent label, Playhouse Records, and the two men distributed them on cross-country tours of American department stores.
Copp specialized in a kind of darkly comedic and decidedly unsentimental storytelling that can make his kiddie records feel like surrealist tone poems. The darkest moment in the Playhouse catalog may be the track “The Chicago Stockyards” from the 1963 LP A Journey To San Francisco With The Glups, in which the hapless Glup family take their minds off the recent loss of their beloved cow Bossie by visiting a slaughterhouse, complete with the sounds of hogs and sheep being led down a conveyor belt to an explosive slicer that chops off their heads.
Video after the jump.
