The Storm Is on the Television

American Pragmatists
Fairfield University
December 12, 1992

My first memory of the trip is being on a pay phone in the lobby of East Hill dormitory, perched above Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. On the other end of the line was my brother Andy in Philadelphia and things were not looking good. It was Friday, early afternoon, and it had been raining all day with little sign of an end. A vicious nor’easter would go on to submerge the West Side Highway, the FDR Drive, and houses up the East Coast.

“Rob and Pam don’t want to do it,” he said, or something to that effect. Considering the weather, I wasn’t sure I wanted to do it anymore either.

Not always the types to look too far into the future, we were stuck in the undesirable situation of needing to re-evaluate plans concocted weeks ago. At Fairfield University, Ted had moved into a house on campus with friends and started a band in the basement. We knew nothing about them except that they were called American Pragmatists and that there couldn’t be anything more fun than getting Andy’s band Kimbashing up there so they could play a show together. They had booked a performance at the theater on campus for that night.

Even had things worked smoothly the plan was geographically ludicrous. After an exam I was scheduled to take the train to our parents’ house in Edison, New Jersey to borrow their Dodge Ram Charger, then drive to Philly, pick up Andy, Rob, Pam, Ed, and their gear, and then get back on the Turnpike and drive back north to Connecticut. Considering the weather and traffic reports coming out of 1010 WINS radio (always sufficient to make you want to dive under the bed and hide) this was probably not going to be in the offing.

In the end, I decided there was no choice but to give it a try, riding the 1/9 anxiously downtown to Penn Station, transferring to New Jersey Transit and watching with fascination at the rising waters on the Meadowlands, lapping up within a couple of feet of the tracks. Later that afternoon the flood climbed even higher and trains were stranded in the chemical swamp for hours until it could subside. I disembarked at Metropark, picked up the truck, and made it to Philadelphia early in the evening. Before I even reached Philly we learned that the show had been cancelled anyway because the school was closed, but alternate plans had been made. There would be a party at Ted’s house the next night.

In the end, Kimbashing pulled out because of the change in schedule, but Andy, his roommate Pete, and I set out on Saturday. I recall stopping at a traffic light along Route 1 near Princeton and noticing the lakes that had formed on the corporate parks, threatening to flow onto the highway. I think we listened to cassettes on a boom box all the way up because there was no tape deck in the truck. Otherwise, the drive was surprisingly uneventful.

We arrived at Fairfield late in the afternoon. The precipitation had turned to ice there. It splintered beneath our feet as we searched the nondescript townhouses for our destination. As we rang the bell, we could hear a rumble from inside. When one of Ted’s roommates opened the door, we realized it was a band rehearsing in the basement. “Who’s that?” we asked our greeter. “It’s the Pragmatists,” he replied. Down the stairs we went.

I don’t know how to explain the effect of that droning B power chord on my post-adolescent brain, played in unison on Tom and Lys’s electric guitars, driven through tube amps, laid in a bed of Pat’s bass, given velocity through the eighth-note pinging of Ted’s wooden stick on a ride cymbal.  Surely there is a neuro-physical explanation for why the overtones from the held F sharp and high B immediately moved me and make my skin crawl every time I hear them. All I knew, and all at once, was that friends of mine had written one of the most powerful songs I’d ever heard.

B to A, F sharp to G, over and over and over again until Tom (I don’t think we’d met yet) stepped to the microphone, singing out in a country-tinged drawl that belied the poetry in his postpunk tribute to Gone With the Wind:

I remember she had this amazing vocabulary.
Oh, she spoke in loves of bread.
When she cut me she was smiling,
and I remember, I remember, I remember
I remember what she said:

“Oh, look around you with your eyes in your fists.
Don’t look at this, these houses are strong
And they’re built to resist.
Oh, look around you with your eyes in your fists.
Don’t look at this, these houses are strong
And they’re built to resist.”
Oh, Atlanta!

Myself, I don’t remember much about the rest of the night or the trip home. I’m not even sure anymore that this is exactly how the trip happened. But it’s almost 20 years later, and the sound of the electrifying welcome we received at the end of a long and wearying journey is all the memory I need.

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Vinegar Tasters...OK. That was me, Belz, Tommy, and Lys Guillorn in Lys's basement. Believe it or not NO DRUGS. I remember we had a janky bass pedal but no bass drum so I ended up using a cardboard box stuffed with towels. Gave good Anti-Parent Culture Sound.
Belz got loose vocally-lyrically. We ate lunch under a tree in Lys's back yard at a table. That afternoon, using Lys's wall-mounted phone in the kitchen, I found out a girl I was in love with went and got married, WITHOUT my say so. Crusher sort of. Then back to making awesome sounds.

-Ted

The Sick Passengers: The Last Show

The Sick Passengers: Christopher Meeder, Chris Williams, Bill Kennedy, Jason Das

Uncle Joe’s Pub
Jersey City, NJ
April 30, 2005

In the spring of 2005 we had plans to go into the studio to document our new crop of songs before Bill moved to Chicago. Alas, it was not to be. Fortunately, we ran a recorder in the back of the room on what turned out to be the last evening we’d all spend in the same room together. If we hadn’t, most of these songs would have been lost forever.

It was a difficult, emotional night and everyone’s nerves were on edge. The recording is way up in the red, but that was just our way of getting the job done. Listen to the death throes of the Passengers in all our ragged glory.

(Don’t miss “Your Patience Bores Me” and “Thaw” below the scroll in the player. They were real burners.)

Classic Rock

Recorded in January of 1993 by Chris Foley, at his grandmother's house in Jamestown, Rhode Island. It was a big old shingled house and there was at least a foot of snow on the ground. If it wasn't one's turn in THE ROOM to lay down dubs, one sat on the living room floor in the sun and cigarette smoke listening to Damned, Beefheart, and Roxy Music vinyl and got schooled by Pete Ryan, who could speak on almost anything, and interestingly. Tom made his spicy potatoes and eggs skillet for breakfast. There were large fishing boats in the harbor. Beers. At night during cigarette breaks you could enjoy pitch black skies and clear stars along with your breath clouds. One night me & Lys slept in this huge downy old bed, and remarkably did not lay it. Tender moments. Tom's vocal sesh on Atlanta could be heard all over the house, we giggled and went daaaamn in the living room. Joe Daley had a candy red thunder broom and Lys had a giant, glossy, black-slab ES-something monster. I was glad to overcome rubbery arms and nail one fill at the end of Atlanta, because after all that's Chris Foley on the mix, and he was the drummer in SS Decontrol. And Bulkhead. SO you have to try. I thought hardcore people would be angry or frightening but Chris was like a giant friendly DAD. He made piccolos, cooked really well, and was patient and encouraging with the first timers. 

-Ted

Hessian Practice Tape

In the summer of 1995 Hessian recorded a couple of songs in rehearsal. We just used a boom box, there are mistakes in the playing, and time did not treat the cassette tape well, but you'll get the idea.
"A Construction Theme" was one of the first songs we wrote and must have been named by Ted. Today this one feels right at home in the early '90s coming for a bunch of guys who were listening to the Jesus Lizard and Shellac at the time.
"Your Name on a Grain of Rice" was the last song we finished and always felt like a step forward to me. I came up with the name when I was traveling in Paris. There was a man in front of Notre Dame who would ink your name in microscopic letters. At the time something about this struck me as moderately profound.
I'm still very proud of the dynamics among the instruments we were able to create in several sections of the song. The whole idea was to leave holes for one another, like the Ex at their most rhythmically interesting, Can in "Spoon," or Sly & the Family Stone in "Sing a Simple Song." Had we continued, this was the path forward.
I made the flyer above for a show in New Brunswick at the beginning of 1995. This was obviously before I got my hands on page layout software. Scroll down for lyrics.

A Construction Theme
Please leave your jacket in the cloakroom
And lay your shoes aside
And step inside for a while.
Warm your hands out by the fire
And here's a glass of cider.
We've set a place for you to
Lay your head, and step outside the outside.
You've spent all your quarters to hide out from your insides.
There are houses for the pious
And I know a place I'd buy us a round of drinks or two.
And on a page or in some corner
With the hand of some man's daughter
In the hay or on the town
We lose our heads and step outside the outside.
Fifteen minutes underground to hide out from our insides.
Your Name on a Grain of Rice
He wears 500 faces
He wears his patience like a crown
But when they pressed him it faded.
"It's just that I'm going 'round a bend again," he said,
"Another bend in 15 years of my time.
I've left my histories in a straight line through tomorrow.
I tried to bury my name."
(He had his name written on a grain of rice.)
He's a clerk, he's a (), he's an engineer.
He's got the books to prove he knows a thing or two.
But what he sees he can see through.
Black eyes.
He wears 500 faces,
Masks to hide a patient frown.
He dons the mask of all he ever meant to be.
Hessian were:
Brian Goad (bass)
Ted Harrison (drums)
Chris Williams (guitar, vocals, lyrics)

Buddy Sevaris - High Strung

Buddy Sevaris, April 1994, Burlington, VT. Photo by Chris Williams.

High Strung was recorded in the dead of a summer night at Drexel University, in a student-run studio, by my housemate, Ken Gregory. We went in as the sun was setting and left just as it was coming up. I remember the lighting was pretty much as Pete depicts it on the cover - a single bare bulb in the middle of the room. I think the fluorescent overheads were causing the amps to buzz or something like that. Full artwork and inserts can be found here. The back cover is not to be missed.

Shag Carpet

Hessian were:
Brian Goad: bass
Ted Harrison: drums
Chris Williams: vox/guitar

They existed in the mid 90s: a magical time where anything was possible. But not really. But kinda it was.