AR: 101

csdh - 101 (2000)

The Houston-based csdh released their debut (and only) album to rave reviews during the spring of my senior year at Rice. But as much acclaim as 101 got as an instant classic, an unbelievably before-its-time and eclectic acid house /folk / electronic noise mammoth of a concept album, it was the bizarre final csdh show ten years ago today that simultaneously put the band in the pantheon of experimental music and necessarily, as you'll read below, ended their career. Taking Neil Young's adage that it's "better to burn out than to fade away" to its logical conclusion, csdh's lightning flash of a career is unsurprisingly the subject of much controversy: could they have really accomplished something had they not been so intensely self-indulgent? Or do we give them far too much credit because they quit before they could eff it up? There is, however, no denying the ridiculous accomplishment contained in the minuscule catalog. If you're unfortunate enough to have never heard this achievement, then you best get thyself to a record store pronto. It's definitely not for everyone, but some people actively desert islands so other people can go to those islands and bring just one vinyl copy of this masterpiece with them. You'd be a fool not to give this one a chance.

My college, appropriately enough, ran the "Lovett Undergrounds," a weekly coffeehouse / open-mic session in the Lovett basement that catered to the lighter-drinking, hipper Rice crowd. I stopped by fairly regularly to check out any on-campus talent that might traipse through or just to lend support to nervous friends I knew would be taking the stage. That night in April '00, though, I basically went on a whim; I hadn't even heard that there was going to be a concert proper, though that became obvious when I stepped in the door. Back then, I was nowhere near as with it, hip or knowledgeable as I am now; I had no idea that the underground sensation csdh had booked the Lovett Undergrounds for a private, in-the-know show. They had released 101 four weeks before in the middle of Rice's Spring Break, and as clueless as I was, I had heard their single "'Splode!" blaring from parties all over campus. So while I didn't really grasp the critical sensation they were in underground circles, and I really had no idea of the importance of that night's show, I *had* at least heard of csdh. "'Splode!," though, was no indication for what I was in store that night.

It's worth noting that Lovett Underground's was typically an acoustic set affair, the type of thing where folks could bang out Dylan tunes or host Don McLean sing-alongs, and things would generally never creep above the you-could-study-through-it decibel level. It was obvious from the stacked-amp setup for the csdh set that the norms were going to be badly violated. It's also worth noting that the typical Undergrounds crowd was perhaps skinnier and more angsty / cynical than the average Rice crowd, but they weren't more than a standard deviation outside of the average. The crowd that night was black-clad and facially-pierced with bumpersticker-smothered backpacks. Lots of black or blue/pink hair, lots of chains and leather collars. But - and this is the weird but - they were not a moody, depressed proto-emo crowd of that stereotypical dress, nor were they angry punks. At least not that night. The dominant vibe was miles and miles of smiles. There was a palpable sense of blissed out happiness, and this was despite the fact that Morphine's Cure for Pain was blaring from the preshow PA. What I'm trying to convey is a seriously dissonant setting; the dress of NOFX with the free spirit of Phish lawn seats. I'll never quite get over that.

As you can imagine, having walked into my familiar basement expecting to hear someone messing up the lyrics to "Ripple" and instead getting all kinds of signs of an electronic assault of punk fare, I was ill at ease. And a little intimidated by the scene and the arsenal on stage. There was an acoustic guitar and a Fender Telecaster, sure, but both stage right and stage left were crammed with amps and synthesizers and drum machines. No drum kit, but a pair of upside down trash-barrels sat in its place. And a couple of vats with wires coiled around their diameters as if a literal experiment would be going on during the show. It wasn't a big stage, and one wondered where on earth the band would stand in the midst of all those wires. To add to the dissonance, the 21st century electronics were being splashed by flickering light. The Lovett Undergrounds were candle-lit and vaguely damp; there were short tables and loveseats/ couches throughout, and the volunteers were serving free cocoa to the alterna kids. After a few minutes of bewildered gawking, I forced myself to ask young black-spike-haired friend Naomi WTF was going on.

She filled me in with a few details in the most thrilled of voices (and before you get your "DRUGS!" accusations on, trust that there was nothing funny going on with over- or under-dilated pupils or anything like that. Trust that it was unbridled, kindergartner-for-the-Easter-Bunny style enthusiasm. Nice to behold), but I still wasn't quite sure what the deal was. Sure, she let me know about the huge concept album that was 101, how it was all she and her friends had been listening to since it had been released, and how the news of the band's "enacted live performance" of the entire concept album, start to finish ("FINISH!" she exclaimed) had effectively grabbed the attention of every underground kid across the state. Lovett was, I had noticed, quite crowded with unfamiliar faces. The single "'Splode!" was just the beginning, she said, I should hear the next track, and oh my god can you believe it and before I knew what was happening she was blathering "ENACTED!" over and over. This got old pretty quick, so I walked to the bar and got a free cocoa.

I'll just go ahead and account the album track by track and the show at the same time, as to do otherwise would give it all away. That night, the Morphine tunes cut off abruptly and, as if this had been arranged beforehand, the table sitters blew out their candles to leave a basement pitch dark save the faint fluorescence coming from the bar area so the baristas could see their orders.
A single overhead light came on to illuminate the middle of the stage, and a six foot six giant of a lead singer, with some kind of chicken-headed Halloween mask on, strolled into view. He picked up his acoustic and patiently affixed the rubber beak around a mic. He gave a hushed but quick "1,2,3,4" and the band (the other members had walked on in the dark, apparently) launched into "'Splode!"

The radio edit of "'Splode!" is an acoustic ditty of an earworm with an impossibly simple A-D riff. It's a classic bright, summer breeze of a catchy song, but is rounded out by enough bass to make it excessively danceable. Easily a four star song, the happy vibe against the bizarre story (see next paragraph) is forever, at least for the Rice population of 2000, associated with good times. The album version (and this show's opener) had all of this - the acoustic bring chungs, the bouncing, window rattling bass, and the catchiness - but also featured screaming, running, LOUD keyboard lines. AND the relatively simple backbeat of the radio take is changed to an 808 polyrhythm that threatens to give irregular heartbeats. Live shows always sound different from the studio, but given how accustomed I had become to the single, my brain was wrenched badly by this version. Oddly enough, with the seeming sonic chaos (and the surge of crowd energy around me), I heard the lyrics to "'Splode!" for the first time that night.

101, as mentioned, is a concept album, and it all starts with "'Splode!" It begins as a one-off stupidly crass joke - the main character of 101, an unnamed narrator, is stumbling into a hotel room for a one night stand at a hotel with an eager companion. The narrator has been telling the woman never to sleep in hotel beds, i.e. under the covers, because while hotels always claim to have washed their sheets, you can never be sure. "Top the 'spread / I'd sleep* instead" coos the singer, and it's unclear exactly how smooth these lines are supposed to be. What is clear is that the narrator has uttered them many times before; it's apparently a killer sort of mood-setter for unobvious reasons, and also a type of life-philosophy - do not trust what is apparent! The irony creeps in when the narrator flips on the tele while his companion is "freshening up" and makes an unsettling discovery. "TV Movie / Floods with UV" he moans, as apparently this is the only television set in the universe that emits ultraviolet light. The UV light illuminates the abject horror of filthiness that is the hotel bedspread, and it suddenly occurs to the narrator that the bedspread almost certainly is NEVER washed by the hotel staff. He decries this with a chorus that you would have had to have been dead not to have caught that spring: "Splode! Stains! The Mountain Top!," and the narrator is left crushed by the times he has spent atop bedspreads thinking he was insulated from the germs of others.

* - Some insist that this second line is "eat," but given the preceding conversation, this interpretation makes little sense.

It is amazing that such a ridiculous and overtly disgusting story could drive such an emotionally sublime album, but it absolutely works - it sets the narrator off on a crisis as this little line he apparently has been using for years has been rendered utterly false. In concert and on album, the three minutes of radio pop perfection (which, incidentally, cuts off at the narrators discovery, only uttering the chorus repeatedly in seemingly cheery-faced denial) spiral quickly into fifteen minutes of kitchen sink mayhem (it's unlabeled on the back cover of the album*). At the show, the lights came up on the lead chicken's bandmates as the mayhem kicked in; the three of them all wore plastic masks of that "have a nice day" '70s style, a mask that has caused some clever csdh fans to lovingly refer to the band as "Chicken and The Entertainments." The anonymity of the band, of course, recalls The Replacements.

* - The back cover notably only contains the words "Splode! ; Rocky." Given that "Splode!"'s boundaries are fairly clear, and that "Rocky" has to refer to the "Rocky Raccoon" cover that concludes the album, most assume that the entire middle of the album is known as ";" - this is assumed to be an allusion to Patti Smith's declaration that she "can put a semicolon wherever the fuck I want to; Jesus did," which is both historically and grammatically dubious. There are competing theories as to what the individual sections of ";" should be called; rumors continue to swirl that the ten year anniversary release will feature individualized tracks with names, but given what happened, one can hardly be sure that these tracks reflect the band's wishes.

I find myself nearly incapable of describing the sounds on this album, either that night or on CD. They are just unspeakably futuristic - there are hints of guitar here and there, when folk passages seemingly over take flow from underneath, but they are definitely the exception. The majority is synth driven dance music... sorta. I say that because the beat stays in a particular groove so fleetingly that there doesn't seem to be time to grab a step, but somehow, this is not a bad thing. Perhaps the best comment is unbridled creativity - anything you can imagine would be in a song is, in synthesized form, from the various beats to the slingshot melodies. ";" is, btw, undoubtedly the highlight of the album and perhaps by concert going life. I'm going to "chicken" out, ha, and say that you must hear it. It's forty-seven minutes of quick cut, ADD passion, so huge and moving that it's hard for me to hear it without getting teary. Trust that you must hear this.

And you should have heard it that night. I think it's really difficult to hear something for the first time in concert and that LOUD and have it just absolutely grab you. The few experimental noise sections, natch, were extended, but even the grating dissonance therein seemed magical that night. And you really should have seen the crowd - while ";" is largely instrumental, there are several whispered spoken word passages and some vocal melodies underneath the chaos; hearing these chanted en masse by the lyrics-memorized alterna-kid crowd was borderline religious. The entire basement of Lovett turned into a throbbing, pulsing, gyrating organic mass, and I seriously couldn't believe something so great could have come out of Houston.

The quipped lines in ";" do propel the narrative quite effectively; the narrator's worldview has become completely unwound, and I'll let you read / listen for the details, but it turns into a meta-commentary of grasping for art to craft meaning. The operation becomes blatantly self-referential in these moments, and that was the big punchline to this show - ";"'s final spoken word passage has the narrator forming a band and trying to work with them to convey the group's message, only their ability to properly convey the aesthetic reaction to having one's worldview disassembled proves incredibly frustrating. This leads to a series of love triangles within and around the band as their romantic notions interfere with their artistic ones, and tension is ripe as the band prepares to play a show... in a college basement... in Houston, Texas. In, yes, April 2000.

This is exactly why the crowd was so excited that night, why the indie kids had turned up in droves to see this up-and-coming band. They were playing the tumultuous show referenced within their album. An album which ends, incidentally, with a hyperviolent cover of The Beatles' "Rocky Raccoon" in which every electronic malady is brought to bear on what was originally a light, folksy tune. In album form it works incredibly if also disturbingly well - it's one of the rare songs that creates such an overwhelming visceral experience that, well, let's just say one should probably not operate heavy machinery within earshot. Also, though, in the album form, the band members tear one another apart - a blood-curling, bones-breaking climax is reached at approximately the 55:03 point of the disc. And on the album, the track cuts off - there is an additional 4:57 on the disc that are empty of any kind of noise.

And this is, natch, the second reason everyone was so excited - the band would play that last 4:57 in the show, revealing the closure to the narrative all these cool people had been letting dangle over their lives for the past three weeks. Ahhhh, it all becomes clear. ENACTED. FINISH. Yes. In retrospect, of course. At the time, I had no clue what was going on, just that a band that had been playing some of the best music I had ever heard in my life, electronica or no, was suddenly covering something resembling "Rocky Raccoon" and getting louder and louder and more and more aggressive. One of the smiley-faced men was miming actually "shooting off the legs of his rival," having brought out a toy shotgun from behind the keyboards on the appropriate line. It seemed like all theater, but when they reached what I later figured out was that 4:57 left mark, things got uncomfortable quick.

Lest you forget, all of this wackiness was played by a huge dude with a chicken head and three smiley-faced guys in suits. at 4:57, the lead singer plowed ahead, Telecaster riffing along, but the three Smiley faced men stopped their active playing (the drum loops were still going) and started a round of harmonic chants of "play the beer, play the beer." Or at least that's what it sounded like. With the lead still thrashing along on the signature Rocky Riff (although in this version heavily distorted) they slowly sauntered toward the lead singer and lifted him, guitar and all. His thrashing became uncontrollable, and notably, his playing - which had been blaring in either voice or guitar or even in acoustic strum all night - was abruptly cut off. With the guitar suddenly absent, the drums-only cacophony felt even louder, and when the "Entertainments" dunked the Chicken into the vat, there were sparks and crack and pops and the stage lights flashed. HORRENDOUS feedback filled the room while the Smiley's just stood there and the now upside down Chicken's feet thrashed from inside the vat. Eventually, one of the baristas shut the PA down by force, as the show had seemingly stopped - they were just allowing an ungodly shriek of electronic ghastliness fill the room, and that's all well and good for a little ten second artistic statement, but somewhere around the forty second mark it got to be way too much.

It all seemed pretty idiotic to me, just in terms of brazen spectacle. So I left, figuring I had gotten my free money's worth for the evening (and more importantly, tired of having my fingers wedged in my ears). And I'm pretty glad that particular bit of "music" is nowhere to be found on the CD - again, I dig the experiments, but the line of "just irritating" seemed to have been crossed. But that wasn't all. The show was raved about, everyone having gotten their narrative closure in realizing that the band imploded. It was thought for a few days that the band was into performance art, and this was, effectively, all part of the shtick. They had pulled off some kind of superb, self-referential cycle of life/art, and would be sure to take their curtain call soon, announce their next tour, what have you.

But then the rumors - the Chicken had drowned! Well, probably not. But he had broken his arm. Or been deprived of oxygen long enough to make him incapable of playing his instrument anymore. He was in a coma. They had broken up over the love triangle. They had actualized their art and found further pursuit undesirable. Whatever the actual reason, new news never came. csdh vanished from the scene. Completely. They never played another show, never made another album. Their sound has vanished entirely, too, so it's not like you can traced the masked members through any other bands.

Being so far removed from the scene, it was a few months before I heard these sorts of details. I find all of the "actual violence" angles difficult to believe, though I guess one can never be sure. It is one of those definitively bizarre events, how a band could tear up our imaginations only to disappear as though they had never existed!

Still, what I see, in retrospect, is a very cool, well-executed artistic act. And more importantly, an incredible disc of music came out of it. I will never believe I got to see that performance; it was pure, dumb luck. But it ingrained this album and its utterly unique sound in me for good. Again, you need to have an open mind and be ready for a dose of insanity with the genius. But you should be able to do that anyways. :) Even having been there, I'll never know what happened that night. Maybe it was a relative of Andy Kaufman. But one thing I do know: I can't recommend this album enough, as there is nothing like csdh's 101.

Status: Dessert Island Recommended
Nyet's Fave: ";"