BOMB
Bomb's first two (and best) albums: To Elvis In Hell and Hits of Acid
Plus, how Bomb got kicked off of Warner Brothers
By Michael W. Dean of Bomb, Part 2
(December 2023)
TRACK 3 (of To Elvis In Hell). "No Color in Utah"
Before I lived in San Francisco, I lived in DC, then Charlottesville, Virginia. In VA, I was in a band called Baby Opaque. Very good jazz-rock band with a taste of hardcore punk, often compared to Minutemen, though I'd never listened to Minutemen when that band started and we formed our sound.
Baby Opaque did an EP and an LP, but was going nowhere fast. I figured it was because I wasn't in a big city and decided to move to a "music city." My plan was this: "Move to NY or San Fran and start a band. Play my odd original music until everyone in that town who liked odd original music had heard me. If I was getting more popular I'd keep doing it. If not, I'd sell my bass and amp, buy a typewriter, and become a writer."
I moved to San Fran on a Greyhound bus. Invited my girlfriend to come with me, she declined (so later I wrote my part of the lyrics in "Gigi" about her).
On the bus, I took LSD for 3 days in a row to "prepare myself for San Fran." By the end of the second day, I felt like I was moving even when the bus would stop.
I pictured the bus letting me off at sunny Haight & Ashbury, then immediately meeting some cool hippie punk chick who would be my girlfriend and I'd join her roommate's band because they'd need a bass player. And her roommates' band would be Dead Kennedys.
In reality, the bus let me off at Second and Mission, in the rain, at a bus station full of aggressive panhandlers who lived on the benches in the bus station. A few looked like maybe they were hippies a few decades ago, a few pounds of smack and crack ago. No one had bothered to tell these people they had failed the acid test.
Furthermore, the bus line had lost my bass amp. I got it back a week later, but I assumed for several days it was in the window of some pawn shop along the route in some other state. I was dazed from the road trip and the acid when I arrived.
Read more about this bus trip, and everything about Bomb, with the names changed, in my novel, Starving in the Company of Beautiful Women.
A lot of the bus journey across America was boring. I compared the look of Ohio and Kansas farmland to the Flintstones when Fred is running and you see the same background repeat over and over (though now that I own a farm and live around many farms, I have more appreciation for the beauty and differences in farmland).
But when we got to Utah, I was tripping and watching the sunrise over the red desert. It looked like Mars to me. I loved it. As I was coming down, I wrote an untitled poem that later became the complete lyrics to Utah.
When I went through Ohio
there were cows there
when there's cows there,
I drink milk
but when I went through Utah
my eyes were parched
and when my eyes are parched,
I don't drink.
It really was a bit of a Zen koan, but with no real life lesson. It was largely just a comparison of the familiar look of rural Ohio (I grew up in smalltown Western New York, near Ohio, looked much like Ohio) to the crazy (to me) beautiful look of Utah deserts. I'd never been further west than Nebraska at this point, and that was once, as a kid with my parents. Nebraska looked like Ohio.
The music of "No Color in Utah" is one of the rare Bomb songs that we all wrote the music together. Tony started the drums, slow, steady, and heavy. Really slow. Most drummers would want to speed this up, but nope. I played minimal bass, the same 3 notes, only 3 notes, over and over, in the slow and fast parts. It's just a tritone plus an octave. Most bass players would complicate this, but nope. Jay wrote a really cool spaghetti Western guitar part over it, and we went from there.
I like space in music. I also liked leaving room for Jay. I respect Doug's guitar playing but I actually liked Bomb a lot better with just me, Jay, and Tony. Bomb was two full with two guitars, and Jay was relegated to playing less because Doug fills up a lot of the available sonic acreage.
I liked to keep my bass playing as minimal as possible. But I also liked to do one tasty lick per album that was a little complex, just to prove I could actually play beyond the root note, third, fifth, octave, and tritone, like many rock bass players.
There's one of those in "Healthfood and Heroin," right before the last verse. That one is inspired by Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead. I do another one in "I'm Not Restless."
So, I showed the guys my Utah poem. They thought it fit the music we'd written. I tried singing it, Jay tried singing it, even Tony tried "singing" it, nothing really worked. Jay was going to sing it in the studio, but we had his wife Maxine Cottrell give it a try. She was a good singer who sang in a good band called Typhoon.
That's one thing about Bomb: even with minimal studio time, we're good enough musicians that we could experiment and pull it off (;ike Jay improvising the keyboard bass on "Mrs. Happiness").
Jay turned out the main studio room lights during Maxine's singing. I think he was performing some manual sex on her- you hear some little moans between lines in the song. You can also hear Jay's teeth grinding on that song, a testament to just how much speed we were all doing to get through making a record on spec time.
Spec time is when you record cheap or free at a good studio by using hours that you don't book. We probably spent about 30 hours total recording and mixing that album. But it was spread out over a month. My girlfriend was an assistant at Hyde Street Studio, she got paid in studio time, and her friend (now her husband) did the recording. I think we just shared speed with them to pay them. None of us do speed anymore.
Several of the sessions we did on almost no notice. Like my girlfriend would show up at my house and say "Someone canceled at the last minute, we have 8 hours available, starting 20 minutes ago. Get down here." This was before cell phones, before pagers. I'd have to go to a payphone and call the other guys, sometimes at work, have them leave work, load the gear into Jay's car, and speed down to the Tenderloin and load into Hyde Street Studio.
I really love "No Color in Utah." We played a lot of hardcore punk shows on tour, and playing that song would really sort out the audience, the ones who only wanted to slam would go to the bar. The ones who liked good music regardless would stay and get in the trance with us.
Oh, the title is Tony being clever. "No Color in Utah" is Tony making a joke about how "there aren't any black people in Utah," as he said. It's not true, but he'd never been there at that point. So he'd made up his mind about what the rest of America looked like before seeing it. He also used the word "farmers" as an insult for any rural white people.
Speaking of hardcore, straight-up punk rockers weren't that into us. Maximum Rock 'n' Roll Magazine was even dismissive of us;
Bomb To Elvis in Hell LP
Eccentric as hell, BOMB go for varied song structures which go from soft to loud, sung to screamed, weird to punky. The experiment wore thin on me, but suckers for novelty might give this a listen.Reviewer Steve Spinali. Label Boogadigga. Issue MRR #48 - May 1987
TRACK 4. "I'm Not Restless"
Sometime during Bomb, I was told I was manic depressive, but I really think it was just constant alcohol use. Because I've been sober since 1999 and I never get despondent anymore. Feelin' blue yes, but never hopeless.
"I'm Not Restless" I wrote fully formed in Virginia, before I moved to San Fran. Jay and Tony made it great but I used to do this song with my old band Baby Opaque. I wrote it all, the chords, words, melody.
I almost didn't show this to Bomb- I thought they'd think it was too "nice." We had 4 or 5 songs already by this point, I was trying to get us to have enough to play an opening gig somewhere so I brought this out. To my surprise, Tony and Jay liked it. Jay liked everything, but I thought Tony would think it was too "un-dark" or something, even though it is about depression and thinking about suicide. Lol.
That's Bomb in a nutshell- "this upbeat song about suicide might not be dark enough."
"I'm Not Restless" is about depression, but with a lot of hope too. It's me WANTING to get out of depression, not resigning to it like so much other music I've heard. It's not me looking to die, it's me looking for the cure.
Though part of what made Bomb Bomb was laughing at death instead of giving into it.
TRACK 5. "Gigi"
The title "Gigi" is Tony being clever and obtuse. It's making a girl's name out of an abbreviation for the last two words, "Goodnight, goddamnit."
"Goodnight, goddamnit" is the last line in a letter written to me by the woman I sing about in my part of this song- the letter she wrote me when I was going to California without her, even though I invited her and she said no.
"Gigi" feels like heroin, if anyone wants a good musical representation of that drug. I've had several people tell me they want this song played at their funeral.
The dichotomy between Tony and the rest of the band here is something we did a lot in Bomb, just not usually at such a slow tempo. Tony playing stiff, but Jay and I playing legato. It works. The music was written together though with the 3 of us in the room together. This wasn't "John writes the verse and Paul writes the Middle 8."
We sometimes ended our set with this song, in defiance to the common thing of ending with a fast rager.
We did a fun thing with "Gigi" when we toured opening for Flaming Lips for a month. When we got back to San Francisco, the sold-out show at the Kennel Club started like this: Tony on stage playing drums, Jay playing guitar and singing the first long part, and Steve Drodz, drummer from Flaming Lips, playing my bass part on my bass. I was not on stage, I was at the back of the club listening to people saying things like "Did they finally kick Michael out of the band?" and "I heard he OD'ed."
I snuck up the side of the room to the stage, and when my part came up, I walked out on stage and sang. There was a cheer in the audience, kind of some relief. Probably a few groans too, that they didn't leave me in Buffalo.
Steve Drodz is a huge Bomb fan, and a talented multi-instrumentalist. After one show we played with them, Steve sat down at the bar piano and played a medley of Bomb songs, singing them cocktail jazz/cheese style.
SIDE 2
TRACK 6: "You In Romance"
The billiard ball break at the start we recorded at Hyde Street Music- put a mic on a 50 foot cable and connected it up to the studio room.
Expensive studios like Hyde Street barely exist now. But when they were common, they usually had some diversions like pool tables or pinball. Three reasons;
1. You can charge more for the studio.
2. Helps bands blow off steam, makes a better record.
3. Any time you spend paying money to play pool is free income for the studio.
Some studios even have free food. When you're paying hundreds of dollars an hour, it makes money for the studio to buy you some TV dinners to pay hourly to eat free. TANSTAAFL.
Fantasy Studios in Berkeley had free food when I was there. I went to watch famous mastering guy George Horn master the Hits of Acid record for vinyl. That's the studio built by (allegedly) exploiting Creedence Clearwater Revival for not understanding what "music publishing rights" are.
The weird key-change last chord is Jay putting in his jazz influence. Jay's dad is a well-known jazz upright bass player Barre Phillips. Jay was raised steeped in the jazz.
The whole second half of this song (until the Doo-Wop end part) is in 7/8 time. Tony came up with that beat. When we told him it was in 7/8, he didn't know what 7/8 was.
Jay and I have a good bit of music theory, his mostly absorbed from his dad. With me, it's from reading and taking some classes in college. Tony has no musical training to speak of. He's kind of an idiot savant with percussion.
Jay and Doug can play any kind of music, by ear, and could play guitar or bass (or in Doug's case, drums) in any rock or pop band. With very little time to learn the songs. Tony played in Bomb because it's what worked for his limited musical range. Now that I'm doing the one-man band home studio thing with synthesizers with BipTunia, I've put out 85 albums in 5 years, with each song going through (or inventing) several different musical styles.
Tony really was amazing for what Bomb was, but he does speed up from time to time. I can't listen to "Hey Richard" or "There Is No Promise of a Future in the Moment" off of Hate Fed Love, as well as a couple other tracks because Tony speeds up, and not in a good or intentional way. But overall Tony's drumming worked really well for Bomb.
I didn't understand what a rock-solid clock-solid drummer was until after Bomb when I played with Michael Urbano in the short-lived band Slish.
Right after drum machines started to get popular in the early '80's, there used to be bumper stickers that said "Drum machines have no soul." Well, my new project has an album called Drum Machines Have No Baggage. That title may have its roots in Bomb.
Speaking of people "nailing it" in one take, the sax on this song is Bob Sax. That was our nickname for Bob Bartosik. We had some other guy play the sax on this first- we spent over an hour trying to get him to record a 20-second section, and it wasn't good. Then we had Bob Sax come in, he nailed it in one take. The only direction we gave him was that we were going for sort of a '50's Doo-Wop feel. We were actually clapping and cheering when he finished because it was so good and the other guy was so crappy.
The other guy who tried the sax part was bad, but thought he was good. There are a lot of people like that in the world. Maybe you think you sound good drunk in your buddy's basement, but in the harsh scrutiny of a good studio, you have to be very good to nail it for the ages in one take. Also a lot of people who can sound good playing with themselves don't know how to play well with others. Tony was very right for Bomb but doesn't play astonishingly well in other more "normal" musician settings.
TRACK 7: "Vagrant Vampires"
Boogadigga Boogadigga Boogadigga Boogadigga!
This song's opening drum part is largely where the name of our vanity label "Boogadigga Records" came from. It's in some other songs, but nowhere as much as here.
Tony invented it, and I've heard other bands use it since. But I first heard it in Jay's garage at 1334 Jesse Street.
The frantic repeating bass line, kind of chicken scratchy guitar over it, a couple people have said I cribbed "La Villa Strangiato" by Rush. But I didn't. If anything I'm influenced there by the thing I think Rush cribbed, which is an old Bugs Bunny cartoon where they're showing automation in a factory and have an orchestra playing a similar (but not identical) melody. I recently learned it's "Powerhouse" by Raymond Scott. Melody starts here at 1:24;
Interestingly, that part of the video says "Most Played," and for good reason. It's great.
Tony and I scored junk on the street and shot up before playing CBGB's the first of the three times we played there. Tony threw up during the first part of the first song, "Vagrant Vampires." He just leaned to the side, threw up on the stage, didn't miss a beat. Punkest shit I ever saw.
TRACK 8: "I Love You Then I Died"
Kurt Cobain's favorite Bomb song.
I have to give credit here to David Wellbeloved, my friend in Charlottesville. He helped write the main idea of this song. Before I moved to San Francisco, one rainy day he and I were sitting on my floor trying to write a song. We wanted to make a joke side-project that was different from our respective bands (his band was LCD, Lowest Common Denominator, mine was Baby Opaque).
Our joke band was to be in the style of Joy Division and we were going to call it "The Swinging Ians" (how's that for dark humor?). All we ever wrote was the line "I loved you then I died," with the two-note bass part, and also the line about making love on my mother's tomb. I was playing bass, Dave was singing, and we had a really old pre-Roland drum machine, we had it set on Rumba beat. I was playing the ostinato A to A-flat, back and forth, as it is in the Bomb song.
I don't recall who came up with "I loved you, then I died," but maybe it was David. I came up with "I met you in the graveyard, by the light of the Moon. We made sweet love, on top of my mother's grave." Dave corrected "grave" to "tomb" since it rhymed. Dave Wellbeloved's name is in tiny letters somewhere on the Elvis in Hell album, about the same size as our names, but it doesn't credit him. Tony was against giving credit.
Tony was also against giving or even paying back debts. For instance, when we got our 60,000 dollars advance from Warner Brothers, Tony was against paying my dad back the 500 dollars he lent us to get the records from the airport when we made To Elvis in Hell. We paid my dad back, but had to fight with Tony to do it. When rehearsing for our reunion gig and recording Lovesucker in 1999, Tony borrowed Doug's drummer's drums, broke one of his cymbals. Tony played hard and often broke cymbals...Tony tried to hide the fact that he broke it so he wouldn't have to pay for it. I saw him break it. We ended up paying for it as a band. We often paid for Tony's drum heads, sticks, and beer during practices.
The little contrapuntal Middle-8 in this song, that Krist Novoselic called a "goofy country western musical interlude," I actually wrote in Charlottesville on a piano. I was trying to teach myself to make my two hands play different things at the same time, and I came up with this part. When I wrote it, it sounded like Bach. Jay made it sound like demented Chet Atkins, and that's a good thing.
TRACK 9: "Mrs. Happiness"
Jay wrote the guitar in about a half hour. I wrote the words and melody, mostly on the spot.
I was in Jay's garage, in the back room, having sex with my girlfriend. Jay knocked on the door. I said "I'm busy." He said it was important. I came out and he played it for me. I was making up words before he finished playing it once. One of the only songs I've ever written where it just all poured out. We wrote it down, then recorded it on Jay's cassette 4-track Tascam Portastudio and I went back to my girl.
"Mrs. Happiness" often served as a break live when Tony's shitty drums would fall apart (often). "Mrs. Happiness" wasn't usually on the set list, but Jay would go into it and I'd sing it when Tony's drums broke, so he'd have time to cobble something together with nails and duct tape, or borrow something from the other band.
Fun fact: before Bomb, when Tony lived in Los Angeles and played drums for hard glam band Celebrity Skin, Tony tried out for Public Image Ltd. Tony was one of many drummers trying out. Tony set up his drums. John Lydon walked in the room, looked at Tony's drums and said "NEXT" without letting Tony play. (I always thought if Tony had just played anyway, he might have gotten the job).
The bass on "Mrs. Happiness" is not me. It's Jay playing a keyboard. Jay improvised the part on the spot. We didn't bring a keyboard into the studio with us, it must have been something that was there in Hyde Street Studios, but neither Jay or I remember what it was, and he doesn't remember playing it. I remember him playing it but not sure what. I think it was a Minimoog, but we didn't spend time looking for a sound. Whatever keyboard it was, I sort of remember Jay just using whatever sound it was set to. This was before most synths had the ability to save presets.
Hyde Street Studios is an oasis in a horrible neighborhood, a crack-infested part of the Tenderloin district. My old roommate and bandmate (from Slish) Bean (Paul Kirk) did a few records playing with Helios Creed there and got sucker punched across the street in front of the bodega, just for standing there.
The list of bands that have recorded at Hyde Street Studios include Flipper, Dead Kennedys, Jefferson Airplane, Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Grateful Dead, Cake, Green Day, Tupac Shakur, Chris Isaak, Tim Buckley, and George Clinton.
Dave Bock, the engineer on To Elvis...In Hell, worked on the Dead Kennedys and Flipper albums recorded there. Dave also later made his mark making the coveted and expensive Bock Microphones which are as good as vintage Neumann U47 tube microphones but cost 5000 dollars instead of 30,000 dollars.
TRACK 10: "Smile and Pose"
Tony wrote the lyrics. The power line everyone would sing along with at the end, the chorus, if that song has one, is "We're fighting for your life." But I never asked what he meant.
I assume it's a dark joke. It used to be the motto of the American Heart Association. They had a lot of anti-smoking ads, and Tony and I were chain smokers (I quit 8 years ago when I had to go on oxygen 24/7 for 3 years, now I'm only on oxygen at night).
This guy Bruce Jak told me a long time ago that listening to Bomb kept him from killing himself one night. That means more to me than any review. He and I still talk. He's a Jaks skater crew/gang member. Some of them adopt Jak as a last name, like the Ramones. One of them, "Nosmo King" (get it? 'no smoking') was another chain smoking bike messenger who played bass in Tony's pre-Bomb punk band Fifth Column (they have one song on the triple album compilation Not So Quiet on the Western Front, and of course, their little punk rock song is called "Don't Conform").
But I also take "We're fighting for your life" as "this band, Bomb, is fighting for your life."
Punk rock in general didn't give a shit. While we played a lot of punk shows on tour, we weren't a punk band. And we cared about our listeners- well, Jay and I did. Tony doesn't let people in his head so who knows what he thinks. But he did used to talk about how fun it would be to murder people. He was probably kidding about that, but sounded totally serious. Anyway, I don't picture him fighting for the audience's life. I don't know if I see him fighting for his own life. I'm actually surprised he's still alive.
I'm going to say some shitty things about Tony here, but I'm not using this just to vent. I've vented my hatred of Tony elsewhere, and I'm being polite here by comparison. Truth is, holding this info back doesn't tell the full story of Bomb. I'm actually being a little kind here, and I'm not talking behind anyone's back.
In my novel Starving in the Company of Beautiful Women, I had a character based on Tony, it was obvious it was him (the novel is basically Bomb with the names changed, and a few other peoples' stories rolled into it). It says some harsh true things about him. I told him that after the book came out (I didn't ask permission, and all this was back when I would still speak with him). He said "If it's true, it's fine." And everything I'm putting here is true, and there are people who can confirm. Some things I left out because the people he did it to don't want anything to do with him, so I'm not going to put them in a position of having to dredge it up to confirm.
I don't think Tony would explain his lyrics- he was always adamant about letting them stand on their own. Hell, Jay and I had to fight to put a lyric sheet on Hits of Acid and Tony vetoed it on Elvis in Hell.
Oh, Tony's veto in our 3-piece band counted as 6 votes, and he'd be an angry child if he didn't get his way. That later broke up the band, and was part of why it was a drag being in that band. It's also why we got kicked off Warner Brothers, which I'll explain later in this piece.
Being in a band with Jay and some other drummer would have been a joy. When Tony left the band (he quit right before I was going to kick him out), Doug should have just moved over to drums live. Doug mainly plays guitar but is a great drummer- one of the few drummers I've heard play Tony drum parts in a way you couldn't tell the difference with a blindfold on. Doug might actually be better at playing Tony than Tony.
I was fighting for your life. Affecting people with that band, especially the albums, really meant / means a lot to me. It's important to me that I took part. It's also my favorite band. I got to be a part of making the best music, the music that didn't exist that I wanted to hear.
The punk rock/metal drum/bass/guitar part under the "Mommy Mommy! Mother Fucker!" part was influenced through me by Corrosion of Conformity, in particular their bass player, also named Michael Dean (he's Mike Dean, I'm Michael). Not any song of theirs in particular, just the sonic fucking roar they put out when I saw them in DC at Space 2 Arcade in about 1983. That night was also The Faith's last show.
That part is also influenced by the hardcore band, The Beef People. I played guitar on both their EPs when I lived in Charlottesville.
I will say this advice I learned the hard way from Bomb dealing with people along the way. It's an old Vaudeville saying, but applies in anything: "Be nice to the people you meet on the way up. You meet the same on the way down."
Also see an interview with Jay Crawford of Bomb