ROY EDROSO

At last check, Google retrieves 185 links for the Reverb Motherfuckers. This compares badly to 21,400 for Corrosion of Conformity and 6,840 for Mother Love Bone, and even with 501 for Drunks with Guns. Soon enough, time will wear this long-dead band's reputation down to mere dust. Till then I go back and check every little once in a while, and savor even the limited-edition infamy, because the Reverb Motherfuckers was my band.

Not mine alone, of course. The examples of PJ Harvey and James Brown notwithstanding, no band is merely the lengthened shadow of one egomaniac. Usually there are least three egomaniacs. In our case, since we existed long enough to leave a trail of dead, there were six or seven, and many more if you include the various Syd Barretts and Angus MacLises with whom we shared the good times, bad times, and periods of alcoholic stupor that led to the glory and splendor that was RMF.

Inevitably we are all Syds and Anguses, though, and everyone who shouldered the wheel has a place in this narrative.

Part One: Drinks at Vazac's

In 1986, I was living in the East Village. Naturally I was in a number of bands.

In one, I played electric guitar behind my friend Rik. Rik was a bit of an eccentric. That should have been no impediment to success, for rock music thrives on eccentrics. But Rik had the same problem that, as time would reveal, a lot of the folks in this story had: He was the wrong kind of eccentric.

For example, though his songs were basically folk songs, Rik was tired of beating them out of an acoustic guitar into a dry mike. So he tried new approaches.

His first idea was to play along with broken records.

He would find an intriguing (to him) skip in a vinyl 45, tape it, and use it as a percussion track. This was, everyone agreed, a new one. People were scratching records, true, but no one actually broke a record and played with it. Usually they put a few pennies on the cartridge to make it play right, or threw it away.

But what to others was annoyance was music to Rik. The gap between his vision and conventional wisdom was made particularly evident one night in a solo performance at No Se No, a basement boite on the Lower East Side. There Rik played to a broken record of a novelty hit called "Make My Day." The skip caused the Clint Eastwood line, "Go ahead, punk," to repeat endlessly. People got sick of it, and complained. Rik kept playing. The mantra of "Go ahead, punk" soon stirred deep feelings among the plug-uglies that frequented the establishment. Finally, one of them got up and broke Rik's jaw.

After this Rik was willing to accept the presence of a drummer. His need for sonic strangeness , however, was not dispelled, but merely rechanneled. Rik loved feedback, as who didn't. (Remember, this was the early Sonic Youth era.) He loved it so much that at some performances, as the amps howled, he would bring out a female guest vocalist who emitted long, ear-piercing screams, and a bagpipe player. You'd be surprised how much noise a bagpipe can cut through.

When it came time to record, Rik decreed there would be no discrete miking in the studio -- microphones were to be placed in random positions around the room, so that all the sounds would blend together on every track. Our producer told Rik that's what mixing boards were for, but Rik persisted.

Then Rik decided that wasn't weird enough and attached vacuum cleaner hoses and long, cardboard tubes to some of the mikes, to add depth to the sound. That's what effects boxes are for, said the producer, but Rik would have none of it.

This bewildered the sound engineers who ran boards at local clubs.

"I'm into this thing," Rik told one such at a sound check at Danceteria, as he repositioned his special amps, made out of fish crates he had retrieved from the garbage, "where everything feeds back into everything else."

"I don't have all day," said the sound man. "Play a song and get your crap off the stage."

My other outfit was a hardcore band. I had answered an ad in the Village Voice, and reached a young Columbia student and bass player named Ron.

"Yeah," he said on the phone in deep, menacing voice, "we hadda get rid of our old singer."

"Why?" I asked.

"He was a dick," said Ron.

Why he and his bandmates should not think me a dick was not immediately apparent. But Ron, who turned out to be an incredibly nice fellow (which was fortunate, since he stood over six feet and was built like a Greco-Roman wrestler), let me sing, or rather scream, over their music.

It was a full plate, but I was unsatisfied. I was then in my late twenties and hadn't done anything but work crummy jobs. I was living with my wife, the drummer of a successful local band, in a tiny studio on East Sixth Street. Neither of us was raking in big bucks. Things got tight. I began taking work home from my job as a proofreader for an engineering firm to make ends meet. It was mind-numbing work and the wife and I were not getting along. While she was out rocking crowds at the coolest hellholes in New York, I was letter-checking chemical formulae at the only home writing station I could find that would not overwhelm our tiny living quarters: a child's school desk.

I started to drink, and to doubt the beneficence of the universe. The darker angels of my nature beat like vampire bats about my head. What I thought they were saying was, "start your own band, and be neglected and abused no more."

One night I expressed this need to my friend Big John at Vazac Hall (known to a later generation of hipsters as 7A).

Big John was in fact big--not as big as Ron and nowhere near as physically imposing (he had a tendency to shamble, whereas Ron walked through walls), but every bit as good natured, and much better at expressing it. In his University of Florida days, he had belonged an all-black fraternity, despite being whiter than the crust on a new snowfall. He stayed likable even in the East Village, which had darkened many another sunny aspect. Walking down Avenue A with him was like trying to get across Mayberry on the arm of Andy Griffith. Everyone wanted to stop him and get a load of his drawl and his shamble and his charm.

Because he was a lovable lug, people assumed that John was nothing but happy. But there was always something else swirling under his bright, white surface.

In college he had introduced punk rock to Gainesville with a band called the Eels, whose songs included "I've Been Fucked By Jesus Christ," and a parody of the Mamas and the Papas' "Monday, Monday" called "Bundy, Bundy"--a celebration of local serial killer Ted Bundy. This was, at that time and place, literally an outrage. The Eels' only performance began with a member of the audience kicking John in the balls, and degenerated into a baseball-bat-swinging riot.

He drew comics, too. When I met him he was working on "Funny Bunny," which featured large-eyed anthropomorphic characters locked in savage, obscene power struggles, and ended with the least corrupt character, a friendly chipmunk, being gang-raped in prison.

It may be said that John drew, at least figuratively, from his own experience. Many of the locals who enjoyed his friendship also exploited it. He had made his last band with his roommate, a schmendrick who eventually screwed John out of creative control, much of the band's earnings, and finally, his apartment.

By the time we met for that drink of Vazac's, each of us saw something in the other that made us want to make a band together. Part of it was talent, part of it was trust, part of it was natural affection. Another part, not necessarily the least of it, was desperation. This is the crucial part. You can't put in the long hours of grinding work if you don't think the guy on the other side of the wheel is trying to get to the same place, and wants it badly enough to keep up with you. Fortunately or unfortunately, we both had that.

Being practical (we had to be, we were broke), we agreed that another noisy, aggressive East Village band would be a long time paying off. A bar band, we reasoned, might be a better idea. We could do some originals, do some covers, and make a little seed money. John had a '70s P-bass. I had a '70s Telecaster. He had played Funkadelic covers. I knew a lot of Hank Williams songs. We had several drinks on it, and went looking for a drummer and a name.

We did not know that, a few years later, our drummer would be insane, that we would be insane, and that our name would be the Reverb Motherfuckers, a synonym for horrible noise, worse attitudes, and the general degeneracy of our time and place. But maybe if we had thought about it a little more, we could have figured that out.

To be continued.