The band formed in the summer of 1981. I joined mostly as a lark. I'd no history in the realms of making sounds. We came together through a posting in a liberal weekly, looking to form a band, one with Eno as an influence. Out of the half-dozen plus who responded we were soon whittled down to four core members. Together we would start a band with the caveat only one of us could read music or reasonably claim to have some familiarity or prowess with a musical instrument.
We rented an office space, room 209, in a building on Worthington street in down town Springfield, MA. To cement the deal our landlord asked us to confine our playing to the off business hours. We readily agreed. That left only one thing hindering us from diving into making music. And that was that only half of us owned instruments. In the proceeding weeks I bought a drum-set, electric guitar, electronic drums and a xylophone. My parents thought me cracked. But I was giddy with what we were accomplishing in that office space of ours. We were creating out of those honks and squeaks and dissonance a sound that we could call our own. It was a sound we were fashioning through the force of our wills into a realm one could loosely call music. And out of that experimental cauldron of proto-music we were, after some months, able to draw approximations of melodies. One of our earliest efforts was the theme to the television show The Wild Wild West. Our version was heavy sounding by way of bass and drums. We also had some originals by then. One of my favorites was culled from our noodling by a founding member who quit after our first practice. The song he left us with was called Get Down Make Gumby, I'll Show You My Pokey.
We were a year or so into it before we were no longer nameless. We took our moniker from a New York Post headline concerning the Cambodian boat people, Cargo of Despair. It was also around that time that the notion of playing before an audience took hold. Fortunately for us there was a welcoming art space called The Zone right around the corner. They took a listen to a cassette tape of our music and welcomed us to perform.
From our first show to our last in 1992, we presented our music in costumes with aspects of theater and the projection of 8 mm films we had made. Each performance was unique. It was our mission and our badge of honor to not repeat ourselves. In fact we switched instruments between ourselves nearly every song. Some of our performances were centered around themes. Our Water Show for instance featured all things liquid and included our squirt gunning the audience to the taped musical accompaniment of three different orchestras playing simultaneously their versions of Handel's Water Music. Each one was recorded with varying speeds. Another show, this one around election time, was called Swan Song For a Lame Duck. It began with a rendition of Swan Lake, a ballerina, and me dressed in a pseudo duck costume that featured swimming flippers, a bill, and a bushy tail. While the ballerina danced on point I flapped my way up to various audience members and said Quack quack.
From our fledgling performances at the Zone we ventured outward. As a rock band we played downstairs at The Rat in Boston, MA. For our first song of the evening we intoned with bells and a chant, Run, Run, Here Comes Jesus. Over the ensuing years we played at a couple of (beer) Keg parties. At one a biker threw a sneaker at us and we were bum rushed off the stage. We appeared at the Brandeis University radio station several times. For one of our outings there we presented a play we had written together. The play, a comedy, was comedic in some part due to my inept handling of sound effects. At one point a cue for a telephone was met with a resounding clang.
At one point along the way we recorded a four song seven inch record. It feature a song entitled One Night With You (is like a week with someone else). We mailed off copies to college radio stations and several off beat music magazines. The latter garnered us for the most part favorable but luke warm reviews. But our music was out there in the world at large. Our sales through local independent record shops were somewhat paltry. During this time we also met up with a record weasel who siphoned off half our records (500) with promises of immediate sales. He disappeared with them with nary a word. We had the satisfaction of winning a case against him in small claims court, but it led not to us seeing a penny for our troubles. We vowed never again and carried on.
The room. We spent endless hours at our practice space jamming and or readying ourselves for upcoming gigs. The music was through out for the most part improvised. We did not master our instruments in the technical sense. By rote we could offer an audience a rendition of any tune in our oeuvre, but never note for note. What we might lack in precision we made up for in heart, sweat, and toil. We could at times grab a song by the balls and rock out with a fervor that could not be denied.
The years rolled by with us filling up miles of recording tapes with our musical efforts. Those tapes are legion now. Each one marks a moment in time, a reflection of us melding together, at that moment, in the ever shifting now. We also won over the years an exuberant audience through our stretching the bounds of our talents while not repeating ourselves.
We also shared an affinity with a performance troupe out of an artist space called AS220 in Providence, RI. Over the years we shared a stage together, more times than not, our ideas in some way or another mirrored each other. AS220 was the cite of one of my fondest evenings of performance, a show we called What Are You Waiting For Go Dot The i. Our performance came about after witnessing a staged production of Waiting For Godot. From there we extrapolated in part with a photographic timer, a one arm baby doll, and a can of cream corn. AS220 was also where we staged our farewell performance. That show began with a mock bus stop confrontation which led to an inconclusive boxing match that morphed into a football game in which we sang out operatically. The night concluded with a solemn rendition of taps. And we were no more.
