Driving Me Backwards
My band Mumble & Peg succeeded in terms of longevity (7 years) and output (3 full length records, two 7" singles, many tours). Erik - the singer, strummer, and main songwriter - was the brains behind this whole operation, and on the surface it seemed like a garden variety "90's mopey indie pop" group. But this wasn't the original plan. Things started quite differently.
I met Erik in early 1995 and he recruited me to play bass (and Chuck to play drums) for a one-off gig doing his pretty songs at the Stork Club. We covered a Slint tune ("Washer") for that set. This went well enough so we played a second show shortly after that under the name "Lozenge" (unaware of the similarly monikered Chicago band - who we ended up sharing a bill with at the Fireside Bowl in Chicago about 5 years later).
As we got to know each other we discovered equal interests in all sorts of fucked up music so we tried to form a band for reals. Rehearsals were loud. We all contributed compositional bits. One "song" I recall from this period was an up-tempo quarter-tone assault called "1234!" We'd bit chunking away on angular chords until Erik shouted "1! 2! 3! 4!" and we'd then chunk much more aggressively. During this brief period we came up with a tweaked out arrangement of Erik's new ditty "Breathing."
I also played in the band Dreamland at this time and went on a short west coast tour with them, so the Erik/Chuck/Matt project got derailed a bit. When I returned from the road I bumped into Erik and without wasting any time he said, pretty much verbatim, "We got a show at the Stork on November 25th. We're now called Mumble & Peg. And we're going to play Brian Eno's 'Driving me Backwards' for an hour with a bunch of drummers backing us up." Okay then! I wasn't sure what I missed while I was away that led to this creative decision, but I was game. If you ever want me to do anything all you need is a clear plan of action.
So the band for this one gig was Erik singing and playing guitar, me on bass, Nils Frykdahl on percussion guitar, and the drum "chorus line": Chuck, Jenya, Dave Cooper, and Wes Anderson. We had one rehearsal, I think. All we really needed.
The opening band Munk finished their set and we took over the stage. All seven of us wore black clothes and had black stockings on our heads. The only light came from a strobe flickering at us at full intensity for the whole length of the show.
The standing drum line took up the whole back half of the stage. All four drummers, each armed with a bass and snare, began playing very slow and loud. Boom... bap bap! Boom.. bap bap! This went on for five minutes and then I came in with the "piano line" in eighth notes on very distorted bass: C B C B C B C B... for another five minutes.
Erik finally strummed the chords, and eventually screamed the first verse. Nils handled atmospherics during all the above and took the long "solo." We then simmered down ever so slowly, and built it all back up again for the second verse and crazed vocal coda. Once all the histrionics were over we were back down to strums and bass and drums for a few minutes, then just bass and drums for a while, then only drums, and the whole epic closed with one final Boom... bap BAP!
I'm still not sure how well that went over but who fuckin' cares. The lights came on. There was applause and unsurprisingly less people in the club than when we started. Funny thing is we were only the middle band - Monopause had to follow that. Luckily they were fond of audience-confusion-and-abuse and happy to be part of this historic evening.
After that our core trio stuck with the name Mumble & Peg and continued to work on weird stuff. But soon we just found it easier to play Erik's lovely tunes. Given Erik's omnipresent acoustic guitar our first album got filed under "folk" and this lazy label loomed over us forever. However throughout the band career you could hear vestiges of those wacky earlier days.. especially during a couple deafening improv shows billed as "Pummel & Beg" (yes, that's an anagram).