Introduction to an essay which is
      in the form of Liner Notes for a 
      CD Reissue Box Set.

This project is collaboration between Tony Oursler and myself. It takes the form of a video installation; a three CD box set of music produced by Oursler and myself as part of a band: The Poetics, in the late Seventies and early Eighties: and a Xerox zine-style book which recreates our original; band note book augmented with period photos an extra CD and essays by each artist.

I consider the work to be an exercise in the construction of a history, and specifically a minor history. Minor histories are ones that have yet found no need to be written. Thus they must find their way into history via forms that already exist, forms that are considered worthy of consideration. Thus minor histories are at first construed to be parasitic.

The musical portion of the project is its root. It is truly historical in that it is of its time. Yet what does it mean to present it now, especially when it was never presented publicly, at least in recorded form, in its own time? It only masquerades as critical analyses, which accompany it, though reflective of period issues, is colored by hindsight. It is, in essence, a fiction. The very mode of the music's presentation is of the present ­ CD box sets did not exist in the Seventies; the packaging itself tears the music from its historical frame. Thus the music is revealed as not being "popular," that is ­ designed to produce instant gratification, since it gratifies fifteen years to late. Instead it is art; it is facade.

This aspect of the project is dealt with much more overtly in the video portion of it, which consists of tapes produced in many different styles. The exploration is of the specific visual terms of historic construction for this particular subject ­ namely Rock music. This is accomplished by presenting a visual catalog of these forms of presentation, presented simultaneously via multiple projection. Here are some of the video sections: straight interview documentation of people who saw the Poetics perform or who were peripherally involved with them; "reality TV" style recreations of Poetics rehearsals, performances, and inter-band squabbles concerning artistic direction; long ambient footage of the landscape of the Poetics: the Antelope Valley and the north San Fernando Valley, Hollywood, Echo Park, and Long Beach; period style rock videos; interviews with rock critics who attempt to position the sound of the Poetics historically; a year by year countdown of influences; etc.

The installation section of this project is organic, shifting to accommodate the architecture of the various venues it is shown in. For Documenta, the plan in to build a three-tiered structure: the top level is a stage with drum set, microphone stand and PA system; the second level is a listening room; and the ground floor is an exhibition of period graphics, photos, and multi screen and television presentations of the various video segments. Surrounding this structure will be sculptural realizations of various works designed, but never made, during the early "artistic" period of the Poetics. These works, in compliance with Conceptualist ideas, will be backdated to the period of their conception.

Despite the project's focus on the formal conditions of the construction of this minor history, it is also my wish that it introduce into official history some things that have not been extensively dealt with before. For example, the documentation of the "Poetics landscape" will bring to a wide audience a view of California that does not conform to any of the cliches of that place. Similarly, the collection of interviews with period rock critics will assemble a group of voices and concerns not previously compiled. This will hopefully remedy the shameful period revisionism by current cultural analysts of "punk" by letting the original chroniclers of the time speak for themselves.

In the end, this work is not so much a portrait of The Poetics as it is an examination of how a history is constructed. It concerns a period that is fairly recent and only now being historically considered. And in this examination, hopefully the present historitization of the Punk period will be perceived as a war for control of meaning ­ a war that one can still fully participate in. This history is not yet etched in stone.

THE POETICS
Remixes of Recordings from 1977 to 1983

As far as I know, the Poetics were the first of the "Art Bands " to emerge from Cal Arts (not counting the Weirdos, considered to be the first Los Angeles Punk band, who had ties to the art school but formed outside of it). In the mid to late Seventies, when Disco and Country Rock ruled, pop music had long since ceased to have any "avant-garde" relevance. Unlike earlier periods when, Jazz, Folk, and Psychedelic music had been unashamedly linked to the art world and to art production, in the Seventies no such clear connection to any musical form existed . At Cal Arts the prevailing attitude among the faculty was that all forms of "popular culture" were equally retrograde. Popular culture was not of much interest to the general student body either (Unlike the present moment when most of the student work I see, in some way, references popular idioms.). Consequently, Rock music was a non-issue. It was something to dance to at parties; it definitely could not be art. Remember, this was before the arrival of British Punk, which eventually ushered into American art schools a Situationist-inspired "critical" usage of pop culture tropes, giving Pop Art a new lease on life. But in the late Seventies, the general art audience could not, or would not, recognize this pop posturing; it could not be differentiated from the real thing. The burgeoning Art Bands on the East Coast (the Rhode Island School of Design-based Talking Heads are the prime example) quickly left the art world behind. There simply was no place for pop music in the art context. It was simpler for the members of these "fake" bands to become "real" musicians than it was to maintain their identities as artists in this milieu.

In 1976 I went to Cal Arts to study in the Graduate Program in Fine Arts, excited by the school's catalogue offer of a multi-disciplinary program. One of my main reasons for going to Cal Arts was to study with Electronic Music composer Morton Subotnik. In Ann Arbor, Michigan, I had been in a noise band called Destroy All Monsters which combined elements of Free Jazz, Psychedelic Garage Rock, and Electronic Music. Feeling that I had reached the limits of Rock Music in that band, combined with the fact that there was absolutely no audience for Noise Music at that time, I decided that perhaps I needed more formal schooling in music - but with an art emphasis. Cal Arts, with its Electronic and Tape Music program and, according to the catalogue, Happenings godfather Allan Kaprow on the art school faculty, seemed the perfect environment. But, I sadly discovered, I was not allowed to take courses in the music school, and Kaprow was no longer on the faculty. I was crushed. The only way I could gain access to equipment was through the back door, by befriending people in the music school or using machinery that was out of date and no longer in frequent use. The original Buchla synthesizer (used on Subotnik's Touch album) was such an instrument. As I recall, it had been relegated to the film department and sat gathering dust in a sound dubbing room. I was able, without guidance, to fool around on this ancient patch-system monster to produce washes of white noise, electronic squeals and simple rhythmic sequences (parts of the cut "Silver Oranges of the Moon" were produced on the Buchla synthesizer). Here I was, in one of the most respected music schools in the country, surrounded by some of the greatest composers of New Music and rooms full of equipment, and yet I was back at my old ways: making a garbage-version of Electronic Music in the Destroy All Monsters tradition. Fate had spoken, serious music was not going to be the path I followed.

I had moved from Ann Arbor with Jim Shaw, another member of Destroy All Monsters and now fellow Cal Arts grad student. We were living in a small house in Sylmar, at the far north end of the Valley, just blocks from the San Fernando swap meet. The swap meet was held three times a week, and often we went all three times. The San Fernando swap meet was one of the junkiest, with a section where people sold used items spread out in the dirt, or out of the trunks of their cars. Our house was filled with swap meet pickings, a lot of it noise-producing. Jim and I were still in contact with the two other original Destroy All Monsters members back in Michigan and we were doing Destroy All Monsters by mail, sending cassette tapes back and forth. We were cranking out loud and repetitious tape loop-fueled trance jams. But, missing the energy of group improvisation, I started jamming with a few other students at the school, notably Bill Stobaugh, Mitchell Syrop and a saxophonist whose name I can no longer remember.

The first incarnation of the Poetics was called Polka Dot and the Spots and was inspired by a group of killer Little Wally singles found at the swap meet. Polka band leader and drummer Little Wally was one of my idols. I considered his kind of rhythm-heavy polka music to be, at least from a Midwestern Detroit standpoint, a form of proto-trance music. Every time I heard Little Wally, it brought to mind a long solo drive I once made to northern Michigan when, slightly calmed from my normal agitated state by tranquilizers, Polka music on the car radio started to synch up rhythmically with rows of corn passing on either side of the car. These rows, viewed at a certain speed from the automobile, pulsed in a manner similar to a strobe light. This effect, heightened by the out-of-phase repetitious playing in the Polka music, was truly mesmerizing. After this experience, the beautiful monotony of such composers as Terry Riley came as no surprise.

The Polka Dot jams bore little relationship to such sublime experiences however, they were extremely crude and moronic. But they set the foundation for the Poetics. Enter Tony Oursler. It was at a crit class screening of Oursler's videotape Joe, Joe's Transsexual Brother and Joe's Woman that I was first struck by the haunting strains of Tony's voice. Oursler's early tapes were strings of perverse little vignettes held together by voice-over commentary. His was a kind of video story telling, presented in the poorest of terms with the characters personified by old dolls or bits of painted cardboard. One strange saga melted into the next. The creepy image quality resulting from being shot on crude black and white reel to reel videotape only added to the tapes' disturbing effect. I was so impressed with Oursler's morbid vocal quality and his narrative abilities that I immediately asked him to be the vocalist in the band. One of our first "songs" was a conga-line punk version of "I See Your Hiney," a childhood song that Oursler wrote new lyrics for.

The Polka Dot band quickly fell apart. One of the main questions concerning us at the time was how much our activities should conform to the rock band format in terms of staging, instrumentation and song structure. That format definitely seemed tired and, for the most part, the new Punk phenomena didn't provide much of an alternative as far as I was concerned. It was at this time that Laurie Anderson arrived at Cal Arts to teach a performance workshop. Anderson didn't have the same hostility to music as many of the other faculty members did; she was a musician herself. Finally, there was a forum to discuss performative issues. At this period Anderson had not yet embraced the pop song format that she is known for now, nor was her work spectacular. Her performances were extremely humble, and primarily language-oriented, consisting often of spoken-not-sung stories that were accompanied by simple electronic effects. For example, she had a violin outfitted with a tape playback head that she would play with a bow strung with audiotape. Sentence fragments could thus be played backwards and forwards producing tape loop-like rhythms or palindromes whose meaning seemingly changed depending on the speed of play.

At this point I should also mention the influence of another visiting artist: David Askevold, whose strange brand of Conceptualism embraced music, text and film/video. David's dark sense of humor, evident in his proposed Kepler's Music of the Spheres Played by Six Snakes, was much more in line with the Poetics' sensibility than the lighter aesthetic of Anderson. We actually performed one of David's texts, "Searing Gum," as a song.

In Anderson's class we listened to audio works of a wide variety: poetry and spoken word records, Pop and Art Music, comedy, etc. and talked about the various staging techniques utilized by the performers, and how they might be played with and used in cross-over ways. Oursler, Don Krieger (another art school grad), and I formed the Poetics in this context. The Poetics, initially, was designed to be a dysfunctional nightclub comedy act. The Gong Show was one of my favorite television shows at this time. The offbeat performers it attracted intrigued me. They were people who considered themselves popular entertainers but who were just too unusual to fit into the normal television or comedy nightclub mold. But this seemed to be changing. Comedy was opening up and offered the possibility of a new audience. Andy Kaufman was doing things that were as interesting as anything being done in the Performance Art world. Not only that, he was doing them on network television. Given these examples, the Poetics experimented with purposely-pointless prop comedy, shaggy dog stories, abstract jokes and lounge music. Not much came out of all this except The Pole Dance, a choreographic work parodying Bauhaus-style structural theater. In it, Oursler and I worked at shoving poles into each others stretch pants-suit outfits until we were barely able to move, accompanied by Krieger who played live on the "orgatron" - an adapted toy organ that was hard-wired to produce a piercing electronic tone. We also did a fairly elaborate, and cornball, sound piece, entitled Dream Lover, especially for the CLOSE Radio audio art show on KPFK, hosted as I recall by Paul McCarthy and John Duncan. We made this tape in response to a request by Doug Huebler, who had been invited to be on the program, but decided to showcase student works instead. Parts of this tape ("The Carnal Plane," "Dream Lover," "Heathens in Limbo") are included in this collection. This radio work was done in 1978 and is the earliest "finished" Poetics material presented. The earlier pieces, from 1977, are rehearsals for our failed "nightclub act" ("Copy Cats") or Oursler solo video soundtrack experiments ("Birds in the Morning").

However, the call of the band format was too strong to resist and the nightclub version of the Poetics merged with some of the ex-Polka Dot musicians to form a more Rock song-oriented version of the band. Even Laurie Anderson, herself once a critic of standard Rock band stylings, went New Wave - positioning herself on the Techno (anti guitar) side of the argument . The Punk phenomena hit Los Angeles by storm and it was impossible to ignore. Seemingly overnight, the Glitter kids on the Sunset Strip had metamorphosed into British-style Punks, completely bypassing the East Coast garage noise influence of the Velvet Underground and the Stooges evident in New York Punk. But things were still fresh at this point and the Punk aesthetic had not yet been completely codified. Performance artists like the Kipper Kids and Johanna Went were performing on stage alongside Rock bands; the Screamers were doing a kind of expressionistic music theater; and members of the noise-oriented Los Angeles Free Music Society (LAFMS) were forming various splinter Art Rock bands. There was an interesting, short-lived, period when the Punk, art, and New Music scenes in Los Angeles intermingled to a certain extant. Each separate scene was so tiny, and so undefined as of yet, that they invited border confusion. This didn't last long.

The Poetics quickly put together a set of songs. We never quite fit into the California Punk scene however, which quickly went in the direction of Hardcore, and we were left out on the periphery. We never played any of the main Punk venues in L.A. (the famous Masque was especially cliquish and hostile to anything not suitably "Punk." Music there was judged on length of song and hair: both had to be extremely short.) And the few times we did play in this context we were met with outright hostility. The Suburban Lawns (fronted by the amazing Su Tissue on vocals) had a space in Long Beach where they presented bands. We played there, uncomfortably paired with roots-Punk outfits Rhino 39 and the Plugz, to an angry audience of Hardcore beach Punks. The leather-clad youngsters were not appreciative of Oursler's stage dress: a Spock-like stretch pants outfit which he stripped off to reveal a pair of shabby underpants - yellow in front, brown in back. This show pretty much signaled the end of our Rock band days.

We were never able to record any of our songs in a professional manner. Only rehearsal tapes exist of them and they are so poorly recorded that they have not been included on this compilation. The rest of this compilation concentrates on the other Poetics music. The "Rock" incarnation of the Poetics consisted of Bill Stobaugh: bass and guitar, John Arnhem: bass and guitar, and Simon (whose last name I could not pronounce then, and cannot remember now) on organ, besides Oursler and myself. At some point John Miller - already a veteran East Coast Art Band player, having played with the Coachmen (at one point featuring Thurston Moore on guitar) and releasing a single with the Hi Sheriffs of Blue - replaced Stobaugh.

We, too, aligned ourselves somewhat with the anti-guitar stance of the early Industrial and Techno Pop bands, though we were far from purists. Anyway, we did favor an organ-dominated sound, though this might also be explained by the fact that both Oursler and myself were ex-Catholics who had spent a good part of our youths in mass sniffing incense and listening to death-lyrics accompanied by organ music.

Movie music, especially Nina Rota's soundtracks for Fellini's films, as well as that composed by Ennio Morricone and Bernard Herrmann, are obvious influences on the later Poetics material. We were also big fans of the proto-Techno band Silver Apples, and the long psychedelic excursions of the Seeds. The primitivism of the Shaggs and the MSR Singers were also inspirations. Jim Shaw had come across a whole box of MSR Singers records that were mind-blowing. The MSR Singers put out compilation records of songs, paid for by novice song writers who answered ads placed in the back of cheap magazines. These songs are some of the most surreal ever penned, and their creepiness is accentuated by the bland lounge delivery of the studio musicians performing them. The Beat of the Traps by the MSR Singers was the only song we covered regularly. Captain Beefheart's comeback record Bat Chain Puller was also important as a statement against British New Wave conformity. I saw Beefheart perform one of his last live concerts in a tiny half-filled club at this time, and it was an extremely moving show. Of our contemporaries, we listened to Throbbing Gristle, Pere Ubu, the Residents, DNA, Devo (favoring the more raw bootleg live recordings), and especially Suicide. Tony was a huge fan of Jonathan Richmond, whose quirky style and childish subject matter is obviously mirrored in Tony's throwaway ditty "The Planet Song." He also had a fondness for the oddball vocal deliveries of some of the rock singers of his high school years, especially Bowie, Ozzy Osbourne and Jon Anderson. Nor were the Poetics adverse to the charms of Disco and Funk. KC and the Sunshine Band, The Village People, Giorgio Moroder, Bootsy and P-Funk were much admired.

At this point we had moved away from the Rock song format and were only playing instrumentals. These pieces were short and had somewhat of a Kurt Weill-like sound to them. Mark Madel replaced Simon, and Tim Silverlake played saxophone. I set up my drum kit to be played standing up, to prevent the beats from becoming too complicated. Some of the works from this period are "Pratfall," "By the Book," "Three Penny Fuck You," "Broken," Urgent," "Rut," and "Psycho Drama." Though we composed many of these short pieces, and rehearsed them incessantly, we never performed them live.

By 1979 we were over as a live band, though we continued to produce music off and on until 1983. Both Oursler and John Miller had moved to New York by 1981, putting an end to serious Poetics activities. A lot of the later things on this compilation were done as part of, or at least are similar to, the soundtracks for Oursler's video tapes of this period - works like The Loner, Son of Oil, and Grand Mal. We did one recording session of instrumentals at the studio of ex-Contortions drummer Don Christensen in New York: "Floater," "The Dummy," and "Tiperillo?" are from this date - don't blame him for the sound, only a cassette dub exists. And a few things here ( "The New Girl," "Silent Night") are from a performance that Oursler and I did in L.A., at the Beyond Baroque Literary/Arts center, in 1983. This performance, titled X-C (for ex-Catholic), warrants description since it so fully captures the luck of the Poetics.

The performance itself was a very last-minute production, just thrown together. It consisted of short texts, meant to exemplify an ex-Catholic aesthetic, spoken live over other sections pre-recorded on cassette, with no attempt to conceal the machine which was turned off and on as part of the act. During the performance we consecrated the space, and ourselves, with several gallons of cheap red wine. When we returned the next morning to clean up the mess and pack up our equipment, it was all gone and the space was clean and tidy. Unknown to us, Alcoholics Anonymous meetings were held on those mornings in the same space. The pissed-off AA members had tossed all of our gear and props into the garbage dumpster. A fitting end for the Poetics.

A note on the recording technology: all of the material on this compilation was recorded in a completely unprofessional manner, most often on cheap portable cassette recorders. Overdubs were sometimes accomplished by recording live through the air, back and forth between two machines. Some things were recorded on an old two track reel to reel tape recorder that allowed for changes in tape speed, splicing, and tape manipulation.

This compilation was pieced together from boxes of uncatalogued live recordings, primarily on cassette. These tapes were done for our own amusement, and never intended for release. While we talked endlessly of honing our performing skills, we never considered the possibility of putting out records, which was far beyond our financial means. We paid no attention at all to the quality of our recordings because they were simply a record of our performance. We were just playing around, but it sounds good to me now - I've found that I prefer this shitty recording sound to the evenness of most contemporary studio recordings.

Besides Poetics material, there are a few solo pieces presented here. Besides the later Oursler soundtrack pieces which I have already mentioned, there are two pieces of music from my 1981 performance Meditation on a Can of Vernors: "Cow Catcher" and "Early America," which feature George Lockwood on Violin. There are also two songs by Jim Shaw: "When I'm Fucking" and "Jim's Song," which either Tony or I assisted him on.

Mike Kelley
1996