It was Hunter S. Thompson who said, “When a man gives up drugs he needs big fires in his life.” Me, I quit drugs back in 1988. Not because I had to: I was fine with blacking out, looking for my car the morning after only to be informed by the police it was parked in a shallow pond in another time zone, and talking a pilot friend into letting me take the controls of his small aircraft only to attempt the suicidal “Lomcevak” maneuver (that was some Denzel Washington shit there.)
But quit I did, and alas, unlike Thompson, I’m no fire bug. Lucky me, I found something better: Cows.
No, not the dairy animals. I’m a pervert but not that kind of pervert, and the closest I’ve ever come to a cow was the night some frat dicks corralled one into my dorm, where it wandered from room to room looking for the source of the pot smell. When it finally found me, I declined to offer it any. It’s a well-known fact cows can’t handle drugs.
No, the Cows I’m talking about were a noiz-rawk band from Minneapolis, who never got what they deserved, which was to be lined up against a wall and shot. Naw: what they really deserved was the undying affection of every caterwaul-crazed chaos freak on the planet. Instead they got a star on the sidewalk of First Avenue in Minneapolis. It’s not much, but it’s something.
From 1987 to 1998 Cows released nine albums—including Daddy Has a Tail, Sexy Pee Story, and Peacetika, the cover of which features an image that is half-swastika, half peace symbol—and played the best live shows I’ve ever seen, thanks to the absurdist antics of Shannon Selberg, vocalist, bugle savant, and the most deadpan comedian this side of Andy Kaufman. Selberg always hit the stage in outrageous outfits, sporting a penciled-on handlebar mustache, an impossibly battered cowboy hat, and the crudest tattoos ever produced outside Death Row. He often wore mousetraps on his ears, one of his arms was oddly bent from a fall through a skylight, and he looked like a deranged redneck, despite his being from Minneapolis.
A menacing glower was Selberg’s only facial expression, and he strode the stage like a psych unit escapee spoiling for a brawl—that’s when he wasn’t singing while standing on his head, or affectionately kicking an audience member in the skull—but you could never escape the suspicion it was all shtick, although he never, ever let the mask slip. He fooled enough people to be attacked by bikers and white supremacists, and at a Houston gig Selberg tired of a large biker giving him the stink eye so in his own words he “leaned down, grabbed him by the hair and French kissed him… After the show he came up and asked if I wanted to fuck his girlfriend.” Making new friends who want you to screw their girlfriends; isn’t that what rock is all about?
1992’s Cunning Stunts was Cows’ fifth album, if you count their phantom first LP, 1987’s Taint Pluribus Taint Unum. Produced by Iain Burgess, the architect of the “Chicago sound,” many consider Cunning Stunts Cows’ masterpiece, but I’m partial to 1990’s rawer Effete and Impudent Snobs, and I’d be reviewing it if my first wife hadn’t made off with my copy and it hadn’t subsequently gone out of print. But the album you really need to own is 1995’s Old Gold 1989-1991, an excellent compilation which has shitloads of great songs on it, too many alas for me to review without writing a treatise.
Have you ever set fire to someone you really love? That’s what Cows sound like. Especially on album opener “Heave Ho,” which begins with a slap and a baby crying then goes hardcore on your ass. Selberg plays a repetitive riff on his bugle, and sings, “Now I’m a different kind of ape/The kind you assholes hate/Have some bait.” It’s a two-minute blast of barely controlled mayhem, and ends with Selberg quoting Lynyrd Skynyrd (“I heard ol’ Neil put ‘er down/But we don’t need him ’round anyhow.”)
“Walks Alone” opens with a surprisingly traditional guitar riff by Thor Eisentrager then takes off like a cat with its tail on fire, with Selberg singing about 2,000 words per minute about a drunken mad man: “Red socks, plaid pants, striped shirt/The cops don’t like his little dance/”Are you alone?”/”Where do you live?”/”What did you drink?”/”We’re gonna throw you in the clink.” Meanwhile, “Contamination” opens with some very distorted Eisentrager geetar and Norm Rogers’ drum pummel, then shifts into overdrive, the guitar filling spaces with noise while Selberg draws out words to impossible lengths [“contamination to meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee”), making him sound like a man about to do something really, really wrong.
“Mr. Cancelled” is about a ditched boyfriend and opens with some great bass by Kevin Rutmanis—who later played with The Melvins and Tomahawk—and is a bluesy, mid-tempo barrage of power chords that chugs along, picking up a speed as it goes, while Selberg lays heavy emphasis on every fifth word or so, giving the song a particularly belligerent tone, even by Cows’ standards. When he isn’t playing noise Eisentrager is laying down some heavy blues riffs, while Selberg follows a turn on the harmonica with, “You said I promised the sky/But just ate and drank and got high/Well it weren’t exactly a lie/But I fucked up and that’s why I’m Mr. Cancelled.”
What follows is the album’s finest track, “Mine.” A celebration of selfishness that would make Ayn Rand proud, it’s right up there with such other Cows’ classics as “Hitting the Wall,” “Cartoon Corral,” and the classic “Shaking,” a cover of the Johnny Kidd and the Pirates standard that Selberg converts into a twisted tale about taking it up the ass from a strap-on-wearing woman [“Yo girl/I love it when you make my asshole bleed.”]. Anyway, “Mine” is a raver about laying claim to, well, everything: “If you can latch onto it, it’s mine/If you can eat or screw it, it’s mine/It’s mine/If you’re some commie scum who wants to share it all/Remember, it’s mine.” “Mine” features an agitated and distorted axe riff and a rhythm section that tears along like a turd on the run, the song growing more frenzied as Selberg finally calls dibs on the entire world: “If its got continents and lots of water, remember/It’s mine/It’s mine” as Eisentrager spews vomit and bile all over your ears.
A loving cover of John Barry’s theme to “Midnight Cowboy,” follows. It opens with a very oddly tuned guitar that almost sounds like a synthesizer and which regurgitates the melody, then is joined by drums, bass, and lots of crushing power chords by Eisentrager. Selberg sings “Oooooooh, ooooooh, oooooooh” throughout while Rogers contributes lots of cymbal crash, and while part of me thinks “Midnight Cowboy” would have benefited from Selberg’s bugle, it’s weird and fantastic just as it is.
“Everybody” is a pummeling, scrotum-tightening guitar rave-up that opens with some nice Rutmanis bass and is followed by some really belligerent guitar, including a scalding solo, and a blood-curdling Selberg scream—I consider him the best screamer in the rock bidness—that sounds like he’s being, well, fucked up the ass by a woman wearing a strap-on. Meanwhile, “Two Little Pigs” is a ponderous but glorious earache of a song about a homicidal drifter with a gun who picks up a murderous female drifter with a knife, and it all comes down to fucking—or as Selberg so poetically describes it, “Then they collide/Two sacks of shit slapping in a mudslide”—before seeing who can kill the other first. It opens with some ominous and fuzzed-out bass and crushing power chords followed by some far-freaking-out feedback. Then Selberg comes in, his voice alternating from a weird mumble on the verses to his normal demented yowl as he sings, “Hey hey/Sooey!!” In the end she wins: “He goes for his gun/But she’s too fast, it’s over before it’s begun.”
Did I say “Mine” is the best song on Cunning Stunts? What I should have said is “Mine” is the best song accessible to normal human ears on Cunning Stunts. But for sheer deranged strangeness there’s no topping “The Woman Inside.” A mad dash to the mental hospital, the song tops a hardcore beat with furious, out-of-kilter guitar, while Selberg mutters unintelligibly, laughs maniacally, and shrieks “Aw, Aw, Aw/There’s a woman inside me!!!!!” the whole way through the song. It may well be his most demented vocal performance ever, although his vocals on follow-up “Terrifique” are great too. “Terrifique” opens with a guitar playing a repetitive riff, which is then joined by more guitars and drums while Selberg sings “Today I saw my parents killed on TV.” But he’s not bummed; he thinks it’s terrifique: “I’m all decked out in my father’s best/And the dog’s looking good in my mother’s dress,” and the genius of Selberg’s vocals resides in the way he shrieks “Terrifique!!” then gives a pained grunt [“uhhhhhhhhh”] while Eisentrager plays distorted guitar in accompaniment.
“Down Below” is another dissonant blowout with understated vocals by Selberg, which is why it’s probably my least favorite song on the album. It’s got a driving rhythm and shitloads of distorted guitars, all powered by Rogers and Rutmanis, and includes a guitar solo from Jupiter along with a great description of getting shot in the head [“He spread her face around the place and then he run”], but it never explodes and ends with a whimper. Finally there’s “Ort,” a pounding and repetitive noise-fest that has Selberg stretching his words to infinity, but like “Down Below” it lacks something, even with its distorted guitars, great whine of a guitar solo, reams of cool feedback, and generally fucked-up sound. Why the band chose to shut down Cunning Stunts with two relatively lackluster songs is beyond me, as they mar what is otherwise a great LP.
After 1998’s disappointing Sorry in Pig Minor, Thor Eisentrager threw in the towel, and Cows followed their bovine brethren to the slaughterhouse. Selberg then got a cheap Casio keyboard and formed The Heroine Sheiks, a less abrasive and funkier outfit than Cows, and in a 2000 interview he told me the Sheiks were out to “put rock back in the fucking business.” He also predicted their debut album would become a make-out masterpiece, the next Let’s Get It On. I think he was in earnest, but no way was an album entitled Rape on the Installment Plan bearing tunes like “OKKK” and “Jew-Jitsu” going to establish The Heroine Sheiks as the new Marvin Gaye, and the Sheiks went the way of Cows in 2008, after releasing four very good and mucho loco LPs that I’m willing to bet not one couple in the whole wide world has ever made out to.
Still, Cows live on in the memories of people like yours truly, who saw them create mayhem on numerous occasions in Philadelphia—while in DC they played to an audience of zombies in a virtually empty Black Cat, proving to me that Washingtonians simply have no taste—and who relied on their ornery but hilarious genius to stay off drugs, glorious drugs. There’s no point in looking in the mirror on days when you’re not yourself, and there’s certainly no point in staying clean if you don’t have big noise in your life. Shannon Selberg’s bugle may well have saved me from rehab, or worse. Which is why I say thank you Cows, and may you rest not in peace but in a god-awful racket, one loud enough to loosen teeth.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A-
