alt Hacker NewsFunny timing... I'm a lost media junkie, here's my related story.
So there's this little mid 80's cow-punk band from NYC called Cowboy Mouth. They had a song called "Hurricane" that got some college radio play. They had one album, Cowboys and Indians, which I just love. Sold something like 10,000 copies, and vanished soon after that. There's basically 12 known songs by the band, a maddeningly small catalog.
Anyhow... Trying to find info on this band is beyond difficult.. Because there just happens to be another band called Cowboy Mouth out of New Orleans which have been active for 30 years and are much much bigger. Adding insult to injury, this other Cowboy Mouth had a hit song called "Hurricane Party"... So there is practically no way to search for the NYC band or the song Hurricane without bumping up against this other band.
Anyhow, in a stroke of luck I stumbled upon an old demo cassette tape by the NYC Cowboy Mouth. I was excited as the tape cover lists two songs that aren't on their album. I recently ripped the tape. The story gets stranger because none of the songs on the tape match the song names on the cover label. Ends up the tape has three previously unknown tracks (of high quality, sounds like they were recorded in the same sessions as the album). Its an amazing find, adding 3 songs to a 12 song catalog! But it's driving me crazy as I don't even know the names and have no way of finding out. And there are those other two unknown tracks listed on the label which I'm dying to find out about and hopefully hear one day.
Anyhow, I say the timing of this article is funny, because I just put the demo tape tracks up on YouTube a month ago, in hopes that someone might recognize them and shed some light on them. Or just to get the tracks into the hands of fans that are still out there.
Here's the tracks in case anyone remembers Cowboy Mouth and is interested in hearing them
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1q7J9sU3qg4
Replies
When I started reading the post, I thought "ah, I've heard of Cowboy Mouth".... but I am probably thinking of the NOLA group.
I find the effort to find lost media interesting, personally. It might sound weird, but the ephemerality of these things is something I personally find a bit liberating.
I've performed in maybe 130-ish bands over the last 30 years almost none of which played more than 10-20 shows. I've put out a lot of recordings for other people, and am around a lot of folks who have put out a lot of recordings for a lot of people.
All that work was highly ephemeral and mostly lost as soon as the band stopped playing. If there were recordings at all, they probably ended up in a cardboard box in someone's flooded basement.
At times, it's been kind of odd to think about how far all that goes back in time, like, probably as far as there have been people playing music. The idea that we could somehow track these incredibly short-lived events that touched a vanishingly small group of people at all would have a meaningful trace that you could pickup at a granular level is a bit odd to me. It seems so impossible that when I don't have access to the specific musicians involved, the chance meaningfully following up on the history or finding artifacts like recordings or t-shirts seems improbable.
For instance, in the mid-60s in Texas there was a big swell of garage rock in the wake of the Beatles playing on Ed Sullivan. It seems like a measurable thing to me, insofar as I played a whole lot of music with folks who came out of that scene, specifically ex 13th Floor Elevator guys. Some of that work from those bands eventually went to get large enough to become visible, The Moving Sidewalks prefigures ZZ Top, for instance. And so it's a bit easier to track. And some of the folks in that scene had longer careers, I used to work for a guy named Jay Boy Adams, who still performs in Santa Fe.
All that happened before I was born in the late 1970s.
But as it was told to me there are many dozens of other groups that were trying similar kinds of music, to varying degrees of success, many of which are barely even remembered by the people who were in those groups. Which is relatable to my own experience- sometimes some old project will come back in a memory, 3-4 folks who were on the same page artistically for a moment but then moved on.
I personally enjoy that situation- it's been a long life and it's statistically only half-over, and the idea of forgetting even the bands I will perform with this month makes playing with them a lot easier. The stakes become so low that following whatever creative impulse becomes less of a feat of overcoming. At the same time, the music is both important enough that I can take hard-lines in my opinions and not have to worry about those boundaries biting me in the ass by preventing me from attaining some artistic recognition that will never come.
All that is kind of immaterial to what I was intending to respond, which is that unless you can find the folks who were in that band (which is not unlikely) your quest to find the other tracks will likely be fruitless. You would have a lot easier time finding Dave Laredo and company (whoever that is) personally.
I think you need to try to find Chuck Warner from Brookline Mass, who was the record label founder (Throbbing Lobster) that put out Cowboys and Indians. Or try to find members of the band.
• Dave Laredo – Vocals, guitar, producer (aka Dave Lichtenstein, worked a bunch with John Cale of Velvet Underground fame) • Steve Cohen – Bass, backing vocals • Julius Klepacz – Drums • Knut Bøhn – Keyboards, backing vocals