September 1993

The first note you hear on Rocket From The Crypt's new album, Circa Now!, comes from the right channel. Someone gently taps a string on an electric guitar, and then moves his hand up the fret. As the sound echoes away, feedback grows stronger and settles on a single crystalline tone. The guitarist hits the note again, a second tone chimes in. Yet another guitar line in the left channel starts playing a second six-note motif that counterparts the first.

“You turn on your amp and turn on your guitar and face it [to the amp]. It's probably the easiest thing to do,” John Reis, a.k.a Speedo, explains. “Feedback is so hit or miss. It's just a roll of the dice a lot of the times.”

Reis is Rocket From the Crypt's vocalist and guitarist.

It's the drums that push this song into full momentum. Starting as a roll in the distance, drummer Atom's beats are brought up until they crash into the foreground, bringing that second guitar up with them.

Now that the engine room is stoking, Reis starts singing in a gravelly, urgent voice: “Watch it slip/Watch it slide/I bet ten dollars on the losing horse.”

“Where's my dinner?” he then pleads. “Where's my dinner? Where's my dinner? Where's my dinner?”

The chorus of this song, “Short Lip Fuser,” then crashes in: “One of these days, you're gonna be sorry/One of these days you're gonna get beat.”

A chorus of Speedo's yelling helpers steal the line from him: “One of the days . . .”

“You're gonna get beat,” he responds.

“Hey!” the chorus responds, polka-time in the punk house.

“You're gonna get beat.”

“Hey!”

“You're gonna get beat.”

“Hey!”

Apollo 9's saxophone then blurts in. Incredibly enough, Apollo 9 doesn't know how to play the instrument, according to Reis.

“Oh no, he's not very good at all,” Reis explains. “He'll be the first one to tell you that. He's proficient to the point that the playing of the record is him, and he does that very, very, very well, but he's been playing saxophone since he's been in the band.”

San Diego's Rocket From the Crypt adhere to the punk ethic of releasing scads of 7-inch singles. However, Circa Now! has a studio complexity. Its songs are rich with detail and studio trickery, indicative of a lot of time spent in the studio.

“We wanted to get everything thing done in five days,” Reis states.

“It was April when we recorded it. Oh God, we were plagued with difficulties all through the recordings. We ended up recording it on a brand of tape that just came out, Ampex 499, which was an upgrade of Ampex 456. It was supposed to be better because you could play louder on the tape,” Reis says.

“Well, they hadn't quite perfected it yet and we ended up got a bad batch. What happened was the magnetic stuff on the tape was coming off. When we would overdub stuff to the point where the signal was being erased off.

“And so for a lot of it, the vocals were done all in one take because we couldn't afford to keep going back and recording over it. It was erasing signal around where the high-hat and drums were, and that caused kind of a weak drum sound on all of the songs.

“We ended up using everything because we couldn't afford to re-record the whole album all over again, which is the only way we could have done it. After we recorded all the basics, we dumped everything down onto another tape. We had to rent another 24-track machine. It cost us a day and money. That probably wasn't that big of a deal but when you're recording an album in five days, it made a big difference.

The problems didn't end there, however.

“We were recording in April [1992]. One of the days of the mixing the riots broke out in L.A. The studio was based right in the middle of where a lot of stuff was going on. So we didn't go back up there. Then they had been booked up for two months solid after that. So we didn't get in until another two months after that,” Reis says.

Rocket songs are short, dense blasts full of archaic melodies and energy that could have only come enthusiasm.

“I think our music is so rhythm-oriented,” Reis explains. “Not rhythm as in a percussion-oriented bass kind of rhythm section, but more like a velocity of strumming. Sometimes we'll do a quirky little lead thing because Andy and I both know how to do leads anyway, but for the most part we're both rhythm guitar players.”

The major exception to this rule is the half-time “Ditch Digger”: “Ditch digger, ditch-digger lend me your ears,” Reis sings. It's a great sing-along, despite the fact that you don't know what it means.

“It's not like we intentionally went out to make a song that sounded like a drinking song. It was just something we were messing around with during practice. It reminds me of the Pogues but with guitars instead of banjos and accordions,” Reis says.

They save the best song, or at least the most elaborate, for last: “Glaze.”

Reis talks: “We recorded the song once before for a seven-inch for a friend of ours. We recorded it over two years ago and he was lagging on putting it out so we decided to re-record the song for the album.”

“For the most part, we're opposed to re-recording songs. It was just that we weren't even sure if it was going to come out at all. We wanted to make sure that it did come out,” Reis says.

In “Glaze,” Reis bellows a sing-song line in a gruffy voice: “Micky is a guy I know, cut his hair and watched it grow.” The guitar bursts in, someone yells out “1-2-3-4,” the song changes into the chorus,

After about two minutes, “Glaze” abruptly breaks into a different time pattern. Two guitars play opposing notes. Petey X, bassist, picks over the same four notes. Others sing in the background: “take back, take back, take back, take back” over and over again.

“The whole thing was just 'Well, let's just play the last part of the song and just keep playing until the actual tape just runs off the reel and we'll be done.' Well, I thought by the time we got to that point, there would be only a minute or two, but I guess we had more time on the reel than expected. We had to play it over and over again, which was difficult. It really got crazy after awhile,” Reis says.

This coda becomes increasingly hypnotic, turning into a musical mantra of sorts. The band threw layer upon layer of sound on the track. Someone yells out in time, a high-pitched guitar note drifts in. Three. . .four. . .five minutes pass. The bass bubbles up for a few measures and then submerges itself again, as does a lone piano. The voices break away from the main chorus and sing their own melodies. The saxophone noisily intrudes, but its blurts also fold into the rhythm.

“I really wanted it...the horns [to get] really super beefy. Paul [Apollo] rigged his baritone so that it would just come in really loud and heavy almost like Fleetwood Mac's Tusk, where about halfway through the horns come in super heavy,” Reis elaborates.

“So that's what we were doing. We we're just messing around with the sax staying the same, and slowly the guitar will change and the vocals will change and when there's no more room for anything to change then the sax will come in really loud over the mix and then from that point on everything else kind of scattered and loosened. The chord progression repeated so many times before that no matter how crazy it got we could do whatever we wanted because the main progression was so embedded in everyone's mind by that time people would still be hearing it even if it wasn't being played,” Reis says.

A collection of voices sing “Everybody smoke pot, everybody smoke pot, everybody smoke pot.” First they sing almost imperceptibly, but then build resonance until they take up most of the attention in this already overcrowded mix. The whole throbbing cacophony then speeds up and slows down, as if someone is playing with the speed of the tape.

Abruptly the song ends. A single tone lingers for a few seconds and then is cut off. The album ends.

--Joab Jackson, Foster Child zine