Ever start something silly that just sort of takes on a life of it’s own? Welcome to Snaildartha: The Story of Jerry the Christmas Snail. It started as a silly little idea: Make the Life of Buddha into a Christmas story oh yeah and make it a snail. The story was originally created to be read by Shawn Stewart as part of the Red Eye Collaborations Uneasy Listening series Holiday extravaganza. Cause nothing says Christmas like a whole mess of feedback.

Time marches on as Time is want to do and in 2003 we retooled Snaildartha this time as a Soul Jazz record, a Christmas gift for friends and family limited to 100 copies, then we gave it away free on the internet. It sounded , well kind of awful but it was free, two years latter we remixed it and it was released on Innova, as a limited edition of 500, and it did quite well. Then of course Tower records folded, and most of the copies disappeared into the either, now you can buy it from Innova, for a reasonable price, or on GEMM or Ebay for a ridiculous price (last time I checked about $35 (us)

All the while every holiday it seems my bandwidth bills would spike up in December, that’s when I remembered the original was still up.

So now we are taking it down, but not to fret here in its stead is the remixed, remastered version yours for free. Sure its available on Itunes but the labels never sent me a check, so pppbbbtttt to them. And Happy Holidays to you!

The band here is truly something else Organ by Scott ”Pink Slippers” LeGere master session player and demigod of the Ecletone records label, On Drums the Buddha of the beat Mr. Terry “Poker Face” Haanen, and rounding out the musical trio Free Jazz legend George Cartwright , one of the many things that makes this record special is that it marks a much more melodic side of his playing, as opposed to the insanity of his group Curlew.The story is told (and mostly written by)by Comedian and raconteur Matt Fugate. Mixed by Brian “don’t give me nickname” Jacoby .Mastered by Bob ”What’s with all these strange capitalization last names” DeMaa and produced and directed by me ; Chris Strouth.So here it is Download and spread the wealth, its Creative Commons licensed and you can use it as lon as its not commercial.

Happy Holidays from all of the Snaildartha 6 and your friends at AlliedChemical.com

PS: these are the liner notes from the original l release just for the purists:

So dig it: in your hands you hold a special Holiday gift just for you. well that would be the case if this was the disc, but since it’s the Internet you probably have something else in your hands…like a mouse! The Story was written by Matt Fugate and myself a few years ago for the Red Eye Uneasy Listening series Christmas Show, where it was read by Shawn Stewart, who still is annoyed about some of the tongue twisters she had to pronounce. To be honest I don’t remember what year that was, anyway suffice it to say Britney Spears was still a virgin.

The story hasn’t changed too much since it debuted. It was one of those ideas that I always wanted to revisit, so here it is, reborn as a soul jazz record. Well, a soul jazz record about a Christmas snail, that’s really just a thinly veiled retelling of the life of Buddha. But isn’t that what Christmas is all about; Jazz, Buddhism, and Snails. Well, it has as much to do with Christmas as a fat guy with a thing for elves.

As to why you have a copy, well, you must be pretty special because there are only 100 of these made.Ok well again since your seeing this on the internet you might not be as special, I mean i am sure your special to someone not necessarily to me but someone must like you.Even GW Bush has friends, granted there all on the board of Haliabriton but they must like him. Just a little bit of holiday cheer that comes from the heart, for people that are special to us, and of course you poachers on the net who might like it as well.
Happy Holidays,

It’s a little easier on my bandwidth if you just get the zip download, but if you want to here what it sounds like then here are the first two tracks:

Rhapsody In Snail
(1 Meg)

<A Snail is Born
(4 Meg)

This work
is licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License

The RNC is over  and the Unconvention is at a close at least for me, however the shows are done. the question remains is what next. While I ponder that here are three of the four episodes (the first one has some good moments but it’s really not all that and a bag of chips…so ) here they are

Episode 2

Episode 3

Episode 4

Ever start something silly that just sort of takes on a life of it’s own? Welcome to Snaildartha: The Story of Jerry the Christmas Snail. It started as a silly little idea: Make the Life of Buddha into a Christmas story oh yeah and make it a snail. The story was originally created to be read by Shawn Stewart as part of the Red Eye Collaborations Uneasy Listening series Holiday extravaganza. Cause nothing says Christmas like a whole mess of feedback.

Time marches on as Time is want to do and in 2003 we retooled Snaildartha this time as a Soul Jazz record, a Christmas gift for friends and family limited to 100 copies, then we gave it away free on the internet. It sounded , well kind of awful but it was free, two years latter we remixed it and it was released on Innova, as a limited edition of 500, and it did quite well. Then of course Tower records folded, and most of the copies disappeared into the either, now you can buy it from Innova, for a reasonable price, or on GEMM or Ebay for a ridiculous price (last time I checked about $35 (us)

All the while every holiday it seems my bandwidth bills would spike up in December, that’s when I remembered the original was still up.

So now we are taking it down, but not to fret here in its stead is the remixed, remastered version yours for free. Sure its available on Itunes but the labels never sent me a check, so pppbbbtttt to them. And Happy Holidays to you!

The band here is truly something else Organ by Scott ”Pink Slippers” LeGere master session player and demigod of the Ecletone records label, On Drums the Buddha of the beat Mr. Terry “Poker Face” Haanen, and rounding out the musical trio Free Jazz legend George Cartwright , one of the many things that makes this record special is that it marks a much more melodic side of his playing, as opposed to the insanity of his group Curlew.The story is told (and mostly written by)by Comedian and raconteur Matt Fugate. Mixed by Brian “don’t give me nickname” Jacoby .Mastered by Bob ”What’s with all these strange capitalization last names” DeMaa and produced and directed by me ; Chris Strouth.So here it is Download and spread the wealth, its Creative Commons licensed and you can use it as lon as its not commercial.

Happy Holidays from all of the Snaildartha 6 and your friends at AlliedChemical.com

PS: these are the liner notes from the original l release just for the purists:

So dig it: in your hands you hold a special Holiday gift just for you. well that would be the case if this was the disc, but since it’s the Internet you probably have something else in your hands…like a mouse! The Story was written by Matt Fugate and myself a few years ago for the Red Eye Uneasy Listening series Christmas Show, where it was read by Shawn Stewart, who still is annoyed about some of the tongue twisters she had to pronounce. To be honest I don’t remember what year that was, anyway suffice it to say Britney Spears was still a virgin.

The story hasn’t changed too much since it debuted. It was one of those ideas that I always wanted to revisit, so here it is, reborn as a soul jazz record. Well, a soul jazz record about a Christmas snail, that’s really just a thinly veiled retelling of the life of Buddha. But isn’t that what Christmas is all about; Jazz, Buddhism, and Snails. Well, it has as much to do with Christmas as a fat guy with a thing for elves.

As to why you have a copy, well, you must be pretty special because there are only 100 of these made.Ok well again since your seeing this on the internet you might not be as special, I mean i am sure your special to someone not necessarily to me but someone must like you.Even GW Bush has friends, granted there all on the board of Haliabriton but they must like him. Just a little bit of holiday cheer that comes from the heart, for people that are special to us, and of course you poachers on the net who might like it as well.
Happy Holidays,

It’s a little easier on my bandwidth if you just get the zip download, but if you want to here what it sounds like then here are the first two tracks:

Rhapsody In Snail
(1 Meg)

<A Snail is Born
(4 Meg)

This work
is licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License

There is a new book out called “The Replacements: All Over But the Shouting: An Oral History” by Minneapolis super writer Jim Walsh, Its been making a lot of head lines here in my hometown, well because it’s the Replacements and it’s their hometown too. Here they are the stuff of legend, but I guess like all legends they didn’t start out that way.

What makes the Replacements difficult for me is that in the 90’s I worked for the label that launched them Twin/Tone or as it was know the TRG (Twin/Tone Records Group), during the Non-famous years post Suburbs, post Soul Asylum, post Babes in Toyland, and of course post Replacements. We did however have Lifter Puller, Brother Sun Sister Moon, Savage Aural Hotbed and some other bands that 90’s survivors might remember fondly I was the Director of Artist and Product so my task was to discover and develop bands. The Replacements were like this big drunken God that all of our bands would get measured against, and they would all suffer in the comparison.

Imagine Guns and Roses, biggest band in the world, Slash at the time worlds most famous guitar player quits and starts his own band “Slash’s Snake Pit” and you’re the Bass player. That is to some extent the definition of career suckatuide. Because it doesn’t matter if you’re a great bass player it will never be Guns and Roses. Now you don’t know this right away so you try, and then you try harder and you may get to be really good but it all gets lost not because of what you are, but because of what you are not.

The Replacements became sort of the gold standard that Mpls Indie Rock was Judged by well them and Hüsker Dü, and Soul Asylum and the Jayhawks …Ok there are a lot of bands that fall into that category but the Mats stand out a bit more today if for no other reason there are a number of books about them currently in the market.

I first heard about the Replacements from my friend Greg Holmka, he was the cool punk rock guy in Coon Rapids complete with fin Mohawk and Agnostic Front shirt, while I was token wanabe punk guy in carefully distressed clothes from Fridley. He started dating a girl I went to school with at Totino-Grace; she was very preppie and dated him mostly to annoy her parents. Greg had seen the Dead Kennedys, Black Flag (before Rollins ruined it.) and turned me on to the wonders and joys that were the Circle Jerks (ok that sounds really wrong), even the guy at Sun’s head shop knew him by name.

Greg became my Guru, I thought he could help leave my little private school life and discover the true punk rock me; he was the guy who showed me how to draw the perfect anarchy symbol on the left leg of my self ripped jeans, he showed me where to buy the DK button that would go on the right sight of my sharpie laden jean jacket, he showed me how to be a non conformist. Which in 1984 meant looking like every other angry at their parents fourteen year old. If only teenagers in youth movements could understand Irony, but then I suppose we never would have gotten EMO.

The entirety of my “Hardcore phase” was six months, it was a short tenure mostly because I got bored with a three chord vocabulary, and looking like part of a ragamuffin army, soon enough I was to leap on the much more embarrassing train of Goth, but for now I was still searching and destroying.<

One day while watching Repo Man for the sixtietrillionth time, Greg put on a cassette of a local punk band that he thought I would like and stop playing REM incessantly (which apparently could mess with my punk credibility), the tape was Let it Be, and the band the Replacements.

On first impression, I hated them. Not just dislike mind you, but truly hated them. The record seemed sloppy, and downright silly (Gary’s got a Boner?!). Perhaps had been recorded while being drunk- It was just so amateurish. The big question is were they Punk? This is the sort of things we debated for hours, like some sort of hipster student council, at the Zantigo’s downtown. I was confused, everyone called them Punk; they weren’t hardcore, these were songs and they weren’t political, Regan wasn’t mentioned once. They weren’t new wave; there was none of that polish and sheen. And they sounded nothing like the Clash, Siousxe or the Damned. That first listening experience left me with the very solid impression that they were the crappiest band in the world, and would never have the importance of a Jody Foster’s Army. I pushed the stop button on the tape, and put on a Die Kreuzen record.

Greg forgot the Replacements tape at my house; it sat in the stereo cabinet of our suburban Fridley home for about two months. By this point I had discovered the Velvet Underground, and would literally listen to nothing else. It was during this period of time that I had a very bad reaction to far too many caffeine pills, which in turn convinced me that I had been dosed with speed. Which lead to me doing many stupid things, not the least of which was running around the block in my boxer shorts singing “Run Run Run Jig a Jag a Jew-Scared to death of you, Say what you do”. My friend John who had convinced me to do this in the first place coaxed me inside thinking the best way to get me to stop running and jumping about was to put on some music –that wasn’t the Velvets. Of course he put in the Replacements cassette, this time however, I didn’t hear it as the mess it originally seemed to be. This time “I Will Dare” made sense. This time I too would dare. It was a golden moment, where the album was perfection. It was an epiffany that lasted until the pizza came, and was quietly forgotten in a post speed haze.

Greg took the tape back later that week, but wanting to try and recapture that moment I went to the Wax Museum at the Northtown Mall and bought the new Replacements record “Hootenanny”. I hated it. I didn’t play it again till 1989.

Eventually I did come to understand their genius; it took a long road trip to Chicago during which the driver played the entire catalog. It was the right context and I was now in possession of a much wider musical vocabulary; I was walking in the Skyway, after being colored impressed. Hell I even liked Gary’s got a Boner.

Sometimes my favorite music takes the longest to like. Maybe because it’s not about when it comes out rather when we are ready to hear it. In 1984 I just wasn’t ready, in 1994, well that was a different story.

During the interviews for the job at Twin/Tone the owner asked me what my favorite Twin/Tone golden age release had been, I responded with the Wallets. I never brought up the Replacements once during any of our conversations, when he asked me what I thought of them; I said they were my least favorite band, possibly of all time. Surprisingly they hired me.

Sacrificing bands to the shadow of long gone gods: pretty much how I spent the 90’s.
Not that we knew it at the time, we were just making records and playing shows and hoping to get some fans and make some scratch. It’s only after the game that we know why the play didn’t work, at the time you are far busy to see the game for what it is.

I am not suggesting that this is a conscious effort on the groups part, rather it’s an influence woven into the subconscious culture of the city. The bands today and even those of recent yesterdays don’t necessarily consider those bands of yore; but the press does. As does the rest of the machinery that makes up a scene: the stores, the clerks, the clubs, the bookers, the elder statesmen scenesters (read those who are over 30 and still go out); this is how the new talent gets measured and judged – will they add up? Sadly, the answer is almost always no. No band starts out ass a legend, but that is how they will always be compared. We will never have another Beatles, another Rolling Stones, a Hüsker, or Replacements, for the same reason we will never get another Einstein or Edison.

They got to the field first, and have the benefit of history washing away their sins, and reinforcing there deeds true or not.