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== Reviews ==
== Reviews ==
{| class="wikitable"
|-
!
! Date
! Publication
! Author
! Link
|-
| {{flagdeco|US}}
| 1967-07-21
| The Berkeley Barb: Vol. 5, Iss. 3
| Ed Denson
| [https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.28033132?seq=8 JSTOR]
|-
| {{flagdeco|US}}
| 1968-07-01
| The Chicago Seed: Vol. 2, Iss. 11
|
| [https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.28044469?seq=15 JSTOR]
|-
| {{flagdeco|US}}
| 1979-05
| Slash
| Z
| [https://archive.org/details/slash_circulation_zero/page/n589/mode/1up?q=%22Red+crayola%22 Archive.org]
|-
| {{flagdeco|DE}}
| 1988
| Howl: No.1, pg. 40
|
| [http://subkultur-ost.de/Howl%2001-88%20(Muenchen)%20Fanzine%20%6088OCRkl.pdf PDF]
|-
| {{flagdeco|US}}
| 1992-11
| Stereo Review
| Steve Simels
| [https://worldradiohistory.com/hd2/IDX-Audio/Archive-Stereo-Review-IDX/IDX/90s/Stereo-Review-1992-11-OCR-Page-0146.pdf PDF]
|-
| {{flagdeco|US}}
| 2004-02-09
| Pitchfork
| Alex Linhardt
| [https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11813-the-parable-of-arable-land-god-bless-the-red-krayola-and-all-who-sail-with-it/ Link]
|}


=== Berkeley Barb ===
=== Berkeley Barb ===
Line 140: Line 95:
Steve Simels
Steve Simels


Charly Records CD reissue<blockquote>"Everybody's in a band / They can't get enough of it," Pere Ubu once sang, and our more politically astute readers are no doubt aware that recent proof of this proposition has emerged during the current election campaign. I refer, of course, to the startling news that Tipper Gore, wife of the Democratic Vice Presidential nominee but better known for getting record companies to slap Parental Advisory labels on naughty rock and rap albums, played the drums in an all-girl garage band in the mid-Sixties. Talk about cognitive dissonance.
Charly Records CD reissue
 
Or maybe not. Actually; it's occurred to me that wanting to be a rock star is pretty much the universal fantasy of our age. In fact, when I re-searched the subject back in 1989, I was able to locate lots of nonmusical celebrities with rock bands in their closets. Some were willing to speak to me about it, among them Chevy Chase (a godawful group called Chameleon Church, with a 1968 album on MGM) and ''Saturday Night Live''<nowiki/>'s Kevin NeaIon (several mid-Sixties garage bands with names like the Hallucinations and the Atomic Bombs). Others were less forthcoming, like Diane Keaton (who sang with a New York City band called the Roadrunners circa 1966) and the former Bush Administration drug czar William J. Bennett (who played guitar and sang with an ''Animal House''-style frat-rock outfit at Williams College back in 1961).
 
My favorite celeb with a past rock life, however, is unquestionably Frederic Barthelme. These days Barthelme is a highly regarded member of the so-called minimalist school of fiction, and his work appears in tony outlets like ''The New Yorker''. But few readers of his story collections ''Moon Deluxe'' and ''Chroma'' know that back in the acid - drenched Sixties he pounded the drums as a member of a band called the Red Crayola, or that he co -wrote such unforgettable songs as ''Pink Stainless Tail'' and ''War Sucks''.
 
"What happened," Barthelme told me in a not-at-all minimalist manner, "was [that] I had already been booted from architecture school [University of Houston, 1966] for a kind of too-wicked treatment of an architectural problem. So I was making pictures, and Mayo Thompson was a friend who had been in Europe for a year. And when he came back he decided we ought to have a rock-and-roll band. "He and I and a guy named Steve Cunningham, who was a year or two younger, got together and started playing Hey Joe and all that. And we sort of developed at the same time the psychedelic stuff was going on, and we used to play for hours and hours." Once christened the Red Crayola, Barthelme and his fellow arty hippies began to garner a local reputation. Eventually, they got to do an album "because we won some kind of idiotic mall Battle of the Bands. It doesn't occur to me now that we won, actually, but we played in it and were heard by Lelan Rogers, who was a smalltime producer and Kenny Rogers's brother-in-law."
 
The album, "The Parable of Arable Land" on the Texas-based International Artists label, sold fitfully at best, perhaps because "the guy who did the recording recorded it in mono," Barthelme recalled. "We thought it was a good idea at the time."
 
Undaunted, the Crayolas went out to California in the summer of 1967, where one performance, at the Berkeley Folk Festival, has become almost legendary. "That's when Cunningham played the famous block of ice," Barthelme explained. "He brought a block of ice on stage, put it on a stand with some aluminum foil under it, and miked the foil. It was an outdoor concert, and it melted attractively."
 
After their California trip, the Crayolas went back to Texas and "just broke up after that season." Mayo continued with another album called "God Bless the Red Crayola" and later reappeared in Europe along with, of all people, members of Pere Ubu.
 
Today, from his teaching post at the University of Southern Mississippi, Barthelme looks back on his brush with rock stardom. "It was pretty interesting," he recalled. "Of course, the idea that I was a rock star — or even a qualified performer — is, I think, a stretch. You do understand I was the world's worst drummer . . . very far ahead of my time, but the world's worst drummer."
 
Still, history plays odd tricks, and after the first Red Crayola album was reissued in the late Seventies, some rock theoreticians actually hailed the band as unsung Godfathers of Punk.
 
"Mayo said something about that when he was in Europe," Barthelme told me, "that in England we were a proto-punk band, and people had heard of us and had the record." He reflected for a moment. "I don't really know if that's true," he said finally. "But wouldn't it be lovely to think so?"
 
Well, yeah, it would, actually. Meanwhile, "Parable" is now available on a Charly CD (a Brit import available at hipper record stores), so you can check it out for yourself.</blockquote>
 
=== Pitchfork ===
=== Pitchfork ===
February 9, 2004<ref>https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11813-the-parable-of-arable-land-god-bless-the-red-krayola-and-all-who-sail-with-it/</ref>
February 9, 2004<ref>https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11813-the-parable-of-arable-land-god-bless-the-red-krayola-and-all-who-sail-with-it/</ref>

Revision as of 18:24, 17 January 2023

Recorded April 1 – May 11, 1967

Released June 1967

Track listing

Side A
No.TitleLength
1."Free Form Freak-Out"1:30
2."Hurricane Fighter Plane" (When the Ride Is Over You Can Go to Sleep)3:33
3."Free Form Freak-Out"2:24
4."Transparent Radiation" (Red Signs Out-Side, Which I Contain)2:32
5."Free Form Freak-Out"4:21
6."War Sucks" (You Remember What Happened to Hansel and Gretel)3:38
7."Free Form Freak-Out"3:09
Side B
No.TitleLength
1."Free Form Freak-Out"1:52
2."Pink Stainless Tail" (Seven Guest Are Quite Now, And Now Not Half So Much)3:16
3."Free Form Freak-Out"3:05
4."Parable of Arable Land" (And the End Shall Be Signaled By the Breaking of a Twig)3:06
5."Free Form Freak-Out"4:09
6."Former Reflections Enduring Doubt" (I Pass in a Rain That Is Always Too Soon)4:57
Total length:41:32

Background

Personnel

The Red Crayola

Mayo Thompson (guitar, vocals), Steve Cunningham (bass), Frederick Barthelme (drums)

Additional musicians

The Familiar Ugly (free form freak-out), Roky Erickson (harmonica, organ)

Technical

Lelan Rogers (producer), Walt Andrus (engineer)

Cover art

Cover design by Flash Graphics (George Banks).

Reviews

Berkeley Barb

July 21, 1967, vol. 5, iss. 3[1]

Ed Denson

Their first lp was released by that strange Houston company International Artists, who also record the 13th Floor Elevators, and it is selling far more than it should because it looks like a rock lp and the liner notes, which are deceptive, make it sound sort of like the mothers or something else which is recognizable.

Basically they went into the studio with a lot of people and recorded it. Most of the "other people" are just background noise, and they represent, as does the record, a certain stage in the experimentation, which is more or less successful depending upon your intellectual framework.

I like two cuts very much: "War Sucks" and "The Parable of Arable Land", and no doubt so will you about the third time thru. It took me that long.

Chicago Seed

July 1, 1968, vol. 2, iss. 11[2]

This is probably the freakiest album ever recorded. Released around the end of last June, it made it to Chicago sometime this spring. The Crayola specialize in shifting from chaos to structured runs, while the Ugly (I hope that they'll pardon me for becoming familiar_) play such background instruments as coke bottles, motorcycles, buzzsaws and kazoos. "Hurricane Fighter Plane" has the freakiest lyrics ever, and the combined group makes the ultimate statement on violence in "War Sucks". Forget General Fox's stupid liner notes and pick up on it. Highly recommended for listening to when stoned, especially for the amazing channel separation.

Slash

May 1979[3]

Z

Radar Records reissue

Crazy Texan youth in the summer of Sandoz. Having a psycho wigout party, bringing their own noisemakers and their Owsley truths, having no rules except the ones invented by the whims of a sugar cube. No conventions, no restrictions, and if that sounds like that cliche "anarchy," yes this "rebellation generation" knew the essence of that word a lot better than most of your drugstore nihilists. Through the chaos three crayolas play six 'songs' — leaking and swirling through treatments, shifters, delays, rhythm and structure barely held together by lysergicized hands and voices, finally, inevitably disintegrating into another 'free form freakout.' You can forget those puerile cliche putdowns of 'peace and love' — these people really were making an attempt to destroy any cages of flesh or spirit, they were trying to break down more barriers than most of the current zipper pinned media idols know about. And forget the stupid attempts to recreate the period like 'Hair' — this was a time that could never be prolonged or duplicated. It was too over the edge — only Mayo Thompson has crawled out of the warp intact. A great document, and it sounds like they had one hell of a party that night. Wish I could have been there.

Howl

1988, no.1, pg. 40[4]

acg

Charly Records reissue

Immer noch ein Meilenstein, sowas wurde in dieser Form seither nicht mehr gemacht (frühe Amon Düüls vielleicht ausgenommen). Beinharte Undergroundband schleppt ihren Fan-Tross mit ins Studio (vielleicht sind sie ihn auch nicht losgeworden) und spielt mit ihnen ein 6-Song-Psychedelic-Trip-Album ein. Daraus erheben sich wie weise alte Helden diese großen Songs, "War Sucks" (übrigens viel härter 15 Jahre später von Really Red für ihre Höllen-Abschieds-LP "Rest In Pain" eigespielt), "Transparent Radiation", "Hurricane Fighter Plane". Monumente, die mit den Füßen im Urschlam stehn, während ihre Arme mit großen Gesten in den Wolken wedeln. Einen Kopf haven sie auch, der ist texanisch wütend und sie können auch ihre Instrumente spielen (die 1.LP war nämlich uuuärrgh). Alles auf trancehafte, stammesusikhafte Weise. Ein Meilenstein, wie gesagt.

Stereo Review

November, 1992[5]

Steve Simels

Charly Records CD reissue

Pitchfork

February 9, 2004[6]

Alex Linhardt

Links

References

  1. ↑ https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.28033132?seq=8
  2. ↑ https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.28044469?seq=15
  3. ↑ https://archive.org/details/slash_circulation_zero/page/n589/mode/1up?q=%22Red+crayola%22
  4. ↑ http://subkultur-ost.de/Howl%2001-88%20(Muenchen)%20Fanzine%20%6088OCRkl.pdf
  5. ↑ https://worldradiohistory.com/hd2/IDX-Audio/Archive-Stereo-Review-IDX/IDX/90s/Stereo-Review-1992-11-OCR-Page-0146.pdf
  6. ↑ https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11813-the-parable-of-arable-land-god-bless-the-red-krayola-and-all-who-sail-with-it/
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