Bill McCarter/Stalingrad Symphony

In the small town of Vincennes, Indiana, way back yonder in the punk-blossomed year of 1978, local musician Bill McCarter decided to do like everybody else in the world and record his own homemade EP. So, he wrote some songs, bought a 4-track reel-to-reel tape deck, and talked some of his musician pals into playing along. Among those pals were future Lazy Cowgirls members Pat Todd, Keith Telligman, and Allen Clark. Also on board was Mark McCormick, who later played with Telligman and Clark in my band Crawlspace. Everything went very well with Bill's recordings--except he never got the EP released! In 1979, Bill moved to L.A. around the same time I relocated there from Alabama. We had met in early '77 while Bill was hangin' around the Gizmos/Gulcher non-scene in Bloomington, Indiana. He gave me a cassette of the music he had recorded the year before with his friends in Indiana. I thought the music on the tape was wonderful, although nothing like the hardcore and chaos that was beginning to consume the L.A. scene and my own musical head. Still, it was hearing this tape that inspired our musical collaborations, which led to Crawlspace. Bill's unreleased EP, which he called SECRETS, sounded obviously influenced by the Velvet Underground, like anybody with taste in the late 70s. But there was a lot more happening. The first thing that struck me was the strange Midwestern-Anglo vocal style--here was a guy who had spent a lot of time in his bedroom listening to Syd Barrett, Nick Drake, Brian Eno, and other assorted UK imports. The vocals were mostly stuck under the band's sound, which pulsated along in a Velvet-y way, but had strong hints of a small-town "country" vibe. Bill was a huge fan of that very early English-house-in-the-country rock like pre-metal Humble Pie and LED ZEP III. The opening track, "Lady In White," also displays a strong connection to the Byrds, circa 5D and NOTORIOUS BYRD BROTHERS. "Is It Pleasant?" is kinda like middle-period Velvets at their most rocked out, with Mark McCormick goin' psycho on guitar. Bill's spoken lyric on this one is my favorite of the bunch, showing off a very dry and warped sense of humor. One of Bill's "secrets" (?) is that he had lovingly assembled a collection of Charlie Chaplin shorts he liked to watch on his Super-8 projector. Remember how Big Star sounded kinda spacey when they weren't rockin'? That's what "I Hear The Blue Sky Sing" brings to mind--although it kinda rocks (or at least chugs). The final of the four SECRETS songs, "(Don't Know) What To Say," is like waitin'-for-the-man Velvets + ride-a-white-swan T. Rex + C&W guitar licks. Beautiful! During the 1980s, mostly before Crawlspace got off the ground in 1987, Bill was a fixture at Lazy Cowgirls gigs in L.A. He appeared at the beginning of each show as the Reverend Billy Ray McCarter, delivering a short "sermon"/intro before the band roared through its post-Ramones punk thing. From 1985-1989, Bill was a full-time Crawlspace member, and appeared on the various things we released at the time. Then he seemed to disappear. Actually, he moved from L.A. to Oxnard, which is similar to disappearing. But in 2001, the McCarter phoenix again rose from the ashes in the form of a very unexpected CDR release called STRUGGLE under the name Stalingrad Symphony. For second guitar and bass, Bill called on L.A. friends Michael Leigh and Leonard Keringer, who play in the current edition of Pat Todd's Lazy Cowgirls. Just to make things a bit more confusing, Keringer also played with Crawlspace in 1987. Bill's long-time Vincennes friend Robert Kemp, who also played on SECRETS in 1978, came out to play drums. And what did this group do together when they went into Earle Mankey's studio? Nothing like SECRETS, that's for sure. Instead, they whupped up a pretty intense 40-minute piece of improv and free-rock sprawl. Gulcher Records has now collected the never-released SECRETS EP and the barely circulated STRUGGLE CDR on one groovy compact disc that should bend back your jaded ears real good. This is high-quality stuff, brothers and sisters--nothin' like the snake oil that now poisons our collective R&R water supply. Dig. (Eddie Flowers, slippytown.com)