the baptist generals

Welcome to the Baptist Generals' myspace page. This IS NOT a booking inquiry page . It doesn't matter if we know you, you won't get a response here. You should direct ALL booking inquiries to Adam at Billions.
Ditched the sorry myspace blog interface and moved the brain dump to someplace a little better. There's a podcast up there if you care to hear some of the stuff i listen to.
Continuing to chisel at a new album. So far the experience has been dynamic and transformative , as usual. Will post some chaff recordings here soon.
Adding a Baptist Generals '06 Europe tour video soon. In the meantime go watch a couple of my crappy short films . It's a bad habit. I can't help it. More to come.
Or, go read a short piece my dead old man wrote way back in the 70's.
----------------- Original Message -----------------
From: sheldon
Date: 1/13/2007
sheldon has posted a new comment about you on MySpace!
According to your privacy settings, all comments must be approved by
you before they appear on your profile.
sheldon's Comment:
"whats in the bag?"
----------------- Original Message -----------------
From: the baptist generals
Date: 1/13/2007
your neighbor's dead cat?
----------------- Original Message -----------------
From: sheldon
Date: 1/14/2007
going back song? my friend is sure its weed.
i thought it was like socks and a toothbrush
----------------- Original Message -----------------
From: the baptist generals
Date: 1/14/2007
i think it's the latter also with maybe a deodorant stick, nose hair
clippers, moist towelettes, personal lubricant, flintstones vitamins,
protection.
you can't take your weed when you're going back -- they'll bust the
shit out of you! crazy friends!
c
Baptist Generals No Silver/No Gold [Sub Pop; 2003] Rating: 8.5The barn's empty and sinking. You see the sky through pauses in the roof; otherwise the wind's muffled. There's bird shit everywhere, and you begin gathering it with your feet into a single pile. You notice that when shit mixes with dust it looks like flour on wet dough. Next you recline across two rusted lawn chairs, unwinding. You sip lemon water and listen to the sky for airplanes taking off and landing: they follow twisting plots, surprising arcs, and pause where they can, rest a while, ascend. Then there's a sound you thought existed only at night in the suburbs, when it's completely still and all you can hear is the hum of the freeway in the distance. My friend has a theory of non-perfect beauty. In her mind, it's worth getting obsessed over uneven teeth, weak coffee in roadside cafes, unintentionally lopsided bangs, sweaters with holes held together by safety pins. The above, I guess, is my application of her theory, but it's also a response to the Baptist Generals, a band who embodies broke-ass gorgeousness in the form of a rowdy soul-sickness not easy to fake. In the world of these four weary Denton, TX guys who buy their equipment at pawnshops, people want things so badly they chase after them until their feet are bloody stumps. Or they pack their one bag then forget to run at all, as if mired deep to the knees in a Southern Gothic dream.The Baptist Generals have been recording in one form or another since 1998. No Silver/No Gold, their debut LP for Sub Pop, is hinged together with a claustrophobic insularity I remember detailed so fully on The Grifters' brilliant One Sock Missing, and rarely after that. The music is fragile and spiritual, sodden and boisterous. It's as if the players are seeking out loosely sewn faultlines while trying to balance decay and redemption and to escape a permanent rupture in either direction.Recorded on an eight-track in someone's garage, the album begins sparely with "Ay Distress", a hobo spiritual showcasing Chris Flemmons' cracked-up voice. His is the pained screech of an outsider, one who seemingly doesn't give a fuck about hitting notes, who instead plows around, and through his bastardized ABC's, still somehow gets the thing right, wrapping every fragment in a godly mist of tangled, slipshod estrangement. While reminiscent of the chirping yowls of Refrigerator's Allen Callaci, the closest analogue is Roky Erickson's post-breakdown solo recordings. And that's high praise."Ay Distress" shares the 3:00 a.m. bedroom vibe of Refrigerator's "One of Everything", the lovely opener on 1996's Anchors of Bleed. Here, in Flemmons' calloused hands, it's a lullaby to one who continually misses the song in their heart. Flemmons nails the words as they fall and spit and piss around him, but when he reaches the near-end of the rhyme, his cellphone starts singing, too. This interruption breaks the spell, pushing him into a series of real-life histrionics: extremely frustrated shouts of 'goddamn it' and 'oh-h-h-h god' (I imagine him rolling his eyes to an empty heaven). And then he throws the phone or some other inanimate junk and finally, before the tape's cut, he smashes himself against a door. Though it isn't the best way to end a lullaby, the next track, "Alcohol (Turn & Fall)", offers a solution for falling asleep when large men are tossing themselves against walls around you: turn off the light, get drunk, sweat it out.There are so many good songs here, and each is difficult to recount by quoting lyrics or offering descriptions of certain elements. Though it's Flemmons' croon that strikes you initially, the band playing with him is equally dead-on: guitars sound like they're being snapped, the drums are shaggy-dog and really fuzzy. There seem to be buzzsaws, and the keyboards, slide guitar, and theremin are always somewhere in the distance catching breaths before chiming loudly into the general mess. The songs threaten to blow out your speakers purely with melancholy and anger.The Baptist Generals seem to know you can't ever really return to some cleaned-up state. And, really, most of us are too poor to afford simulated perfection anyhow. So you learn to deal with your injuries, make sure they're accounted for, and if you're lucky then you find some powerful and pure way to express the things that are most fucked.Brandon Stosuy, Pitchfork------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------ -----------"Baptism by Ire" TimeOut New York February 6th 2003 ..384Spastic Texan troubadours the Baptist Generals unleash an album born of frustration and rage By Jay Ruttenburg "Ay Distress," the first track on the Baptist Generals' debut album, No Silver/No Gold, begins sweet and well-behaved. Chris Flemmons, the group's frontman, croons over a spare acoustic guitar, his Texan howl quivering as if he were serenading people in a coffeehouse, or perhaps a hillbilly's wedding reception. Before long, his song--like the rest of the CD, recorded in his garage--breaks down. One hears Flemmons's cell phone launch an unwelcome duet with his guitar; his voice mutates from folkie balladeer to rankled bluesman."Ohhh God!" the interrupted singer moans, his wail grotesque and desperate, like Howlin' Wolf performing from the toilet stall of a Mexican restaurant. "Fuck!" A slight pause follows, then a mumbled curse--and then, over feeble protests of his bandmates, the distinctive clangor of a rankled Flemmons hurling his mighty body against a metal door."I don't usually have fits," insists the singer, speaking on the offending cell phone from his home in Denton, Texas. "I do have control over my emotions. But we record live to 8-track. You only get one chance to get the song right, and I knew we weren't going to get it to sound that good again. To me the song is incredibly beautiful-- then it's just totally ruined. And you can hear the destruction taking place on the album."Chris Flemmons's resounding encounter with his garage door provides a wordless metaphor for the record, a heap of rickety songs that smell of beery frustration. Recorded on pawn shop guitars and junkyard drums, No Silver/No Gold (Sub Pop) perpetually threatens to corrode into loose shards of country yaps and shuffling old instruments. This is a band whose roots bleed through: Flemmons and longtime drummer Steve Hill played their formative Baptist Generals shows not in rock clubs but on the stoop of the Cork Screw, a local beer-and-wine establishment. (Hard liquor sales are banned in Denton County, an edict that, one suspects, has salvaged this teetering band from utter collapse.)Yet No Silver/No Gold exposes wounds more severe than boozy breath. Flemmons rural moan--a perpetually aggrieved cry suggestive of a dying mammal--unveils a pain that was absent from the album's predecessor, a rollicking EP called Dog. This is no coincidence. "Chris has had an awful time in the last couple of years," says Matt Barnhart, whose Denton-based Quality Park label released Dog in 2000. "His father passed away and then his grandmother died, too. Chris was an absolute mess and ended up getting surgery for terrible stomach problems. I don't think he was ever at death's door, but there was a dark cloud hovering over him. It really seeps through on the new album."Flemmons himself remains scarred from his bad spell, claiming he can hardly listen to No Silver/No Gold, which contains a radiant farewell to his father ("St. Christopher's Medal") alongside gut-splitting nightmares of addiction and desolation. "I get notes from people who write, 'Your CD hasn't come out of my stereo,'" he says. "I write 'em back like, 'You're fuckin' sick, man. How can this be a repeat listen?' I didn't want our first full-length to be a death album--I tried to stay away from that material--but on an emotional level it's all about death and surgery. Our bass player says it's the angriest album he's ever heard. Looking back, I suppose I feel the same way."Despite the Baptist Generals affinity for nu-metal hairstyles and black T-shirts, the four Texans manifest anger in a largely subdued fashion. Instrumentally, the songs revolve around Flemmons's nylon- stringed acoustic guitar (which set him back $20 at a pawn shop) and the vivid, jazzlike drumming that Hill bangs out on ramshackle skins."Our setup in the garage is so ghetto," Flemmons says. "But it's a step up from Dog, which we recorded in my kitchen. On that record, the first track gets cut off in the middle as well, when the dog starts barking and I yell, Stop that! I ended up liking the beginning of both records. But I think we're going to start recording in a studio."Recording engineers of greater Denton would be wise to muzzle their dogs, mute their ringers--and for heaven's sake, cushion their walls with something safe and padded.No Silver/No Gold is out on Sub Pop.