Missing Foundation

Candid bio by Jim Waters (producer of Missing Foundation, along with others like Sonic Youth and John Spencer Blues Explosion). Courtesy of Vincent Dominion.
Although the band had started a few years earlier in Berlin with Pete Missing and Florian Langmaack, they did not really get going until Pete, Chris and Mark hooked up in NY. That is when I became involved and I was involved pretty much from then on. I had been childhood buddies with the drummer (Mark Ashwill) and driving force of MF. He died of cancer in NY about 2 years ago. I was generally recruited to help out with whatever projects he was working on. I was not involved with the day to day matters of MF, just the recordings (for the most part) and some live shows. I did not go to many rehearsals except for when we were about to start recording a new project. Then I would go and see what kind of instrumentation they were using, who was playing what and how the instruments were interacting. Otherwise, they were on their own.
There were many band members coming and going throughout their history and it is hard to remember them all. There was a German guy named Florian who would pop in from time to time. He and Pete had actually started the band together a few years earlier. He would come to NY every so often for some live shows or to do some recording. When they toured (especially in Europe) he would come along. Florian was probably more influential in the band than I know since I wasnt along for the tours nor was I around at the bands conception. Sometimes he would mail us sounds to work with for our next recording process. There were some saxophone samples and industrial fans and motors that we used from time to time. He also came to one or two recording sessions. He was a nice guy and easy to work with. He brought along some great ideas, sonically speaking. He didnt live in NY so I am not entirely sure of what his total involvement with the band was.
The members at the time of the first album were approximately: the drummer was always Mark Ashwill, the singer was Pete Missing, (real name was something like Peter Colangelo although I cant exactly remember anymore) he was of Sicilian ancestry. There was a percussionist named Chris Egan who later moved to Boston to become a photographer. There was a French violinist whom everyone called Mudhut. His name came from arguments that he and Pete had about whose ancestors had been more primitive. Pete claimed the French people still lived in mudhuts while the Roman Empire controlled the known world. There was a British bass player for a while but I cannot remember his name at all anymore. The guitarists name was Vern Toulon. He was from Madison, Wisconsin which is where Mark and I grew up. Verns kids were in a punk band that was kind of big for a year or two during the mid eighties. They had a couple of albums out on some fairly big punk rock label......again....some of those details are fuzzy. There was a metal banger named Bill Devallier (not sure of the spelling) and another guitarist named Adam Nodelman who both kind of appeared somewhere around this point in time. For awhile there was a guitarist named Rebecca Korbet who kind of came and went, she was cool.
The first album was recorded at Kramers Noise New York Studio which was at that time a 16 track studio in the mid thirties in Manhattan. I had not seen them live before I started working with them. Mark and I had been friends for years and so I was always on hand to help him with his projects. I used to do the sound for MF when they played live so I witnessed most of their performances from a pretty good vantage place. One of the earliest shows is still one of my favorites of all time. Somehow, after getting a bad reputation as a band of troublemakers, they convinced the people at the Limelight to give them a show. The Limelight was a posh NY disco which made the booking very questionable. My job was to act like the sound man, get them a good professional sound check and then to turn all the faders up to maximum once the show actually started. Pete was frisked at the door to make sure he had brought fireworks with him. It didnt matter since one of his buddies snuck them in anyway. The place was packed with trendy disco people with their sateen dresses, pants and disco accessories etc.... My wife remembers walking into the Limelight and seeing a young white chick disco dancing with an older black dude to the sounds of Say Captain.....I say what.....I say captain......I say what...... They were the perfect image of a disco couple. We knew this was the wrong club for MF, it was not a good match. As the disco music faded down the smoke machine was turned on and the band was backlit onstage. It was amazing to see their silhouettes through the smoke as they suddenly started blasting out huge dissonant chords and pounding out ear splitting beats. The crowd, who were pushed up against the stage, began running in horror. The looks on their faces were priceless as they pushed and shoved to get away from the music. In the meantime Pete had lit a pair of roman candles and was shooting them, one in each hand, into the crowd. It was hilarious, the room emptied out immediately. The club people came up to the sound board to find no one there and all of the faders pushed up to the top. That was fun. They were pretty much banned after that.
I do remember one pretty good show at the Kitchen, which was a performance warehouse on the west side. That was actually a pretty good show since nobody shut them down and we were able to do an entire show at full volume without any interference. They were never asked to play there again on the other hand. Another pretty eventful show was at CBGBs. I would guess that this was around the time of the 2nd or 3rd album because of the line-up.
By this time MF was notorious. They tagged their upside down martini glass on every building in NY and were somehow supposedly responsible for the riots at Tompkins Square Park. Mike Taibbi, a hack reporter with CBS news did an expose on MF. He linked them to the riots and various shady activities. MF always thought of themselves as political activists though I am not really sure if there were any goals other than to cause chaos and mayhem with a little bit of self promotion mixed in.
Anyway, Hilly Kristel somehow agreed to give them a show (at CBGBs) providing that they promised not to cause any trouble....of course he wanted them to cause trouble since his club had become passé. He needed some street credibility. The Mike Taibbi expose played on CBS news just days before the show and there was a lot of anticipation in NY concerning the show. The night before the show someone called the police to say that they had better be at CBGBs, that there would be trouble. Of course the show was packed. We did a sound check that afternoon but instead of bringing their usual instruments, they mainly brought metal file cabinets which we miced and EQd much to the dismay of the CBGBs people. They were a bunch of old school Rock n Roll trolls who sneered at us and generally tried to hinder the whole process. Of course a few years later when everyone was banging on metal they proudly bragged about how they were the first club to allow this sort of behavior. Sorry....but the Swans had already been doing the metal banging thing for years.
By the time the show actually did begin there were cop cars parked outside and the CBGBs club personnel were frantically looking over everybodys shoulder to make sure they didnt have any bombs or whatever. It was too funny. MF brought along their own body guards. A bunch of Puerto Rican kids from the neighborhood stood between the band and the crowd. What a show. As usual it was my job to turn all of the faders up on the board as soon as they started playing, which I did. I saw an awful lot of really cool people cringing and heading for the doors......Kramer among them. I knew we were doing something right then. Within about five seconds Mark picked up his entire drum set and threw it into the front row. People scattered, mayhem and chaos reigned. CBGBs tried to cut the power and the cops moved in. The band disappeared into the crowd. A couple of the CBGB dudes pushed me out of the way and turned off the sound system. By the time the dust had settled there was a huge Voice of the Theater speaker (which had been hanging from the ceiling) lying on the ground in front of the stage in a pool of blood. Everyone near the front was busted in the head by flying metal drum sticks and pipes. We all got out and met around the corner on 3rd Street. Bill Devallier (one of the metal bangers) started calling me an asshole. It was too irresponsible he kept saying. The record company dude had also been hit in the head by flying metal and he kept screaming at me that I was an asshole. Sorry guys.....I was the sound guy. I was not into throwing things and hurting people. Somehow, in their mind, I was to blame I guess.
The politics in the band were more about causing media events than anything concrete about improving things. Outwardly, they were against the cops and the Nazis who ran the city/country, corporations, banks, etc......These issues were discussed a lot among themselves and the lyrics certainly reflect this. The other side of the coin is that they all wanted to be stars or celebrities of some sort (at least Mark and Pete for sure). They wanted to be notorious. They had a need to be center stage. For instance they had no trouble pointing fingers at everybody whom they felt were fucking with them but saw no irony in their fucking with other people. You could always find Pete at any event sneaking around behind the scenes breaking stuff or spray painting anything that didnt move although that wasnt always true either. One time at the Palladium, Mark and Pete began spray painting people on their backs as they walked past them. For the most part they were tagging tuxedos and party dresses. They got caught though and were thrown out and beat up. The bouncers threw Mark down the back stairs and he and his girlfriend suffered broken limbs. They didnt go back to the Palladium much after that.
As far as the recording process is concerned, each record was totally different. The first record was recorded at Noise New York at a sixteen audio track studio. The band was very young at that point and was not sure of its own direction. Pete had some vague ideas about what he wanted to say with his lyrics but was otherwise unable to communicate what he wanted the music to do. Mark and Chris supplied the rhythmic element. They in turn were not sure how the music should sound (at first) and were very reliant on the guitarists/instrumentalists to come up with something that somehow fit their vision. The first guitarist, Vernon, was a by the book punk rock guitarist and didnt quite get the abstract vision that was being forced on him by the others. He didnt last long. Soon afterwards a guy named Jaime Gorman began playing guitar/bass and another fellow named Adam Nodelman also joined in on guitar. Adam was very much into noise music and fit right in immediately. Jamie seemed to come from a more traditional music background but was open- minded and into experimentation so he fit in well too. This was my personal favorite line-up of the band since we were all so like minded in the sense that we knew that we were trying to move away from typical chord progressions and arrangements. Adam and Jamie were able to translate those ideas pretty effectively.
To be honest, I dont remember the first album taking so long to mix. The first one is kind of a blur. My recollection is that it was actually pretty quick since we didnt have a budget to work with and none of us were real happy with the music. I think that right after we recorded it we all felt like it was time to move on to something else. Vernon quit at that point and so did Mudhut. I think we spent more time on the rest of the records to tell you the truth. The second record which was titled 1933" came out in 1988. 1933 is a reference to the year in which the Nazis took control of Germany. It was not a celebratory title as some people thought due to the extreme assault/in your face/fascistic approach that the band took. In fact Adam Nodelman, who is Jewish, was less than happy with the confusion that the title brought. There were too many skinhead Nazi skateboard punks from Long Island running around at the time and they of course saw 1933 as a cool thing and started coming to the shows looking for violence. The 1933 reference was about the gentrification of NY and that the police were moving the street people out of the city to make it safer for rich white people to move in. Pete, who was always out and about all night claimed that he would see the police at Tompkins Square Park move in during the middle of the night and grab homeless people and take them away, never to be seen again. There was a lot of tension building around Tompkins Square. It had always been a very open park where street people, drug dealers and homeless people congregated all night long. It was like a little city. As far as they were concerned, they werent hurting anybody. As Avenue A began to gentrify and the sushi bars, Starbucks, Kinkos and Iggy Pop moved in, the homeless people had to be moved out. The park began to have a curfew and was watched by the cops at all times. That time period is in essence what the record was about. All of the Puerto Ricans and squatters who had lived in this half demolished part of the city for years were now being forced out.....but they were poor and had nowhere to go.
The record was started at a small eight track studio on the corner of Avenue B and 2nd Street. It later turned into an art gallery. After a session or two we began recording on my Sony reel to reel 4 track machine at Marks loft in Williamsburg. I had an assortment of Shure microphones and cheap Sony condenser mics which were plugged in through various Radio Shack mixers and EQs. It was beyond primitive. I remember setting up what few mics we had so that Pete would have a vocal mic, the drums could have two or three mics and everyone who was involved could be heard. As soon as I would get it set up, another person would show up and tell me that they wanted to hit something or bang on a piece of metal or something. Working with MF was usually frustrating. None of them were technical in the least so, I always had to stop in the middle of the recording to explain to Pete why he couldnt light a stick of dynamite during the middle of the song or something along those lines. Pete wanted me to figure out a way to make all of the energy on a record happen all at once instead of having to play the entire record. He wanted some sort of explosion to occur in the instance that you set the tone arm onto the record..... Later on I got myself an Otari eight track reel to reel with a Yamaha 16 channel console which we transferred the 4 track tapes to. At that point Mark, Pete and once or twice Adam, would come over to my place to overdub and to mix. We had more time to mix that one since we had all of the free studio time we wanted.
The Tompkins Square Park situation and the whole cleaning up of the East Village and the Lower Eastside were what gave MF the fuel for most of their music until the band finally broke up. Assault on Your Life and A Hunting We Will Go is just a few of the titles referring to that time period. One song from 1933 which was not politically inspired was Jameels Turmoil. The band had a rehearsal space in an old school building on 8th Street between Avenue B & C. They also shared the space with an old jazz musician named Jameel Moondoc. Jameel may have been a crack head by this time but Im not going to talk about that. He would sometimes come in while they were rehearsing and mumble and rant at them. After one such incident they continued rehearsing a new tune. At that point Pete saw something sticking out of Jameels sleeping bag (yes, Jameel also slept there most nights). What he found was a filthy encrusted pair of Jameels underwear. Pete held the trophy up on the end of a drumstick and swinging it above his head began singing, This is a place of turmoil....this is a place of turmoil....etc.... The rest is history as they say.
By the time we began working on the third album, the line-up had changed again. After the show at CBGBs, Jamies girlfriend convinced him that he should not be associated with the band in any way. He bent to her will and quit. I think he was fed up with the constant needling that Pete would give him. Pete was always testing band members, giving them shit, pulling shit on them, fucking with them. It was a constant annoyance which some people just didnt want to bother with. Jaime was a pretty low key guy and he was ready to move on anyway. A new bass player was brought in. His name was Vince. (I dont remember his last name but his brother is Kaz, the cartoonist. His nickname was VKP and has a song named after him on the Demise record. He was a quiet, unassuming guy. He was very even tempered and because of that, became the target for Pete. He took so much shit. He (like all of us) just let the shit bounce off of us. A guitarist was brought in whose name was Chris Cheeseburger. (real last name ????) Again, Pete would needle this guy all the time because (as Pete would say) he was a whiner.
He obtained the name Chris Cheeseburger after he had dragged his Marshall amp from New Jersey via the Path trains, transferred to the NY subway and lugged it out to Williamsburg. He complained of being very hungry and would not move any further until he had something to eat. He had the misfortune of ordering a cheeseburger in front of Pete and Chris Egan. He was ridiculed mercilessly from then on. I am not sure why this was such a big deal since they all ate the same sort of food (Mark would frequently have a cheeseburger for breakfast). Chris eventually faded away from the band, he was not liked for some reason. I always thought he was a reasonable guy. He and Pete just never got along. Plus, he was a more traditional rock guitarist. He wasnt that interested in the noisy elements of the band, he wanted them to rock more. Chris and Vince lived in New Jersey and had a pretty crappy commute. They would have to haul huge amplifiers and their guitars on trains and then lug the stuff to some far off the beaten path rehearsal space. Pete would give them shit the whole time if they even mentioned what a pain in the ass they had just gone through to get to rehearsal. If Pete was the bad cop then Mark and Chris Eagan were the good cops. They would smooth things out.
The band had found a huge loft space in Williamsburg which was located above a metal shop. They could leave their equipment set and we were able to build a sort of sound booth where I could record the band from. I also remember that the room had a huge sheet of metal against one wall which was used in the recording. The sheet must have been 8 feet high, 12 feet wide and _ thick. It was massive and Bill would pound on it with a metal pole. It was huge and gave off an amazing boom when hit. Because of its massive size they could never take this to their shows. For the shows Bill would be reduced to banging on some file cabinets. They would usually go trash collecting a week or so before a show and find some new stuff to bang on. Of course they would just abandon their stuff onstage afterwards which made it easier to split in a hurry when things got ugly. Pete and the guys always had these plans to make a total mess of the club that they were playing with the idea that they would just leave all of the gear. Chris and VKP would then have to figure out a way to get their amplifiers and guitars out in one piece. If they complained about it then Pete would take them to task.
We recorded the third MF album Demise in that loft on my Sony 4 track reel to reel. A lot of it was live and raw. We didnt really have a way to do overdubs at the loft since there was no way to get a pair of headphones loud enough to hear them over the amplified sounds. If there was any overdubbing we probably did some on my 8 track machine after bouncing the 4 track tapes up to the 8 track. I dont really remember doing a lot of this on Demise, however. I think they wanted this record to be more raw and ugly sounding than 1933 had been. Mark thought that 1933 was too slick sounding. His girlfriend kept saying that she thought that it made them sound like the Talking Heads which was definitely not cool! At that time (mid to late 80s NY) you were not allowed to like the Talking Heads, Frank Zappa and definitely not bands like the Beatles or the Byrds.......however, you could like 8 Miles High as long as it was performed by the Minutemen. You could also like David Bowie, especially if Bauhaus does a note for note rendition of Ziggy Stardust. Either way, I had no problem with the idea that they wanted a more raw sound.
The first two albums had been released by Purge Sound League, a small independent label from NYC. The band members did not want to deal with that guy anymore (I cannot even begin to remember his name). Demise would be released by MF on Foundations of the Universe records. Again, the content of the album was driven largely by the politics of the downtown/eastside gentrification situation. Sounds from the actual Tompkins Square riot were used at the beginning of A Hunting We Will Go. You can hear police sirens and helicopters which were recorded with video cameras and hand held walkman cassette recorders. Pete and Mark began to be at odds with each other and a power struggle was part of the group dynamic from then on. There was a song called Will from the Demise album which was actually attributed to the fact that Mark wanted to play the song and record it.....even though no one else in the band cared about it particularly. It was his will that forced the song on the rest of us.
After that the band actually signed a deal with Restless Records. We actually had a half of a crappy budget to work with for a change. By then I had also built (with the help of Mark and Dave Kelly) my recording studio on West 14th Street (Dave joined somewhere around the 1933 record, he was a percussionist). It was a small 8 track studio. The budget allowed for us to rent a 16 track 1 Otari recorder for a number of days. That is how Ignore the White Culture was recorded. The band had changed again. Chris Cheeseburger was on his way out and Mark Bloodsucker began replacing him on guitar. A guy named Bones began adding percussion and samples, as well as playing bass. These guys had much more finesse then the previous band and they were a lot more arty. By then every downtown band was hitting metal and producing more aggressive sounds. It was no longer very daring nor fresh. By the time this line-up had evolved, MF had become somewhat of a cool band to be a part of every show was a spectacle. The earlier versions of the band had been through shit and were beat up. Now they were getting bigger gigs, touring Europe and going on week long tours of the east coast. They were on Restless Records. They no longer had a problem recruiting members. At first they could only attract musicians who were not wanted in any other band. Now some hipsters were tagging along for the ride. Some of the members were starting to get very strung out on heroin too. I remember one incident where we were recoding a very loud bass overdub. The bass cabinet was out in the hallway where we couldnt see it all. After working on the bass part for a long while (actually, I think it was Vince playing the bass) we went out to check something about the mic placement, only to find one of the band members passed out with his head directly in front of the speaker. It was really fucking loud and for a long, long time! I cant believe that guy can still hear anything at all after that incident.
We spent more time recording that record and were able to control the sound a little more. It was also the first time where a record company started to get involved. They (the record company) wanted something more along the lines of 1933. They hadnt liked the third album at all. It had no songs is what they kept telling us. It was too raw. This caused dissention in the band. Of course everyone wanted to tell Restless to fuck off but they also compromised in order to keep the budget money/tour support cash flow happening.
Another first was that MF suddenly had management. As soon as they got the record deal with Restless, some sleazy promoter chick moved in and somehow convinced them that they needed her to manage them. I tried to talk them out of it but Mark had already decided to go with it. Of course she couldnt do anything for them and only managed to get all of the record company/recording budget into her hands. That means that the band got almost none of the money to record with and the manager got the rest. I was always having to work for them for nothing or next to nothing. Now, when they finally got a budget to work with they, handed it over to a manager that they had barely met, who proceeded to rip them off and then disappear. What a bunch of morons.
A part of the recording process that had become routine also came to a head on this record. During band rehearsals, the instrumentalists had a habit of just rehearsing their parts until they were satisfied with their performance. There was a total disregard for what Pete was doing since no one could hear him at the rehearsals anyway and he would never seem to really finish the lyrics until the particular song in question was being recorded. What would usually occur during the recording is that the band would get a take that they would like, and then Pete would complain that the song was not long enough to fit his lyrics into it, or that it was too fast for him to vocalize with. Of course we would try to get him to commit to a vocal pattern or a rhythmic phrase, and usually thought that he was doing that on his own. At the sessions it became very apparent that Pete was often reading from pages of notes, but never the same way twice. This would turn into a big fight every time. At one particular session, Chris Egan had had enough. He came up with a way to get back at Pete. He told Pete that his vocals were not sounding angry enough....that they needed to sound as if they were being forced out of him. Therefore, Chris volunteered to stand behind Pete as he sang, and as Pete would begin singing, Chris, whose hands were positioned around Petes throat, would begin choking him. He convinced Pete that he sounded more desperate when he sang like this and Pete went along with it. We watched in the control room, laughing our asses off as Chris throttled Pete again and again. It was sweet revenge.
By the time we got around to recording the last album, Mark and Pete hated each other and we recorded it without Marks involvement for the most part. I believe that Mark was involved at the very beginning and then dropped out altogether. Nobody saw him for awhile and it was discovered that he had become very strung out on various narcotics. Other band members had become just as fucked up and it was left to the newest band members to finish the album. The band kind of fell apart around that time. Pete went back to Germany, while Mark (after cleaning up) started a new band called The Spitters. The Spitters got their name from the people they had all seen at the methadone clinics who would get their dose, pop it into their mouths, and then wait to get outside where they could spit it into a cup in order to sell it to other users. Those people were called spitters. I helped them record a number of tracks for their first EP and the subsequent album. At that point in time I moved from NYC. I had never enjoyed living in NY and finally just got out and moved.