Thinking Fellers Union Local 282

At the beginning of the 1990s, the most hilarious experimenters of San Francisco were the Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, who made eccentricity the fundamental principle of their composition method, reserving the right to mix any acoustic instrument, any natural sound, and any electronic noise in their anarchic aural excursions.

In reality, they came from Iowa, where they had begun playing in a folk-rock vein, documented only by self-produced cassettes such as Wormed By Leonard (Thwart Productions, 1988), some tracks of which were later included on the EP Natural Finger (Ajax, 1991) three years later. The cassette was reissued on CD with several previously unreleased tracks in 1995. Also released was Archipelago Brewing Company, a project dating back to 1987 by Jay Paget and other band members.

The album Tangle (Thwart, 1989) was their first major work. It fully formulated their theory of a sound derived from the surreal folk-pop of the region but further distorted by psychedelic hallucinations and psychic depressions. Their favorite style is exemplified in Sister Hell and Keeps Repeating, ballads sung (alternating male and female vocals) in a detached tone over a tribal rhythm, indulging in interludes and tails of Dadaist chaos.
Anne Eickelberg (bass and vocals), Brian Hageman (guitars), Mark Davies (guitar), Hugh Swarts (guitar and piano), and Paul Bergmann (drums and accordion) display an amateur technique that nonetheless manages to ignite the instrumental What Time Is It and the distorted rock and roll of Sports Car. That raw and rough style also manifests in the disjointed and improvised harmonies of the more psychedelic tracks, It Wasn't Me and Cold Cold Cold Ground. In practice, the quintet attempts to build a bridge between the alternative rock of the 1960s and that of the 1990s, between flower children and Generation X.

Following the single 2x4s/ Horrible Hour (Buf Sed, 1991), Lovelyville (Matador, 1991) is the collage collection that made them famous. It exemplifies their reckless style, with haphazard quadrilles like Four O'Clocker, sarabands full of jovial missteps and madhouse strumming, reminiscent of the acid-folk of the Holy Modal Rounders. Blissfully surreal vignettes like Nail In The Head rely on arrangements that are nothing if not arbitrary, in which both a funky horn section and Native American-style tribalism may appear.
The instrumental 2x4S is therefore entirely unexpected, advancing with a grim and deafening heavy metal attitude, yet punctuated by the braying of a trombone straight out of a 1950s movie soundtrack. Pseudo-jazz heresies like Big Hands spill from one corner of the record to another. The album appropriately ends with the funeral cadence and vomiting vocals of Nothing Solid.

After the album came the EP Where's Officer Tuba? (Hemiola, 1992). At this point, the combo consisted of the three original members from Iowa — Anne Eickelberg (bass and vocals), Brian Hageman (guitars), and Mark Davies (guitar) — plus High Swarts (guitar and piano) and Jay Paget (percussion, formerly of World Of Pooh, who joined in 1990).

But their true tour de force is Mother Of All Saints (Matador, 1992), a super-collage of no fewer than twenty-three fragments. Hageman and Davies play just about everything, from French horn to viola, from mandolin to banjo, and all five play some form of percussion. The compositional rules practiced by the quintet are extremely loose and open to interpretation. Essentially, each song stands as its own story, ranging from a pseudo-jazz pace (Hive) to an electronic pastiche (None Too Fancy), from a rhythm-and-blues instrumental (Shuddering Big Butter) to a psychedelic reverie (Wide Forehead). The inspiration for their mad pantomimes can come from children’s ring games (Hornet's Heart), TV soundtracks (the instrumental Star Trek), or orchestral tuning exercises (Tuning Notes). For the most part, they are awkward collages of chords, as in Gentleman's Lament.
In Hummingbird In A Cube Of Ice, one can hear Sonic Youth in a cabaret version. Catcher is a country-rock piece grotesquely psychedelized with John Cale-style viola dissonances and keyboard symphonic staccatos. Tell Me exemplifies how duets between string instruments can degenerate into madhouse riffs, building apocalyptic crescendos of harmonic absurdity. The instrumental Raymond H. perhaps reaches the most delirious heights of harmonic deconstruction, weaving a bridge between bluegrass and exotic music, between avant-garde compositions and Morricone. Countless other themes are merely hinted at—just two chords slightly off-time, maybe out of tune, followed by a bit of chaos for good measure. The Thinking Fellers are supremely capable of producing noises that even Zappa might have been embarrassed to attempt.

The chaotic editing of their masterpiece gives way to more regular songs on the 1993 EP Admonishing The Bishops, such as Hurricane and Million Dollars, where eccentricity has transformed into an alien virus that disrupts the metabolism of the harmonies. Undertaker, however, rumbles at full speed amid Eickelberg’s warbles, a surreal vignette from another era. The best example of their chameleonic style is Father, constantly changing until it fades into a Nashville-worthy country & western. Its unpredictability and humor make it a surefire hit with college audiences.
Their performance method is in fact not at all related to the Residents or Captain Beefheart, being too wild for the former and too sophisticated for the latter. It may instead be akin to John Zorn and the post-modernists of New York.

The saga of the Bay Area’s quirkiest band continues with the EP Funeral Pudding (Ajax, 1994). The nursery-rhyme quality of Waited Too Long and its kindergarten-like accompaniment, and even more so the ragged instrumental jam of Give Me Back My Golden Arm with its chaotic coda, prove once again that their style is not amateurish (or “lo-fi”) but deliberately childlike. Their art originates from a programmatic existential regression to a state of total innocence and unawareness. On the path of that disoriented folk that is their promised land, the Fellers serve up nonsense like Heavy Head. Flames Up, a comical instrumental in the vein of Duane Eddy and the Ventures, emerges almost by miracle, with the musicians apparently unaware that there was ever a time when those sounds were in vogue. The EP represents the group’s experimental alter-ego, whereas in the previous EP they had limited themselves to simply playing songs.

On the album Strangers From The Universe (Matador, 1994), their deconstructionist technique begins to pay off commercially as well, since the Fellers exploit the countless irregularities of their group improvisation to compose (relatively) regular songs like My Pal The Tortoise, which therefore become inextricable puzzles, paradoxical collages, densely packed mosaics of incomprehensible signs. The most chameleonic is Cup Of Dreams.
The Fellers’ fantasies are not of melodic themes but of sonic ideas, like those piled around a single guitar chord in Guillotine or around the syncopated march of Socket; they constitute an ideal soundtrack for the madness of the human species. The music indeed reflects their conception of human existence as a more or less random sequence of events, in which trying to find meaning is pointless: the cabaret-like motifs of February ("Let's all disappear/ vanish from memory/ far away from here") and Operation ("I was having an operation done/ I didn't know what for") express not discomfort but the fatalistic resignation in the face of the omnipotent chaos that governs our lives.
Their theater of the absurd (lyrics worthy of Beckett and Ionesco) reaches a triumphant conclusion with the waltz for accordion and piano of Noble Experiment, in which an apocalypse of flowering gardens and singing birds is foretold. Every second of their music is unpredictable, instinctive, played in blissful indifference; yet their subversion of the conventions of the song form stems from a deep (instinctive) knowledge of its harmonic mechanisms.

Brian Hageman also plays in U.S. Saucer and has released a solo album, Twin Smooth Snouts (Starlight Furniture Company, 1995).

I Hope It Lands (Communion, 1996) may not quite reach the heights of their most paradoxical moments, but it is still a fearless act of defiance against reason. The production is the most professional of their career, and the songs flow without rough edges, yet the tone remains the tragicomic one of jesters, and the eccentricity recalls Zappa, Allen, and assorted freaks: the cabaret quadrille of Lizard's Dream, the whimsical Kevin Ayers-like fairy tale Elgin Miller, and even Brains, a scene worthy of Mothers Of Invention and Gong. But the songs are more songs than sketches, simply surrounding melodies with meticulous harmonic architecture: A Lamb's Lullaby could be a grunge litany by Dinosaur Jr sung in a soul falsetto, paired with an Oriental-flavored instrumental by Camper Van Beethoven and a sequence of industrial guitar-saw music; the delicate chanson Empty Cup is the poppiest thing they’ve ever done; and the instrumental Hills delivers a piano theme worthy of a soundtrack. The group’s quirky humor resurfaces in brief interludes, in the musique concrčte of The Poem, in the barely audible strumming of Conrad Adrift Toward Mars, and in the atmospheric noises of Hudson Bottom Dance; surreal touches roaming the lands of John Fahey, Antonio Badalamenti, and Pierre Henry.

San Francisco’s most unpredictable band (and one of the most brilliant in recent avant-garde rock) shows no mercy with these stew-like works in which even the most childish idea becomes a masterpiece of arrangement.

After a six-year hiatus, the Fellers went mainstream, or nearly, with Bob Dinners And Larry Noodles Present Tubby Turdner's Celebrity Avalanche (Communion, 2001), an album that was originally recorded three years earlier. Their songs have never been so regular and pleasant, clearly a concession to the vogue of lo-fi pop (Sno Cone, You In A Movie, '91 Dodge Van), although still bizarre and angular compared with the competition. The dynamite rock and roll of Another Clip, the demented hard-rock of The Barker, the frenzied and chaotic In The Stars, the panzer-grade boogie of He Keeps Himself Fed are the closest things to their old style. The Residents are still a major influence, as evinced by the cacophonous litany Holy Ghost and by the brief eccentric numbers like Boob Feeler. The ghostly bolero Everything's Impossible and the surreal theme of El Cerrito open a new front, the equivalent of trip-hop for a band of psychos like them.