60 Minutes Of Laughter
60 Minutes Of Laughter
originally released on cassette in 1982, C61
60 Minutes Of Laughter was the first audiotape artwork on which I ever appeared. Recorded in Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1981 and 1982. 60 MOL was Deborah Jaffe’s tape project, the fourth issue of a small press magazine Debbie published called 12 Seconds Of Laughter. 60 Minutes Of Laughter features sounds by Hal McGee, Debbie Jaffe [aka Master/Slave Relationship], Viscera, Gabble Ratchet, Trish & The Swishettes, The Dancing Invisibles, Residential Rick (Karcasheff), and more. 60 MOL is a lo fi lo tech collage consisting of earliest recordings by Viscera, tape cut-ups, primitive noise jams, simultaneous poetry readings, deconstructed rock songs, a live dada performance recording in a Country & Western bar, weird pop songs, experimental music, and more.
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"60 Minutes Of Laughter Part One" 30:45
Side One of the tape: "Red House, Blue House" – DJ & HM / "Voulez In The Voulez" – GS; "Ant War" – HM / "Kurtz Kapers (Apocalypse Later)" – Kurtz Memorial Band / "A Different Kind Of Music" – Viscera / "Love In The Tropics" / "Starvation And Beating" – Viscera / "Floatin' On The Waves" – Dancing Invisibles / "Love Is On My Side" – Trish & The Swishettes / "Home" – Viscera / "Composition" – HM / "Outraged Civilized World" – Viscera / "Another Simon And Garfunkel Hit" / "Three Blind Pigs" – Residential Rick / "To Tristan, With Love" / "Yeah, Yeah, Yeah" – Trish & The Swishettes / "Seeing The Future" – Viscera / "Airplanes And Engines (Are Beautiful)" – Dancing Invisibles / "Husband And Wife Scenario" / "New Eyes"/ "Pain Research" – Trish & The Swishettes / "Improv" – Gabble Ratchet / "Apple Pie"; "Wurlitzer Intermission" – DJ.
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"60 Minutes Of Laughter Part Two" 30:11
Side Two of the tape: "Wurlitzer Intermission (cont)" / "Collage/Gertrude Stein" - Gabble Ratchet / "Dharma Proclivity/Butchered Calf" – Jolifanto Karawane and Mipoola Palinga / "Tinyness" – Park Avenue Rick / "Live At The Sanctuary" – JK & MP / "Bird Is Dead" – HM & DJ / "I Love You I Love You I Love You" / "Repercussive Illusion" – HM / "WWIII" – Army Brats (RK, DJ, HM)/ "WWIV" – Army Brats / My Balls – L. Extentensa (Toby O'Brien) / "Public Lavatory, Blue Light" – HM & DJ / "The Edge" – Viscera / "Negative Image" / "Everything And Nothing" – Viscera / "Tiger Talk" – Burnt Circuits (DJ & HM) / "I Don't Understand" – DJ w/ 'Mr British' / "Silly Love Songs" / "Why Do You Do It?" / "Freedom To Be Immoral" – The Conversations / "Accepting Things As They Are" – Viscera.
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60 Minutes Of Laughter was the first audiotape artwork
on which I ever appeared. 60 Minutes Of Laughter was Deborah Jaffe’s
tape project. It was the fourth issue of a small press magazine
Debbie published called 12 Seconds Of Laughter.
I met Jaffe in August of 1981 while I was working as a prep cook
at a Mexican restaurant in Indianapolis. We found that we shared
a lot of the same interests in music, art and literature and Debbie
and I became best friends. We often visited her friends Rick Karcasheff
and David Mattingly, who knew a lot about weird avant garde music.
They had a group called Gabble Ratchet and they played analog synthesizers,
with Jack Sexson on guitar, and recorded their noisy experimental
music on cassette tapes.
Debbie published a small press magazine called 12 Seconds Of Laughter,
the subject of which was “the obscure, in all forms”.
She took photos from foreign film catalogues, nonsense absurdist
phonetic poems, cut-outs from advertisements, tracts, etc. and collaged
them together to make non-statements about “love, sex, politics,
psychology, religion”.
After publishing three print issues she conceived of an audio version
on cassette. 60 Minutes Of Laughter was a compilation of audio routines
of material by ourselves and our friends that Debbie and I had recorded
on a small portable “shoebox” cassette recorder during
1981 and 1982. Deb made a collage of these recordings with various
segments from poetry and language instruction records, a Wurlitzer
organ, domestic audio scenes, her junior high school band and sundry
sonic doodles.
Debbie and I recorded numerous simultaneous poems. We chose texts
from a wide variety of sources -- our own poems, magazine articles,
shopping lists, advertisements, The Bible, etc. The often arbitrarily-chosen
texts clashed, collided and melted into one another.
Debbie and I read in the newspaper that a local Country & Western
Music bar called The Sanctuary had an open microphone night every
Wednesday. Anybody could go into the little performance area and
play a song. We constructed big paper cones to put on our heads.
We chose Dada names for ourselves: I was Jolifanto Karawane. Debbie
was named Mipoola Palinga. We wrote our new names on the hats. I
taped the words of Hugo Ball’s Dada abstract phonetic poem
“Elefanten-karawane” (1916) onto my beat-up $70 acoustic
guitar. We both donned long black coats. When it was our turn we
donned our big tall cardboard cone-hats and walked to the stage.
Deb went to the microphone on a stand stage right. I sat down in
a chair in front of a boom mike lowered to my mouth level. I spoke
into the microphone, addressing the audience:
“The first step is to realize you’re asleep.I mean, would
it really matter if you stuck your head in a Waring blender?”
I began to rub and scrape a grooved stick against the guitar strings,
pulling the stick back and forth roughly over the strings and striking
the body of the guitar with my hands and the stick. I increased
the speed of the rubbing and striking and abrasive scraping up to
a big crescendo. I cried out in a loud voice inflected with a pseudo-Caribbean-tribal
wail, stretching the phrasing out and down and around as far as
I could: "Gadji beri bimba!"
Debbie took up the response in a long cascade of wails, yelps and
pseudo-operatics. Our vocal lines crashed into silence.
Then I took up the next call: "Glandridi lauli lonni cadori..."
We continued this call and response of a line from Ball’s poem
with Debbie providing the elements of contrast, background and setting.
Debbie warbled and chirped and giggled like a maniac and screamed
and bellowed out and swooped in big arcs up and down. I leaned into
the microphone, coughed up the words, rolled and gargled them around
in my mouth and throat and spitted and barked them out – going
through a rapid-fire catalog of exaggerated phrasings, monkey chattering,
accents and character voices from Monty Python and bad jungle movies.
The audience soon started to make lots of noise, with lots of loud
talking and people standing up, shouting and yelling and shaking
their hands and gesticulating. People yelled out their responses
to what we were doing, things like: Devo!
We were up there making a bunch of racket, just yelling a bunch
of stuff, and me beating and misusing and abusing my guitar. After
several minutes of this chaos we brought the assault to a close
and the audience burst out yelling and clapping and shouting –
united together in their response to us. As we finished a guy in
the audience yelled out “Heil Hitler!”. And the rest of
the audience burst out cheering and laughing in agreement at the
sentiment. They were clearly excited and everybody was having a
good time.
We were scared and decided it would be a good idea to pack our stuff
and head out the door as quickly as possible before we were attacked.
Neither of us wanted to get beaten up and we didn’t think it
was unlikely if we hung around much longer.
Debbie knew a guitar player who idolized Tom Petty. Deb and I tried to work out some songs, with Deb and I doing some vocals along with Roger’s hot electric playing. “Airplanes And Engines” was extracted from an epic nine-minute version. I had written a poem of several pages treating the subject of how technology, in spite of its drawbacks, will be the instrument through which we will transcend earthly, bodily limitations and enter into different realms of the spirit or consciousness. I do my very worst imitation of Jim Morrison. “Floatin’ On The Waves” was another example of how Deb and I banalized and deconstructed rock music. The excerpt here shows us reducing song lyrics to mere arbitrary sounds, with no regard to content – only to the way the words sounded together.
A couple of times that fall of 1981 we visited a waitress I knew from the restaurant where I worked. We all had a lot of fun sitting around in her house doing trio vocal improvisations – stream of consciousness – start with no preconceived idea – listen to the others – make sounds in reaction to what you hear – whatever came into our heads. Deb and I were trying to cultivate a kind of artistic infantilism, to draw closer to true uninhibited expression. We experimented quite a lot with babbling, shouting, crying, screaming, whining and giggling. We also cultivated artistic “primitiveness” in an effort to communicate as directly and instinctively as possible.
“Ant War” was culled from a recording of
me playing my cheap electric guitar through a small amplifier. I
liked to misuse, abuse and overuse the tremolo and reverb effects
on the amp. I was trying to create something that had a lot of energy
but that evoked visual imagery. A driving rhythmic pulse, with noise
in overlapping, frothing currents of distortion and crackling electricity,
controlled feedback and pitch manipulation.
“Composition” was composed with a Casio VL-Tone, and is
an early example of my use of programmed music. The VL-Tone was
the first keyboard ever made by Casio. The VL-Tone was a hybrid
calculator/musical instrument.
There are two recordings of Rick Karcasheff and David
Mattingly’s experimental music group Gabble Ratchet on 60 Minutes
Of Laughter. Both date from the months before I met Debbie, Summer
1981. I admired Gabble Ratchet’s improvisational style, and
their use of Korg MS-10 analog synthesizers.
“Improv” is a short snippet from a much longer jam. Debbie
included it here to showcase her weird stifled scream. “Collage/Gertrude
Stein” is composed of a collage of pop music, news programs,
TV ads and other sonic detritus, mixed completely into the left
channel; and in the other speaker, a Gabble Ratchet jam tape with
Deb doing readings from a book by Gertrude Stein.
Rick’s two short tracks are original works that clearly point
to an infatuation many of us had at that time with The Residents.
“Three Blind Pigs” is based on a traditional nursery rhyme
I knew well from childhood, but in the original it was three blind
mice. In Residential Rick’s world the mice become pigs.
On 60 Minutes Of Laughter Debbie Jaffe included several
audio scenes and oblique references to her life that illustrated
some of the themes that she would later develop in Viscera and Master/Slave
Relationship. Debbie’s early life experiences caused her to
doubt and rebel against common notions of romance, marriage, family,
religion and popular taste.
The pieces “Husband And Wife Scenario” and “New Eyes”
were from a recording Deb made of her much older half-brother Jim
(a con man and womanizer), his ex-wife Val and their church minister
in 1973 in Des Moines, Iowa.
“Kurtz Kapers” was taken from a recording Jaffe made of
her junior high school band in 1976. She played clarinet in the
band.
When she lived in Marion, Indiana she went to the Wurlitzer Electric
Organ shop downtown and played the organs, which were available
for rent on an hourly basis. There were cassette recorders built
into the organs. Debbie took extracts from her hours of organ jam
tapes for the “Wurlitzer Intermission” segments on 60
Minutes Of Laughter.
Deb got the sound effects, language and poetry records from the
main branch of the Indianapolis Public Library. One of her great
finds was the Gertrude Stein record that had a scratch on it that
caused the phrase “sometimes Vollard mumbled” to repeat
over and over. Debbie used this recording as a segue into the first
Viscera piece on the 60 Minutes Of Laughter tape.
60 Minutes Of Laughter contains the earliest recordings
by Viscera, from the Summer of 1982. That Summer Deb and I started
developing some pieces in which I would recite, sing or act out
poems and stories we’d both written, and Deb would compose
a minimalist background/ backdrop or mood setting using simple instrumentation
– mostly our Casio VL-Tone mini keyboard.
We wanted to get right to the heart and guts of the matter of life
and existence: to live and show the pain and torment of existence
through the art. There was no redemption in life except for the
artistic expression of our experiences. This expression must be
direct and bare, devoid of artifice and rationalization, all the
loose psychic wires hanging loose and going every which way. Erratic
mood swings and spurts of energy followed by lassitude...our fragmented
perplexed perception of the world outside and our fragile mental
states.
Originally released by Mirth And Merriment Productions. Reissued by Zidsick.
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Two Polaroid photograph collages
from early in the Jaffe and McGee era (1981)
