Crawling Walls

 New Mexico Garage Psych

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The Crawling Walls

In the summer of 1979 I moved to Albuquerque to start a Ph.D. program in statistics.  I had been living in Austin for the previous six years, at a time when punk rock was changing the music scene in the southwest. I remember going to see local Austin bands at clubs like Raul’s on Guadalupe, right by the U.T. campus. I arrived in Albuquerque knowing absolutely no one, and being completely unfamiliar with the music scene. One night I went to see a showing of "Rock ‘n’ Roll High School," featuring the Ramones (although it was originally written with Cheap Trick in mind, which would have totally changed this story), at a movie theater on Central Avenue (the old route 66) when I met a girl who was dressed exactly like Riff Randell from the movie. She invited me to a house party a few days later, where I danced my ass off to the latest punk, ska, and new wave records with people who later became bandmates and friends; from that point on I became immersed in the Albuquerque underground music scene.

A rather unique characteristic of Albuquerque is its isolation. The next big city, in any direction one might choose to travel, is about 400 miles away. This had two consequences which directly affected me: first, touring bands that might otherwise not have considered playing Albuquerque stopped there anyway because their crappy vans couldn’t make it all the way from Phoenix to Denver in one stretch; and second, musicians and artists, feeling the isolation, developed an amazing camaraderie uniting the various components of the underground culture. There would often be punk, garage, electronic, psychedelic, art-rock, noise, and rockabilly bands sharing the bill at house parties, warehouse shows, and back-alley clubs, and the people attending would span the full spectrum of musical, artistic, and sexual preferences. Sexual preferences? Yes, punk bands would play at gay bars, something that would have been unheard of in most other parts of the planet.

In 1982, my girlfriend (Elaine) and I were living in a tiny house in the 200 block of Princeton Dr. SE. A few hundred yards away, in the 100 block of Stanford, there was a house occupied by members of several bands. One of the people living there was Hans Kohls, who was a computer operator at Kirtland AFB. He was just then learning to play guitar, but the most incredible thing about Hans was that he knew absolutely everyone in the scene. He and I started a guitar/synth band called Conflicting Theories. We performed some originals, some covers of Depeche Mode and Orchestral Manoeuvers in the Dark, and an occasional surf instrumental, playing live tracks over a Dr. Rhythm drum machine and a couple of Sequential Circuits Pro-One monophonic synthesizers. At one show, we had a friend of ours, Bruce Hill, the drummer from The Generics, sit in with us. Having played with a real drummer, we found it hard to go back to the cheesy Dr. Rhythm. Sorry, Doctor.

In May of 1983 I went back to Austin for a few days to visit some old friends, including Mark Leon, who had been my housemate for several years during graduate school. By chance, I heard part of a radio show where the DJ was alternating ‘70s and ‘80s punk rock tracks with late ‘60s garage and psychedelic tracks, many from Texas bands like the 13^th Floor Elevators, Moving Sidewalks, The Golden Dawn, Mouse and the Traps, Shiva’s Headband, the Sir Douglas Quintet, and Bubble Puppy.

When I returned to Albuquerque, I bought a copy of Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, and proceeded to learn every song on the compilation. I suggested to Hans that we find ourselves a permanent drummer and morph into a garage-psych band, and the transformation only took about a month. There was a punk band we knew, called Straight Razor, and we convinced their drummer, Richard Perez, to join us. At first, we played a bunch of songs from the Nuggets compilation, including “I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night,” “Dirty Water,” “Night Time,” “Pushin’ Too Hard,” “Liar, Liar,” “You’re Gonna Miss Me,” “Psychotic Reaction,” “Hey Joe,” “Talk Talk,” “Incense and Peppermints,” “Nobody But Me,” “7 And 7 Is,” “Time Won’t Let Me,” “A Question of Temperature,” and “Wooly Bully.” We quickly started writing songs in the same vein.

There’s a parallel story that goes along with this one, but I won’t go into a lot of detail here. As the Crawling Walls were getting off the ground, I was also playing in a band called the Jet Girls. Because of its proximity to West Texas, Albuquerque had always had its share of rockabilly bands. But this band was a tad different (to put it mildly), inventing the entirely new genre of "glitterbilly" and creating some now-legendary performances, including the infamous party where the police helicopters showed up. Find Keith Drummond and Simon Whiteley on Facebook and they can fill you in.

The confluence of art and music that I mentioned a few paragraphs back becomes important at this point. A few local artists who liked the band would regularly make posters for our shows. In return, we would play house parties and gallery openings. It worked out well. And I kept copies of the posters, which is the only way I was able to construct the rest of this history.

The First Incarnation

Bob Fountain: Vocals, Vox Continental organ, MiniKorg synth for keyboard bass
Hans Kohls: Guitar
Richard Perez: Drums and vocals

The show on October 20 with Plan 9 was one of the most memorable. They had left their home base in Rhode Island and were touring the country in a school bus that broke down in Kansas. They got it fixed and drove 12 hours straight, arriving after the Albuquerque show had already begun. No matter. They got there, and they were great! Afterward, they parked the bus in my driveway, and the 8 of them (they were touring with 4 guitars, bass, drums, keyboards, and vocals!) camped out at my house for a couple of days, long enough to stay for Hans' going-away party. They were amazed at the poster art that R.K. Sloane had done, and invited him to do the cover for "Dealing with the Dead," the album that they were working on, which pretty much launched Sloane's new career doing album art. He created cover art for 2 other Plan 9 albums, as well as several of the "Battle of the Garages" compilations, Roky Erickson's 1986 "Evil Hook Wildlife" single, and many others, including the skull and guns logo for the Guns N' Roses "Use Your Illusion I" album.

And so ended the first version of the Crawling Walls. The Air Force transferred Hans to Colorado, so Richard and I hastened to put together a new lineup. One of the other students in the statistics graduate program was a friend of mine, named Jeff Otis. His brother, Larry, was in a semi-famous Albuquerque band called The Philisteens. They had a record deal and were trying hard to make it big, but they were also going through a merry-go-round of guitar players. I knew Larry from various parties, and he and I had even sat in on a late-night jam session once or twice. I approached him with the idea of joining the Crawling Walls, not really expecting him to be interested, but to my surprise, he agreed! Richard's wife, Nancy, joined us on bass guitar, and we were back in business.

The Second Incarnation

Bob Fountain: Vocals, Vox Continental organ, Yamaha DX7
Larry Otis: Guitar and vocals
Nancy Martinez: Bass guitar
Richard Perez: Drums and vocals

The Crawling Walls opened for the Ramones at the Albuquerque stop on their "Too Tough To Die" tour (with the lineup of Johnny, Joey, Dee Dee, and Richie). That was definitely our pinnacle moment. The concert was sponsored by Natural Sound Records, who staged a contest to determine which band would share the bill with the Ramones. We submitted a demo tape, and the store owner, Paul Hartsfield, selected us as the opening act.

During graduate school, I was a member of the UNM Popular Entertainment Committee (ASUNM-PEC) and had the chance to work backstage for many of the concerts that were held in the SUB Ballroom. Most of the time, the headline band would be holed up in the green room until someone knocked on the door and told them they were needed on stage. So I was surprised to see Johnny and Joey Ramone watching us from the wings during our set. It turns out they were seriously into late '60s garage psych, and in 1993, they recorded an album called "Acid Eaters," consisting entirely of cover songs (including "7 And 7 Is," which was part of our set list that night, so maybe we had some tiny influence on them).

By this time, we had quite a few original songs, and Greg Shaw from Bomp Records decided to release a Crawling Walls album on the Voxx label. We recorded the entire album, "Inner Limits," in the basement where we practiced, at John Smith's house ("Bottomline Studio"), on a Teac 3340S 4-track reel-to-reel machine. Our recording engineer was Mark Shipman, who had been the sound engineer for The Philisteens. The instruments were all recorded live in stereo on two tracks (so if any of us made a mistake, we started the track over), and the vocals and a few extra guitar parts were recorded on the remaining two tracks. It gave the album a nice, organic, live feel. The cover art was a joint effort by R.K. Sloane and Teri Corbin.

Here's an interesting example of the art/music feedback loop that had emerged in Albuquerque. R.K. Sloane had a character named Boyd Johnson that would appear in some of his comics. I remember seeing one of his drawings called "The Adventures of Boyd Johnson—The Brain That Wouldn't Fry." I'm not sure where it appeared, but if anyone has a copy of it, send it to me, please. I'll trade you something cool for it! Here's a different episode with the same character, that was published in Mutual Oblivian #3. Inspired by the comic, I wrote a song by the same name. Later, at a gallery showing of Sloane's art, there was a 22" by 28" pastel self-portrait of the artist, titled "The Brain That Wouldn't Fry," and marked "not for sale." At the closing of the show, he presented it to me as a gift, and it still hangs in my house today.

At the first band practice after finishing the album, Richard and Nancy showed up without their instruments. Uh-oh. WTF? They were quitting the band. I guess that Richard had been upset for a while, thinking that Larry and I were preventing him from participating in the creative process. I really didn't see it coming. There may have been deeper issues, but I never really talked much with Richard and Nancy after that day, so who knows?

Anyway, we already had some shows set up, so we started the search for a new rhythm section. It wasn't long before Carl Petersen and Bill Mudd joined the band. We knew them from Ubana Pistola, a band that we had played with several times. Within a couple of weeks, they had learned all the songs on the album, and a half-dozen of our favorite cover songs.

The Third Incarnation

Bob Fountain: Vocals, Vox Continental organ, Yamaha DX7
Larry Otis: Guitar and vocals
Carl Petersen: Bass guitar
Bill Mudd: Drums

Postscript

Our last show in Albuquerque was on July 30, 1985, at the Northwestern Corral. One of the bands we played with was Michael Glover & Shout. Mike had been the drummer in the Philisteens, Larry's former band. A few years later, Mike played drums in the Strawberry Zots, another Albuquerque psychedelic band.

Our actual last show was 4 days later in Hollywood, at Bomp Record's Cavern Club. The last song of our set was "Falling Away," whose final lines are "Look at the walls, how they crawl and they sway. I can't see them now, 'cause they're falling away."

Now it was my turn to break up the band. It was unavoidable, since I was graduating from UNM and had accepted a position at the University of Texas at San Antonio. In Texas, I tried to restart the band, but it never took. There's a time and a place for everything, I guess, and I had slipped out of place. Still, there were some interesting moments. Jim Beal, the music writer for the San Antonio Express-News, reviewed the "Inner Limits" album and later contacted me when his band, Anarchists' Convention, needed a keyboard player for a couple of months. I played a few club gigs with them. At one of the shows, Augie Meyers, the organist from the Sir Douglas Quintet (and many later bands, including the Texas Tornados) was in the audience. We invited him up on stage, and he burned up the keys on my Vox Continental for a couple of songs. That was cool.

In 1992, I moved to Portland, Oregon, where I still live. I'm a professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Portland State University.

In 2006, my friend R.K. Sloane passed away. Every once in a while an event occurs which shifts the universe in a peculiar way, and this was one of them. Upon learning of Rick's death, I found myself vividly reliving those wild times in New Mexico. It inspired me to start writing songs again, stirring a creative impulse that had lain dormant for far too long.

Hans Kohls eventually moved to San Diego, where he played in several bands. He never lost his love for instrumental surf music, and he recorded an album with the Sand Devils, also featuring Ran Mosessco from the Israeli surf band the Astroglides. Hans and his wife Lisa tour the country in their RV (check out their blog, Metamorphosis Road), and the Sand Devils still play gigs when Hans is in town.

Richard Perez and Nancy Martinez live in Southern California, and I understand that Richard still plays in bands, mainly doing covers of '60s material.

Larry Otis, Mark Shipman, Carl Petersen and Bill Mudd are still in the 'Burque. After the Crawling Walls, Carl and Bill had a band called the Ant Farmers and recorded an album in 1990. Also, Bill played drums in the Strawberry Zots at some point after Mike Glover had left the band. Carl is currently the editor of the Weekly Alibi, Albuquerque's alternative newsweekly.

I'm still writing songs and playing music. Along with Adam Bayer (former drummer of The Mooney Suzuki) and guitarist extraordinaire Will Ivy, we are The Low Twelve. Give it a listen—you'll hear echoes of the Crawling Walls.