This History of the Monkey Power Trio… “1995: The First Hour”

For the past several years, I’ve been posting my detailed notes here about the annual meetings of my one-day-a-year pseudo-band, the Monkey Power Trio. I’m not sure why I started to do this, but it’s become yet another thing for me to obsess about. I sit alone in an airport every year, before heading home from wherever it is that we’ve recorded, and I start franticly writing, fearful that, if I don’t get to it right away, I may forget something of potential importance, like the fact that we fought over Cheez Its in Manzanita, Oregon or that there were 10 homicides in Baltimore the day we recorded there, or that I fell in a lake before a session in the suburbs of Atlanta and almost couldn’t pull myself back out. It shouldn’t matter to me that these things are recorded, as I know that no one, not even members of our own families, or, for that matter, other members of the band, are likely to care after I’m gone. Yet I feel compelled to record everything, as though what we were doing was of some historical significance… When a single group photo would suffice, I find myself writing several thousand words… I think, to a large extent, I do it out of fear. I worry about my ability to remember things, and I think, if I record them here, I’m somehow protecting these fleeting memories of mine. I might say publicly, as I’ve done in the past, that I’m doing it for future musicologists, but, really, it’s just for me. It’s kind of a hedge against getting old. And the impetus has grown more acute this past year, given that we’re all now in our 50s, and we’ve already navigated one significant health crisis within the band. Like it or not, we’re all beginning to fall apart.

Well, not too long ago, I went through the site archives and figured out that I started documenting these sessions in earnest beginning with our 18th day as a band, which was spent outside of Reno, Nevada, near Lake Tahoe. While I’d made the occasional reference to our annual sessions prior to that, that’s when I started to take the task of documentation more seriously. And, now, because I have OCD, I’m slowly trying to fill in the blanks about those first 17 days we spent together as a band, in an attempt to preserve what can still be preserved. And it’s proving to be really difficult. As much of this happened in the early days of the internet, and before there were cell phones with cameras, a lot of what transpired between us is just gone forever.

So, with all of that said, I’d like to dedicate this post to that first Monkey Power Trio session 24 years ago.

The first session took place in the basement of an apartment building in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, where my old high school friend and bandmate Dan Richardson was living at the time. Dan, after graduating from Rutgers, had moved to Ann Arbor to live with me and our mutual friend Matt Krizowsky. In 1993, though, after a few years of living together, and playing in bands, we all went our separate ways. I moved to Atlanta with Linette, Dan moved to New York, and Matt, after staying in Ann Arbor a little while longer, moved to New Jersey, where he lived with his brother while looking for a job. And that was the situation in the summer of 1995, when both Matt and I traveled into Brooklyn to see Dan, who was living at 131 Union Street.

And, really, everything beyond that is fuzzy. I remember it being warm. I remember that we ate really good pasta painted with squid ink. I remember getting into a little bit of a tussle on the roof of a building, and an audio tape being thrown to the street below. And I remember us being relatively close to one another in the basement, as we quickly made up and recorded songs. But that’s about it… Oh, and the band was smaller then. There were just the three of us. Over the next few years we’d grow to five. That first day as a band, though, we were a proper trio, crowded around a little tape recorder in the basement of 131 Union Street.

So, I decided to engage both Matt and Dan in a conversation, in an attempt to see how much we could piece together about that day back in ‘95… What follows is that discussion.

[note: The covers of this first Monkey Power record were all hand-colored. It had been stipulated that all exposed nipples would be pink. A few, however, made their way past Quality Control with non-pink nipples. If you have one of those, you might be sitting on a gold mine.]

MARK: Does any documentation of this first session exist, other than the record we pressed, that might help us zero in on when the session might have taken place, or what might have happened during the session? Do either of you have photos? I know that there was an audio tape of us talking — or at least of me and Dan talking — on the roof of a building, likely before the session, but, as I recall, Dan wrestled the tape away from me, and threw it into the night… God, it would be great if that tape still existed somewhere.

DAN: I had one photo of us right outside of the Smith Street subway station. It would be the only documentation of that session that I know of, besides perhaps a cassette recording somewhere of the session in the basement… OK, I found the photo.

MARK: Very cool. I don’t remember having seen this before. Do we just happen to all be looking in different directions, or did we stage a douchey band photo on purpose, knowing that we’d be putting out a record? And who would have taken this? Did either of you have a camera? Could it have been Al? [note: Dan had a roommate by the name of Al at the time.]

DAN: I remember staging it as a douchey “band photo”. Now, all I can think about this photo is that we look thin. And kind of filthy.

MATT: I didn’t own a camera at the time. As for the cassette of the session, I had a copy with all the multiple takes of the songs, but I just looked and it’s not with my other MPT cassettes of early sessions.

MARK: OK, I reached out to Al, who now lives in Zurich, and he thinks that he must have taken this photo. “That must have been me,” he said. “I definitely remember the four of us walking along Houston Street during the day. I also vaguely remember you going into a shop that sold Japanese/Korean pop stuff.” I know the place he’s talking about. They sold videos and toys. Matt used to get stuff there. Was it called something like “Kim’s”?

MATT: Yes. He’s talking about Kim’s Video, which had several locations in Manhattan. I wasn’t a regular shopper there until I moved to NYC in October of ‘95.

DAN: I found another photo — an actual photo from the basement!

MARK: I guess I would have taken this one, but I don’t remember having a camera at the time. Is it possible that someone else was with us? Maybe Al again? Or maybe I just snapped this shot with a camera of yours, Dan. Or maybe I had a camera that I just can’t remember. I was taking photos for Crimewave at the time, so I guess I must have had one… Matt’s wearing the same shirt that he was wearing in the earlier photo, but it looks like maybe you’ve changed, Dan. So maybe the two photos were taken different days.

MATT: It looks to me like Dan is wearing the same dark green shirt in both photos, but it looks brighter in the subway photo because of a flash.

MARK: OK, I can accept that interpretation.

DAN: I still have that guitar. Other than that, I really don’t remember any of this stuff. I’m not sure about anything.

MARK: Do you know who Matt and I are? Do we look familiar to you?

DAN: Vaguely. You’re both older and fatter, though.

MATT: The first photo looks like it was taken at President and Smith, near Dan’s place, not on Houston, as I think Al was suggesting. Maybe we went shopping Friday with Al, though, before we went drinking. But the subway photo is after the session in Brooklyn, which, I believe, was on a Saturday.

MARK: I’m curious. How do you know the photo was taken after the session, and not immediately beforehand? That first photo does look like it was taken in the evening, though, doesn’t it?

MATT: Dan and I appear to be in the same outfits. And, as we seem to be in agreement that the session took place prior to October, I would have still been living in New Jersey. So, I wouldn’t have able to make multiple trips to Brooklyn. And there’s no reason we would have gone to the subway unless someone was going to use it. I also have a backpack strap over one shoulder, so I believe I was departing to return to New Jersey, after we recorded.

MARK: Dan, do you remember when Al moved in with you on Union Street? And do you remember him being there after our session?

DAN: I have no idea.

MARK: I wish we’d had someone like Brett Kavanaugh in the band, keeping detailed notes on a beer-soaked calendar… OK, I’m going to write to Al again, and see what more he can tell us about our band’s history. I see from LinkedIn that he’s now a “VP for Knowledge and Records” at some company, so maybe he kept a diary, or something… In the meantime, can you remind me how you came to be living on Union Street, Dan?

DAN: I was living with an art student named Daniel Hughes in NYU housing before I moved out there. When our NYU lease ran out, Dan and his friend, the sculptor David Simon, found a place in Brooklyn, and invited me to move there as well. We paid some mob guys a deposit, and tried to build walls for bedrooms inside of this loft-type space.

MARK: And Al moved in when one of those guys left, or the four of you all lived there together?

DAN: I think that Al moved in after Dan Hughes moved out.

MARK: OK, just got word from Al that he thinks he moved to Union Street in the Spring of ‘95, and that he remembers my visit that weekend “really well.” So far, the only thing he’s shared is that he remembers us going to an Italian grocery, where a guy asked me what kind of cheese I liked, inspiring the MPT song, You Like-a the Cheese, on that first record? I have no memory of this, but it sounds plausible… Do either of you remember that?

MATT: No.

DAN: No, but the guys who worked in that neighborhood did sound just like you sound in the song.

MARK: You Like-a the Cheese, I think, will go down in history as the song most reflective of our ethos. Agree? Disagree?

DAN: It’s one of the least musical and most like a prank phone call, so yes.

MATT: Disagree, but it has a better chance than Fatty Rocks.

[note: We apparently wrote-out the lyrics for this first record, and included them inside the cover. You can see some of them here, along with the comment, “Listen to those wheels click as lyrics are written on the spot.” A larger version of this image, and the one facing it in the inside cover, can be found here and here.]

MARK: Over the years, when asked about our origin story, I’ve told it incorrectly. I’ve said that, on the spur of the moment, we’d grabbed whatever instruments we could find, going into the basement of the apartment building that Dan was living in, to make a record. And that’s how I remember it having happened. In a recent conversation with Matt, though, he pointed out that we must have planned it, as he would have brought his saxophone with him from his brother’s house in New Jersey, where he was living at the time. Do either of you remember having conversations prior to the session, and how we came to decide that we should record?

MATT: I’ve never remembered it as a spur of the moment decision. Even if it occurred after I’d moved from New Jersey to Brooklyn, I would have had to have brought my instruments from my apartment to Dan’s. One thing I’m sure of is that I had a hangover during the session because we’d gone out drinking the night before, probably with the usual NYC Newtonian group. We may have made a decision to play/record then, if I was already living in Brooklyn. If I was in still in New Jersey, though, we would have had to have discussed it even earlier. [note: Newtonian here would be an adjective referring to a group of high school friends from our days in Newton, New Jersey, who had relocated to NYC, and not fans of Sir Isaac Newton.]

DAN: I think Matt must be right here. He would not have had his instrument at my place for any reason except if we’d planned it ahead of time.

MARK: So, based on everything we know so far, it sounds like the session happened prior to October, before Matt was living in the Brooklyn, which would mean that we’d pre-planned it before I came out from Atlanta for my visit… I’m pretty comfortable with this, and I don’t think we need to do any more digging to help us pinpoint the date of the session any more precisely, but I think it’s worth noting that, in the first photo, there’s an Olde English 800 malt liquor ad behind us, and that Matt’s wearing a Demolition Doll Rods shirt, while I’m wearing a shirt that I’d gotten in Atlanta, when I saw K. McCarty perform the songs of Daniel Johnston. That’s one of Daniel’s drawings on the shirt. K. McCarty’s album of Johnston covers, Dead Dog’s Eyeball, came out in ‘94. I guess I could write to her and ask when she played Atlanta on that tour, if we wanted to hone in a little more closely on the date. Or, maybe, we could find out when Olde English started selling in cans.

MATT: I got my DDR shirt in 1994 while I was still in Michigan. Subway ads run for several months. I don’t think the shirts or ad will provide any way to pinpoint the date.

MARK: OK, going back a bit, prior to this session, we hadn’t played together since we all lived together at 502 Catherine Street in Ann Arbor, right? And that would have been the Summer of 1993… At least I seem to recall having moved away from Ann Arbor shortly after graduating, and, from doing a little research, I see that commencement was May 1. So, when would we last have played together as Prehensile Monkey-tailed Skink? [note: Our band in Ann Arbor, with Bulb Records founder Pete Larson, was Prehensile Monkey-tailed Skink.]

MATT: You didn’t move away from Ann Arbor until the lease ran out towards the end of August. I have a flyer for a Skink concert on June 3, 1993. [note: I think this was the concert running the same night as a show by The Restroom Poets for which Mark made a fake version of their poster with a different date. Fun times.] The last Skink show was at Sunday Bulb Sunday on August 8, where Andy Claydon filled in for Dan because he had left for grad school at NYU. I don’t remember if there were other concerts after the June 3 show, but we would have played together at the house through July.

MARK: What? Andy was in Skink too? Fuck, I don’t remember that at all… When we get done with this, we’ll need to do an oral history of Skink.

MATT: Andy was in the band for that one night only. There were four Bulb acts at The Blind Pig: Couch, Skink, The Monarchs, and Cornelius Gomez, which Ricky must’ve come back to town to play in. I think Pete set it up, but without knowing that Dan was leaving town.

DAN: I never knew that Andy filled in for me at a Skink show. Fascinating.

MARK: OK, I reached out to Andy. Here’s what he says. “I played guitar on three songs, but mostly I played drums while Pete played guitar,” he told me. Then he added, “I do remember several shows, though, where Greg played drums while Pete sang.” So, was Greg Hughes in Skink too? I’m learning so much about my own band’s history. This is great.

MATT: I don’t remember playing with Greg at all. That may have been before I joined Skink, or there were a few times Skink played The Lab, and I wasn’t there because I had to work.

MARK: OK, I asked Andy to clarify about Greg playing drums for us, and it sounds like, from what he recalls, Greg would jump in and play drums on occasion while Pete was running around, singing Alright, which seems plausible to me. “I can’t remember if he played on other songs,” Andy said. “It always seemed pretty impromptu.” I can definitely remember some interplay between us and the Monarchs on stage, but the details are fuzzy…. Back to Monkey Power Trio, did we have the whole “we’ll record once a year until death” pact worked out before we had that first session, or did we just decide on that after we got done recording?

MATT: I think it was after, but I don’t have strong memories on this topic.

MARK: I have a really vague memory of walking down a Brooklyn street and agreeing to it. I’m assuming it was after the session, and we were happy with the results. I also remember walking to get handmade, squid ink pasta. Maybe this was that same walk.

MATT: I don’t remember this, but it would explain why I didn’t stay longer with you and Dan, as I was still a vegetarian at the time, and wouldn’t be eating squid ink pasta… If I’m right, and you and Dan were dropping me off at that subway stop for me to make my way back to New Jersey in that first photo, you could have gotten pasta afterward. The store where you got it, if I’m thinking of the same place, is close to there.

DAN: I remember that we came up with the idea to do it once a year soon after we recorded that day. The squid ink pasta was from a place only a few doors up from my apartment. Specifically, it was ravioli painted with squid ink stripes. Delicious, and super cool-looking.

MARK: Does anyone remember how the name of the band came about? Did we come up with it at the session, or was it later… after the session, when we were sending the tape off to be pressed?

MATT: You and Dan discussed names after I had left, and I didn’t participate. MPT was the best of the choices. One of the others involved Krebstar 3000, or something similar, which reflected your obsession at the time with The Adventures of Pete and Pete.

DAN: I’m pretty sure that Mark came up with the name somehow. No clear memories.

MARK: I think we liked the fact that the “Monkey” part of the name harkened back to Prehensile Monkey-tailed Skink. And, given that we were just making small, off-the-cuff songs, I think we saw some humor in referring to ourselves as a “power trio,” like Cream or the Jimi Hendrix Experience.

MATT: I remember the main reason I liked it was the other suggestions sucked, and I didn’t have anything better to offer.

MARK: OK, so, at some point, we went into the basement, giving ourselves 1-hour to come up with enough songs for a 7” record… Did that one hour include setup time as well, or were we really just in that basement room for an hour?

MATT: I don’t think this 1-hour time constraint actually existed. I’m pretty sure we recorded for longer than a hour. You may have said “The First Hour” in the title of the first record, but I don’t think it proves anything. And setup time would have been minimal: Dan finding a place to plug in his guitar, me getting my sax ready, you selecting junk to beat on, and finding a location for the boom box to record everything. I have a memory of the boom box on a beat-up paint-splattered stepladder, and that seems to be verified by the photo above.

DAN: Yeah, you’re making up the one-hour constraint in hindsight. There was no timekeeping involved.

MARK: It wasn’t a long session, though, was it? I mean, it seems to me that we just walked in, beat on stuff and screamed for a while, and then just walked out? I don’t remember working on anything very hard, or really writing songs. I mean, we could have tried a second take once or twice, but that was pretty much it, right?

MATT: We tried a few second takes on some songs. I think we probably did 3 hours, 4 max.

DAN: I’m guessing it was about 2 hours and 35 minutes. I don’t remember doing songs more than once.

MARK: Does anyone remember what I was beating on? I remember there being a space heater or something, and maybe a big metal thing that was used for mixing cement. I don’t believe there was anything approaching a real drum, though… just a few metal things that I pulled to be within striking distance.

MATT: I think one of the objects was an old sink.

DAN: I’m pretty sure one of the objects was a support pole, or maybe a pipe. You can see them in the photo above.

MARK: Did I have drumsticks, or was I beating on these things with pieces of pipe or something? I remember there being drumsticks, but I could be wrong about that… Did we maybe buy drumsticks the day before?

DAN: I could have had drumsticks lying around.

MATT: I think it was drumsticks. They may have been old ones from Ann Arbor, saved by you or Dan.

MARK: Dan, was that room in the basement where you used to do laundry?

DAN: No, it was a basement room that I’d never been in, I believe… See, I can’t even recall where the hell I did laundry back then. I don’t remember doing it in the apartment, or at a laundromat in that neighborhood.

MARK: Judging from the stain on your shirt in the first photo, maybe you didn’t do laundry at all.

DAN: I do hate doing laundry.

MARK: Does the original recording of the entire session exist? I think we just let it run for the whole time, without stopping between songs, right? I’d like to hear the whole thing.

DAN: Matt said he couldn’t find his copy, and I don’t have one. I think it’s been lost to the sands of time.

MATT: I don’t think we just let the tape run.

MARK: Did I draw the artwork for the record that same day, or did I do it later, upon returning to Atlanta? Given that it’s just printed on white paper, I suspect I just printed them at Kinko’s, and then colored them by hand.

MATT: We didn’t decide on the band’s name the first day. And you did the artwork later, around when we pressed the record, which took some time. Back then we had to have the songs remastered to DAT to submit to the record press, I think we hired someone to do that.

DAN: I took the cassette to some guy’s apartment in the East Village. He had a cassette-to-DAT setup, and made the copy. I think he even bobbed his head up and down to some of the catchier tunes.

MARK: So, when we went into the basement, did we know that we were going to end up pressing a record, no matter what we did?

MATT: I don’t remember, but apparently yes.

DAN: I think, having learned from Pete Larson that you can just put any old shit out on a record as long as you pay United Record Pressing, we had the idea that we’d do a record. I don’t really remember if we had the idea of making it before we went into the basement, during our time in the basement, or upon leaving the basement, though.

MARK: I liked this phrase we used in our marketing of that first record. “Your band might call this a good first practice – we called it a record.”

DAN: I like that phrase too. I also like the fake record review from Music Music magazine. The first cover is still one of the best.

[note: This is the back cover of “1995: The First Hour,” a larger scan of which can be found here. As it says, “This was a good place to start, there are actually some pretty good ideas for songs here.”]

MARK: Do either of you have any memories of the session itself? I can kind of remember hitting things, and yelling… and I have a vague recollection of the room… but that’s about it.

MATT: Pretty much the same vagueness.

MARK: Is this the session when we did the song Honcho, or was that a later session?

DAN: Yes, we did Honcho at this session.

MATT: We did at least two takes, and they were both bad. It was just you reciting titles, followed by, “These are magazines!”

MARK: This session also had the lyric “Hawaii Five-0 is a TV show”… There were seven songs on that first record; Baby Eyes, The Theme from the Film: “Daddy, What Was Monkey Power?”, Jehovah’s Shit List, October Throughout History, Kling Kling Bang Bang Pop, and You Like-a the Cheese? Anything specific about any of these songs that you’d like to have recorded for posterity?

DAN: No.

MATT: I wish we could still write with brevity.

MARK: Wait a second… If we have a song called “Daddy, What Was Monkey Power?” I guess we must have named the band before the session, right?

MATT: I think we came up with the title long after, it’s an instrumental. We did not name the band before the session.

MARK: It’s been so long since I’ve listened that I didn’t even remember it was an instrumental.

DAN: You can listen on our website, Mark.

MARK: Thanks… Anything else for the historic record before I seal the time capsule and we forget about this forever?

MATT: Is that a promise? You’re not going to ask the same stuff about this again 10+ years down the line?

MARK: I do have a tendency to keep going. I was interviewing someone last night for my History of Zines project, and he said that being interviewed by me was, “like fighting a hydra.”

DAN: This document is 21 pages long! I keep feeling like this is some shitty homework assignment.

MARK: OK, I should note that this little oral history exercise of ours has been pretty heavily edited, in that I removed about five pages of us debating as to the exact timing of the session, trying to determine if it had taken place in August or October of 1995. Ultimately, Matt produced a copy of my old zine, Crimewave USA, where I’d published an article titled “The founding of the Monkey Power Trio,” which I had absolutely no memory of. In it, I say that we recorded “after” filling up on the above-mentioned squid ink pasta, and that we did this on my last day in the City, during a trip that, it would appear, began with our friend Rob’s August wedding in Princeton. Oh, and this article also mentions that the record went to press the day that OJ Simpson was acquitted of murder, which would have been October 3, 1995. So apparently I stayed in New York for a week or so, as Rob’s wedding was likely on a Saturday, and we recorded the following Saturday, right?

MATT: It would have been a Saturday. I think you had pasta after the session. If it was before, I probably wouldn’t have been hungry anyway due to the hangover. The article said we had planned the session ahead of time. It also said Dan came up with the idea that we meet up every year for the rest of our lives before the session. It doesn’t specify when Dan came up with that, it might have been while you two were walking in Brooklyn during your trip.

DAN: I agree that I came up with the idea.

MARK: And, during this week in New York, I also went to a taping of Geraldo’s television program, tried to leave a copy of Crimewave with the Jehovah’s Witnesses at their world headquarters, and sat in on the recording of an excerable Rush Limbaugh special called “Sometimes You Just Gotta Laugh”… right? I’d originally thought that I must have come back again, but I guess I did it all during this one week. I apparently used to have a lot more energy.

DAN: I do remember going over to The Watchtower (Jehovah’s Witnesses’ headquarters) to try to hand whomever answered the door a copy of Crimewave. For some reason they didn’t want it, and didn’t find any humor, or irony, in the situation.

MARK: OK, so I flew from Atlanta to New Jersey, took the train out to Matt’s brother’s place, stayed there for a night, then caught another train to Princeton for Rob’s wedding, and then I headed into New York, where I think maybe I stayed with both Dan and Anne (Shapiro), doing all the stuff I just noted, before we recorded the following Saturday. Does that sound right?

MATT: That sounds about right. I don’t remember if you came to my brother’s place directly from the airport. I suspect you might have stayed a night or two in NYC beforehand, you might have flown to LaGuardia or JFK. There was no train stop at Newark Airport at that time, you would have had to take a taxi to the NJ Transit train station, if you were coming from NYC you could take a PATH train there. In the issue of Crimewave you mention sighting performance artist Gene Pool in his can suit outside Nancy Whiskey bar during a drinking night that started at Jaycox Coal. That was probably the night before the session. I remember meeting Al for the first time at Jaycox Coal. I thought it was later but August sounds plausible. And we would have walked down Houston Street to get to Nancy Whiskey after Jaycox’s 2-for-1 Happy Hour special ended. And we had several beers’ head start before Al arrived, so that’s why he remembers it better. [note: For those of you looking to retrace our steps, and capture some of the magic, Jaycox Coal, as 12 Avenue A, is no longer in business. Nancy Whiskey, however, is still at 1 Lispendard in Tribeca.]

MARK: While we’re on the subject of drinking, it’s also worth noting that, according to the liner notes on the record, there wasn’t much beer consumed. On the back cover, it says, “The worst part is that we weren’t even drunk.”

DAN: I noticed that. Probably drank too much the night before.

MATT: I think we eventually had a couple beers but we definitely started sober and didn’t get drunk.

[note: As of right now, there are four items that are ready to go, in case anyone with deep pockets would like to put together a traveling museum exhibition on “1995: The First Hour.” Dan still has the guitar. Matt and Mark still have their t-shirts. And the tape player that the whole thing was recorded on has just been rediscovered.]

COMPLETED PAST SESSION NOTES: For those of you who haven’t yet had your fill of Monkey Power history, here are the other session notes that have been completed thus far.

2012: Lake Tahoe, Nevada
2013: Jackson Hole, Wyoming
2014:Cumming, Georgia
2015: Cleveland, Ohio
2016: Cumming, Georgia
2017: Baltimore, Maryland
2018: Manzanita, Oregon

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5 Comments

  1. Posted March 27, 2019 at 8:01 pm | Permalink

    According to the notes on the old, yellowed cover, you can hear a paint brush that I was using for percussion snap during one of the songs. So I guess I wasn’t using drumsticks. Or, at least, I wasn’t just using drumsticks. There’s also a note on the back cover that says I was hitting a gas cans, space heaters and a cement mixer.

  2. Anonymous
    Posted March 28, 2019 at 7:51 am | Permalink

    I wonder why October 4, 1929, of all the dates in human history, popped into your head.

  3. Kim
    Posted March 28, 2019 at 9:54 am | Permalink

    October 4, 1929:

    The Colorado State Penitentiary riot ended in the early morning with its leaders all dead. With the prospects of escape clearly hopeless, one of the leaders shot his accomplices and then himself. In all, eight prison guards and five inmates were killed.

    The Victor Talking Machine Company was merged with RCA to form RCA-Victor, with RCA holding 50 percent of the stock, General Electric 30 percent, and Westinghouse Electric 20 percent.

    Ramsay MacDonald arrived in New York City and proceeded to Washington, D.C. by train, where he had an introductory 20-minute meeting with President Herbert Hoover. MacDonald became the first sitting British Prime Minister to ever visit the United States.

    The Fritz Lang-directed silent science fiction film Frau im Mond (Woman in the Moon) premiered in Berlin.

  4. Kim
    Posted March 28, 2019 at 9:55 am | Permalink

    Black Tuesday would happen a few weeks later, on October 29.

  5. 734
    Posted March 28, 2019 at 10:15 am | Permalink

    A good friend would not out Andy Claydon as a member of Skink.

3 Trackbacks

  1. […] was purchased at a K. McCarty concert somewhere in Atlanta between the 1994 release of her album, Dead Dog’s Eyeball, and the first session of my one-day-a-year band, The Monkey Power Trio, in August, 1995. [The […]

  2. […] band, the Monkey Power Trio. For those of you who might not be familiar with our origin story, it all began back in 1995 with a promise between old friends one hot, summer afternoon in Brooklyn. Without much in the way of any real planning or forethought, we’d decided to make a record […]

  3. […] begun the process of trying to recreate the past. Earlier this year, as you may have seen, I posted an oral history of our first session, which took place 25 years ago now. And, today, I’m happy to share the second installment of the […]

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