the Martian Entropy Band

you guys probably remember, I was going to the university when I lived at the house of madness, as a composition major. I studied with some pretty heavy duty dudes, among them George Balch Wilson, William Bolcom, Leslie Bassett. All very well known personas in the academic music community. I tried very hard to pull off some of my oddly timed music for my composition courses, the truth was I could not get the student musicians who were available to me to perform the pieces correctly. Hence, my recitals usually came off with 2 or 3 musicians playing the correct parts and the other ones dropping out completely because they couldn't keep up with the time signatures. In one such instance, William Bolcom told me that I was "very ambitious". I guess that is true and it definitely strikes me that way when I listen to some of the more difficult tunes that we did. The difference being, you guys could actually pull it off LOL

 When I listen to the free concert recording I am amazed -- I just didn't expect to hear the strength of chops, the tightness we managed, and the relative professionalism of the music, as whacky as it all was.  It makes me wonder if I've improved my skills much at all over the past 32 years ... I guess we did practice ... how many times a week, how many hours a week ... probably 10 to 20?   We probably had several hundred hours on every tune we played at that concert, at least.  The niceties, finer touches, inflections, transitions, extra accents, harmonies, just amaze me when I listen to it now.   We really poured our hearts and souls into all that material, and, Hugh, you were certainly ambitious, which was the best thing for us, I think.  We all tried to keep up with you, and worked our butts off to do it.  The results are certainly gratifying now.

 I was just thinking, though, how I was so excited to be able to hear this concert again that I sent the link to friends all over the country, some of them professional colleagues, some of them with small children ... and now I hear the occasional vulgarity, the off-color references, the glorification of marijuana, and just hope I didn't upset or badly offend someone out there ...  It was the times, though, and our unbridled humor, creativity and immersion in the counterculture. 

Obscenities were just language to us, pot was regarded as no worse than beer, and probably not as bad.   There is still reason to think that, in spite of the "war on drugs" propaganda that goes all the way back to 1938.  I mean, marijuana has never permanently damaged anyone, to my knowledge.  It's hard to smoke it like cigarettes - you would get too stoned and forget you were smoking something ... I suppose someone foolish enough to drive under the influence could be distracted or, if smoking while driving, drop the joint down their crotch and have an accident ... such things must happen ... but I digress (it's quite late as I write this ...)

The humor content was inspired by many cultural influences.  Mike and I had big science fiction collections, we all listened to the Firesign Theater comedy routines to the point of memorizing them, and Frank Zappa's music, a big influence, had a lot of humor in it at that time.  We were definitely deep in the counterculture of the time, and I hope listeners understand that and take it all in the context from which it sprang.

 Your compositions and drive, Hugh, were a key factor, though, and an inspiration to the rest of us.  What a gas it all turned out to be in retrospect.  I couldn't be happier with the richness of the arrangements and the tightness of the performance.  I do think this material has commercial possibilities even today.  It's too bad we didn't get the breaks back then to achieve some commercial success.   We certainly worked hard enough to deserve it, and it probably would have enabled the creation of a lot more music.

In any case, I hope the listeners and viewers enjoy this as much as we did (and do).  I laugh out loud every time I hear Mike doing his Music Man rap - another influence I didn't note above - it's just too funny and crazy.  The odd metered stuff is great, and even the "cheesy farfeezy" organ just fits in.  That nutty 5-headed tape echo I played through was sometimes just over the top, but, like everyone's effects, I somehow managed to turn it on and off at just the right instants to pull everything together coherently.   I am just amazed every time I listen to this stuff.

Maybe it won't seem that exceptional to people that weren't there and don't have enough knowledge of the context of it all to be able to appreciate it, but I hope that's not the case, and everyone will get as big a kick out of it as we did.  The audience reactions that are barely audible during the concert were certainly appreciative.

Best to all - Tim 

speaking of offending people... I remember one time I'd met a cute little honey at the music school, she was a flautist. I don't remember her name now but it was something like pernilla baumgartner or something... a nice white girl. Really cute... I told her about the band and she was telling me, "Oh yes I have a personal love affair with Jazz musicians!" all that crap... well, I brought her over to the H.O.M. to experience a rehearsal. Someone lit one up and Mike broke into "Trouble right here in Ann Arbor" and she was like, out of there lickety split... I guess to have a real love affair with jazz people you need to get down and dirty LOL

and who the heck is that in yer new avatar! Looks like Howard Stern playing the mandolin LOL

Well, that wasn't Howard Stern ... that was me at Mike & Salli's always-excellent Halloween party a couple of years ago.  I think the theme was "the 60's" or something, so I was trying to do a heavy duty hippie thing.  You noticed the mandolin -- that is my prized Rickenbacker solid body electric mandolin, a real 8 stringed beauty.  I got it because I wanted an electric mando that SOUNDS like a mandolin but can wail, and, I'll tell you, that little baby can scream when I run it through my Line 6 Pod and Line 6 Spider III amp (1x12 and 70 watts).  The only drawback is that I like to bend the strings (difficult on a mandolin - few performers I've heard EVER attempt it, but then, I'm still crazy after all these years).  That plus a little distortion makes it sound more like an electric guitar played up high ... which is OK, but takes away from the mandolin mania of it all.  (BTW, for years I've had the IM ID of mandolinmaniac on Yahoo's IM system - stopped using it years ago, tho - nobody was ever around or interested in IMing me).

 But, back to the House of Madness.  We sure got some serious mileage out of that house.  I don't know how many of those stories I really want to tell, but am sure I'll get around to many of them eventually.

 I clearly remember buying the teardrop doorstop lathing, rolls of yellow burlap, and bags of upholstery foam for the sound proofing.  I rolled the edge of the burlap around a long strip of lath and nailed it to the old knotty pine basement paneling at the floor, the rolled and nailed two short pieces vertically at the ends to make a big cloth envelope.  Then I poured upholstery foam chunks into it until it was full.  I closed it by rolling another piece of lath into the top edge of the cloth and nailing it to the wall, creating a big bolster of foam more than a foot thick and 8 feet long.  It took three of them, I think, to cover the whole wall to the ceiling; and, man, did those things absorb sound.  I remember standing on the side porch at the top of the basement stairs when the rest of the band was playing inside and only feeling my feet vibrating.

The cats (some of them kittens at the time) went ape$#|t on that stuff, running sidways down the walls, zooming up to the ceiling, jumping off from high spots, and doing the kitty monorail thing (appears on LOLcats site at http://icanhascheezburger.com/ from time to time) on top of any door left open.  It was a blast watching and playing with them down there.

Eventually the stuff became dusty, and it reduced the volume of the room a bit, and it was taken down when it was no longer needed a few years later.  It sure provided great sound proofing for the band, and a unique atmosphere ...

More later - there are a lot crazier stories than that about the old House of Madness.  I bet the current owners have NO idea what sort of stuff went on there!

Best to all - Tim (Mumbles) Prosser (now "the mandolin maniac") 

Great topic Tim, I would like to point out to readers that we are talking about a basement room about 20ft x 20 ft in which the walls were completely covered with three layers of foam padding encased in yellow burlap, it looked like the walls had three rolls of fat hanging off them if I may use a graphical analogy. Boy Tim you really did put a lot of effort into that.

 The funny part is that somehow the house had been named the House of Madness,

and our foam-walled practice area became known as the Padded Cell   

hardy har hah LOL

 and off one corner of this area was Mike the Spaceman Bassman's workshop area, where he had a workbench where he did all his electronic gizmo creation and hot glueing. I think a later post about all of them will be required.

 In this workshop area were not only walls and shelfs full of lots of scientific and dangerous items, but also hanging from the ceiling tons of wires, cables and instruments of destruction. The interoscitor sat along one side of the workshop. What's that, you say? you'll have to wait for a later post...

it was quite a conglomeration, that house of madness :) more later...

I would point out to the reader that the casual attitude towards cannabis was really a reflection of the fact that the city we lived in, Ann Arbor Michigan, in those years, had the most liberal marijuana laws of the entire nation. Specifically, if someone got caught with it they would be issued what amounted to a $5 traffic ticket. so... that was the environment in which these songs grew.

Please dear reader, rest assured, we are all aware of the current climate concerning drugs and we are not condoning drug use at this time in any way shape or form, merely painting a true picture of the time and place in which the band existed. When Mike said "we got trouble right here in Ann Arbor" he weren't kidding! (sic)

maybe the $5 pot law was a backlash after the "It Ain't Fair, John Sinclair" debacle. To refresh the reader's memory, John Sinclair, a local activist anti-hero (later recognised more postiively for being a historian and archivist of local [Detroit Blues] culture) got busted for two joints and thrown in jail. None less than John Lennon recorded a song about him and there were huge rallies and concerts in Sinclair's benefit. He was finally released and I think that was when they changed the pot laws.

I remember around that time, our local congressman got himself photographed on the front page of the Ann Arbor News smoking a joint and maybe even got himself busted and paid the $5 ticket if I remember correctly. (Mike makes reference to that in the song "Trouble"). I don't know if that was done on purpose or what but there it was in black and white.

 Really reactionary politics, I think, but I wasn't aware of any of that at the time, really. What I was mainly interested in was following in the footsteps of Frank Zappa and John McLaughlin. And quite frankly, to goldly bo where no band had gone before.

and just to tie in the history, Mike the Spaceman Bassman emailed me last year to tell me he'd seen my signature on a contract with John Sinclair's signature in John's archives, which he'd been granted permission to research for an article he wrote which he published here - http://www.mondodyne.com/a2observer/peoplesballroom.shtml The contract had been made when John hired me (yeah I knew him) with my highschool buddies to play a gig at the People's Ballroom in Ann Arbor, before it burned down (yeah I was there when it burned down too, but not playing that night). John Sinclair was booking the bands for the ballroom, and Mike had gotten us the gig there with his lightshow, Light Opera. This was before the Martian Entropy Band days.

But I actually knew John Sinclair before that gig -- in fact I had wandered into the White Panther house one day out of curiosity, at the ripe old age of 13. I didn't know anything about it except someone told me it was cool. John had been there, and was very nice, is my recollection. Mainly they were talking about sharing food and that sort of thing, nothing really militant, except to the extent that we don't always do that sort of thing, I guess it was socialist propaganda or whatever... what did I know of that at 13...

Yo Tim I'll never forget the time your girlfriend streaked in and interrupted our rehearsal one day completely stark raving nude, to give you a birthday present! LOL!!!!

We are talking a complete band rehearsal, four or five musicians, several onlookers, jamming and partying away and here she comes running in completely naked -- gorgeous, mind you -- and we all like drop our instruments and just stand there with jaws dropped while she plants a wet one on Tim, then runs out again...

and a one, and a two, and a...

Frequently there were poker parties in the living room at the House of Madness, with my cat Meeks hiding behind the couches and chairs, waiting to dash out and snatch up a dropped piece of popcorn or cheeto and quickly remove it to somewhere behind the furniture, from whence loud crunching noises would then emanate.  As a result of those parties, the original dull green carpeting, present when I bought the house, gradually turned to a muddy brown <bleh>, but nobody noticed.

When I bought the house, the previous owners had left a black metal (and very patriotic) eagle with outstretched wings hanging on the front of the fireplace.  I immediately outlined the feathers and other features in day-glo orange, and I still have that eagle on a shelf in my garage.  I should photograph it under a black light and submit the picture for the website.  The small plastic skull with the oversized eyeballs glued into it that I found in the basement rafters years after mike moved out still exists, but I think I gave it back to Mike last year.  That picture would be a good one to have on the site, too. 

When I first moved into the house, the overhang above the basement stairs was low enough that I hit my head every time I went downstairs for the first week or two.  Finally, one evening when I had a headache from hitting it so hard and so often, I found a 5-6" thick block of hard upholstery foam and NAILED that sucker to the over hanging wall.  After that I bounced my head off of it for another week or two, but without pain or injury, and finally became used to ducking at exactly the right moment every time I descended the stairs, a habit that lasted for the next 22 years, until I sold the house and moved on.

Sometimes I am amazed at how that the neighbors put up with us.  We had the driveway full of cars most of the time, and cars of all sorts parked in front of the house most nights.  The extensive soundproofing kept the band's music from getting out, but you could feel the vibrations if you were standing on either of the porches.  It was party time almost all the time, and those in school while living there had a challenge to find enough peace and quiet to get any studying done.

When we had a real party, the place packed them in, and almost every room in the house had to be prepared and put into use to handle the crowds.  In Wayne's room people would be sprawled all over his waterbed, the TV would be on with gosh-knows-what (possibly the Playboy channel, received illicitly by the aid of a carefully-tuned cable TV notch filter).  For at least one party TVs were set up in every room, with cables going back to a VCR that played the hit erotic movies "Deep Throat" and "The Devil in Miss Jones". 

I'll write more about the house soon.
Best to all! - "Mumbles"

hmmm... I think that party was after my time... I think Wayne moved in after I moved out, yes?

Yeah ... Wayne got your old room.  Was Tom Flook living there upstairs when you were there?  I've got some stories about him.  I tipped him off to this site, and hoped he would come tell some of his own stories, but I don't know if he's been here.  He was one of our roadies (probably our most dedicated one) at the disastrous Michigan Theater ripoff/fiasco.  I have to find his email address ... I did call him last weekend, tho ..

We were all mavericks at the House of Madness, and Flook fit right in ...  I'll write soon about the great waterbed disaster (at least, that's the way I remember it) ...

- Tim "Mumbles"

yup Flook was living there when I was. Flook was/is a great guy, I'm really glad to hear he's still around! Flook, what up man, you better join up and contribute dude! you're an honorary martian...

The great flood of 1974(?)

One crazy thing that happened at the House of Madness was "the flood".

I stopped home on my way to a wedding (held outdoors in the gazebo on an island at a nearby park) to change clothes, midday on a Saturday, only to find water dripping from the ceiling of my basement bedroom.  My bedroom, I should explain, was separated from the practice room by a wall I had constructed, and featured a stereo and mattress on the forest green-painted basement floor.  It was quite illegal from a building code perspective, but I was 23, fresh out of college, and had no clue about that.

Anyway, I dashed down to my bedroom and opened the door only to find water dripping from a number of parts of the acoustic-tiled ceiling.  That was a shock.  I knew that Mike's bedroom was directly above, and featured a huge waterbed mounted on cement blocks and plywood sheets, with a 2x8 standard waterbed frame around it, and the appropriate plastic liner inside the frame.  I dashed upstairs to look in Mike's bedroom (he was gone at the time), and inspected as much as I could see, but could find no evidence of dampness.

Dashing, panicky, back downstairs I thought about where the water pipes ran, and was quickly certain that there were none above my bedroom ceiling.  The water continued to drip ominously.

Then Flook, hearing my cries of distress, came downstairs and looked around (much more calm than I).  He walked to one side of the room, inspecting the ceiling, and, saying something like "Hey.  Here's your problem.", poked a finger at the ceiling tiles, immediately producing a hole of considerable size from which a stream of water more than a half inch in diameter began to descend, directly into the top of my stereo system.

I am sure I screamed, and dove to pull the stereo system's plug from the wall, and then lifted all it's components in one movement and moved them to another, dryer part of the room.  Flook disappeared as I scrambled to flip my mattress-bed on its side against the wall, and then ran crazily about the basement to get buckets, mops, old towels, and anything else with which to contain the falling liquid, which continued to come down for quite a while.  I did make it to the wedding, only a little late (fortunately I was not in the wedding party), but soon returned home to try to figure out what in the #$%@ had happened. 

As it turned out, Mike had neglected to staple the liner into the waterbed frame, and sometime during the early morning hours the bed had developed a significant leak.  The weight of the water in the liner pulled the liner down until it began to escape over the edge near the back corner of the bed, run out of the frame, down the wall, and through the floorboards.  That was a BIG bed, as I said, and held a lot of water, and, if Mike was home, he didn't notice before he left. 

I don't remember clearly if the bed was partially emptied out the window onto the back yard using a garden hose, but certainly a lot of it made its exit through my bedroom.  Two of Mike's walls were covered with brick-and-board bookcases, nearly floor to ceiling, which were positioned on the carpet, which was quite soaked by then.  Since the bookcases could not be moved, the carpet had to be cut away from them, and probably, too, made its exit to the backyard through the window.

Eventually everything became dry again, not without much effort by Mike after he got home, and much later Mike kindly sanded the floorboards back to a state of relative smoothness, as the inundation caused them to swell and buckle badly.  I'll admit I (the homeowner) was initially pretty upset with Mike, but ... we all live and learn, and he did make major, even heroic, efforts to make things right, which I truly appreciated. 

Such was just one of the sufferings undergone by the band-house, the House of Madness, during the days of the Martian Entropy Band, and I am happy to report it and laugh it off now.  It was a panic when it happened, though.  Ah, the trials and travails of college days in the '70's.

More nuttiness associated with the House of Madness: the Blue Moon

Mike, the Spaceman Bassman, acquired new transportation: a blue Econoline van with windows all the way around.  It was great for band gigs, light show gigs, trips to parties or the food coop, etc.  Unfortunately, the lady across the street backed into it soon after he got it, but that's not the real story.

At one point, after or during one of the many fun parties, Mike took a bunch of probably "under the influence" people downtown in his van, and they drove through one of the University of Michigan campus business districts, down South University Ave., while everyone "dropped trou" and displayed their derrieres through the windows to the usual throngs on the sidewalks.  Thus, the van became known as the "Blue Moon" (corresponding with the "mooning" of the locals through its windows).  The van was perfect for this sort of thing, obviously.

What amused me most, however, was Mike's reporting on the event.  He described the act of mooning behind glass as a "pressed ham salute", except that, for the men involved, it was a "pressed ham salute, jewels pendant".  The thought of that still makes me laugh, and, when I mentioned it to Mike recently (32+ years after the actual event) he laughed also, and said something like "That's what we have friends for - to remind us of such things long after we've forgotten them ourselves."  Certainly, the Blue Moon will live on in the memory of many.