Riding Shotgun By Starlight...With The Ominous Sigh!, "Just Trying To Find My Way Home"
TECHNICAL INFO: CD, self-released (Cheguevaraisnotdead Recordings), 2005
Scott Coleman, the brainchild of RSBSWTOS, is the subject of one of my favourite rock and roll stories. Whether it is urban myth or fact, I don't know. Importantly, it doesn't really matter; it was a perfect way of deconstructing the milieu of the man himself.
A friend, who was recording the debut LP (this one is the follow-up), set up the click track for Scott to play along with. Record is hit, and Scott plays the first guitar track. The rhythmic constant of the pulsing metronome is flatly ignored, the music wandering behind and then suddenly leaping ahead. The friend was tearing his hair out, anticipating a lengthy and irritating session of tracking and re-tracking. When finished, the friend, looking to tread lightly, informed Scott that it could do with recording again. Scott declined, preferring to record the second guitar line without the click. Obligingly, my friend did as instructed, despite how abstract and seemingly error-strewn take one was.
What happened next was magical; Scott played the counterpoint track in exact time with his first track. Whilst, to 'common' hearing, still seemed arhythmic and microtonal, it was all exactly as intended. His music had developed its own language, its own logic; it made perfect sense, it could be replicated endlessly, but only by him.
In the early days, his performances were the stuff of legend. Taking to the stage armed with voice and a Fender Stratocaster with ten pedals, billed as 'a one-man art rock explosion', he'd proceed to lay waste to the night. Simply ignoring the man was not an option; he either stunned you into attention or drove you fleeing from the room in sheer terror. This sense of room-bursting horror was heightened when he landed an opening slot for Monitor Records band EZT on a UK tour, bringing doses of sonic ectoplasm nightly.
The record I own is a later effort, when a rhythm section was added. Whilst it does reign in some of the more outre parts of the early material, the lengthy psychedelic/hard-rock tendencies remain, the shifting dynamics and heart-on-sleeve vocals remain. 'Fairfield, Iowa' is more plaintive, mourning a distant love.
He was in our life and is out again. Currently playing in a London-based band White Shoes, Black Heart - a more conventionally rocking affair.
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