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Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 is an American experimental indie rock group, which was formed in 1986 in San Francisco, California, United States, though half of its members are from Iowa. The Best Indie Rock Albums of 1994. View reviews, ratings, news & more regarding your favorite band.
A gem from the fellers. My Pal the Tortoise, off of Strangers From the Universe.
It's therefore no wonder the Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 chose to pay tribute to the film with a stupid, worthless EP combining three Mother Of All Saints tracks with four pieces of studio jerkoffery and a Caroliner cover formerly available on 7'. I started out with Strangers from the Universe. Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 Welcome to the official website of the Thinking Fellers Union Local 282. Albums Track listings, cover art, and other information about TFUL282 albums. Compilations Compilation albums featuring cuts by the band. EP's Information about TFUL282's three EPs.
With such a longwinded moniker, it seems likely that Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 could be nothing but a bunch of pretentious art-school rejects. Fortunately, that's pretty far from the truth -their sound is a hybrid of art rock and punk rock, based on noodling on organs, electric banjos, mandolins and heavy, fuzzed-out guitar blasts. The group formed in 1987 in San Francisco and released their first album 'Wormed By Leonard' on their own label Thwart a year later. In 1991, the group made the jump to the Matador label, where they released 1991's critically acclaimed 'Lovelyville', 1992's 'Mother Of All Saints' and 1994's 'Strangers From the Universe'. They moved to Ajax for the following year's 'Funeral Pudding' and then to Communion for 1996's 'I Hope It Lands', where they remained on the roster for the rest of the '90s despite their lack of further releases. However, they continued to play sporadic, spontaneous dates and a new album was rumored for a 2001 release. [SOURCE: ALLMUSIC]
The most melodious of experimental bands, the most serious of funny bands,and the most down-home of art rock bands is Thinking Fellers Union Local282. Four of the band's five members relocated from Iowa to the San FranciscoBay Area in 1986, and in its music you can hear sounds evoking both a ruralback porch and the downtown junkie squat where the group once rehearsed.TFUL282 spikes its complex compositions with doctored vocals and a tangleof eccentrically tuned stringed instruments. Yet this band surpasses thescreechy and squawky; over 15 years it has gradually mutated from a clamorousjumble of the Residents and Sonic Youth into something more stark and sublime.
On its eight albums, the effervescent melodies and emotionally chargedlyrics of TFUL282's more college-radio-friendly songs collide with murkiermeanderings recorded in rehearsals on a four-track or boom box. To putit politely, this lo-fi work--known as 'Feller filler' to the faithful--dividesand crystallizes listeners' opinions. The resulting hi-lo clash is akinto Faust's The Faust Tapes, a crazy quilt of sound that can tryyour patience or expand your cranium.
The band lacks a distinct image or a single frontperson (all five sing),traits that render it well-nigh unmarketable. Still, TFUL282 once battedits eyelashes at the big time. In 1995 the band accepted an offer fromsub-R.E.M. anthem rockers Live to serve as opening act on that band's arenatour. The experience, punctuated by howls of 'You suck!' from Live's fans,confirmed that the Fellers and commercial triumph would forever have onlya nodding acquaintance.
Lights out 3 2 download free. TFUL282 retired from touring in 1996 and hasn't released an album sincethat year's I Hope It Lands, so rumors orbited that its membershad turned in their union cards. Which makes the long-delayed appearanceof a new album on the Communion Label--entitled (deep breath) Bob Dinnersand Larry Noodles Present Tubby Turdner's Celebrity Avalanche--a joyousevent for TFUL282's small but passionate fan base.
With Bob Dinners, the band returned to working with longtimecoproducer-engineer (and Pell Mell bassist) Greg Freeman. Together theytook lawn shears to the dense sonic thickets of earlier albums. Where threeguitar lines once battled for attention and frequency range, Bob Dinnersopens up empty spaces as chilly as a Midwestern prairie in February. Eventhe album's goofier moments (hello, 'Boob Feeler'!) carry an ominous undertow.It's also ringed with melancholia, especially on '91 Dodge Van,' whichdetails the band's retreat from the front lines of its members' lives.Today TFUL282's future remains uncertain, especially after drummer JayPaget's move last year to Boston.
I met with Anne Eickelberg (bass) and Brian Hageman (guitar, viola,mandolin) in a Mission district coffeehouse on a drizzly San Franciscoafternoon. (Later I talked to guitarist-banjoist Mark Davies and collagedtogether the two discussions. The fifth Feller, guitarist Hugh Swarts,was out of town.) I learned about the persistence of poop and how stealingthe voice of the Cure's Robert Smith can make you cry. The mood was pleasantbut sleepy, like a languorous dream.
Perfect Sound Forever: The new album seems maybe more serious and somber.Even the funny things on it are kind of ominous.
Anne Eickelberg: Wow. 'Boob Feeler' is? [laughs]
Brian Hageman: [more seriously] Yeah, I can't take exception to that.
AE: It has a somber feeling to me, definitely. It really could be lookedat as each one of us dealing with what it feels like to not tour anymoreand the band starting to recede more and more into the background of ourlives. But I don't think it was conscious.
BH: We sometimes entertained the idea that it was taking so long becausewe were drawing it out unconsciously. Nobody really wanted to finish it.I thought that finishing that last mix would kill me. But it didn't reallyhappen. It was the most fun, I think, to record of any of them.
AE: There was a sense of freedom. We all seemed a little more open-mindedand into doing more last-minute experiments.
Mark Davies: I guess some of those cuts are [serious and melancholy],although there are some I would consider pretty jubilant. I don't knowthat I would see any kind of retrospective feel specifically in any ofthe songs, except '91 Dodge Van,' and Anne wrote those words. It seemsto me to be a bittersweet look back.
AE: Part of what made me want to name the song that is because the Dodgestayed with us for way, way, way too long after we stopped touring. Wecould never deal with getting rid of it. It was like this mausoleum, becauseit just sat there with stuff from the last tour in it, like itinerariesand coffee cups. And every once in a while you'd have to move it, or somebody'dwant to borrow it, and you'd get in and it would be kind of musty and allthat stuff would still be in there. That feels intense. And we finallygot rid of it, but it just took forever to finally sell it.
BH: A church bought it. A Korean church.
PSF: When you wrote and decided to put '91 Dodge Van' on the album,did you think about all the people who would be asking you about it, likeme?
AE: I would be lying if I said no. And actually there were times whenI felt like, 'Oh, I don't know if this should really be on here.' Becauseit seems manipulative in a way. But it is really emotional, and it's kindof how I feel.
PSF: Manipulating who?
AE: The listener. 'Cause it's sad. And then I decided it would be OKas long as it wasn't the last thing on the record. That would just be maudlin.And we discussed that, and we all agreed. And I think because it's so shortit's OK, it's just like one facet of how it feels. And we made sure thatsomething more upbeat and flippant would follow it. Like maybe it's notreally over.
BH: Actually, that riff is the same riff as that first one on the record[the harder-rocking 'Another Clip'].
MD: Yeah, that riff was a really old thing. And when we recorded that['91 Dodge Van'] we were just screwing around, doing a slowed-down, mellowversion of it that Greg taped. And I ended up liking that version betterthan the balls-out one. Because they were so different in mood it madesense to use them both.
PSF: What's the deal with the delay of the album's release?
BH: We were recording it, like, one weekend here and there out of amonth, every once in a while. It was a lackadaisical process.
AE: It could have come out maybe a year ago. We just have a lot of inertia.The artwork is one of the main things that kept it from coming out. Weabsolved ourselves of all responsibility 'cause nothing was happening.We just could not get it done. So we finally just sent a package[to the Communion Label] with a few photographs and like letter saying,'OK, you have to finish it. You have to find artwork and you can call itwhatever the hell you want.'
PSF: I noticed that Bob Dinners is thanked on the I Hope It Landsliner notes. So it's all set up.
BH: He is? Oh, that's good. I'd forgotten that. These characters, BobDinners and Larry Noodles and Tubby Turdner, we've discussed for years.Basically Tubby Turdner is kind of an insensitive, gregarious fat talkshow host.
AE: Bob Dinners is the Ed McMahon, and Larry Noodles is the Doc Severinson.
BH: Larry Noodles has a lot of problems with being really completelyin love with Bob Dinners. And he had worked so hard on the music, 'causehe writes theme music. And finally Bob Dinners gives Larry Noodles theopportunity to play this thing on the show and it takes half the show andgoes through all of this horrible, dirging screeching. And Bob Dinnersjust can't take it and Larry Noodles is crying through half the thing becauseit's just so emotional for him.
AE: And Tubby is laughing at them.
PSF: I read one review that called you 'Los Weirdos Ultimos.' Are youas weird as people say you are?
AE: When we're all together we can be pretty weird. We have our ownparticular way of relating to each other. We just take things and run withthem. It's about poop a lot of the time.
PSF: Well, what isn't? Another thing you could say about this albumis that there aren't three guitars going full-bore at once. There's a littlemore empty space.
BH: That's very conscious.
MD: There were points in the mixing where we consciously pulled thingsout to introduce more space into the songs. We've always had trouble withthat. On some of the earlier recordings with all three guitars going anddrums and bass, you ended up getting so much phase cancellation that often,the more things you added the smaller the whole thing sounded. One of thestrong points about the live show is the density and the onslaught of allof that sound. But in the studio it just doesn't work that way.
PSF: Was there an effort to reach a larger audience with the more commercial-soundingrecords like the Admonishing the Bishops EP [1993] and Strangersfrom the Universe [1994]?
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AE: There was, but we didn't do a very good job. We weren't trying towrite in a certain way, but we were wondering if we could survive on themusic, and if we could be on a bigger label and get more money to record.
MD: I don't recall any conscious intent to make it more accessible.It's hard to keep that sort of thing from creeping in unconsciously.
BH: Strangers came from a really slow and kind of a bad timefor us, where we almost broke up.
MD: Those songs spanned over a couple of years. The beginning of thatperiod, things were really tenuous, because we pretty much took a yearoff and said, 'Let's decide after a year if we're going to start doingstuff again or not.' We did sporadic things during that time, but we werekind of trying to take a break from each other. And then at the end ofthat period we basically said, 'Let's try to push it more instead of givingup.'
BH: Most of that was written in the year where we played maybe threeshows, and Mark went to Indonesia for awhile. And we were practicing atthis rehearsal space at Turk Street [in San Francisco's seedy Tenderloindistrict] when it was really bad. For awhile we were the only actual bandthere. Everyone else was squatting and throwing up in the halls.
AE: And doing dope all the time.
MD: I especially remember coming home from a show at 3 a.m. one morningand having bodies strewn on the stairs, and you're trying to carry bigamps and not step on anybody. The bathroom was always locked because someonewas either shooting up or puking or fucking in there. And somebody setthe place on fire once. People with really pasty, translucent skin walkingaround. It was like Zombieland.
BH: The writing of those songs came out of that somehow. We weren'tthinking about going anywhere, we were thinking about ending.
AE: Yeah, it blows my mind that after that [period] we made thedecision, 'Let's try to..'
BH: Try to make a living on this.
PSF: What do you think of the term Feller filler? [they laugh]
AE: I think it's funny that it exists and that people have debated aboutwhether or not it should even be called that, and some people hate it andother people like it.
BH: People request the Feller filler.
AE: And I wish that we could play it, too. I mean, that's some of mymost favorite stuff. One of my favorite songs we ever put on a record is'None Too Fancy' on Mother of All Saints [1992].
BH: It's really good! The atmosphere, the feeling of it.
AE: It's so fucked up.
BH: I would never tell someone that they should like the home-recordedstuff. But all of us--
AE: We're compelled to put it on.
BH: None of those things got on there without all of us really wantingit to be on.
AE: And there's a lot more that didn't make it that was under consideration.
BH: My only exception to the term Feller filler is, if you reallywant to hear filler, I've probably got 75 reel-to-reel tapes of two- tofour-track stuff.
AE: Bad stuff.
PSF: Do you mix up hi-fi and lo-fi stuff on the same song?
BH: Yeah, that's a favorite thing. I was talking to someone recentlyabout 'Sports Car' from Tangle [1989] and how it has this horriblerecording of my voice. We were talking about the beauty of ghetto blasters--theydon't make these any more, ghetto blasters with built-in mics--they havethis really killer automatic compression. And if you had to get a bandplaying and it's a really dynamic thing, just sort of crashing great improv,but it's a real song, these compressors can give you the most intense sound.Because every new little thing that comes along just squashes everythingelse. Violence is captured in there. It gives you the feeling that a lotis being squeezed through a small hole. And it energizes me to hear that.So we did this vocal that was recorded on the worst old reel-to-reel outon the front steps, while it was raining, while somebody inside kept hittingdifferent distortion boxes.
That was so early for us in California that we were still having peoplecome to us and telling us who we sounded like or who we should listen toif we didn't know. A lot of people were making really good assumptionsabout where we were getting stuff. They just weren't right. We hadn't heardthe Swell Maps, and none of us had ever really listened to Captain Beefheartand the Fall. And the Fall had this one really beautiful song where it'sgoing along with this really relaxed, sort of Velvet Underground feel,and suddenly you hear a tape machine and it sounds like somebody's recordingof the song is in the background.
PSF: Yeah, 'Paint Work.'
BH: Yeah! It's beautiful. There's something about that that fills mewith.. It's so much more of a story or something. It suddenly just expandsthe whole song into something that makes it more real.
PSF: Elf Power covered [the Strangers album-closing lullaby]'Noble Experiment.'
MD: I was pretty floored by that. It's flattering.
AE: I'd love to hear more covers. I'd love to hear bands totally makefun of it. Because that's one of things that's given us the most pleasure,totally fucking up our own songs in practice.
PSF: Oh, your songs.
AE: Well, other people's, too. But doing these really supersarcasticor supergeeky renditions. And that's hardly ever come out live, unfortunately.We've had so many hilarious practice sessions where we just start coveringourselves and doing these hideous versions of songs. Like, 'Let's do thenew wave version of this song.'
BH: When we were practicing [in late 1999] we started getting into that,and it was so much fun. I was singing like the guy from the Cure, singing'The Operation' [from Strangers] like that. That felt so good. AndI was thinking, 'I feel so stupid for not having started doing this eight,ten years ago, just pick someone and sing like them.' It's a blast. SuddenlyI felt really emotional. I was crying a little bit, like: 'Oh, yeah, that'sthe voice I should have been using all this time. His.'
PSF: The Live tour. Do you have any stories from that?
MD: We'd gotten into a cushy state where we were playing the same clubseach tour, and had more and more fans each time that were into what wewere doing. We got kind of lulled into that. So doing the tour with Livewas really shocking because every night you're playing to more people thanyou've ever played to before, and they all think you suck. What was coolabout that was that you had to get your energy and enjoyment directly fromthe music and each other instead of from the audience.
AE: I'm really glad we did it. We talk about it a lot, even to thisday. It answered a lot of questions for us, too, because it made it soclear that there was just no fucking way that we ever gonna get biggerthan we were. Once you see the inside of the industry like that: 'Oh, thisis how it works, and this is what the majority of people want, and thisis what it takes to do this.' But it was a good realization. It was a joyousthing.
BH: Yeah. And it was so funny. We would sit back in the van sometimesand realize the rage that would fill the mind of a Live fan when this groupof people in their mid-30s came out, and they had obviously not changedtheir clothes or anything. They looked like their parents on the weekend.They obviously did not take any steps to entertain or anything.
AE: Yeah. No light show. We didn't make any attempt to look hip forthe kids or whatever.
BH: Or hop around energetically.
AE: As soon as we walked out it was just: hatred.
BH: I stepped up to the mic once and said, 'Now we're going to playa medley of selections from the theme for A Fistful of Dollars.' And this skinhead in front of me, his eyes were going crossed. He nearlybroke his middle finger off giving me the finger so hard. He was screamingat me with hatred! I can't imagine anything more horrible for him thanto have me walk out there and keep him from his band.
MD: It was pretty unnerving, because people were throwing things. Ihad a basketball whiz right by my head.
PSF: I downloaded a couple of their songs to listen to today. And theywere just despairing.
MD: That was weird too. To go through that experience each night, andthen have them come on afterward and see the crowd ignite. People werereally responding to this stuff they were playing. It was mystifying.
PSF: When you decided to give up touring, was it unanimous?
MD: No, it wasn't. I wanted to keep going. And I think Brian did, too.But everyone else was just too worn out by it. It's really grueling. Andnot just the physical nature of it, but trying to make a living off it.It was such a meager existence. People were just thinking having a dayjob wasn't so bad after all. At least you could go see a movie once ina while. But I wasn't quite to that point yet. I wanted to try a littlelonger. But I can't imagine that it would have gone on much longer if wehad. Because there's not really a big-enough market for this kind of music,I don't think, to support many bands.
PSF: Do you have a sense of what the status of the band is now, withJay in Boston?
Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 Strangers From The Universe Blogspot Youtube
AE: Vague.
BH: Vague, yeah.
Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 Strangers From The Universe Blogspot Online
MD: I don't know. I always feel like there's potential for something.I can't see myself saying that there's no chance of anything ever happeningagain. But I don't know if we'll ever do another record. And I certainlydon't think we'll ever tour again, unless it's a few dates here and there.
AE: The band is definitely still open to doing some music. Like we didthis Shaggs song for a Shaggs [tribute] compilation.
PSF: Which song?
AE: 'Who Are Parents.'
PSF: Their rhythms I just can't figure out, so I don't know what itwould be like to try to cover that, because if you normalize it you wouldn'treally get the Shaggs feeling.
AE: Ours I'm really proud of. I think it turned out so great.
BH: It's like a church thing.
AE: It's very smooth. But creepy.
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PSF: So might there be more records or more shows?
AE: Anything's possible.
BH: We were all friends before the band started, and we're all stillfriends now. If we were more like strangers to one another it would beeasier to say, 'Oh, it's really unlikely.' But the fact is we see one another.
AE: Band-related stuff is a good way to get everyone to come out oftheir houses, because we tend to hide a lot.
BH: Jay definitely told us when he moved that we could get another drummer.
Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 Strangers From The Universe Rar
AE: At the time we were like, 'Oh, there's no way.' But I actually havethought about it a couple of times recently. There's a couple of peoplewho have even said [they'd play drums]. 'Cause playing is fun, and I totallymiss it, and I get depressed when I don't.
BH: We might be coming up upon doing something, because it seems likeeverybody really misses that.
Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 Strangers From The Universe Blogspot 2017
MD: I can see us doing little projects here and there together. WhenJay left there was talk of him coming back to do a show or two when therecord came out. I don't know if that's going to happen. But I hope itdoes.