Red Crayola

It is not a coincidence that Thompson was rediscovered by the new wave ten years later: his Soldier Talk (1979) could have well been the album of the Pere Ubu (the band he eventually joined).
As of 1997, none of the major encyclopedias and histories of rock music published in Anglosaxon countries mentioned them.

Few rock musicians have the stature as avant-garde composers that Mayo Thompson demonstrated over the course of his tumultuous career. Thompson came from free-jazz, had played in a satirical folk group, and lived among local folk-singers before forming Red Crayola in 1966. Thompson, imbued with a freak spirit akin to Frank Zappa's, gathered around him with the Texan equivalent of Zappa's Mother's Auxiliary, a group dubbed "Familiar Ugly," and embraced the unbridled creativity of the Cucamonga master. At his side he hired Frederick Barthelme, another visionary experimenter (brother of the more famous Donald and soon to become a prominent novelist himself), and guitarist Steve Cunningham.

Parable of Arable Land was recorded in 1967, but composed the previous year. The album is one of the milestones of rock music, a carousel of savage harmonic inventions/sabotages that makes it a timeless psychedelic masterpiece.

Far from being just a “brain-fried” hippie, Mayo Thompson was playing avant-garde music for rock bands. Noise is the undisputed protagonist (the original epigraph should have been “what is that tiny record drowned in all that noise?”), the open format of the tracks and their free-form structure can host a virtually innumerable variety of instruments within the songs, from electronics to chimes, hammers and motors included (during a concert they used some ice dripping on an aluminum plate) with the declared intention of exploiting all the instruments’ possibilities (even though harsh-sounding) up to the point that you would not be able to recognise some of the instruments themselves. They experimented on everything human ears can perceive. The conceptual and programmatic rigour of their musical research couples with an inappropriate taste for nonsense which is expressed through a manic preference for funny noises and grotesque percussions.

The album coins the ideal model of the psichedelic suite: the creative chaos is reached at the end of the song, after a melodic introduction that usually features a certain degree of rowdiness, percussive frenzy and swarming electronic effects. The songs degenerate into psychedelic mini-symphonies for expansions and streams of consciousness, based on disjointed syntaxes and demolished by atonal vortices or harmonic hurricanes that can only be compared to the most radical free-jazz sessions, although unprecedented as for pollution and proliferation of basic sounds. The music of Red Crayola goes beyond a simple psychedelic trip: which heavy drug can cause similar sensory shambles and nervous breakdowns?

One after the other, these songs really tell the parable of a boundless and fertile land, still undiscovered: Hurricane Fighter Plane, the most melodic track, obscured by a dark incessant sound in the background, with a rhythm that rides at a gallop and a chaotic coda for harmonica and all sorts of percussions; the frenzy war dance of War Sucks, the most ferocious and infectious track, dictated by the most epileptic tribalism, where all instruments beat the dance’s time while Thompson rails against war; the filtered and distorted folk-rock of Transparent Radiation, for voice and harmonica, that after two strofes is overwhelmed by a general pandemonium; the subsonic and metallic vibrations, the knockers, the out-of-tune riffs with their deformed timbres, the pneumatic hammers, the blood-curdling screaming of Stainless Tail; and then Parable Of Arable Land, arguably the greatest harsh-sounding solo in the history of music, where clangors of cans and screeching saws play the overture to another bacchanalian of exhausting total-dance.

Roky Erickson plays keyboards in Hurricane and harmonica in Transparent Radiation.

Live 1967 (Drag City) collects long improvised jams recorded live in California (one of them even features John Fahey).

The second album, recorded in 1967 but rejected by the record label, would only be released in 1995 as Coconut Hotel (Drag City, 1995). It was even closer (in spirit if not in sound) to the likes of Edgar Varese and John Cage. The centerpiece is the anarchic dissonant concerto Boards, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. The rest of the album swings between a trance-anemic form of free-jazz (Vocal), a dissonant piano sonata titled Piano, a solo guitar improvisation a` la Robbie Basho (Free Guitar), and a horribly disfigured form of world-music (Water Pour), with even 36 One-Second Pieces (36 compositions that last one second only).

In the meantime the band had changed its name to Red Krayola (with a "K", in order to avoid legal problems).

God Bless (International Artists, 1968), composed after a stay in New York and a collaboration with Joe Byrd of the United States Of America, contains twenty weird fragments of songs.

Thompson, accompanied by bassist Steve Cunningham and drummer Tommy Smith, is a much more subdued animal in these brief songs. The singing and the playing are all "wrong" but wrong according to a madness closer to David Peel than to Captain Beefheart. The bulk of the album are slightly demented folk songs such as Say Hello To Jamie Jones, Save The House and Coconut Hotel, which can derail into the Dadaistic cabaret of Big and Night Song. The rest, however, is widely distributed: Victory Garden is a more serious elegy, Music is a brief incursion in the world of barbershop vocal harmonies, Sheriff Jack is a boogie, Dairymaid's Lament is a bizarre garage rave-up, Sherlock Holmes is a sort of pop ballad, and The Jewels Of The Madonna predates noise-rock of the 1990s. Finally, at the abstract end of the spectrum, there is the musique concrete The Shirt , the free jazz of Free Piece and the incompetent sonata Piece For Piano And Electric Bass Guitar.

Their music was not exactly Sgt Pepper. Red Crayola disbanded among the general indifference. Thompson lived in a long and dark seclusion playing amateur music and releasing a faded record, Corky's Debt To His Father (Texas Revolution, 1970), a collage of pop songs, bluegrass rhythms and psychedelic effects.

In 1973 Thompson moves to England, where he set up a multimedia lab called "Art And Language", participating to some of the most prestigious international art exhibitions. Art & Language’s provocative approach to art also reflects upon Thompson’s musical activity. He now sympathizes with the new wave movement.
Corrected Slogans (Music Language, 1976), the lab’s musical manifesto, doesn’t resemble any style of music, rather it looks like a musical treatise: ideological summations at a hard pace, folk ballads, Renaissance songs, jams that srip the flesh off, soprano trills, café chantant and cabaret "verfremdung". Every fragment is orchestrated for voice and one instrument only, while the lyrics recite essays on Trotsky or advanced capitalism. Thompson has staged a circus of neurotic intellectuals occasionally posing as Fugs or bohemiens.

Thompson is rediscovered by the new wave movement and he takes this opportunity to come back on the music scene with a fluent band still called Red Krayola. Not only the album Soldier Talk (Radar, 1979) is as noble as the first one, but it is also formally the best of his career. It is eclectic to the point of lunacy, licentious to the limits of free-jazz, abstract as much as acid-rock can be, self-referential like postmodern art (Wonderland, the sickest and gloomiest Sixties revival). Thompson picks up the original project of harmony disintegration (just listen to the copybook guitar solo of X, psychedelic and completely out of tune) exactly where he had left it (the title-track’s sluggish/insane dance is the aphrodisiac apogee, a thorny mix of squabbling, clinkers, roars and bangs). He is helped by Lura Logic’s playful saxophone and by Pere Ubu (who can be considered his children, after all), the champions of the new wave movement that he joined permanently the following year.

The EP Microchips And Fish (1979) is the result of a collaboration with other British creative minds (among them Lora Logic) of the new wave movement. The title track is a concerto of atonal guitar stabs, even though it features a funky-disco rhythm and android vocals; the B-side, The Story So Far, begins with a pressing instrumental bacchanalian and finishes with an agonizing swollen blues.

The Eighties begin with the release of Kangaroo (Rough Trade, 1981), a more accessible report when compared with the sociomusicology of Art & Language. The album is another rosary of alienated slogans (on the history of Soviet communism!), still supported by Logic’s saxophone and by Ravenstine’s noises.

Black Snake (Rec Rec, 1983) shows that Thompson is getting closer and closer to Pere Ubu, on the point of becoming the Jack Kerouac of the 1980s (many songs are “recited” in the manner of beat poets.

A few years later Mayo Thompson is talked about once again, thanks to a long series of recordings in the name of Red Krayola (singles, compilations, compositions for soundtracks), like the album Malefactor Ade (Glass, 1989), that is basically a collaboration with the German keyboardist Albert Van Oehlen, and Red Krayola (Drag City, 1994). The latter also features Jim O'Rourke, guru of Chicago’s post-rock. The album is sketchy and disorganized like no other, although it still features a few great psychedelic numbers (People Get Ready, I Knew It) and some self-indulgent dadaist show (Rapspierre, Suddenly, Art-Dog, Stand-Up).

The sound of the mini-album Amor And Language (Drag City, 1995), featuring Thompson among Chicago’s intelligentsia (Dave Grubbs, John McEntire), is less bizarre and more relaxed, almost like  a drawing-room soul-blues (relatively speaking) in tracks such as The Ballad Of Younis And Sofia, A-A-Allegories, Hard On Through The Summer, T, The Wind.

The singles 14 (Drag City, 1994) and Chemistry (Drag City, 1996) are auteur's divertissments.

(Clicka qua per la versione Italiana)

Hazel (Drag City, 1996) is Red Krayola's best album since Soldier Talk. Thompson delivers his usual dose of dadaistic sketches, and at least I'm So Blase`, Duke Of Newcastle, GAO rank among his best. But the best element of the album is a newly found talent for composing "songs" whose off-key, somewhat anarchic structure, letting both melody and rhythm float at the same time, is an exercise in avantgarde composition while it entertains with simple ditties such as Father Abraham, Another Song Another Satan, We Feel Fine, Serenade.

Fingerpainting (Drag City, 1999) restores some old material and mixes it with new material. The result is entertaining but not particularly significant. This album is like a tribute to the old Red Crayola paid by the new Red Krayola.

The mini-album Blues Hollers And Hellos (Drag City, 2001) resorts to a more contemplative and mellow accompaniment for Thompson's proto-Beat poetry.

The Red Crayola singles were collected on Singles (Drag City, 2004).

The instrumental mini-album Japan in Paris in L.A. (2004) contains the soundtrack to a short film.

After a long hiatus, Mayo Thompson recruited a new crew to record a Red Krayola album, Introduction (Drag City, 2006): guitarist and vocalist Stephen Prina, Tom Watson (of Slovenly), drummer John McEntire (of Tortoise), accordionist Charlie Abel, bassist Noel Kupersmith. The album is another highlight of Thompson's uncompromising career, although his capricious genius seems to have mellowed quite a bit. Most of the songs follow the lead of Breakout (a liberal revisitation of the country anthem Will the Circle Be Unbroken), that straddles the line between sanity and madness without falling into either camp. Thompson's delicate phrasing and a rollicking boogie punctuated with shy accordion evoke the spectre of Bob Dylan on a rainy day. Most songs are even less lively, bordering on whispers in the night, and even shorter, bordering on mere shadows. Greasy Street even dispenses with trying to "sing": it's just plain talking amid sparse instrumental sounds. The soaring It Will Be is doo-wop for mentally impaired children. The instrumental L.G.F. is much closer to new-age music and plain muzak than to vintage psychedelic freak-outs. The dejected instrumental Elegy is a folk dance for Parkinson's patients. By those standards, the catchy and well-arranged Vexations is a shameless pop tune.

The EP Red Gold (2006) sounded like left-overs from the same sessions, but they were often worthy of the album's material (Bong Bong, Easy Street, Oh I Was Bad).

Thompson completed the transition to old-fashioned singer-songwriter on Sighs Trapped By Liars (2007), credited to the Red Krayola With Art & Language, a collection of 13 regular-length songs, by far the least interesting album of his career.

(Clicka qua per la versione Italiana)

Five American Portraits (Drag City, 2010) presents again a mostly sober Thompson trying to sound melodic in Wile E Coyote. However, the rest is wildly different, ranging from the smoky blues with chaotic horn fanfares of Jimmy Carter to the Mozart-ian piano sonata and Bach-ian grand fugue Ad Reinhardt that ends the album on a hilarious note. Unfortunately the satire of George W Bush is stale and overlong. The 15-minute John Wayne is much more intriguing, especially the surreal instrumental overture (a cowboy rhythm that duets with a tentative piano improvisation) if not the drunk country song itself (a` la Holy Modal Rounders) that includes a spastic instrumental intermezzo.