Caveman Shoestore

(Translated from my original Italian text by ChatGPT and Piero Scaruffi)

In the 1990s, the Caveman Shoestore stood out in the Portland scene because they were a guitarless trio. Elaine DiFalco (from the underground scene in Phoenix, Arizona) juggles vocals and organ, while a rhythm section accompanies her in a highly creative, pseudo-jazz, pseudo-Slint manner. In fact, it’s made up of two avant-garde veterans: bassist Fred Chalenor and drummer Henry Franzoni, both former members of Face Ditch and Tone Dogs—Chalenor a past collaborator with Wayne Horvitz in Pigpen, Franzoni in the fusion group Das Neonderthrall.

Formed in 1991 at Portland’s Alternative Independent Music Fest, they were introduced in 1992 by the single Spill/ An Angel Flew By (T/K). The first track is driven by booming hard rock bass lines and African tribal drumming, while DiFalco trills with noble poise. The second, far more experimental, thrives on a feverish rhythmic weave and a near-somnambulist litany. Both songs dwell on the fringes of familiar rock territory. Chalenor’s work is particularly prodigious, capable of producing grandiose timbres and dizzying vibrations.

The album Master Cylinder (T/K, 1992) emerges as a masterpiece of rhythm, simultaneously acrobatic and atmospheric, exploiting every trick of the instruments to accentuate the singer’s vocal evolutions. The most twisted, convoluted (and often furious) tangles of bass lines and percussion beats magically coalesce into songs. DiFalco steals the spotlight in the anguished jazz-soul organ of Big Slow Melvin and the ethereal, spacious vocal harmonies of Flying—tracks as different as possible from each other, testifying to her eclectic personality as a singer.
The work teems with surreal, jazzy ideas, simultaneously creative and sly. Perhaps the pinnacle of their eccentric imagination is found in the phantasmagorical Tractor Pulling A Clown, set to a street organ and a variety-show ballet, and the dark impulses of Secret Doorway, the two instrumental tracks that could have taught even Zappa a thing or two.
This is an album that, in the tradition of the best “no wave” combos (Golden Palominos, Ambitious Lovers), naturally unites cacophonous pieces (Information Overload) that seem straight out of a conservatory with Latin-jazz ballads (Lost Horizon) that hint at a commercial potential.

Fred Chalenor’s Tone Dogs, with Amy Denio on vocals (coming from avant-garde theater and film), recorded Ankety Low Day (C/Z, 1990) in Seattle, a work perhaps too conceptual, in which folk, jazz, and rock were meant to merge over irregular rhythms with almost chamber-like orchestrations. The rhythm section of Matt Cameron and Fred Chalenor dominates much of the harmonic landscape (see the bass solo on Hade Hade), but the highlight of the album is No Cry, played and sung entirely by Denio. Collaborators include improvisation experts such as Fred Frith and Hans Reichel.

Chalenor functions somewhat as the Zappa of the project: wild and messy with hardcore ferocity in the jungle of squeaks on Vexed At The Vogue; with paradoxical conductor-like verve in the fanfares of keyboard and horn dissonances on Wandering Guru; with a clownish Lol Coxhill flair in the playful quadrille-bolero weave of BS Jig; with mad exuberance in the nursery rhyme of Fifth Grade Brownie Wall; and finally, as a childlike Dadaist in the rollicking instrumental piece Poly. Denio channels her avant-garde vocal ambitions in the surreal chant of Carry Me Down and her compositional avant-garde impulses in the minimalism of Secret Crush, which suddenly bursts into a lively Caribbean saxophone theme. Denio also delivers the album’s most accessible track, the Brazilian dance Brave It (with Gato Barbieri-like saxophone), a hiccupping composition sung in the didactic tone of the Art Bears and played with a Fred Frith-style shredded guitar.

The trio’s only flaw is a lack of cohesion and sustained fire. Individual tracks are full of intelligent insights, but they overlap without fully developing them.
The Early Middle Years (Soleilmoon, 1992) also highlighted a sly pan-ethnic inventiveness (Salvatore, Waltz, Agyptian Occordian), which reaches its apex in the tribal novelty of When George Bush Was The Head Of The) C.I.A. (with Denio performing a childlike solfège à la Enya and a violently distorted slide bass). Tracks such as Traffic Island Psycho, for voice and two basses, and Three Fell Swoop continue the “progressive-rock” trajectory of the previous album.

At the end of 1993, cellist Amy DeVargas joined the Caveman Shoestore trio, and in 1994 the album Flux (T/K) was released. DiFalco’s aristocratic vocals now take center stage, so much so that many of the tracks (Knife Edge, Actualize, Kurtain) can be described as intellectual lieder, accompanied alternately by jazz-inflected, minimalist, and dissonant arrangements of a listless progressive rock. The band remains somewhat constrained by the structures of this vocal-oriented music and manages to express its full potential only in the short instrumental Henxyme and the jazzy Underneath The Water.

The Caveman also collaborated with Hugh Hopper on Caveman Hughscore (T/K, 1995), High Spot Paradox (T/K, 1997), and Delta Flora (Cuneiform, 1999).