From 'Shovel' to Trash: The Recovered Teasley Interview
A crucial conversation with the brains behind Man Or Astro-Man? got buried in 2020
Here’s a quick timeline of how the Estrus: Shovelin’ the Shit Since ‘87 book got moving on my end:
October 2018: Art Chantry, Scott Sugiuchi and Dave Crider ask me to write the history of Estrus Records for an upcoming coffee table book.
January 2019: Korero Press makes the project official. Research begins.
January 2020: My then-wife and I temporarily move into a basement apartment in Portland, Oregon (from Seattle) while we looked for a house.
March 2020: World stops. We’re working from home, stuck in the dark, underground apartment. In Portland, Oregon.
May 2020: Downtown Portland starts hosting nightly, violent skirmishes between Proud Boys/Portland PD and Antifa. Sometimes normal people got caught up in the bullshit. As a reporter, my job was to report on this. Every night. (For the next 100+ days)
June 2020: Man Or Astro-Man?’s Brian Teasley graciously accepts an invitation to an interview.
I give you these qualifiers because you have to know I was astonishingly unorganized and mentally exhausted by the bombardment of bad news I not only had to process every day, but had to expand on every day as part of my career. Anyway, Both Scott and I have talked in interviews about how many different versions of the book we had. One of those versions leaned a fuckton into satire and doofus humor as an attempt to match the voice of Estrus. I was thinking along the lines of the old National Lampoon Magazines. Anyway, one of the features in a Man Or Astro-Man? section was going to be Brian being interviewed by an alien or some shit. It’s a shame because Brian is a wealth of information and because this bit got trashed, some good quotes he gave never came to life. And that’s what brings us here. In an effort to populate my shubshtack with content, I’ve decided to unearth some unpublished “shit.”
I decided to take out all the unfunny stuff and just let Brian’s answers stand alone.
EARLY DAYS
BRIAN TEASLEY (Man Or Astro-Man?): When we were teenagers in Alabama, we had been playing for a little bit. Brain [Causey], Star Crunch, and I grew up in the South but always tried to get away from the South. The stuff that we were playing badly in high school was Gang of Four, Echo & The Bunnymen, and Bauhaus — you know, these 80s British bands. And then we kinda tried to figure out what music we really wanted to play. And this was at a time when there was this grunge, XFM explosion happening…and we fuckin’ hated that stuff. Especially how sincere and honest it was. The 90s were all about singing about how your dad made you play tee ball.
Anyway, one weekend my parents were having a garage sale, back when I was like 17. I went through a bunch of their records before they put ‘em out for sale. There wasn’t anything crazy deep, but they had a bunch of Ventures records and Dick Dale. And I remember goin’, “Maybe we should play these. They don’t sing about their girlfriends at all! No vocals.” Soon after, I was in a record store in Birmingham and saw a 7” of either the Phantom Surfers, or the Mummies—maybe the Roofdogs—and was blown away that there were bands revitalizing this idea of looking backwards but in a slightly more punk rock way. We saw other [bands] coming from the same place we were coming from. Eventually we just dove deep in to Estrus. It gave us this idea of where we were at musically. We wanted to be kinda snotty and anonymous and punk rock and weird and goofy all in one rolled product of stupidity.
SHTICK…OR ASTRO-SHTICK?
BRIAN TEASLEY: Every band is a shtick band. …We would be on a bill with Sebadoh or Brainiac. We never thought we weren’t supposed to play with those kinds of bands — ones that are not like us. And I was thinking the other night, those guys are just wearing t-shirts and acting like they don’t care — they’re making a statement. That’s a shtick. It made me realize Neil Young has a shtick, Bob Dylan has a shtick. We definitely had a shtick, but, I also think the Beatles had a shtick.
We weren’t trying to be cool, obviously, we were just trying to be entertaining, amusing and fun … For a long time we really did a lot to try and not let our real names get out there. In a way, it probably helped that we were stupid enough to do the “twice the effort for half the result” thing. “Hey, those guys are traveling with 20 old, CRT television sets and putting them on stage! And with no crew except for Carl [Ratliff]!” It was stupid the amount of stuff we would set up. I run a music venue now and I see bands that have way less stuff than what we traveled with back then and they’ll have ten crew members. We just didn’t know better. We kinda felt like, “Oh, that’s just what we do.” And it was harder, but it made us want to do it more often. …. Man or Astro-Man? was always a “more is more” than a “less is more” kinda band.
I think when we got older towards the end of the 90s, we had kinda grown from just trying to see if we could piss people off and have fun. I guess we were caring a little more. … One thing that always kinda haunted us [in the later years] was, when we’d work really hard on a record for a long time and then the record review would be about the live show and hot rods and hanging out with girls — that kinda stuff. And we felt like we could never quite break out of that. I never really cared too much. Well, maybe there was one year where it kinda bothered me. I was sick of getting the same reviews that we were getting when we were 19. At the same time, if you told 19-year-old me that I’d ever have a record review or be upset about a record review…oh, fuck that.
[Once we] were on Touch and Go, we became friends with Touch and Go bands. … So when we started touring with bands that weren’t just surf bands, [the other stuff] starts creeping into your sound. Even in subtle ways like maybe it’s how you operate your day. Maybe it’s how you pack your fucking trailer or whatever. Maybe it’s hearing one of the bands use a cool octave pedal. So we just naturally started being a little different.
LUCKY RECORDS MESSY DINER
JAY HASKINS (Lucky Records): I had some real nightmares putting out records. Man or Astro-Man? was a complete fiasco. The colors were wrong on the covers and I couldn’t afford to redo them — it would have been like $2,500 to $3,000. And so we had to live with it. We had tried to match the vinyl with the cover; it was supposed to be red and white swirls. The record plant let it go too long and the records turned pink— like Pepto Bismol pink. Not only that, the labels didn’t say whether it was 33 1/2 or 45 RPM. So I had to manually put stickers on all 2,500 45s.
BRIAN TEASLEY: That’s a classic Man or Astro-Man? thing. I think we’ve probably had more typos and bad luck on releases… “Yeah, you know how you guys wanted to do translucent, fuckin’, lava dragon fire red? Yeah, it’s Peptol Bismol pink.” It’s just the classic [situation of], “Well, let’s just get it out, let’s get it rolling.” And then ten years later people are saying, “That’s so cool how you guys did that color scheme! It’s so cool how you misspelled all those words in the liner notes.”
ART CHANTRY’S & DAVE CRIDER’S IMPACT
BRIAN TEASLEY: We were really fucking lucky to have some really smart people push us along early on. Art would definitely be one of those guys. He clued us into a ton of records and a lot of cool stuff [Around the time of the first record] Art Chantry asked us, “Does anyone know where could get a theremin?” … We were like 19 or 20 at the time. We literally looked it up in the dictionary to try and find out what it was. And Google wasn’t around either. Finally, I had to make an embarrassing call to Art—I don’t even think I pronounced it right. Anyway, he explained it to us, and then shortly after that we played a show with Jon Spencer Blues Explosion and [Jon] had one. And we were like, “Fuck!” He beat us to it! We can’t do it now.” But obviously [the theremin] became a big part of our stuff. That was all because of Art. Fucking getting to license a Richard Powers piece of art—one of the most famous, coolest surrealistic scifi book illustrators ever. I had no idea who Richard Powers was [at the time].
ART CHANTRY: I know I turned them on to a guy who made Tesla coils—an artist named Dale Travous. I took Brian and Rob [del Bueno] over to the guy’s studio to see one in action and they flipped out. Rob later built Tesla coils with Dale. I also helped them find old 16mm movie to project onstage during performances—the “Robbiethe Robot” episode of Twilight Zone…stuff like that.
BRIAN TEASLEY: I don’t mean to be too cheesy or pandering or fawning—or just trying to be too grateful even. Those dudes that were a generation above us that was into cool shit really helped us. We got to kinda stand on the shoulders of these older punk rock guys, who, for whatever stupid reason helped us out. The list is long. Maybe the felt so sorry for us, that we were some stupid redneck kids that had no hope. Without Dave, there is no Man or Astro-Man? Like, it ends in ’93 as a joke band. He gave us that platform just functionally [speaking]. [How we operated during the Estrus years] also kinda set the stage for us always working with cool people. ….Because there was no dumb infrastructure, [Estrus] really allowed us to learn how to do the band thing ourselves. And that doesn’t happen without Dave Crider.
Not necessarily Estrus-related, but, I used to write postcards to bands all the time: “Hey, can we do a show with you? Can we do this, can we do that?” And, I remember writing a postcard to John Peel saying, “Hey look, I think your show is shitty, and you’re way overrated. You’ve been doing this for too long, please never play my band. But here’s a copy of our single, don’t fuckin’ play this.” And, he played it. We ended up doing like nine Peel Sessions because of that and we got to be friends with him.
# # #