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A six song EP that marks the end of their relationship with Rhino records, this is the Freaks breakthrough record where they really begin to discover the essence of their artistry. Perhaps the explosion of originality that occurs on this record is due to the fact that they begin to accept those very family ties whose restrictions they had explored in their earlier work—this record was recorded in Richmond (as opposed to the first two, which were recorded in California), and the cover is a collage of personal photos of the band's family and friends. The CD itself even recognizes the shift back to their roots—it has a roadmap of Virginia for its artwork. This is also where the attention of the music press starts to drop off (perhaps because of their move back to Virginia and away from the publicity that living in LA provides), which is unfortunate because their next album is their most coherent and unified work to date—a masterpiece by any standard. The strongest tracks on this record are "You'll Never See the Light of Day", "Ten More Minutes to Live", and "This Old Town".

Paul Watson—Trumpet
Jocko MacNelly—Jazz Guitar
Zip Irvin—Baritone Sax
Bruce Rode—Buckin' Bronco
Mark Linkous—Foot
Zack T. Hogg—Arm Pit
Tater Brix—Mouth Harp

Released 1989
Produced by Bruce Olsen and House of Freaks

Bryan's comments

2:32
1:17
3:09
3:10
2:51
2:22
Ten More Minutes to Live
This Old Town
Meet Your Heroes
Pass Me the Gun
You Can't Change the World Anymore
You'll Never See the Light of Day

 

Bryan's comments

The day after John Leckie and I finished mixing "Tantilla", I packed up all my belongings, all of our equipment, rented a U-Haul truck and moved back to Virginia. Johnny had moved back to Richmond the previous summer in the middle of our Midnight Oil tour. He got married to his then-girlfriend and was plugging back in to the Richmond lifestyle. Initially, I thought it was a bad idea to move back to Richmond. We had never been recognized at home, which is why we left, but Los Angeles supported us right off the bat. However, right before heading to LA to record "Tantilla" I met my future wife, Kathryn, and I was all hot to move back.

In retrospect, I think it was a bad idea for HoF to move back home. Personally, it was great for me, but that was the beginning of the end for the Freaks. The LA press stopped paying attention to us and it got harder and harder to do things to promote ourselves. In LA we were always playing events and getting written about (sometimes for doing as little as going to some Hollywood schmuck's party). We even missed some opportunities. I had a chance to play on a Tom Waits song, but because I lived in VA, it never materialized.

However, once we came back, we were really happy to be home. Just after Christmas of '88, we went into the studio, at Rhino's request, to record B-sides for any single releases from "Tantilla". Rhino was still operating in the era of the 45 rpm (45's were quickly becoming a thing of the past as CDs started taking off). But we thought it might be fun to record some stuff, here at home, far away from record industry interference.

At first we had no idea what we were going to do, or how we were going to approach the songs. We got our friend Bruce Olsen, who had worked with us on our first demo tape and owned The Flood Zone studio and nightclub in Richmond, to engineer and co-produce. The songs quickly spun off into outer space and we had a blast recording them. We started calling up a bunch of our friends to come down and sit in on our tape. During the sessions, Johnny and I kept saying "Boy isn't great to have all our friends around, again?"

Johnny and I enjoyed the sessions so much that we called up Rhino and our manager after we finished mixing the songs and said that we didn't want to consign these recordings to being B-sides and we asked them to release it as an EP. Much to Rhino's credit, they said okay, in spite of the fact that they weren't too much into the whole thing (EP's are notoriously hard to market and sell). We just wanted to release the batch of songs. Immediately after we finished the sessions, we started shooting the video for "Sun Gone Down" and then we were off on tour for the rest of the year to support "Tantilla". "All My Friends" wasn't released until October of 1989. It didn't get much press and by then we were starting to slip into obscurity.

The cover was pretty simple. Johnny and I wanted a bunch of our friends to submit photos of themselves. There's a picture of Mark Linkous, future brainchild of Sparklehorse, Stephen McCarthy of Long Ryders in front of the Berlin Wall, our producer friend Bruce Olsen (old high school basketball photo), John Leckie getting a light in the desert, my brother and sister as kids and many others.

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10 More Minutes to Live

This was a song we wrote and performed out in Los Angeles. It was more of a Freaks style "piledriver", ala "Bottom of the Ocean", but when we went to record it for "All My Friends", I played it on acoustic guitar. Also, I sang it an octave lower than the way I'd been singing it live. Much quieter, too. From there the arrangement kinda fell into place. We made a conscious decision to add bass as an independent instrument. I think we were getting bored of the two man approach and had no more ideas on how to do it. We used bass all through the EP. Basically, we were canning the two man concept as it was becoming too limiting. Lyrics are from a dream I had where I was in some war (probably the Civil one) and my moment of truth in battle arrived and I ran away. So I figured I was a chicken.

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This Old Town

I don't remember when or where this was written. I know I wrote it ... probably just some ditty I wrote in my apartment. It was recorded live, with me on guitar and voice, Johnny playing washboard and Mark Linkous on foot stomp.

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Meet Your Heroes

This was one of the first songs Johnny and I ever wrote together and it was a staple of our live shows up until "Tantilla" came out. Gary Stewart, the A&R guy at Rhino who signed us, never really liked the song, so it never made it on to our first 2 records. The basic track was actually recorded in the summer of 1988 for some local aids benefit record ... "Rock for Life", I think it was called. We dug up the track for "All My Friends" and added the baritone sax, a bass guitar and a Johnny vocal. We had Johnny sing the song, the best he knew it (he didn't know the lyrics, really) over my vocal, and then dropped his voice in here and there throughout the track. Also, we did on this track something we grew quite fond of doing, which was, we had the engineer set up an open mic in the studio and run the tape without us hearing it and then he'd record us banging on shit and yelling and whatnot at random. We used this track of out-of-whack sounds to "color" the song. There are all sorts of crashes and screams and bangs that pop out in this song.

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Pass Me the Gun

Just another diatribe. I think it was two songs stuck together. Also written in LA. More cool Johnny drums (I think he was enjoying playing with a bass guitar again).

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You Can't Change the World Anymore

Another rework of a live "piledriver". For some reason we decided to do it kinda loungy. We called in our friend Jocko Macnelly to play "jazz guitar" and a friend, Paul Watson, to do a Miles style trumpet. We really dug this one. I remember it being the last song we mixed and we felt compelled to go down a few martinis afterwards. The lyrics were directed at U2, who's "social consciousness" was bugging me. The "Irish guy" is, well, guess. This song was another one that Gary Stewart disliked. He thought it was too cynical...

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You'll Never See the Light of Day

This is another early Freaks tune. It was pretty much of a dog, though, and we never did much with it. During the "All My Friends" sessions, I rewrote the lyrics and made them about a circus side show. It was inspired by an old episode of The Twilight Zone, where some character gets dismembered and stuck in a jar of formaldehyde into some sort of unrecognizable preserved thing for a circus side show. I loved the new lyrics and we proceeded to record some crazy spaghetti western song. The "horn section" is me on clarinet (barely), Johnny on trombone (harldly) and Paul Watson on trumpet. Bruce Olsen is doing the rodeo yells (by the way he's a horse trainer now ... sells to people like Bruce and Demi). This has to be the funniest House of Freaks song ever. Oh yeah, I did an entire track of armpit farts. I had my shirt off and a mic up to my armpit and was just pumping it for the whole song. Man, I was sweating like a pig by the end. It makes a great sound through the track, though.

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