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Animal Time - Chap-Stick for punks

The Chapman stick is, perhaps, the most nerdy of rock instruments. This gallery of notable players looks like a monument to mid-life male celibacy. It's a guitarish thing that has some bass strings, and works on the principle of string tapping- the technique brought to the masses by Eddie Van Halen and Stanley Clarke, and the reason most guitar solos in mainstream rock sounded like turkey gobbles during the Reagan/Bush years. During the mid-Eighties heyday of hardcore, string tapping was the most unpunk thing a guitarist could do. And even as underground rock got more metallic toward the end of the decade, the emerging guitar heroes of grunge didn't do much tapping- those gobbledy gobbledy sounds get lost if you lay on the fuzz, anyways.

So if the Chap-stick is so unpunk, what could be more punk than a mid-Eighties duo that was Chapman Stick and singing drummer. Animal Time was just that. The music is fast, thrash-fast in places, other times more textured like the Wipers. The lyrics are bitter and nerdy, but nerdy in a way that suggest that Atom and His Package might taken some influence from them. Not bad for a stick band, pioneering even.

I know very little about Animal Time. This stick site doesn't mention them. But they were real popular among the deejays at WRCT in 1986, when the record came out. One of those deejays went on to form the band Wimp Factor 14, who had oddball instrumentation and similarly witty lyrics. I played Animal Time on WXDU a few years ago, and an Internet listener wrote in who remembered them. I think the listener was from upstate New York. But Mr. Horribly-Charred-Infant from the Happy Flowers remembers Animal Time as being from Georgia.

Animal Time - I Was Only Trying to Help
Animal Time - Insecure Girl

posted by bendy @ 8/15/2005 12:05:00 AM [permanent link]

happy flowers played cat's cradle in 2000?!? did you go????

said dickumbrage, at 8/17/2005  

I never saw Happy Flowers live. I did do a radio station review a Happy Flowers album that was just a childlike drawing of smiling stickfigures with turntables. Got shit for that from some djs. But there's not a lot you can actually write about there music, anyways.

said bendy, at 8/17/2005  

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