Kilgore Smudge Lives... in Casper Wyoming

Back in the day before MP3s and CD burners, coming across new good music was a hard thing to accomplish. Radio spoiled early our ability to mindlessly enjoy depthless pop music, and then we grew up to spend countless summers watching the same numbing rotation of mass-produced musi-tainment on MTV. We watched as the independent rock stations in our city got swallowed by Clear Channel hell bent on making all music mediocre and safe for the masses. We just begged for something listenable to make its way to the airwaves, which it never did, so instead we spent our time in the wrong parts of town at the best CD stores rifling through the collections in search of buried treasure. Sometimes we might have heard snippets of an album, or seen a stellar performance on second stage somewhere, and we'd search the racks hoping we might find the CD of that band that nobody's ever heard of. But even if we fount it, making that purchase was always a gamble. We risked forking over our last 15 bucks for a CD that might be half rotten.

Those were the days when kids still ripped tapes for one another to pass along music that hadn't made the mainstream. Here was music on the cutting edge: dynamic, creative, interpretive, raw, and without the glitz image, just a sound. Music that took the last 30 years of innovation as its roots and transformed their sounds into true examples of musical evolution. Not flat, postmodern disruptions of old paradigms, but instead articulate responses to the past presented in new, edgier formats. "Undiscovered" bands really lived the music because the money hadn't had a chance to corrupt their aesthetic standards yet. The underground, liminal areas are always the staging points of innovation, but a place where the profit motive of the culture industries have not yet penetrated, so good music without a mass distribution deal spread by second and third generation tapes.

My high school buddy lived in Florida and came across a tape of band called Kilgore Smudge and passed it along to me. I listened to that tape until it broke. I searched high and low for the CD version but even the stores that catered to more independent tastes didn't have it and couldn't manage to special order it. It wasn't until years later when the band got picked up by Warner Brothers and released a second album under the name Kilgore that I finally found a used copy of their first CD. Their second album, naturally to an old fan, didn't have the same feel that I heard off of that second-generation tape; maybe it was a combination of the hiss and odd pitch warbling from the tape medium mixed with the sounds of a smaller productions budget that made the first release seem authentically untouched by mass culture. Still, their second album was leagues ahead of what got airplay at the time, but as most bands capable of becoming legends do, they faded into obscurity for reasons of their own.

Flash forward to today-- in a bout of nostalgia I went out on the internet looking for Kilgore's second album, because after loaning my original CD to several friends it finally disappeared before I had a chance to rip it to MP3. I'm not feeling very warm to paying $15 bucks for a used CD, because I don't even own a conventional CD player any more. Furthermore, I already went through two hard copies of the CD and I'm not buying the third on principle, especially because the original members of the band will never see any of that cash. In any case, I feel like I already own stock in this band I never even got a chance to see live, just because I tried to keep their music going by passing it on to others who had never had the luck to hear them. Hell, I would pay for some DRM-free MP3s, but after a quick search on the net, I find not a lot, and even the *cough* less legal avenues turn up nothing. R.I.P. ONIK: I would have liked to known ya, but I was just a kid...

Although I didn't find the album I was looking for I did find a lovely time capsule of obscure band trivia (thanks to our cultural pillars of information, Myspace and YouTube). Heres an eye-rolling, forehead slapping example of the worst reporting that the mainstream media has to offer. Straight from the unforgiving desert, Wyoming's very own sorry excuse for a news channel K2 interviews Kilgore and tries to paint them as the shocking, bad influences they never were:



And since I can't currently find their album, here's a live song off of their first album, with a grit and intensity I haven't seen for a while. How I'd love to get my hands on a couple of bootlegs, but the internet isn't quite yet the library I'd like it to be...