… or, How I Became a Monos’lab [1]

1979 was an interesting year to be listening to the latest music. That summer, Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park in Chicago signalled the beginning of the slow demise of that musical genre. Punk music had been banging its head against the wall of that sound. New music coming out that year certainly had punk leanings but had also moved on. In 1978-79 we were listening to the debut or second albums from the B-52s, Devo, Talking Heads, Prince, Gang of Four, Pere Ubu, Elvis Costello and the Attractions. This music had energy and vitality. It was raucous but also honored the beat. It felt smart and fresh, ready to both take on and make fun of the world.

That year, in Iowa City, our newly formed band, Pink Gravy, was vibrating with creative energy, and our small nascent fan base was eager to hear and see what we would come up with next. [2] On September 22, we played one of our most interesting gigs: an outdoor show as part of Iowa City’s dedication of its new ped mall, four downtown city blocks converted from car traffic to foot traffic. We set up our stage by the new fountain at the center of the mall, within a stone’s throw of a half-dozen bars. The show took place on Saturday night after the annual Iowa-Iowa State rivalry football game. Football fans, some still drunk from pre-game tailgating, were hitting the bars hard. Almost everyone was wearing their colors – their fierce alliance represented by either the bumblebee black-and-gold of the Iowa Hawkeyes or the cardinal-and-gold of the Iowa State Cyclones. It was an uneasy commingling of warring camps.

And our band of sarcastic misfits and agitators was in the middle of it. We might cover Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made for Walking” or Graham Nash’s “Our House” to appease the audience, but by the time we’d finished mutating those songs, they were barely recognizable. We attracted a range of baffled looks and blurry heckling, and tolerated an incident involving “drunken fools who happened to climb into the fountain and spray the crowd with water [and] damaged the public address system,” [3] but we managed to give as good as we got. Our dumbfounded audience was invited to consider the possibilities that we were due for a “Nuclear Accident,” that it was “Eggtime,” that “Everybody Is a Monos’lab.”

When we played the Beaux Arts Costume Ball at Maxwell’s on October 29, Thomascyne decided to alter our performance wear. Since the audience would be in costumes, she made long pink hooded robes to replace our usually outlandish stage outfits. We looked vaguely liturgical, like nine monos’labic monks. By early December we had earned a two-night weekend show at Gabe’s, which would always be our favorite place to play.

We merged these new sounds we were hearing with the older music we loved. We each shared our personal favorites with the rest of the band: The Velvet Underground, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, Patti Smith, Bob Marley and the Wailers, Fela Kuti and Africa 70. I kept checking out the double album An Evening with Wild Man Fischer from the Iowa City Public Library. To annotate the quality of the vinyl discs, a librarian had dutifully but aptly and perhaps facetiously affixed a warning label: “Warped But Playable.”

Many wanted to categorize us as new wave, a catch-all term bandied about to explain whatever was coming after disco and punk. We adamantly rejected any attempt to pigeonhole us. Everybody in the band was writing songs – at least fifty in the first two years of the band – and we all explored our favorite musical styles. The blues were represented by “Boinger Man” and  “Middle Class Honkie Blues.” [4] Reggae and ska with “Nuclear Accident” and “Gangrene.” Punk with “Fab Con Men” and “I Wanna Be Your Toto, Dorothy.” Country and western with “Goodwill Store.” California surf music with “Iowa Wave.” Doo-wop with “I Like Ike.” Calypso with “Bio” (a remake of Harry Belafonte’s “Day-O” that explains the simple pleasures of selling one’s plasma). All these songs were homages to genres that had influenced us, but our flair for musical shape-shifting also dissuaded listeners from trying to define us.

There was so much that I loved about performing with Pink Gravy and participating in other Monos’labic sabotage. I loved having the opportunity to collaborate with a group of creative people. We leaned on and learned from each other when composing or refining songs, lots of co-writing of both lyrics and music. Inspired by the band’s protests at the Duane Arnold nuclear power plant, I had written the poem “Emotional Data,” which the band managed to turn into a song with a brutal driving beat and a call-and-response singing approach between me and Thomascyne and Brenda. Here are some of the lyrics:

D: I’m the guy with the x-ray eyes

T/B: That’s not the Cedar River

D: That’s a coolant system getting hot

T/B: That’s not a rain cloud

D: That’s a plume of hydrogen gas

T/B: I’m a fixed statistic

D: Nothing to evacuate

T/B: When the meltdown comes

D: Woah! Nothing to evacuate

T/B: With the stockpile comes down

D: I’m afraid of the light

The song featured a long instrumental breakdown in the middle that sounded like industrial noise. This became the signal for all available band members and every brave soul in the bar to do the song’s signature dance, The Meltdown, which entailed slowly descending to the floor and writhing amongst each other in the most congenial of ways – part mosh pit, part hippie love-in. 

I loved the dopamine high of performing in front of a raucous audience. I loved singing “Rock ’n’ Roll Nun.” [5] We all had stage names for our Pink Gravy personas: Louise and Thelma Swank, Phil Dirt, Dr. Ben Gay, Bob Quinze, Bert the Intellectual Cowboy, St. Orlando, David Ben Sunny. I might be introduced as Physical Ed or Johnny Brandex or Kid Karnage, all depending on the moment. That, along with our stage outfits, functioned as disguises so we could fabricate semi-porous boundaries between our performative lives and our more prosaic daytime lives.

I loved the way we were able to slip onto public platforms to make fun of the idiot world around us. In 1980, during the heat of the presidential campaign, David Tholfsen and I concocted a side project called the David Convention. Faced with a choice between a Georgia peanut farmer incumbent and a Hollywood movie star, we fought to add an option to vote for David – any David. I recall running around the campus Pentacrest during a noon hour in a pink polyester sport coat, hollering, cajoling students to vote for David. At a Pink Gravy gig at the Crow’s Nest on November 1, we held the David Convention. David and I famously performed an acapella medley of our favorite Wild Man Fischer songs. Quite a few other Davids were there.

I did take breaks from the band to travel – the first five months of 1980 in Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize. The band continued to perform with great energy. In a rather charming documentary of the band, some of the best videos were shot while I was gone. When I returned from a summer-long 1981 journey through Europe, both the band and I had moved on. But our parting of ways was amicable. Pink Gravy dispersed in that centrifugal way typical of our time – to Lee County, Iowa; Bloomington, Indiana; New York City; Phoenix; Portland, Oregon; San Francisco. Some of us have formed new bands; our first drummer earned a doctorate in musical anthropology; one of us plays Irish traditional music. I’m still here, holding the gifts I gained from the experience – a clearer recognition of myself as a poet, the joy of creative collaboration, the liberating craziness of spontaneous performance – gifts that would quietly resonate in other chapters of my life.

Footnotes:

[1] From Part 1: The Monos’labs were parodies of clueless inarticulate suburbanites, Dick Nixon’s Silent Majority, who would then flock to vote for Reagan. Seemingly unable to fight the rising tide of conservatism, the Monos’labs chose to cynically and satirically infiltrate it.

[2] See “Why Are These People Acting Stupid?” by J. Christenson, The Daily Iowan, November 11, 1979, pp. 1A, 4A, 5A. http://dailyiowan.lib.uiowa.edu/DI/1979/di1979-11-08.pdf 

[3] From a Viewpoints letter published in The Daily Iowan, Bill Case, October 4, 1979.

[4] Although I’m unable to link any of the sound recordings we have of our music, our collection of live recordings is in the process of being digitized for the Pink Gravy and Monos’labs archive being curated by the University of Iowa Special Collections folks.

[5] Who wouldn’t enjoy singing, “Here comes the fire chief / Oh, here comes the fire chief / With his red helmet and damaged brain cells / He’s just seen a rock ’n’ roll nun / But a couple a days in the electric chair oughtta set him straight”?