Firewater
The Golden Hour
Bloodshot Records
By Jose Fritz
I own this cassette tape that came out in 1986. Before Firewater, before Cop Shoot Cop, before Digdathole, before Shithaus there was Loop. The Line up was Todd Ashley, Jon Rose, and Phil Puelo; some names you’ll recognize from the rest of his catalog. It looks like it was screen printed, and the artwork cut from an anatomy text book. The songs are malformed, and Todd’s sinister, snide lyrics are only just developing. This particular tape lived in the glove box of a Honda Civic for about two decades before coming into my possession. The heat and grime has earned the tape some drop outs, but it serves as a reminder. It was the beginning. It really was the last and only time he failed to impress.
In the song “Dark Days” Todd sang, “We walk but once among the living, no regrets and no forgiving / It’s hard to dance when you’re down on your knees / These are dark days indeed.” He often dedicated the song to George W. Bush, even doing so on their KEXP performance in 2003. Following the horrible pseudo-reelection of our aforementioned, incorrigibly wicked, child-like president in 2005, Todd became an American expatriate. He saw the brimstone smoke snaking down the streets and decided the stink was too much to bear. The promise of future suffering and a descent into the burning sewage of fascism was unbearable. So he quit. It became a 3-year sabbatical spent in Asia and the Middle East.
Poverty, oxidation, humidity, opium, mustachioed transvestites, open sewers, caste systems, live ammunition, sand and solitude were inspiring: “Words and melodies seep from the sweat-stained walls in flickering light into my semi-consciousness. Ideas which wouldn't ordinarily show their faces in the piercing light of day, or under the sickly green fluorescent glare, materialize in the shuddering semi-darkness.” …If inspiration is the right word.
So where can you go where everyone knows that you’re nowhere? When you’re trying to escape the cultural reach of the last superpower nation-state where do you go? He went to Thailand, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Turkey, Israel and probably other places he’s less proud of and can’t exactly stamp on his passport. There’s Calcutta, Peshawar, the kibbutz in the desert… but even then you’re in a perfect circle of green on Google maps. You’re not even nowhere; you can’t get there from here. Even in the most remote places he could always see the glow of civilization on the horizon in the evening. The expedition produced a mix of sounds: new and old, domestic and imported. That’s where The Golden Hour delivers.
The klezmer rhythms of the past albums meet Slavic, Persian, and Asian melodies. Todd samples nomadic musicians from Tel Aviv, and dubs them over a beat played by itinerant farmers in Punjab. A chorus of men from Surin chant thus collaborating with a Turkish wedding band playing a tar and a baglama unknowingly. The hand claps are from Brooklyn and the trumpeting sounds of the shahnai are from a street sweeper in Salabad. Todd ties it all together with a twisting, bitter unshaven frame of meaning. As he wrote in his travel blog Postcards from the other side of the World: “I could tell by his sour expression that he was convinced all foreigners were inherently perverse and devoid of musical taste, which of course we mostly are.”
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