Overnight Stay at Breakheart Lodge
A review of the final album by The Insiders (1993)
The Insiders
Johnny Heartbreak - vocals, marimba
Jitterbug Hounslowe - guitar
Ayshalia Lyon - bass
Veronika Vogler - keyboard
Big Nobodaddy Heimlich - drums
Track list
1 Outsiders Breakfast Time
2 Johnny Heartbreak's Breaking Heart
3 Lost Boy, Lost Girl
4 Reminiscences for Losers
5 Artful Intelligence
6 Breaking Bread with The Demon
7 Drop it in the Basket
8 Kryogenik/Cry-O-Genie
9 Thump Guns and Silver Bullets
10 Chop Chop Supplies
All songs written by Lyon/Vogler/Heartbreak/Hounslowe/Heimlich
Producer/sound engineer (tracks 1-7) Roz Rescinda
We all know about the circumstances surrounding the recording of this album, and I really don't want to let... all that... get in the way of appreciating the music as music, away from all the speculation about What Really Happened and the finger-pointing chit-chat of Who Really Was to Blame. Then there's all the distracting discourse about whether Hecatomb Records should have even released the album at all, given what we now know…
But just let's park all that, okay? Put on the disk and let the last Insiders album surge through the room. Doesn't it fill you with joy as well as the inevitable sadness? Let the joy speak louder than the sadness, then, and let's hear it out...
'Outsiders Breakfast Time' perhaps should have an apostrophe, maybe here or maybe there, I wouldn't know about that. All I know is that it's a blissful return to The Insiders as they were in the beginning, a blast of that post-punk cow-town sound that delighted us all when they were first starting out. It could be Alan Vega on a good day, or young Johnny Cash on a bad day, or something in between the two.
Naturally it's significant that the track turns The Insiders into ‘The Outsiders’ for the purposes of this song, a hint of the malaise that was creeping over the group, the feeling that having just succeeded as music insiders, they were now shut out by a newly hostile indiepop scene. However that may be, it's undeniable that Jitterbug Hounslowe's slide guitar brings a serene Hawaiian bliss to the angsty proceedings.
'Johnny Heartbreak's Breaking Heart' does have an apostrophe, and in the right place too. It carries on with the country-ballad feel of the foregoing, but pulls out all the stops in crafting a swooning hazy aura of 3am smoky bars, before blasting us with the aural assault of the outro, which goes on so much longer than we could possibly tolerate.
Because now the truth is out: Johnny Heartbreak is revealing himself as Frankie Teardrop from Suicide's terrifying first album. All the nihilism, all the dark energy that pulls deep at the heart of our galaxy being and draws it into a consuming black hole, is what this song has become. Knowing what's to come, after all the sweetness that's gone before, it's a hard listen indeed.
'Lost Boy, Lost Girl' is heartbreaking - to continue the theme - a duet sung to a simple drum and bass accompaniment. Big Nobodaddy forgoes his habitual savage drumbeat to offer up a delicate brush-on-snare rhythm set off by Ayshalia Lyon's complex, jazz-like bass. The bassline carries the dark and delicate melody, but with a heavy-ness that puts one in mind of early Swans.
In the duet, Johnny H and Veronika Vogler croon their lost love to each other with bitterness and regret that is painful but also wonderful to hear. When they harmonize together on the line "The one you seek for is the one who's turned away from you" I confess that I wept. When Veronika sings "No-one knows if tomorrow will find me, or you will", chills overcame me thinking of what was to come.
'Reminiscences for Losers' features a long keyboard solo by Veronika Vogler and, unusually, vocals by Jitterbug and Nobodaddy. Johnny Heartbreak is nowhere to be heard on this slapdash hardcore-ish outing. It's not the Insiders' finest hour, and instead serves like an interlude, an antechamber to catastrophe. It's said that Johnny was out of the studio getting all the elements he would need for the final day, but other sources say he'd already amassed everything, and that all the other bandmembers were aware of his plans and quite prepared to go along with them.
'Artful Intelligence' is as if Johnny H and the gang had left their cares behind them and were cranking out goodtime pop-rock in the manner of The Smiths, with their tongues firmly in their cheeks. It's said that the song was laid down in a demo track compiled in happier days, while Johnny and Veronika were on their 'honeymoon' in a Barcelona squat, and way before Ayshalia Lyon had even come on the scene to ruin the lovebirds' idyll.
That may be so, and the track surely shows all the signs of being composed in that Summer of Olympic Love. But that version of events overlooks the way Jitterbug Hounslowe had already broken his way into the lovebirds’ Barcelona scene, and how the rumoured three-way was actually becoming a four-way, and even a full five-way, in this fateful final year.
On the vinyl release, this is the end of side A. When we flip over the disk and start on side B we find ourselves in a very different world indeed. The dark, the horror of the end, is growing all the way through. And yet, paradoxically, this is the greatest and most uplifting music The Insiders ever recorded. It will always be a mystery of the most mystifyingly mysterious how Johnny H and The Insiders could be approaching the end they had in mind for themselves while playing and producing such sublime music. Is this the same sort of thing that Blake had in mind when he wondered at the magnificence of the Tiger Tiger Burning Bright? Is this Yeats’s Terrible Beauty?
I find it hard to say anything coherent or graceful about any of the tracks, but I'll do my best. 'Breaking Bread with the Demon' is what it says, a yowling communion with the forces of darkness that somehow manages to be delicate and sharp-edged as a crystal goblet broken into shards and bearing stains of blood. Johnny seals a pact with the underworld which may be taken metaphorically or literally, depending on whether it's daylight, or if you're listening to it in the dead of night and its abandonment to the demonic becomes so very real.
'Drop It In The Basket' crackles with despair and wildness, a despairing energy, a pogo-ing anthem in salute of madness which has as its central mystery: what is the "It" that Johnny is screaming to drop in the basket? On the soundtrack something thumps, a soft thudding impact - is that what we think it is? It's notable that sound engineer Roz Rescinda is not credited in any of the last three tracks, which were all recorded in the last 48 hours of the session behind closed doors. Is it true what the rumours say about Roz and the basket?
"It's gettin' pretty funky in here," giggles Johnny as they launch into "Kryogenik/Cry-O-Genie", a track which mashes up genres in a bewildering array of post-punk, funk, electro-pop and even opera, a track that will be studied for years to come as groups come along seeking the New Thing.
It's somewhere here in this 8-minute megaproduction, but it's tangled up, this New Thing, in a confusing mess of Old Thing and just plain Wrong Thing. It's almost impossible to reach a verdict on this track - we'll just have to wait until the human species has evolved some more before we're ready to even approach it.
"Thump Guns and Silver Bullets" is, on the other hand, a recognizable classic of the old school. In it, The Insiders reach a perfected sound that is the acme of their agonized and amazing trajectory. I mean Acme in the Wile E. Coyote sense, both a triumph of the craft and a catastrophic disaster waiting to happen.
What do I mean? Last year Nirvana broke through from Indie to mainstream success with "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and I predict even greater success for them - if they can overcome the curse that is singer Cobain's charisma and Adonis good looks, the thing that has the media crawling all over them like carrion flies. Johnny Heartbreak could never have been accused of being too good-looking. With his scraggy physique and his unparalleled eyes, his gaptoothed grin and hair like burnt straw, he was nobody's idea of Adonis. But he had charisma to burn.
Now, with "Thump Guns and Silver Bullets", the cat is out of the bag - anyone who wants to achieve indie-mainstream crossover success just needs to imitate some part of this song, any part of it. If the imitation is in any way competent, they are guaranteed chart success. I predict 863 different versions, ripoffs and offbrand repetitions of this track in the year to come.
And so to the end. "Chop Chop Supplies" is a black joke, a killing joke if ever there was one, and if there's any substance in the accusations of appalling taste against Hecatomb as a label for releasing the album, it is surely because of the inclusion of this track. No matter what the stickers on the packaging warn you of, no matter that you've already heard stories far more lurid than the reality, it still comes as a sickening shock to hear this track and realize what you're actually listening to.
It's a return to their earliest form, when they were playing hardcore clubs around the college circuit, squatting with punks, the nostalgia and the bathtub crank are palpable.
But it goes on for far longer than a simple hardcore thrashabout should play. It goes on for five minutes, six, seven. And then the first instrument is silenced. Ayshalia Lyon will play no more. Eight, nine - now the keyboard is gone. You can hear Johnny H wandering around the studio, cackling wildly, his doomed partnership with Veronika finally and definitively over. Then the drums beat no more.
"Chop Chop!" cackles Johnny, without a backbeat, but the thrash is still wild, coming from Jitterbug's wildly distorted knockoff Fender, the same secondhand piece of shit that he started with. It's jagged, out of tune, but beautiful in its rough grandeur.
Then, shockingly, Johnny's gone, calling out "Bye Bye" in his mock-British accent and then singing no more. Now there's only the guitar playing. And does it play…
In the funky-smelling studio, filled with death and legend, Jitterbug Hounslowe plays some more, plays until he doesn’t. It's wild and discordant. It's the music of the spheres - if the spheres were all lumpy and gross, flecked with spittle and bile.
Then the guitar slows, becomes softer, slower. Jitterbug's fatal OD is taking its effect, one final speedball into eternity. The music slows to a single D note, fuzzy and gritty and wobbling away with a tremolo as fragile as a fractured crystal chalice containing a mouthful of lifeblood. Then there's silence.
When the Music's Over. The Day the Music Died. Bye Bye You Sick American Pie.
There's nothing I can say. This is the end.
There's nothing I can
There's nothing
[First published in Roustabout Magazine, June 15 1993]
Review Fiction is my new favourite thing.
I'm going to do one of these, Murph. Like Jon, this might be my new favorite genre. Loved this!