Appliances-SFB: More Than Enough

I'm trying to finish getting all those Appliances-SFB clips up on the YouTubes. I think, after this one, I have four more to go, and then I'll be done. Yay! Three out of the four that are left are covers of other people's songs, and I'm trying to get permission from the writers, although I don't know if it's necessary. There are an awful lot of videos on the YouTubes of people playing songs written by other people, and I seriously doubt that they all got permission from the authors.

Well, then. Here is "More Than Enough", written and sung by guitarist William Siebecker while Tom Laskin takes over on guitar. If you can understand the words, you'll find that, even though he wrote the song during the reign of The Greatest President In Our Nation's History™, Ronald Reagan (believe it or not, I succeeded in writing that without barfing - anyone who knows me is aware that I consider Ronald Wilson Reagan, a.k.a. Insane Anglo Warlord, to be among the worst presidents we've ever had and it is his policies which have culminated in the mess we're in right now), or possibly during the reign of King George I, the song is still relevant. That's kind of a sad statement, but it's true. Enjoy!

Appliances-SFB: Washed Up

Next up from the Appliances-SFB video archives is "Washed Up". For any music geeks reading this, in this song we get a little fancy-shmancy with a meter of 5/4 for most of the song and switch to a sort of swung 4/4 during the choruses. I always found this song to be a lot of fun to play.

Some of you readers have commented that I don't need to make excuses for the audio quality. Okay, I hear you. I guess I just wanted to make it clear that this is an old recording and I did the best that I could with the source material. In my opinion, the bass is mixed a bit too loud relative to the other instruments and the keyboard and guitar not loud enough, and this is not my doing. This is just the way the show was mixed when it was taped how ever many years ago it was. I wouldn't want anyone to think that because I was the bass player I made it louder than everything else. So. Enough of that. I won't mention it ever again. Happy?

Washed Up...

Appliances-SFB: Mr. Ugly

This one was probably one of our most popular songs. What more is there to say? Call me Mr. Ugly...

Appliances-SFB: The Little Fella

One of our more "pop" numbers, The Little Fella. Enjoy. Or ignore. Your choice.
I would apologize for the weird audio quality, but it's beyond my control. That's public access television for you, I guess. I tweaked the audio as best as I could without spending oodles of time on it. If I had more time, I may have been able to fix some of the dropouts 'n' stuff, but that opens a whole 'nother can of wax. Er..., ball of worms. Or something. In all fairness, I'm sure the engineers had their hands full trying to get decent sound in a live situation, particularly with a group that liked to play as loud as we did. It's not as if there was a large production budget. It was basically set up, play, and hope it looks and sounds okay. So, there you have it.

Appliances-SFB: The Pest

Hello, everybody. I haven't been posting much in recent weeks. I'm still alive, although sometimes I wonder about the definition of "alive". Recently, much of the energy I would normally have for blogging has been devoted to getting all the darned Appliances-SFB footage that recently came into my possession formatted and edited for posting on the YouTubes. I tried to do it myself for awhile and got very frustrated with the lack of information available on how to make it work, so my brother enlisted the aid of someone who knows more about this sort of thing than I. Nothing came of that, for reasons I don't fully understand, but it sounds as if real life got in the way, so I'm back to doing it myself. One reason I'm putting them on the YouTubes is that they allow larger files than Blogger, so the quality can also be higher. In addition, posting them only here on Enriched Geranium seems to be frustrating those few people who are looking for A-SFB videos on the internets and they are having trouble finding them. Due to my lack of knowledge on the subject, and possibly due to the shortcomings of the software I have found that doesn't require laying out any cash, it's a very slow process (truly slow, I have to let the computer run over night just to load one song before I can edit it and add titles and all that), but it's coming along. I have succeeded in getting almost all the clips that I have posted here up on the YouTubes (just search for "Appliances-SFB" if you're so inclined) and now I have a new one, too, just uploaded tonight. Hopefully, someday soon, I will be done with this project and get on to something else. I think I have eight more to go. It will be good to have them all up there for posterity, but it's a tedious undertaking.

So, here for your enjoyment is Appliances-SFB performing "The Pest".

Appliances-SFB: The Squire

Time for another installment from Appliances-SFB.
I bring to you "The Squire".

Appliances-SFB: Rockin' in the Free World

We didn't do very much material by other people, but here's our interpretation of Neil Young's Rockin' in the Free World. If you weren't aware of the fact that Young wrote this song during George H. W. Bush's term in office, you might think it applied to George W. Bush's reign of terror. Not much difference between the two. Only such catch phrases as

"a thousand points of light" and "a kinder, gentler..." differentiate one Bush from the other. I suppose one might also argue that HW was mean and smart while W is mean and stupid.

Since it's the day after Thanksgiving as I post this, and people are prone to talk about those things for which they are thankful at this time of year, I'll just say that I'm thankful that soon (but not soon enough) we'll be seeing the backside of the worst and most criminal president this country has ever had. Here's to hoping he ends up doing prison time for his crimes.

On this song, William Siebecker takes over on vocals while Tom Laskin joins in on guitar. I particularly enjoy Siebecker's vocal improvisations on the last verse and chorus. I also find it a bit frustrating that, in all these videos, Siebecker's guitar is too low in the mix and it's hard to hear what he's doing much of the time. I always felt he was (and still is) a brilliant guitarist and ought to be mixed up front. Oh, well. It was a low budget undertaking (like, free) and I'm glad that this document of the group exists, so I shouldn't complain.

A great song by a great songwriter. I don't know if we did it justice, but here it is.

Appliances-SFB: Stop F#ckin' Around

Warning! Although most of our songs were obscenity free, this one is not. NSFW! At least, not if the F-word is a problem. No nudity or other potentially offensive images, though. (Sorry)

This song seemed to be a real hit with most of our audience. Maybe it was due to the fact that it was so sensitive. I don't know.

Appliances-SFB: #2

Here's the second installment of the Appliances-SFB which is called, coincidentally, "#2".

One thing that might not be readily apparent to people who are new to A-SFB is that, in my opinion, our music was full of humor. That's not to say that we considered ourselves to be a joke, but we also didn't take ourselves, or the genre, very seriously. At the time, there were an awful lot of bands out there who appeared to be quite serious about the whole "rock" or "punk rock" image. White pancake makeup with black eye-liner, or whatever. Occasionally we would "dress up" (I believe there are some photos of me in leopard spotted stretch pants floating around somewhere- $5 on the clearance rack in the women's department at some store or other - how could I resist?), but it was in the spirit of having a good time rather than trying to be particularly cool. Don't get me wrong, we liked to "Rock", but we were also aware of, and enjoyed, the silliness of it all. I, for one, never felt particularly cool; I always felt like an outsider even among the people for whom we played, but I enjoyed playing and the people who came to hear us were almost always nice people.

I tried to use iMovie's built-in graphic EQ to bring the bass down and accentuate the guitar and keyboards. I think it helped some, but there's only so much you can do to fix a stereo mix, particularly when you're just throwing a file into some software and clicking on stuff, hoping for the best. It seems to me that some video quality was lost in the process, and I don't know what the explanation is, aside from the fact that I've read that iMovie is a "lossy" video format, whatever that means. I'll have to look into that.

So, here's A-SFB playing #2. Once again, the performance is not perfect, and I only have myself to blame for that, but I always tried to play spontaneously. If I had written parts that I played the same way every time, or if I was a better musician, maybe I wouldn't have made so many mistakes, but at the time I felt that it was better if I didn't know exactly what I would do on any given song on any given day. There was a basic structure to a song and I tended to try to play around with that structure without ever having my part set in stone. That's still pretty much my approach to playing music, for better or worse.

Appliances-SFB: For Kids' Sake

As any regular readers of this blog are undoubtedly aware, I once played in a group called Appliances-SFB. For me, playing with A-SFB was an experience unlike any I've had before or since. Once drummer Meredith Young joined the group, we played with the same personnel for, I think, 16 years or so. When a group plays together for that long, it develops a level of familiarity which can resemble musical telepathy. Every show we played was an experiment in chaos. Sometimes we were able to control the chaos, sometimes the chaos controlled us, and in those cases we would follow it and see where it led. The end result was sometimes brilliant, sometimes not, but it was always an adventure and an awful lot of fun. Well, whatever, it's all ancient history now.

I recently acquired a copy, on DVD, of a video made in, I think, 1991 for the show Alternative Playground on Madison's public access station, WYOU. I thought it would be easy to edit it into individual songs and post it on the intertubes. Hah! I assumed it would be easy to find people who knew how to perform such feats of digital wizardry. Hah! I had no idea how difficult it would be to figure out how to transfer from DVD to any other video format. At first, I didn't even know it was necessary. In the absence of actual instruction, advice or information, through trial and error I have finally, I hope, succeeded in getting one song edited and encoded in a format where the audio and video will actually play in sync once uploaded. (From the previous sentence, you might surmise that other attempts were made which were less than successful. If so, you are correct.)

It's not the best performance, and I'm not entirely sure what the videographers were attempting to achieve, but here it is in all its imperfect glory. I hope to post other songs from this session as I get around to editing and encoding them for the intertubes. For the time being, this is, as far as I know, an Enriched Geranium exclusive. I hope you enjoy Appliances-SFB playing For Kids' Sake.

[Note: Appliances-SFB was a LOUD rock band. As such, it simply isn't possible to achieve anything remotely resembling the live experience unless you play this loud. Very loud. Ear-splittingly, chest-thumpingly, wall-rattlingly loud. I know, we're all older than we used to be (funny how that works) so don't hurt yourselves. Since this recording was mixed for television back in the days before home entertainment centers with surround sound and stuff were very common, if you listen to it through a good sound system, the bass will be louder than it was intended to be relative to the other instruments. Using the vocals as a reference point, I think the bass is too loud, the drums just about right and the guitar and keyboards too quiet, but, unfortunately, that can't be helped.]

Appliances-SFB are/were:
Tom Laskin: vocals
William Siebecker: guitar
Meredith Young: drums
Bill Feeny: keyboards
Ed Feeny: bass

Unfortunately, I don't know the names of all the people responsible for the making of this video. To the best of my recollection, Frank Miale was one of the producers/mixers/somethingers. There were others. My apologies to all those who are uncredited. If I find out more names, I will add them.

Aaaarrrrghghghg!

Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away, there was a rock band called Appliances-SFB. They once did a live concert at Madison's public access cable station. My brother had a copy of it on VHS and about two years ago he gave it to someone to transfer to DVD. He just got it back and gave me a copy. For the last few days I've been trying to edit it into individual songs so they can be posted on YouTube and stuff like that. I figured that since it isn't encrypted, it would be easy. Hah! It turns out iMovie won't import DVD files, so it needs to be converted to another file format. Someone told me to use some free software called Handbrake to do that, so I did, tried to import it into iMovie and it just spins it's wheels and nothing seems to happen. The original video is almost two hours long and isn't broken up into chapters or anything, so it looks like it needs to be converted in one big chunk, which seems to mean that even if it works, it won't be fast. I've left the computer running overnight to do its thing, but it still isn't working. I've done google searches and Apple user forum searches and waded through tons of different articles, but none of them directly address my particular needs. I don't want to drop any money on software to do this, particularly since there doesn't seem to be any guarantee that it will work.

IT'S DRIVING ME CRAZY!

Just needed to vent about that. If anyone reads this who happens to know an easy (and inexpensive) solution, it would be, like, totally awesome if you shared it with me.

Appliances-SFB: Article about SFB re-issue

Regular readers of this blog (there must be at least seven of you by now) are most likely aware that I once played bass in a group called Appliances-SFB. Thanks to the efforts of drummer Meredith Young and Rusty Olson of Rockhaus Guitars, the previously unreleased third album, 3rd & Long, and our debut album, SFB, are now available on CD. It's a bit odd to see these albums being (re)-released after all this time. Appliances-SFB were in existence for 19 or 20 years and I was a member of the band for 17 years. We rehearsed and gigged quite a bit for most of my tenure and received little recognition. I choose to believe that, for the time, we were possibly too adventurous musically to gain any commercial success. Even if I'm wrong about that (I was wrong once; it could happen again), the fact that we were based out of Madison, WI didn't help a whole lot. There were bands in Madison during that time (Killdozer and The Tar Babies, for example) who may have had more commercial success, and deserved every bit of it, yet, as far as I know, none of them were able to really make a living at it.

So, here we are in 2008. It has been almost eleven years since the last A-SFB show (8/03/97). The first and third albums are out on CD for the first time. I don't have access to sales figures (I don't think anyone is getting rich on this project), but there seems to be an awful lot of interest in the group now. More than while we were active, and I don't know how to explain it. Still, it's gratifying to me to know that there are people out there to whom our music meant a lot. We invested a lot of our energy in this group. I think we were pretty good and pretty creative. Our live shows were always an adventure. Our recordings didn't capture the sheer energy of our live shows (recordings rarely do), but I think they were also pretty good.

When I think back on it, I realize that, although we were based in Madison, we probably played in Milwaukee something like five times for every time we played Madison. Below, you will find an article from Milwaukee's In Music about the re-issue of SFB. The article mistakenly states that SFB stands for "Sh*t for brains". In reality, SFB may have stood for many different things (Sharks Fear Bears; Short, Fat & Balding are some possiblities), but "Sh*t fer brains" might well be the official version. Note the proper spelling of the second word: "fer", not "for". Read it if you so desire.

If you wish to purchase these very important bits of rock history, you can get them from B-Side or Mad City Music Exchange in Madison, Rockhaus or Atomic Records in Milwaukee, Rushmore Records (sorry, couldn't find a link for them) in Minneapolis or CD Baby on the internets.

Stay tuned for more posthumous A-SFB news.



In Music

Rockhaus reissues classic Appliances-SFB debut

Although based in Madison, we wouldn't blame you for thinking Appliances-SFB were a Milwaukee band.



By Bobby Tanzilo
Managing Editor


Although the band was from Madison, Appliances-SFB was a fixture on the Milwaukee music scene at the dawn on the 1980s.

More than Tar Babies and more than Swamp Thing and other Mad City bands, Appliances could reasonably be called part of the Brew City alternative rock and roll scene, playing regularly at The Starship, Niko's, The Palms and later at Café Voltaire and The Underground.

"The Appliances SFB were this amazing progressive yet edgy band from Madison who slipped into the Milwaukee scene like a nerdy A-Team, kicking ass at their shows, then leaving town before anyone knew what happened," remembers veteran musician Ron Faiola, who is now Webmaster of MilwaukeeRockPosters.com. "In the early '80s Milwaukee didn't have an 'alternative' band with as many good musicians like the Appliances."

The band's Milwaukee connection continues well over a decade after its demise. In 2004, Rusty Olson of Rockhaus Guitars on the Southwest Side issued the band's third and final disc, "3rd and Long," on Rockhaus Records. It was the label's first release.

Now, Olson has reissued the band's definitive musical statement -- its eponymous 1984 debut -- on CD, too.

Olson says that the reissues came about thanks to the music store.

"I get to meet and talk to lots of musicians every day at the shop," he says. "Often times discussion is spent on gear, repairs, shows and recording projects. On just such an occasion I had been talking to (drummer) Meredith Scott Young about a recording his band Appliances-SFB had done some years back. It had been recorded, mixed and mastered and never released."

"3rd and Long" was recorded at Madison's now-legendary Smart Studios in the early 1990s with Butch Vig, Steve Marker and Duke Erikson who are three-quarters of the band Garbage.

Despite the fact that Olson's expertise was in guitars, not in releasing CDs, he decided the music was too important to pass up the chance to issue it.

"I thought this was a shame to see hard work and time spent on something just to have it on a shelf and never heard, so I asked him what they were going to do with it, we came up with the idea that Rockhaus should put it out.

"It could have seemed like an odd idea at the time for a guitar shop to do this, I couldn't think of a good reason not to do it and the idea rather appealed to me anyway."

Where "3rd and Long" is a fairly traditional, edgy post-punk rock and roll record, its roots are decidedly more engaging. And those roots are best experienced on the 1984 "SFB."

The manic vocals of singer Tom Laskin recall nothing less than the earliest work of Nick Cave with The Birthday Party. And if the music is a little more traditional post-punk on tunes like "Nothing" and "The Pest," other tracks, like "Mr. Ugly" and "Neo-Fascist" are firmly in the vein of that landmark Aussie band.

Olson says he's thrilled to reissue a disc that's as important to him as "SFB" is. ("SFB," incidentally, stands for 'sh*t for brains" and the band tagged it onto its name when it learned there was another band called The Appliances.)

"This one was one of my personal favorites," he says. "To have my name anywhere near it would have been an honor really. Most of all They were nice enough to let me do it. It was out of print and getting hard to find. I thought it would be nice to still find it on record store shelves.

"You know, for kids' sake," he adds, referencing a song title from "3rd and Long."

The disc has been mastered from the original ½-inch master tape, which Olson says was, fortunately, still in good condition.

"Its great having the reissues because back when an Appliances 45 or LP would come out," says Faiola, "if you didn't buy a copy right away, it would disappear -- either sold out or suddenly unavailable for some seemingly sinister reason."

Although Appliances-SFB broke up years ago, all of its members are still musically active, Olson says. Bill and Ed Feeny are in The Reptile Palace Orchestra and Ed is also in the Motor Primitives. Laskin writes for Madison's Isthmus newspaper and plays guitar with a band that does experimental recordings. Guitarist Bill Siebecker still plays guitar and works as a stage actor and drummer Young plays with Bad Dates and The Subliminal Overtones.

Olson says he hopes Rockhaus will continue to release CDs and has his sights set on two more Appliances discs for a start.

"There is the second record 'Green Door / Them' that has not been put out on CD yet. I also took in a reel of (unmixed) 2-inch tape of a live recording to Smart Studio a few weeks ago to be mixed down. Who knows, might be a busy year for the Appliances SFB.

"There is lots of really interesting music that is out of print or unreleased for whatever reason from the Midwest. If I can do something about it, I think I should. My business depends on local music to survive. I think the two go hand in hand."

Appliances-SFB "SFB" now available from CD Baby

Since I posted this, SFB has become available through CD Baby in addition to the stores mentioned in the previous post. Don't forget to get your copy of 3rd & Long while you're at it!

Appliances-SFB "SFB" now available!

SFB, the first album by Appliances-SFB, is available on CD at last! Although I have yet to see it, I'm told that B-Side in Madison has it in stock. Mad City Music Exchange would be another possibility, as would Atomic Records in Milwaukee. Re-issued by Rockhaus in Milwaukee, it can be obtained directly from them as well. It's a little tricky to find on their website, but if you call or email them, I'm sure they'd be happy to sell you a copy. While you're at it, pick up a copy of 3rd & Long. You'll be glad you did. Also, keep your eyes peeled for the upcoming re-issue of Them/Green Door, the second album by Appliances-SFB, coming soon from Rockhaus.

** CD Baby has 3rd & Long, and you can listen to some of the songs there, but SFB isn't available through them yet. Hopefully, both albums will also be on iTunes at some point in the not-too-distant future. **

Old friends 'n' stuff

I went to see the Mekons last Thursday night. It was a fun show. They have evolved into a somewhat more folky kind of sound, but they still have a rock 'n' roll attitude. Accomplished musicians one and all and very progressive politically. Funny and engaging people on stage, too. If they happen to come to your town, I recommend going to see them. If you visit their site, click on Lu and Steve and look at the lists of people they've played with. You'll undoubtedly recognize a few names.

The last time I saw them was probably something like twenty years ago and I was playing with a group, Appliances-SFB, that opened for them on at least two occasions, back in the day. Four of the five members of A-SFB were at the show. Most of us don't see much of each other these days, and it was good to see all of them, see The Mekons, hang out for a little after the show.

L-R: Bill Siebecker, Sally Timms (Mekons), Ed Feeny, Bill Feeny, Meredith Young

Ed Feeny, Bill Siebecker, Jon Langford (Mekons), Meredith Young, Bill Feeny

I get occasional e-mails from people who tracked me down to tell me how much A-SFB meant to them at some point in their lives. These are people, for the most part, that I haven't ever met, yet the music we made was very important to them. I like hearing from them. It's nice to know that what we were doing was meaningful to other people. There has been some talk of an Appliances-SFB reunion. A local promoter has been asking some of us what it would take. It would be great to play together again, but I'm not holding my breath.