With his glasses, his greased-back hair, and a paunch barely concealed by a leather jacket, David Cloud looks more like an unlicensed orthodontist than a rock star. But don’t let his gentle appearance fool you. On a rainy Saturday night two weekends ago, Cloud arrived at Lucy’s Record Shop with a bulging Coleman cooler. He mopped his brow, smoothed his hair, and dumped his payload of dry ice into a plastic garbage can. With a whoosh, a mushroom cloud of fog engulfed the room, and a couple of jaded kids threw themselves to the floor and leapt from the billowing carpet of mist like dolphins.
That was before Cloud had even picked up his guitar. As the room began to fill, Cloud struck a quintessential rock-god pose at the microphone, then hunched over his instrument. And with that, his three-piece band, the Gospel of Power, proceeded to demolish, deconstruct, and remodel an entire set’s worth of pop and rock ’n’ roll classics. “Peppermint Twist” came out as late-1960s Haight-Ashbury psychedelia. “Eight Miles High” became a hypnotic drone unlike even Hüsker Dü’s incendiary version. A winding spiral of noise (in waltz time!) turned out to be, of all things, Percy Faith’s drippy “Theme from A Summer Place.”
The wrecking of familiar songs, though, wasn’t at all campy: It was exuberant and conceptually brilliant. Every aspect of the performance, from the dry-ice fog on the dinky stage to Cloud’s Frampton-esque posing, laid bare some aspect of rock ’n’ roll as ritual. By placing the silly and the substantial side by side on the stage and on the set list, the band dared listeners to pinpoint the difference. At the same time, the group restored the power of the music to surprise, shock, and elate.
For viewers used to the Nashville club-date routine, David Cloud’s Gospel of Power must’ve looked and sounded like a broadcast from Mars. It was, instead, the latest outbreak of a rock ’n’ roll insurrection. Two years ago, Cloud and a group of fellow sabotage artists launched a revolt. They took up instruments; they seized the means of production. And they declared war—a war on everything pompous, pretentious, and boring in the local music scene. They had one common goal in mind: to disrupt the deadly ritual of seeing a rock ’n’ roll show in Nashville.
Thanks to Marshall McLuhan, we know that television is a “cool medium,” which means the transmission of information will run strictly one way—from the idiot box to the idiot. Thanks to Nashville’s rock scene, we know that live performance can be even colder. Whether you’re at the Exit/In, Caffé Milano, or 12th & Porter, watching a band is usually as passive an act as watching TV. The band beams out from its box of space; the audience receives blankly with utter indifference—or, worse, polite applause. Neither challenges the other. The exchange of energy between artist and audience—the chief advantage of live performance—is utterly thwarted. That’s what Cloud and his friends mean to challenge.
If the movement could be traced back to a single instant, it would probably be a chance encounter between two crackpot geniuses on a cold autumn night in 1994 outside the Belcourt Twin in Hillsboro Village. On the front steps, a Nashville native named James Clauer stood performing improv skits with some friends on the theater’s staff. Suddenly, a rumpled figure appeared in a long coat and started to spar with Clauer, parrying his verbal thrusts with stentorian blasts of mock-Shakespearean verse. This was David Cloud.
Cloud and Clauer both recall an immediate meeting of the minds; the two began to meet at Bongo Java and other coffeehouses to explore their theatrical bent. Their method, as Clauer recalls, was to drink as much coffee as they could stand and perform afternoon-long acting exercises in character as different animals. “He’d be an aardvark, and I’d be a monkey,” remembers Clauer, a tender and startlingly thoughtful person who nonetheless becomes thoroughly unhinged in the spotlight. “We wouldn’t speak English for hours.” The last straw came when one coffeehouse finally kicked them out, citing Cloud’s all-too-convincing impersonation of a rhinoceros.
Undaunted, Cloud and Clauer decided to channel their creative energy into a band. The result, Cruel Oval Brown Stomachs—COBS to you—was a jaw-dropping synthesis of performance art, experimental theater, and pure vaudeville. In a memorable Yuletide set at Lucy’s, the COBS sent a tinfoil-plated “robot” staggering into the audience with a tray full of eggnog. Minutes later, the cyborg went spastic and started flinging eggnog all over the flabbergasted onlookers—one of whom ripped off the creature’s industrial-tubing arm and clubbed it repeatedly. Then the show started. After a tremendous fanfare, the curtain dropped to reveal Cloud plunking out ’60s pop hits on his guitar while Clauer heroically bashed at a single snare drum and cymbal. They might as well have been playing the same song in separate isolation tanks.
Their opening act that night was another newly formed band of media terrorists. Chris Davis, a Vanderbilt English major from Shreveport, had recently been introduced to two brothers from Nashville, Aaron and David Russell. “We agreed on certain aesthetic terms,” says Davis; those terms included a preoccupation with seminal stage performer Emmett Miller, trance blues, and the Stooges. They formed an inscrutably ironic noise band, the Frothy Shakes, which, at its most berserk, resembled Throbbing Gristle fronted by Ignatius J. Reilly. Davis played drums; David Russell provided tireless amphetamine rants; and Aaron, a first-rate guitarist, did his damnedest to hide his skill.
In a reversal of the usual local formula, the COBS and the Frothy Shakes were filled with original ideas and lousy at self-promotion. And as with all prankish art-as-subversion groups, from the Surrealists to the Sex Pistols, the bands’ anarchic nature hastened their demise. Word of mouth drew large audiences to subsequent COBS shows, but Cloud says the pressure to top himself made him break up the band in 1995.
From its ashes, Clauer joined Davis, drummer Josh Elrod, and bassist Matt Bach to form the Tony Guides. If anything, the Tony Guides carried Clauer’s confrontational comic sensibility to even further extremes. Clad in a skintight red dress and heels, Clauer shouted indecipherable Spanish over loping grooves that mixed hip-hop and funk with the Northwestern ’60s punk of the Sonics. Their performances were sheer Dada. Before one show, Clauer meticulously poured pebbles in a straight line on the floor—a gesture that went unexplained. At another show, Belcourt staffer Danny Limor burst through a giant Kool-Aid packet and dispensed Kool-Aid to the audience, while Clauer chanted, “Hey, hey, it da Kool-Aid Man!”
“We were tired of that Nashville hard-edge music,” says Clauer, a devotee of Andy Kaufman’s pushing-the-envelope standup routines and the hothouse melodramas of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. “It was just a little bit too tough. We wanted people to laugh.”
Many didn’t—particularly when the band played an art opening at the Cannery last winter. Inspired by the occasion, the Tony Guides took their guerrilla theater to the gallery, selling self-produced fanzines and “kits” for Tony Guides franchises. Then, in a particularly surreal bit of art criticism, Clauer began selling bags of cat feces for $5. An artist responded by shoving Clauer and Elrod, screaming that the gallery opening was only “for serious artists.”
Clauer argues that’s exactly the kind of pretention that Nashville needs to deflate. “There’s no spontaneity,” he says. “Any time you catch people off guard, you get their brains going. Anything you do in front of people can turn into a performance, no matter where you’re doing it.”
Earlier this fall, James Clauer moved to New York, where he works as a location manager for Forensic Films. Before leaving Nashville, he served in that capacity on Gummo, the directorial debut of his friend Harmony Korine, who cast David Cloud in the key role of a wheelchair-bound diabetic father. The Tony Guides, alas, are no more. The Frothy Shakes are also virtually inactive. Aaron Russell is in graduate school at Wake Forest studying archaeology; David Russell has moved to Northhampton and does research work.
Davis now supplies the rhythmic muscle in David Cloud’s Gospel of Power, along with former Tony Guide Matt Bach and guitarist Dave Friedman. The Gospel of Power had its first show just five weeks ago at Springwater. The insurrection, though dormant, is not dead.
The only recorded artifact of this musical revolution is a recently released vinyl LP that appeared in local record stores last month. Entitled Killed by Death #11, the cover promises “raw rare punk rock” from the years 1977-82, performed by such punk flagbearers as the Orgy Poppers, the Grumpy Winos, and the Curly Fries. Yet a nagging suspicion persists that the many groups are actually just the Frothy Shakes. Perhaps it’s the sonic mauling given to tunes like “Ladies Home Urinal.” Perhaps it’s the virulent snideness of the liner notes. Then again, maybe it’s the message scratched on the vinyl’s inner groove: “You’ve been fucked over by the Frothy Shakes.” Whatever the case, by enshrining their sloppiest, most deranged meanderings on record, the Frothy Shakes made their ultimate statement about the misguided aim of Nashville’s chief industry: making music that’s precise, preplanned, and lifeless enough to be recorded.
The Frothy Shakes, like COBS and the Tony Guides, were never meant for digital enslavement. They took rock ’n’ roll out of the studio and back into the clubs, where it could once again exist only in the moment. In their brief, bizarre lifespan, these interrelated bands made music that was provocative, incantory, peculiarly innocent—and, above all, funny as hell. We shouldn’t bemoan their loss, even though our stodgy music scene needs their anarchic spirit more than ever.
“I wouldn’t’ve done it if I didn’t want to connect with people,” says David Cloud. He doesn’t want his band to be too loud; he wants to play songs as fun and accessible as those he hears on oldies stations or big-band station WAMB. When he sings “Hey There, Lonely Girl” a cappella at the close of his show, he does it out of a sense that pop music, however distorted by bloat and bombast, still has the power at its core to speak to, and for, anyone receptive enough to listen. “The only way I invented something,” he insists, “was by not knowing how to play it.”
