A BAND CALLED VOMIT LAUNCH
Chico, California is a small town in the northern agricultural flatlands of the Sacramento Valley. It looks to the untrained eye like your average California suburb and its principal landmark is Chico State, an institution with the dubious distinction of being the number one party school in the USA. This translates into streets filled with drunken frat boys looking for action and a party to crash. As Patricia (Trish) DeRowland puts it: “They hassle people. I rag a lot on their sexual politics and stuff, but the bottom line is they’re just dicks. They have a lot of money and they use it to dominate people.”
Trish is lead singer and occasional guitarist for Vomit Launch, a quartet with a joke name and a bottomless pit of great songs. Despite the dominant culture of the town they call home, there is a struggling element of that thing called “alternative music” in Chico, and Vomit Launch are its shining ambassadors.
A couple of stimulating cassettes and a plug from friends at the late lamented BravEar zine helped get their name out, but it wasn’t until their first full-length piece of vinyl that they started to receive serious attention. Exiled Sandwich is one of those albums that seems to spring from nowhere to reinvigorate your jaded sensibilities. There are endless variations on the old psychedelic/punk/garage rock recipe left untapped, and Vomit Launch mix up one of the best brews. They jump from angry hardcore rants to moody bass-driven dwells, bittersweet strummy pop singalongs, or sludgy Flipperesque goofing, and put their personal stamp on everything they do.
Live, the band blur the line between the sublime and the ridiculous, with master comedian Trish leading the way. When I first saw them she had on yellow floral bellbottoms with clown makeup. She’ll bounce around with a deranged grin on her face, crack you up with an endless stream of ludicrous jokes, and then turn and spew naked emotions into the microphone with unexpected intensity. her voice is slightly wobbly but riveting, sometimes similar to Penelope Houston when she was still an Avenger.
In contrast, Lindsey Thrasher (her real name) is perfectly deadpan while churning out waves of guitar twang and fuzz. Larry Crane is a goofy lug with a degree from the Peter Hook School of Bass Playing (fully accredited and still one of the best), and Steve Bragg, a tanned and muscular English immigrant and part-time member of the Feederz (“Frank’s a great guy; he’s a bit out of it, that’s all”) is an uncommonly powerful and creative drummer.
I attempted to interview Vomit Launch after they’d played a loose but mesmerizing basement set at an eviction party in San Francisco’s Ingleside district. A rambling, alcohol-soaked chat ensued, some of which follows. I left out the part where a roomful of people burst into an a cappella rendition of the Koyanisqaatsi soundtrack. You had to be there.
SECRET ORIGINS
I wondered, of course, how they had come up with their delightful name.
LINDSEY: Doug Roberts and I have known each other for years. He’s our trumpet player. Every Friday we’d say “Let’s start a band this weekend!” We came up with a list of names, and when we actually started playing we went through them and decided the Butthole Denture Group wasn’t a good enough name, and Truckload Of Fuckers was almost a good name…Vomit Launch stuck out for some reason.
I ventured that Truckload Of Fuckers had a nice ring to it, and Trish pointed out “You can reverse it and make it Fuckload Of Truckers, which is sort of beautiful in its own way.” But Vomit Launch stuck. They did change their name at one point, though, when people were razzing them about it. Trish explains: “We had this big gig and announced, ‘Okay, we’re changing our name. Come to the gig nand find out what it is.'” The new name was…”Vomit Launch UK.”
In the beginning there was Lindsey and Larry, and then came Trish and the first live shows.
LINDSEY: Trish decided to join the band, because we let her, because she had a drum machine…I have a tape of the first time Trish and I got together and did stuff. It has a really good song—the only line I remember is, “I’ll set you on fire and watch you burn.” The first show we played they pulled the plug on us. We played with this band because they let us; Patricia knew the people in it. At the end of the night we started playing our hideous medley, and we did [Flipper’s song] “Sex Bomb”…
TRISH: It was part of the medley. You know, “Louie Louie,” “Wild Thing,” “Hang On Sloopy,” just all the good songs. And they pulled the plug, but then they let us play there again, and talked like we were great.
LINDSEY: The last time we played there they gave us sweat towels.
TRISH: And ripped us off. So we’ll never play there again.
LINDSEY: There’s this guy in Chico who wants to sue us for character defecation, because he hates us and someone shit in his car. Not that he blames us, but… he doesn’t pay bands what they should get, and so he gets shit from the bands.
Steve (who’s “bi-city,” spending half the week in Berkeley and half in Chico) went from being part of the audience to part of the band. “I went to see them at the VIS [in San Francisco] and they didn’t have a drummer, and Trish was apologizing so much for not having a drummer, that…if you hadn’t, no one would have known you were meant to have a drummer, so I said ‘hey!'”
What bands had he been in?
STEVE: Shimaya’s Wurlitzer, in England in the 60s, and in America there’s been Special Forces…Defend The Keg: “We’re DTK, and we’ve got nothing to say!” Who else? Dismal Sex…
TRISH: Big Underwear…
STEVE: The Bad Boys…every town has a “Bad Boys” in it…The Crows…
LIVING FOR THE DEPRESSION
I asked about Chico. It turns out that rents are low, but so are wages.
LINDSEY: It’s not really minimum wage. You know, like $5…
TRISH: But you drink good beer, eat good food…It’s extremely cheap to live there, though you can’t make enough money to save.
LINDSEY: But you can get a practice space for 75 bucks a month.
TRISH: So I don’t feel I could afford to move and still be in a band. I can’t type. I’m a DJ and a retail clerk.
LINDSEY: You could learn to weld!
HOW TO WRITE A VOMIT LAUNCH SONG
All of VL’s songs are credited to the four of them. I wondered if Trish wrote the lyrics, or whether it got passed around.
TRISH: Whatever you are doing in the song, you write. Occasionally someone will give me some lyrics that fit. Sometimes Larry will say “I hear the guitar, like, higher” or something.
LINDSEY: The only song someone else has written for me was where Larry had this guitar part on “Kill The Bouncer” and I tried to play bass and Steve told me I should not be playing bass on that song ’cause it was really a funk song.
I thought Trish was singing “BILL the Bouncer.”
TRISH: We just changed it…I work with a lot of bouncers, and many of them are named Bill.
LINDSEY: They all have no necks.
TRISH: One of them, however, is named Wayne and he’s really nice. He’s a diver. Soon as I met him he said “my name is Wayne” and I’m “come on, you’re kidding!” and he’s like “what do you mean? My name is Wayne.” And he didn’t like being a bouncer. He hated it. The bartenders used to bitch because any time there was a fight, Wayne would be all “I’ll watch the doors,” and wouldn’t get involved.
LINDSEY: But basically one of us will bring something to practice and everyone else will figure something out. Or we’ll just say “Steve, play a drum beat!”
TRISH: And make it fast, or make it moody.
LINDSEY: And we just start doing something.
LARRY: Like “Simon Says.”
LINDSEY: “Simon Says” started out because we were practicing in this theater rehearsal space, and these people came in who were being really snotty and wanted us to hurry up, so we figured let’s write the ugliest, loudest song ever. So it was, “Okay Steve, start it.”
LARRY: It was “Sweet Emotion” originally.
TRISH: Yeah, but then I wrote the lyrics about people who were really snotty about being “socially conscious.”
LINDSEY” So socially conscious they’re not human.
LARRY: Like some people we’ve met at Gilman Street.
LINDSEY: And if you listen to it, it is basically “Sweet Emotion.” [Note; The song does share the opening lyric “Talk about things you don’t understand,” but it veers off pretty sharply after that.]
THE MAKING OF EXILED SANDWICH
LARRY: “Chewing Cloth” was supposed to be on the record. We gave [producer] Greg Freeman the list of what was to be on there, and he kept calling us and saying “I can’t believe you’re not putting ‘Wane’ on there.” So “Chewing Cloth” was the song that got axed and “Wane” was added in its place.
Vomit Launch don’t think highly of “Wane,” though I find it insanely catchy. Seymour Glass, writer for Bananafish and friend of the band, points out that “Wane” is actually a misspelling—it should be Wayne, though in this case not Wayne the bouncer. Larry reveals that the title came from a Far Side cartoon: “The world needed a scapegoat and they found Wayne.” So what I thought was an arty title turns out to be an arty typo.
“Chewing Cloth” is, however, included on the band’s limited edition cassette release Fuckerbarf, along with the frightening “Knock Yourself” and the brilliant anti-macho rap number “Swelling Admiration,” among others. My copy ends with a collage of one night’s onstage between-song banter, minus the songs. Like I said, the sublime and the ridiculous…