(Post up: a sepia-toned ~reflection~ by Patrick Death / Glowerman 5000)
“What? Pete & Pete Surge Mean To Big Old Robot Clean, Little World, Me”-- or --
“What? We Do In These Post-Post-Post-Apocalyptic Cheese Cankle Soles?”
-- or -- “Nobody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t Everyone?” -- or --
“Stand By Me. Not Too Close, Though. You Don’t Want To Get Popcorn On Yourself, Do You? ...Or Do You?”
If a band plays a set at the Equator, in a teetotaler’s wet cappuccino nightmare of a nightclub, will it make a dent in a garbage can? Who might want to wear such a thing around their ears, in lieu of headphones, eyes staring straight ahead into blinding steel?
Me. I did. And to a certain, muddled extent, I still do. While I have occasioned to try to put the permanent influence of our high school band aside, it’s futile at best and stupid at worst. Nine to fourteen members, in an unpredictably rotating lineup that officially called for ten, molded me into the half-upright “person” I am today.
We singlehandly invented the ugly and obnoxious genre of avant garbage, and put it to bed just as it started to yawn. Still kept waking up, though. Cute little guy. Robot Clean was our band. You can’t take it away from us, because we can’t find it. Talk to me later. Talk about your rocket.
East Hartford, Connecticut’s biggest claim to fame has been, and might forever be, that it’s East Hartford. Just like any other of the plenty of spirit-sucked towns all over America, people are born there, forced into it. Some die there, others get killed. Ten, fifteen years ago, there were no big attractions where left-of-center roustabouts could innocently rage.
I don’t even want to imagine how much worse it is now for wayward weirds. Party time in the Krauszer’s outhouse, I guess. It's why our only option, if we wanted to share our musical madness, was to bring it to a coffee bar on Main St. in neighboring Manchester. And completely decimate it with our sound, robbing it of any dignity.
But before we had our brief taste of what it meant to put on a truly crowd-curdling performance, we had to quasi-write and record about twenty times as many tracks as we could even replicate live. Someone else can write a detailed chronology, but I enjoy thinking that this all just sort of came to be in that Botcave. The result of too much candy money, too little time, and so very much candy.
Songs concerning: elves made of glue, sex and baseball and Yalta, the lunasaur, crushes mentioned explicity by full name, musician’s mayonnaise, hating those closest to you, killing the snake, thighsteel, being fatalistic about the slim likelihood of growing up an astronaut, yeah vs. no, and, most importantly, hating your face. We really hated on your face. Still do!
When I was a littler kid than I was in 2001, I used to dream up bands and pop star scenarios fit for the sort of aimless yearning only plump ten-year-old dorks can have. Having what I think is medically referred to as “pompous asshole tendency” from the word Go on this dumb stilted planet, these rarely involved my few friends. That never stopped me from draping such fantasies over them as if I really was living out these bullshit aspirations.
I am but one of a good bunch of a few billion seasoned liars. So, I’m not going to waste much time in this silly ruminating text to say that life itself is a lie. Naturally, or chemically, however we find it, this world we share is one of such truth that any attempt to codify it aloud, or in text, is fraudulent. It’s been a mad slow crawl, but over time it became clear to me that any art I’d ever want to be a part of would have to recognize and reconcile this false fact.
Robot Clean, for whatever it’s worth (we’ll find out exactly how much a few decades from now, when we try to make some bank from our inaccurately annotated, corneal coffee table me-books), while not exactly the apex of my creativity or highly limited abilities, was honestly the first real art I ever made. Robot Clean was and is the grand lie made, almost painfully, real. With an outrageous smiley. It drove me, like too many people have had to over the years. ;)
By operating under the sheer guise of being a group, we became one out of thin air. Somehow we had convinced a well-meaning but clueless guy to let us share his stage with acts that were as blandly milquetoast and forgettable as we were childish and batshit. Friends and family members dutifully attended shows, a good lot of them puzzled or frightened at what we deemed presentable.
We even inspired a band of younger teen twerps from Manchester to follow our brain-burning lead and harass the suburban natives. The generally insipid, easily-sated clientele of this place, at least in our restless, high school tunnel vision, thought a paid-entry open mic held a legit chance at seeing something classy. Or even worse: the ruling majority of awful-without-trying singer-songwriters who thought they’d found a nice, serious venue to ply their craft. Pinch their elbow skin and run.
Named after a vaguely redneck novelty tee, While Preparing Dinner Edna Accidentally Opens Up A Can Of Whoop-Ass (Edna for short) played shows even stranger and testier than ours. It’s been a decade, ten years that have seen plenty of bands trying to out-weird each other instead of the puke-hearted normals. Certainly an ill wind of reflexive, surface cool here in 2011, yet in all this time, I haven’t seen another act dare the six-man ballpoint click solo. It will most likely take a few hundred thousand years before a new group of kids arrives at this idea independently.
Our group, really more of a performance troupe blessed with a few legitimately talented musicians, was a collaborative exercise in playing our sugar-fed and, at times, ravingly psychotic (“Look at my corns” ring a bell? No? Too bad, then) renditions. Chy’know, dug. Our senior year fell right in that sweet spot, just before total American annihilation. Not quite the nifty 90s anymore, not yet the hero-less zeroes. Lou Pearlman was starting his plastic pop reign of terror all over again. We had to make our own alternative, maaaaan... (I just blood-farted.)
Robot Clean was a high number of things, depending on who was there at any given session or live jaunt. A sturdy outlet for ourselves to put a blanket on what, if anything, growing up in East Hartford meant. Semi-musical jokes and sketches concerning classmates, us, old TV shows. A rambunctious embodiment of what a curious Misfits lyric could even mean as a kid. Something to talk about while eating candy in philosophy class. A band? No. A sangwich?
It’s a place in our mind. Everything was tenuous. Even at our most productive peaks, we had in-fighting and ridiculously lopsided roles. True to the current mandate I uphold with my own work now, you can’t really Google us. Our albums had severely limited runs, due to them being home-pressed in the days when CD-Rs might actually set you back a few bones. We existed because we had to. We did our thing with the expressed intent to antagonize and provoke.
Don’t remember us? How huge we were? That’s fine. We don’t really remember us, either. Surely, though, you might recall wanting to be in a good old hometown band, or if you were, you might have wondered why it just didn’t seem right. The answer is cake, breh: you weren’t nearly as twisted and preternaturally agitated as us. We all had problems. How could there be problems?
We were nerds, we were awful, and we were (mostly) white. Now we’re this cruel hodgepodge of all the most hated minorities. Someone changed their name to Tampure... I think one of us is a marmoset now? Even though we’ve all changed, we still remember to watch “Roots”. For the laughs. And that’s precisely what makes us, well, the best band ever.
