Manor Astroman? A fans Chicago pilgrimage.
Issue 214 / October 2006 More from this Issue
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By James Bennett
I'll be the first to admit that I'm stuck in the 90s. I still wear Vans half-cabs and drive a 97 sedan. I still think that Seinfeld is one of the worst ideas for a TV show ever, just like I did when I watched it the first couple of times. People still give me shit for hating Seinfeld, just like they did in 94. Not a whole lot has changed. But nowhere does my 90s obsession ring truer than with music. You will never be able to convince me that any album rocks harder than Rocket from the Crypt's 1995 effort Scream Dracula Scream. And you'll never be able to persuade me that any band is better live than Auburn, Alabama's Manor Astroman?.
The first time I saw Manor Astroman? was in April of 1997, in a small bar in Tempe, Arizona. This was five years after the band had originally started playing, conquering stages across the world with their unique blend of punk, electronica and surf music. After a solid two-hour set and a double encore, the band capped off the evening by setting off a Tesla coil in the middle of the stage, sending thick, purple lightning through the club. As impressive (and frightening) as the light show was, the power surge melted part of the venue's electronics and blacked-out parts of suburban Phoenix for the better part of three days (this due to the clubs proximity to a power substation). This was how music was supposed to sound - not like that damn Dave Matthews or whatever the hell else was playing on the rock station back then. Now I understood what Huey Lewis meant when he said that "the heart of rock n roll [was] still beating." But what Mr. Lewis was blissfully unaware of in his post-80s cocaine-head-fog was that true rock n roll was so far from mainstream music in the nineties that a person had to look really hard to find it. It wasn't on the radio. Rock and roll wasn't touring the county fair music circuit alongside an older and lousier Huey Lewis and the News. This night, in an Arizona club recently deprived of electricity, the disembodied heart of rock n roll was alive. It was with four guys from Alabama, touring under the guise of stranded space aliens playing intergalactic surf punk. I had just seen it - live and in person. The Astroman set provided such a powerful spectacle that I marched over to the merch table and bought every record the band was selling. To this day I buy every Astroman record I can find (at last count, my 7-inch collection was at 47). From literal sparks and sound, an obsession was born.
Fast forward almost a decade and I found myself in Chicago at Touch and Go Records' 25th anniversary bash. The main reason why I had traveled there was to catch the newly-defrosted Astroman set (according to the band's current mythology, they had been cryogenically frozen for the last five years). In the fading light of an overcast evening, a collection of nerds, dweebs, surf-purists and math geeks had forgone watching the legendary David Yow and Scratch Acid on the east stage so that they could vie for position in front of the stage where the Astromen would hold court for the final time. The stage was set with television monitors. They were playing old sci-fi films, a concert film of Sun Ra and simple, fuzzy black and white static. Clear plastic tubing and yellow wire framed the area around the amps and in front of the drum set. On the right, just out of view of most of the audience, was the dreaded Tesla coil. If things went well tonight, the boys just might succeed at melting part of Chicago.
I'll be the first to admit that I'm stuck in the 90s. I still wear Vans half-cabs and drive a 97 sedan. I still think that Seinfeld is one of the worst ideas for a TV show ever, just like I did when I watched it the first couple of times. People still give me shit for hating Seinfeld, just like they did in 94. Not a whole lot has changed. But nowhere does my 90s obsession ring truer than with music. You will never be able to convince me that any album rocks harder than Rocket from the Crypt's 1995 effort Scream Dracula Scream. And you'll never be able to persuade me that any band is better live than Auburn, Alabama's Manor Astroman?.
The first time I saw Manor Astroman? was in April of 1997, in a small bar in Tempe, Arizona. This was five years after the band had originally started playing, conquering stages across the world with their unique blend of punk, electronica and surf music. After a solid two-hour set and a double encore, the band capped off the evening by setting off a Tesla coil in the middle of the stage, sending thick, purple lightning through the club. As impressive (and frightening) as the light show was, the power surge melted part of the venue's electronics and blacked-out parts of suburban Phoenix for the better part of three days (this due to the clubs proximity to a power substation). This was how music was supposed to sound - not like that damn Dave Matthews or whatever the hell else was playing on the rock station back then. Now I understood what Huey Lewis meant when he said that "the heart of rock n roll [was] still beating." But what Mr. Lewis was blissfully unaware of in his post-80s cocaine-head-fog was that true rock n roll was so far from mainstream music in the nineties that a person had to look really hard to find it. It wasn't on the radio. Rock and roll wasn't touring the county fair music circuit alongside an older and lousier Huey Lewis and the News. This night, in an Arizona club recently deprived of electricity, the disembodied heart of rock n roll was alive. It was with four guys from Alabama, touring under the guise of stranded space aliens playing intergalactic surf punk. I had just seen it - live and in person. The Astroman set provided such a powerful spectacle that I marched over to the merch table and bought every record the band was selling. To this day I buy every Astroman record I can find (at last count, my 7-inch collection was at 47). From literal sparks and sound, an obsession was born. Fast forward almost a decade and I found myself in Chicago at Touch and Go Records' 25th anniversary bash. The main reason why I had traveled there was to catch the newly-defrosted Astroman set (according to the band's current mythology, they had been cryogenically frozen for the last five years). In the fading light of an overcast evening, a collection of nerds, dweebs, surf-purists and math geeks had forgone watching the legendary David Yow and Scratch Acid on the east stage so that they could vie for position in front of the stage where the Astromen would hold court for the final time. The stage was set with television monitors. They were playing old sci-fi films, a concert film of Sun Ra and simple, fuzzy black and white static. Clear plastic tubing and yellow wire framed the area around the amps and in front of the drum set. On the right, just out of view of most of the audience, was the dreaded Tesla coil. If things went well tonight, the boys just might succeed at melting part of Chicago.
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Posted on September 13, 2007 by Joe Kuta
Dang, wish I had known about this. Just now reading about the bands behind Space Ghost and following this one; pretty cool stuff. Thanks for the re-cap ;~)
Posted on December 25, 2007 by robert
i really wish i'd known about the concert i would have flown to chicago. they were so great live. i saw them at the 9:30 club in washington. and chatted with the band in philadelphia at 2am in front of a diner--they had yet to go on to start their set.
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