Manor Astroman? A fans Chicago pilgrimage.
Issue 214 / October 2006 More from this Issue
Download PDF
As the stage lights behind us faded out, Scratch Acid bid their adieu - off to play one more show in Seattle before calling it quits for good. The spotlight came up on the Astroman stage, and the crowd settled in. The guy who had been doing a half-assed job introducing bands for the last day and a half said something about the cosmos and how Alabama and outer space are remarkably similar. He may have even made an anal-probing joke. Then the reverb guitar kicked in. For a fan of psychedelic surf music, nothing sounds sweeter than a heavily reverbed guitar. For the next 45 minutes, the band plowed through a set of almost a dozen anthems. Traditional instrumental tracks like "Time Bomb" and "Man Made from Co2" alternated with rarer vocal tracks "9-Volt" and "Uranus is a Planet." The band was in rare form that night, with every single note pushing the audience closer to a collective, orgasmic cheer. How is it that this powerhouse of a band hadn't played out in so long? And was this really the end?
It was the end. The band had fallen victim to the scourges of line-up changes and careers. Almost six years had passed since their last tour. But this set was significant for other reasons as well; not only was it the last time the band would play together (there are currently no plans for any other shows), it was the first time in over a decade that the original line-up was onstage. The band was originally comprised of four people: Coco, the electronic monkey wizard on bass, Starcrunch and Dr. Deleto (and his invisible vaportron) on guitar, and Birdstuff on drums. Dr. Deleto left the band early on. I've never been able to figure out exactly what happened to him. If you asked about Deleto at a show, the band would always say that he had been converted into a text file, was printed out, and then shredded. Whatever the case, he was replaced by Captain Zeno. Zeno left shortly after and was replaced by Dexter X, the man from Planet Q (who had previously played in the band Supernova, but not the phony TV band featuring Gilby "I'm a famous musician, really I am" Clarke. Come on people, Supernova. Doesn't anyone remember the song "Calling Hong Kong". . .). After one particularly grueling stretch of touring, both Starcrunch and Dexter left the band. That's when things got really strange. In the time immediately after this final line-up change, two different touring clone projects, containing no one who had ever been in the band, performed under the name Manor Astroman?. The Alpha Clones, an all-male astro-clone band, and the Gamma Clones, who were all female, simultaneously toured in the summer of 1998, playing full Astroman sets to scores of confused fans (uh, where's Coco?). No one was really sure what to make of this chapter in the Astromen's history. When the band resurfaced two years later, Birdstuff and Coco had been joined by Blazar, the probe handler and Trace Reading, at least one of whom had been a touring astro-clone. Manor Astroman?'s career slowly fizzled as the spacemen's human alter-egos took on more responsibility and stopped releasing albums. Coco started a company that makes and distributes bio-fuels, and launched a recording studio in Atlanta called Zero Return. Though the studio is state-of-the-art in every respect, it is renowned in the music-recording world as one of the premier analog studios on the east coast. Birdstuff continued musically, playing with the bands Servotron (along with Dexter X), the Humans and the Polyphonic Spree. He also started a Birmingham, Alabama club called the Bottletree. Starcrunch wrote the theme song to Nickelodeon's Jimmy Neutron and began an Athens, Georgia based record label called Warm Electronic Recordings. God only knows what Dr. Deleto has been up to, but at the time of the Touch and Go performance he had grown his hair out considerably.
It was the end. The band had fallen victim to the scourges of line-up changes and careers. Almost six years had passed since their last tour. But this set was significant for other reasons as well; not only was it the last time the band would play together (there are currently no plans for any other shows), it was the first time in over a decade that the original line-up was onstage. The band was originally comprised of four people: Coco, the electronic monkey wizard on bass, Starcrunch and Dr. Deleto (and his invisible vaportron) on guitar, and Birdstuff on drums. Dr. Deleto left the band early on. I've never been able to figure out exactly what happened to him. If you asked about Deleto at a show, the band would always say that he had been converted into a text file, was printed out, and then shredded. Whatever the case, he was replaced by Captain Zeno. Zeno left shortly after and was replaced by Dexter X, the man from Planet Q (who had previously played in the band Supernova, but not the phony TV band featuring Gilby "I'm a famous musician, really I am" Clarke. Come on people, Supernova. Doesn't anyone remember the song "Calling Hong Kong". . .). After one particularly grueling stretch of touring, both Starcrunch and Dexter left the band. That's when things got really strange. In the time immediately after this final line-up change, two different touring clone projects, containing no one who had ever been in the band, performed under the name Manor Astroman?. The Alpha Clones, an all-male astro-clone band, and the Gamma Clones, who were all female, simultaneously toured in the summer of 1998, playing full Astroman sets to scores of confused fans (uh, where's Coco?). No one was really sure what to make of this chapter in the Astromen's history. When the band resurfaced two years later, Birdstuff and Coco had been joined by Blazar, the probe handler and Trace Reading, at least one of whom had been a touring astro-clone. Manor Astroman?'s career slowly fizzled as the spacemen's human alter-egos took on more responsibility and stopped releasing albums. Coco started a company that makes and distributes bio-fuels, and launched a recording studio in Atlanta called Zero Return. Though the studio is state-of-the-art in every respect, it is renowned in the music-recording world as one of the premier analog studios on the east coast. Birdstuff continued musically, playing with the bands Servotron (along with Dexter X), the Humans and the Polyphonic Spree. He also started a Birmingham, Alabama club called the Bottletree. Starcrunch wrote the theme song to Nickelodeon's Jimmy Neutron and began an Athens, Georgia based record label called Warm Electronic Recordings. God only knows what Dr. Deleto has been up to, but at the time of the Touch and Go performance he had grown his hair out considerably.
Page: << Prev 1 [2] 3 Next >>
Facebook
Myspace
Twitter
YouTube
RSS
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.
Add a comment
Please keep your comments on the subject of the article.
We will delete your comment if it is racist, misogynistic, sexist, bigoted or just plain lame.
No HTML allowed!