BULLET LAVOLTA

The Gun Didn't Know I Was Loaded LP/CD/CS

The Gun Didn't Know I Was Loaded Four college disk jockeys in Boston -- Clay Tarver (guitar, now of Chavez), Bill Whelan (bass), Corey Loog Brennan (guitar) and Chris "Cruster" Guttmacher (drums) -- formed a band in January 1987. The guys placed an ad in Cambridge's Second Coming Records for a singer and in this way came across Indiana transplant Yukkie Gipe (ex-drummer for Hoosier combo the Repellents, and the graphic artist on the Zero Boys classic Vicious Circle LP).

Brooklyn-based poetess Marianne Moore supplied the name in a letter of 19 November 1955 to the Ford Motor Company, she had suggested the following for a new Ford car model:

"The Resilient Bullet"...or Intelligent Bullet... or Bullet Cloisone... or Bullet Lavolta

The bullet idea has possibilities, it seems to me, in connection with mercury (with Hermes and Hermes trismegistus) and magic (white magic)." Ford dismissed these (and approximately forty other equally audacious suggestions) and instead chose the Edsel.

The band's first practice space -- Mrs. Guttmacher's living room -- resulted in nightly confrontations with the police, which sort of helped Bullet Lavolta's hard-edged, stop-start sound along. A half dozen originals and a few covers (the Simpletones' "I Like Drugs," the Germs' "We Must Bleed") annoyed the neighbors. After a few weeks the group attacked a now-defunct Brookline recording studio (the Sound Loft) and brought back as booty the "Baggage" sessions, which were soon released as a (short) series of radio tapes ("Baggage" followed by "Autopilot"). Tom Hamilton (ex-Offbeats) was the engineer and producer.

The first live show was a disaster. Luckily only about a dozen people were present, at a now-defunct Boston dive known as Chet's Last Call. For some bizarre reason, the band thought that their sound would be too massive and the "stage show" too wild for the tiny club. What actually transpired -- anarchic embarassment -- was a sobering experience indeed.

Three days later (17 April 1987) the Blake Babies, a more restrained Bullet Lavolta, and the Lemonheads played in front of 400+ paying customers at a self-produced, self- (over) promoted show in the dining hall of Harvard University's Adams House. This was the gig that is pictured on the cover of the Gun Didn't Know I Was Loaded. Corey was particularly insistent that every vertical and horizontal surface of Boston's Commonwealth High School (former home of the Lemonheads) be plastered with flyers. That ploy played off -- roughly one-quarter of the entire school showed up. Corey and Clay also were scrupulous about sending personal invitations to the editors of Forced Exposure . It will be noticed that Byron Coley has never mentioned the band in print. The band avoided substantial damage penalties by taking all the chairs, tables etc. in Adams House that had been broken during the show and simply throwing them into a nearby trash dumpster. No one was the wiser.

Bullet Lavolta met with modest success during the late spring/summer of 1987. In May bassist Bill Whelan organized an all-ages afternoon show with the Lemonheads and Cleveland's Pagans. To his credit, Bill didn't even flinch when his bass stack fell on the Pagans' Michael Hudson, who had excused himself after "Six and Change" to bark behind the amp line. Other notable shows included a WMBR (MIT radio) birthday bash with Dag Nasty, Redd Kross, and twelve not-so-well known bands (unfortunately Lavolta played first), and an extremely lucrative sold-out gig supporting the Rollins Band (lucrative for the promoter, that is. Lavolta got $38.50). In July Lavolta was able to tag along with the Lemonheads (a pattern which would repeat itself many times over) to play at a WNYU "Nu Musik" fest an New York's Tramps nightclub. The subsidized beers the club provided resulted in the wildest Lavolta show since the confusing WNYU interview can be heard preceding "Baggage" on The Gun Didn't Know... The DJ, Emily, is now doubtless "College Promotions Representative" for Atlantic Records. Crucial Boston scene figure Curtis at Taang! Records had by now taken an interest in Lavolta, and included the group on his very strong Fist Full O' Hits sampler cassette. This was distributed at the 1987 New Music Seminar, with the comment "no Taang release yet but we're thinkin' about it."

And now the story of The Gun Didn't Know... There is a well-known communications school in Boston's picturesque Back Bay called Emerson College. The radio voice of Emerson College is WERS-FM, which until 1989 used to broadcast bands live each Sunday evening on a program called Metrowave. Just about every major (and many a minor) Boston area group has played on this show. The station still has in its possession but a small proportion of these broadcasts; theft and incompetence have taken their toll on the rest. On 26 July 1987 Bullet Lavolta played its first (of what was to be two) Metrowave appearances. Such was the prestige of Lavolta at this time that WERS had no qualms about recording them over a tape made two weeks previously by another local band called The Pixies. Despite many snapped strings, broken drum heds and howling feedback from Corey's wretched Music Man amplifier, Lavolta managed to thrash through all twelve of the original songs in their repertoire.

Soon after this prestige appearance, the band put out an eight-song cassette (studio "Baggage" and seven other tracks), entitled (at Chris Guttmacher's absolute insistence) The Gun Didn't Know I Was Loaded (issued at Tape Complex 41). Only 160 copies were made, with witty labels made by Bill Whelan and elaborate artwork and liner notes by Yukki and "Hardcore Kate" Tews.

What you have here, is an expanded version of that cassette, with eleven songs recorded live (the guitars were so out of tune on "The Gift" that you're not missing anything). As Yukki Gipe sagely noted on the original cassette, "[the songs] were broadcast exactly as you hear them... no overdubs; no second takes. Quite like life itself." Two curiosities are "Turbotorc" (another name suggested by Marianne Moore) and "Allright" (the latter obviously filler), songs which have never been released before -- in any form.

The band's subsequent history can be traced only in outline here. In September 1987 Kenny Chambers of Ipswich, Mass.'s legendary Moving Targets replaced guitarist Corey Loog Brennan. Corey had gone off to Italy for a year after playing a semi-illicit farewell gig at a yuppie watering hole in Boston's financial district called The Exchange (he later was to reappear in the Lemonheads). A self-titled EP, Bullet Lavolta was released on Taang! in spring 1988. Side One had the earlier Brookline sessions ("Baggae," "Circuits," "Autopilot"); Side Two contains material recorded with Ken Chambers. About the time of the release of the EP, The Cruster announced his intention to leave the band in a year (quite a lot of notice). Before actually splitting, he recorded what was to be the band's first full-length LP, The Gift (released in the summer 1989 on Taang!, later sold to RCA, and favorably reviewed in People magazine). (Chris is now drummer for a Boston group, Cul de Sac.)

On 23 March 1989, 19-year old Boston native Todd Philips (a past member of the Moving Targets) was selected as The Cruster's hard-hitting replacement, and was immediately whisked away on the band's first European tour (many more were to follow). Todd's vinyl debut came late, however; the summer 1990 RCA EP Gimme Danger (a record which only a privileged few have ever seen or heard). About this time, Ken Chambers announced his departure from Bullet Lavolta to pursue a solo career. Too bad: Sassy had just featured Lavolta as the first installment in its series "Cute Band Alert." In Febuary 1991 the band flew to California with new guitatrist Duke Roth to record their first proper full-length LP for RCA, to be released in August of that year. All quite impressive for a band once described as "a blazing inferno, a festering blister, a pulsating boil, athrobbing spasm, a musical monstrosirty... Bullet Lavolta."