Rube Wadell Moon Traveller Commentary

Stink Bait Rube Waddell Vaccination 38048-8019-2 Date Reviewed: February 2000 Rube Wadell takes its name from a heroic goof of a pitcher. Their Wobbly rhythmns have all the kids jumpin'!

Where is Lester Bangs when you need him, besides died a long Nyquil death? Lord give me the strength to describe the Rubes.

You know I got a letter the other morning from my friend in the Sybaritic Kingdom by the bay. It was Jim Haas, who has discovered the San Francisco group Rube Waddell ; he sent me their CD, known as Stink Bait, and a note. And this my friends is Moon Traveller material. The music is pretty unique, and not easy to describe. This is the note that he sent to me:

Revelation,
Near as I can see it …back again where it's always been
Poking through the hay bales of Wisconsin,
Dropping from the holes in the pockets
of Boston student-types,
slipping through the hands of
San Francisco sybarites,
served up by bottleneck chain
gang trains sung out in ever idiom I ever loved
Hey Rube!

Rube Wadell is three guys playing out of and around San Francisco. Jim sent the record to me because I turned him on to the Pogues about 15 years ago and he wanted to get even, perhaps. This because we have been partners in a quest for musical deliverance going on a virtual eon. Which has led to Wadell.

How could you possibly consider buying Stink Bait without getting an idiomatic rundown? So here we go. Idioms made use of: Blues, string band, Indian, Hawaiian, chain gang, medicine show, Wobbly, and hobo. Whew. But the Mamas and the Papas, or Hollies, conceivably, could do that.

What is compelling is that these idioms are mostly unveiled with a tonal sense at home in the present era (i.e., Led Zeppelin, and Rage Against the Machine fans) should, if honest, find something here. Again Whew.

The disc starts out a little slow; its careening in all directions by the time it hits the third song, Git Out. Which is a fortunate 32 sec. Then comes the 1:55 Roy Smeck, and we're happening! Smeck is a slide god of vaudevillian guitar players who rode Tin Pan Alley's early 20th century interest in Hawaiian into a totally other realm. But first I want to tell you about Jim, and me, and Racine, and the quest for music. And also insert a sidebar about the historical Rube.

TRACES OF JIM - SOULVILLE I first met Jim only in his traces. I'd played ball against him in CYO, yeah. But he was not, say, a pitcher with the intimidating fast ball of Mike Brusha -- I don't recall that he was a pitcher at all. So as a ball player he was a guy on the field, like me. His traces were there at the dark narrow record store on Main Street, however. I would save my money and go down to buy a copy of the Fugs record -- or the Blues Project, the Mothers of Invention, what have you -- and lo, it was gone! And I'd ask Norman at the counter if it hadn't been misplaced (understand we are talking about record covers here, at the record store called Soulville, the record covers were on display, but the records in sleevers were behind the counter -- goateed Norman was there too). Norman would say Jim Hass bought it. Later we became friends, and would sit on mattresses in a room even more narrow then Soulville, Jim's flea market (but valuable!) orientals covering every surface, and he would play John Coltrane, and Ornete Coleman, and Moondog, and I'd say your tastes are a bit more experimental than mine, and I'd bring Little Walter, and he would say ah, when he passed judgement on Walter or the Velvets Loaded and such. And so we conversed. Seeking with our gang a blinding insight and pizza. So here I am looking at Rube Waddell. Jim was so determine to get it, and to get it to me. He bought the record from the Rubes themselves out of their apartment. For which I am glad.

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WHO WAS RUBE WADDELL? Who was Rube Waddell? He played professional league baseball between 1897 and 1913, and was one of its most heroic human characters the game has ever seen. He is best known in the record books as the long-time holder of the single-season strikeout record. He is just as renown as a freewheeler, a drinker and a of man of joie de vive. Off-season is when he would flower. He wrestled alligators, acted in plays. He played rugby. He hunted venison. He loved fishing and children and often did bar tending. He loved fire engines so greatly that it was said he might walk off the mound if fire sirens were heard. He was known to follow the engines, and go into the burning building to help save fire victims. Teams he played for included the Philadelphia Athletics, St Louis Browns, Pittsburgh Pirates and Milwaukee Millers. The 349 strike outs he threw in 1904 stood as the top benchmark until 1965 when surpassed by Sandy Kofax. [Nolan Ryan subsequently bested Waddell' mark twice, and now holds the record of 383. Randy Johnson passed Waddell with 349 strikeouts only in 1999.] At the time that Waddell struck out 302 batters in 1903, no other pitcher in the American League had fanned even 200. In those days, before the home run became a frenzy, batters were not too proud to choke up and lunge at pitches, so strike outs were harder for pitchers to come by than today. In fighting an icy flood in Wisconsin in about 1912 or 1913 he caught a fatal cold, and he died in a San Antonio tuberculosis sanitarium in 1914.

RUBE WADDELL REVIEW CONTINUED
And the Rubes have absorbed, transfigured, and transcendented the original Smeck with an ode delivered in the uke-friendly fretting region. "ma-ka-miki-ma-ka-miki-ma" they intone. Come fish!

Jim and his son Gabe went to see the Rubes, and Gabe described them to me thusly; "When you get up close and look, they've painted their teeth brown-like." So there, they have taken the classic rock style of Kiss and the New York Dolls and twisted it until they arrive in the mystical land of hobo chic.

This feeds in with things you hear in Stink Bait. Because you have numbers like Salt of the Earth (not the Rolling Stones song), Joe Hill's Will/The Ballad of Joe Hill, and Hobo Train here.

Could have called Stink Bait Call of the Wild. We have a character who fought a bulldog for a ham sandwich outside a Safeway. We have a demented Volga boat crew singing John The Revelator. And they call up the revelation! Train sounds. Nice, fairly constant tamburaic oinga-boinga.

There follows a sampling of lyrics, they concern a fellow named Franky:

He rode all the way on a flat car in the rain
From Bakersfield to Barstow
Dreamin of a box car and a can of beans (train sounds harmonica trill)(from Hobo Train)

Later Franky fought a bulldog in his dream. If you've listened to Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music in a Nyquil cloud you know what I am talking about when we say the Rubes are transcendent. But maybe 'transient' would be a better depiction. The guess is that these guys honed their licks on a street corner or two, and their approach to recording holds true to the vision. There appears here a conscious effort to avoid the overdub, to play and mike within the ambient room as it is … so that the Rube Wadell sound reminds somehow of the electric field recordings of Robert Johnson in a San Antonio hotel room for Okeh, or the Memphis Jug Band in a Memphis hotel for Victor.

The Rube Wadell string band casts a gauntlet in their choice of name. Rube is best known in the record books as the long-time holder of the single-season strikeout record. He is just as renown as a freewheeler, a drinker and a of man of joie de vive. Does the Rube Waddell band carry this grand appellation manfully? Yes says Moon Traveller.

Last update: 8/12/2004; 10:14:23 AM.