Photo by Damian Eckstein. Left to right: James Kavoussi, Chris Thomas, Eric Michael Cohen, Dave Abel
Right now, there are probably groups of people making music in studios, in dank basements or practice spaces that have little more in the way of amenities than electricity. Some of these folks are creating something because they want to, while others feel like they “can’t not rock,” to borrow a term once used Dan Cuddy (Hypnolovewheel, Magic Pillow). This feeling is akin to a biological need.
Of those players, some might produce songs that can be downright amazing, drawing on styles that preceded them, harnessing ideas into something that takes the familiar and makes it feel new. Maybe they’ll never leave the basement. Or maybe they’ll put out an album that only a select few will hear. It might catch on, it might not. They don’t care. They’re doing it because of the way it feels.
Fly Ashtray could be described this way. One might also be tempted to rework an old saw like The Best Band You’ve Never Heard since they’ve rarely ventured beyond their Brooklyn-Manhattan base. Aside from one 1994 album on Shimmy-Disc, following a co-release by that eccentric imprint and a smaller NYC label, largescale exposure has eluded them. Nevertheless, they’ve been around for over 40 years.
During that time, they have amassed a healthy discography, much of it on small, independent labels. To help the songs stick to your memory, the group has reputation for tracks with names such as “Hoafie Woafie,” “To the People Who Fold Clothes, Thank You For Folding Clothes” and “Moist Floor Ruined My Bad Idea.” Occasionally the titles show up in the lyrics, but not always. Despite the rather whimsical slant, Fly Ashtray will never be mistaken for a joke rock act. This is warped pop music at its finest, equal parts catchy and complex, with twin guitars able to toggle between interwoven riffs and anthemic power chords.
Fly Ashtray’s lineup has changed throughout their lifetime, leaving guitarist/vocalist Chris Thomas as the sole original member. But fellow guitarist/vocalist James Kavoussi has been on board throughout all but the band’s very early days. Bassist Dave Abel joined in the late ’90s, with drummer Eric Michael Cohen coming on board a few years later. Kavoussi, Thomas and Abel all take turns in front of the mic, with each one’s style blending and complimenting those of his co-horts. Cohen has turned in a song or two of his own throughout that time too.
It might be tempting to assume that a band might be ready to rest on their laurels after four decades, trotting themselves out onstage once in a blue moon to relive the glories of a misspent youth. Part of that is true. Fly Ashtray shows might only happen once or twice a year, but they continue to produce an expanse of arty indie pop (though they really preceded such a description), only getting better as time has gone on.
The origins of the group date back to 1983 when Thomas was attending Fordham University. “I had a bunch of friends that played music. I thought, we should pull all these people in together and have a music… club, or something,” Thomas says. “We weren’t really thinking that it amounted to a band, quote, unquote. Just a regular bunch of people who convened to play with one another.” John Beekman, who would later become a regular member of the band, was recruited to play bass at a show on the Fordham campus, in which the band played the “Peter Gunn Theme” while Dr. Seuss’ Green Eggs and Ham was read. The band’s name came when Thomas saw an actual ashtray shaped like an insect.
A set at a later Fordham show got the band permanently banned from the campus, thanks to a song called “Throw Things at Me,” which encouraged the audience to do just that. Kavoussi, not yet in the band, was there, and walked in on the band as they were rehearsing their set – in the men’s room. “That night I thought, some day I’m going to join this band,” he recalls.
By 1985, he was part of a solid lineup that began rehearsing regularly, with Thomas, his brother Eric (drums), Mike Anzalone (bass), and Beekman (now on vocals and occasional guitar). Kavoussi’s first instrument with the band was keyboards. “I just wanted to join the band. I didn’t know what I was going to do or how playing keyboards was going to add any value to it,” he recalls. “Live, when I played keyboards, I was very paranoid about just how cheesy keyboards could sound. I always had my volume really low or made sure I was going through a fuzz box.”
With four songwriters in the band, Fly Ashtray’s sound had a lot of like-minded elements coming to bear on it. “Early on, I think I was one of the people that laid down this idea: no covers and mutual songwriting credits. That was some sort of idea that I had and that we shared,” says Beekman. “At the early rehearsals, people would have a riff and we’d bang on that for five minutes.”
Chris Thomas agrees. “We were inspired by a lot of punk stuff, a lot of prog stuff. Not that we could emulate anything proggy because we weren’t good enough musicians. But it was coming from all around, even pop music,” he says. “It was all kind of sui generis. It just kind of made our sound up, as opposed to adhering to any formula. I was interested in hardcore punk in the mid-‘80s but the formal orthodoxies of that genre soon became wearisome. We, maybe, satirized it a bit. Those kind of acts seemed to be enslaved to [the idea that] you have to play in 4/4 and the songs have to be this long and you have to have this kind of guitar distortion. It got really boring. And we wanted to experiment more.”
“The Day I Turned Into Jim Morrison” (pHoaming Edison, 1987) was a three-song single that showed a band still getting its bearings. The recording didn’t quite capture their sound accurately (Kavoussi’s keyboards are buried in the mix), which might explain why the band would begin recording themselves, a process they have continued to follow, with just a few exceptions, in the following years. After using an early Tascam four-track recorder at rehearsals, Kavoussi eventually ran a recording studio in Manhattan called Toxic Shock from 1988 to 1992, giving them unlimited studio time. pHoaming Edison would also become his moniker for experimental solo releases.
Photo by Kathleen Milea
At some point, Kavoussi also scrapped the keyboards in favor of guitar, giving the band a more signature attack, blending single-string leads and riffs and creating a bigger sound. A few more singles followed, in addition to an appearance on the ROIR cassette New York Scum Rock Live at CBGB!, a distinction that didn’t quite fit the band either.
Their lineup also shifted around this time. Anzalone was also playing in the band Uncle Wiggly with Kavoussi and the late WFMU DJ Wm “Bill” Berger (the latter two alternating guitar and drum duties). He decided he only had time for one band, so Beekman switched back to bass. Eric Thomas moved to Japan and, shortly after, Glenn Luttman joined the band on drums.
In 1991, See Eye co-released the band’s first full-length disc, Clumps Takes a Ride, with Shimmy-Disc (who released it on vinyl). The minimal credits on the cover didn’t list any band members and claimed it was recorded over a period of three years, with a few songs that originally appeared on the cassette Nothing Left To Spill from a year earlier. It also presented a full picture of the band in their idiosyncratic glory. Over-driven guitar freakouts gave way to twangy riffs that deliver pop bliss. A track like “Crows,” for just one example, went through three great licks worthy of the Meat Puppets before coming to a quick end. In fact many of the tracks did their thing in two minutes and change. When a song like “Ostrich Atmosphere” took it over the four-minute mark, the repeating dual guitar riff made it count.
And then there were the song titles, which on Clumps included “sssssS…” and “The Man Who Stayed In Bed All Day.” The latter title actually factored into the lyrics but that wasn’t always the case. While cheap yucks weren’t the band’s primary focus, they definitely had a good time amusing each other. Titles “mostly came up through banter and wordplay, so there are a lot of non-sequiturs. A lot of in-jokes,” Thomas says.
Kavoussi concurs. “One person would come in, and say, ‘Hey, I have this instrumental and it has this really dumb title.’ Someone else would be like, ‘Okay, I’ll write the lyrics and sing it,’” he says. ”So we were trying to out-goof each other.”
If lyrics often seem secondary, popping up only after the guitars have played through a riff or two, that’s intentional, at least as Kavoussi sees it. “I think nobody in the band has ever really felt like lyrics were the most important thing. I often feel like lyrics are just this pain in the ass extra thing I have to think of to complete a song. Sometimes I’m so annoyed by that, I’ll just come up with the most nonsensical stuff to sing.
“I can’t speak for everybody but, more often than not, I’ll come up with the music and maybe even a melody. Then, most of the time, the lyrics are an afterthought. The person that is more guilty of that than me is Chris. He will, on many occasions, have a song that he’s written and, for years live [at shows], he’ll just mumble stuff. Then when we decide to record the song and he has to do his vocal overdubs, he’ll be sitting in the studio with a piece of paper, coming up with the lyrics off the top of his head. The thing that drives me crazy about that is that he’s really good at coming up with clever lyrics off the top of his head, whereas I come up with nonsense lyrics off the top of my head.”
Now a solid four-piece unit, Fly Ashtray camped out at Kramer’s suburban Noise New Jersey studio to record their first official Shimmy-Disc album, Tone Sensations of the Wondermen, which came out in 1994. The production falls somewhere between the unproduced, band-in-a-room immediacy of its predecessor and Kramer’s signature, reverb-heavy knob work. (He mixed Uncle Wiggly’s Shimmy debut Across the Room And Into Your Lap that way. While my ears enjoyed the Galaxie 500-esque swirl of it, the band wasn’t completely happy with it, which Fly Ashtray might have been thinking about while working on their album.)
After taking a few years to complete an album, the band felt a little constrained to have to finish everything in just a few weeks. “We had some mockup cover art,” Thomas says, laughing. “The title was going to be Kramer Prevents Fly Ashtray. It was a cartoon of Kramer holding up this big clock, because we felt like it was such a hurried affair. He was up on a step ladder holding the clock.”
At the same time, Tone Sensations covered a lot of sonic ground, from wild pop to more experimental material, with everyone having a hand in the writing. “The Big 1-2-3-4” kicks things off with an interstellar rave up. The song that takes the cake in the title territory — “What Do You Think Of The Guy In the Purple Chicken Bunny” — begins with some stuttering trebly guitar, bridging the gap between early Talking Heads and the Minutemen, before some twin-guitar lines reveal the rapport between Kavoussi and Thomas. By now, they weren’t beyond covering other people’s songs; the album concluded with “Can You Hear Me” an uber-obscure tune by Hamish Kilgour’s the Great Unwashed, that began with a low drone, interrupted by a jarring blast of tape noise. Several bandmembers attributed this to drummer Luttman.
Recording for a “fringe” indie label like Shimmy-Disc had its plusses and minuses, but three decades later, past and current members of the band have mixed feelings about the album. “I listened to Tone Sensations within the last few years and thought it was way too long,” Thomas says. “Way too many songs on that thing. Some of them sound too much alike. If we could do it over again, we might be a little more judicious about what got included and what got excluded. Always leave them wanting less, is my motto.”
“The thing with Kramer is he had a sort of sound: big reverb compression and we didn’t necessarily want to do that,” Beekman recalls. “Now when I look back – I didn’t get this at time because I wasn’t really focusing – that first Low record I Could Live in Hope was recorded there. They were probably the next band in there after us. It was the same summer. I listened to that record and thought, Damn, this production is good. Maybe we should’ve just let Kramer do his thing. But we were a very different sort of band than Low. There’s room for a lot of airy production.”
