Stick Men
There’s a point where more information becomes too much information. Every year more records come out, more books are published, more E-mails come in, more Web sites go up. If I miss a new CD these days, it’s usually because I lost track of it in this overcaffeinated shuffle–not because it was hard to track down. And yet, amazingly, since I moved to Chicago from Philadelphia in 1984, I’ve still met no more than two or three people who’ve ever heard of the Stick Men–a remarkable early-80s quintet from Philly whose complete recorded output has just been reissued as the CD Insatiable by the prog-oriented D.C.-area label Cuneiform.
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Of course, back in the days before zine culture, widespread independent music distribution, and Napster, this wasn’t surprising at all. The Stick Men–the missing link between the Contortions and the Minutemen–put out their 1982 debut album, This Is the Master Brew, and a 1983 follow-up EP, Get on Board the Stick Men, on a tiny Philly indie called Red Records. They were club fixtures at home and played frequently in New York and other east-coast cities, but aside from one short midwestern tour in ’83–which brought them to Tuts, at Belmont and Sheffield, where they played for me and about seven other people–they didn’t get out much. Booking tours and getting reviewed in nationally available publications was much more difficult for underground bands than it is now.
Baker knitted together decontextualized black slang and low-rent wordplay into a private vocabulary. On the manifestolike “Master Brew,” he swipes cadences from early hip-hop: “Gonna rock then shock then pick your purse / We’re the rock jam curse / From the center of the earth / It’s a slimey, timey drilling tool / With a sensitive bit just right for you.” His talent for mixing oil and water hits its apex in the epic “Funky Hayride”–it’s almost five minutes long–where Stack chants, “Shoop bamma lamma lamma lamma lamma crack” as he blurts, “Chickens in the barnyard / Cluckin’ it up / Cows and pigs and horses run amuck / They all jam down at the pigsty / Gonna get on board / For the funky hayride.”
