Barbara Manning - Super Scissors (3-disc set)

As longtime readers of this blog can readily attest by way of my many posts over the years, I'm a huge Barbara Manning fan.  As such, I've been meaning to post her magnum opus, the three-disc Super Scissors comp, for forever... but I could never come up with the words to properly introduce this music here.

Fortunately, someone already did so - the paragraphs below are taken from the liner notes to this set, written by the lead compiler:

I can still recall, quite clearly, falling in love with these Scissors recordings during the first week of November 1987. I'd just moved to San Francisco days before and I'd made it my mission to track down Barbara Manning - whose songs and voice had captivated me on the album she'd recorded previously, 28th Day.

Barbara and I had a couple of mutual friends and one of them gave me her number. I called, and was invited over to hear some "demos". Already being a fan, as well as a taping fanatic, I showed up with my own "dubbing deck" and proceeded to copy about two-thirds of what later became the Lately I Keep Scissors album. During the course of the evening, Barbara got me very stoned and a little bit drunk. I eventually stumbled home with my gear, and woke up the next morning already under the spell of these recordings. I immediately plugged in my headphones and began playing these songs over and over.

It didn't take me long to feel that these songs and the performances - the plaintive vocals, the haunting feel of the music - were on the level of my heroes Sandy Denny and Nick Drake. Initially, Barbara hated me comparing her to these "folkies". She saw herself much more on the indie-rock side of the fence and after she turned me onto some Flying Nun recordings, I could certainly hear the influence of The Chills, The Verlaines, etc. on her work. However, I felt vindicated about a year later when Martin Phillips of The Chills did an interview upon which he spelled out his love for a lot of the folk music that I'd been trying to turn Barbara onto. That said, she was into Krautrock long before I even knew the meaning of the word.

After a bit of arm-twisting, I convinced Barbara to let me release these recordings on my new Heyday Records label. She said, "okay,", as long as she could record a new song called "Never Park." Since most of the recording for the album had already been done, we went into Greg Freeman's studio just a few times for a couple of overdubs and mixing sessions. Greg always treated vocals like an instrument, meaning he kept them buried among the other instruments, and Barbara was self-conscious about her voice (wanting it lower). So, if I contributed anything to the production of Scissors, you can credit me with making sure that her vocals stayed up in the mix.

It's important to remember that Scissors was originally

recorded without any plans for release - it was really just a case of Barbara having some cheap studio time and a handful of friends willing to help out with a batch of songs that she'd stockpiled. In my mind, Lately I Keep Scissors is one of those great debut solo albums of an artist stepping out on their own, away from their previous band, like Van's Astral Weeks, Lennon's Plastic Ono Band, et al. It also shares an edgy dose of reality with those albums; Barbara makes personal statements about her life, its ups and downs, all captured on tape for the rest of us to mull over, be moved by and enjoy. Like many of my favorite albums, it's an uncomfortable but elating listening experience that leaves me numb, no matter how many times I hear it.

Of course, Barbara's earlier band, 28th Day, was not anywhere close to groups like Them or The Beatles in fame, but you get my point. What really blew me away when I first heard these recordings, was that Barbara didn't realize how good they were - nor did the general public have any idea what would eventually be unleashed on them - that cassette tape that I had dubbed felt like a million in prizes. The fact that she wasn't famous didn't make the recordings any less important in my obsessive mind. After Scissors was released, artists such as Robyn Hitchcock, Sonic Youth and Yo La Tengo acknowledged it. Soon, Barbara's moody songs and ethereal voice began weaving their own special path that would lead to recordings for bigger and hipper labels: Forced Exposure, Sub Pop, and Matador - as well as high profile gigs and international tours.

By the time of One

Perfect Green Blanket, I was being told to keep away from the studio and keep my mouth shut, although I was still allowed to hear demos as they were happening. I suggested that both the home demo of "Sympathy Wreath" and the studio recording be used for the final album. Barbara got a 4-Track machine after Scissors was released, and several demos (and songs recorded just for fun) that she taped at her San Francisco apartment on Lyon Street during this time are included as bonus tracks on the One Perfect Green Blanket CD. One of the highlights for me is hearing her sing "Cheap Holiday Song" by the obscure but legendary San Francisco band X-Tal.

The Barbara Manning that created the music on these CDs was a beautiful young tigress - the energy and magic she evoked on stage was incredible and for several years I never missed a gig and recorded many of them. Barbara in general is not a fan of her own live recordings, and the handful of live material included here reveal some of the songs that she was playing during the time of One Perfect Green Blanket (occasionally during tours with her sister Terri) that were never recorded in the studio. There are also a couple of "Flying Nun" cover versions represented here, and Barbara makes these songs her own.

For the audiophiles out there, you'll be pleased to know that all songs from Lately I Keep Scissors and One Perfect Green Blanket have been remastered from the original reel to real master tapes and transferred carefully to digital format. Frankly, these recordings have never sounded as good as they do now - as we used the best of both analog and digital technology. Scissors sounds better than ever before, while I hear a slight muddiness on One Perfect Green Blanket.

For the hardcore Manning fans (which you must be or you wouldn't have bought this box set) is Disc Three - filled

with previously unreleased songs and recordings from the Scissors sessions. To be honest, I dragged my heels a few times since first announcing this project, but the advantage of having taken so much time is that we kept finding more tapes. When Barbara showed up one day with a previously unknown reel-to-reel tape of Scissors outtakes, I thought I'd pass out from excitement. Until then, I'd been working from cassettes made after each recording session. After a lot of listening, the songs that made the final grade were either ones that didn't get included on Scissors the first time around or were radically different than the released version.

Just shy of two decades since first hearing these Scissors songs, my love affair with Barbara's music continues - ad she's still making records that will spellbind and entrance you. Actually, now that I think about it - Barbara's career (and life) has lasted longer that the icons that I first compared her with.

Barbara gave me free reign as I worked on this collection - so if there's anything you don't like about it, please send the complaints to me. And if there's anything that blows you away, all the acclaim belongs to her. It's her art, her music, her voice, the magic is all hers - she's got everything she needs, she's an artist, she don't look back - she can take the darkness from the night time and paint the daytime black.

Pat Thomas *
Oakland, CA
May 2006

Here's the lineup and track selection for each disc:

Disc 1 - Lately I Keep Scissors:

1. Scissors
2. Breathe Lies
3. Somewhere Soon
4. Talk All Night
5. Make It Go Away
6. Never Park
7. Every Pretty Girl
8. Mark E. Smith & Brix
9. Something You've Got (Isn't Good)
10. Prophecy Written

Disc 2 - One Perfect Green Blanket (with previously unreleased bonus tracks):

1. Straw Man
2. Smoking Her Wings
3. Don't Rewind
4. Sympathy Wreath
5. Green
6. Lock Your Room (Uptight)
7. Someone Wants You Dead
8. Sympathy Wreath (Demise) Or ODE2WOP
9. Walking After Midnight
10. Green Home (Demo Version)
11. I Wish I Could Tour
12. Cheap Holiday Song
13. Lock Your Room (Uptight) (Home Demo Version)
14. For Pity's Sake (Live)
15. On on and One (Live)
16. Winter Song (Live)
17. Optimism Is It's Own Reward (Radio Session)

Disc 3 - Previously Unreleased Outtakes & Demos:

1. Scissors (Acoustic)
2. Make It Go Away
3. Every Pretty Girl
4. Mark E. Smith & Brix (Alternate Version)
5. Something You've Got Isn't Good (Acoustic)
6. Prophecy Written (Electric Version)
7. Wires Cages Fences and Gates (Without Drums)
8. My Name Is Not
9. Song for Trish
10. Someone Wants You Dead (Acoustic)
11. Make It Go Away (Alternate Version)
12. Wires Cages Fences and Gates (With Drums)
13. On on and One (Home Demo)
14. Reverse Disguise (Home Demo)
15. Scissors (I've Been Working on the Railroad) (Home Demo)

So here, for your listening pleasure, is the legendary and hard-to-find Super Scissors set, featuring some of the early work of Bay Area indie icon Barbara Manning.  I've been enjoying this set for years, and I think the entire comp is a winner! Have a listen, enjoy, and as always, let me know what you think.

Please use the email link below to contact me, and I will reply with the download link(s) ASAP:

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* - Interestingly, and if I'm not mistaken, this is the same 'Pat Thomas' who currently serves as Kendra Smith's manager, and who wrote the David Roback tribute in Variety last month that I referenced in the previous posting...

Various Artists - Not All That Terrifies Harms 7"

Another Barbara Manning-related post...

Late in 2016, I provided a requester, Jon Der, with a link to my World Of Pooh Land Of Thirst posting from a few years back, and in the process had a great back-and-forth dialogue with him about bands we were mutual fans of, including this one and The Fall (my all-time favorite band, as I've mentioned ad nauseum (and recently shown) here on this site). Jon clued me in to the news that an in-depth oral history of World Of Pooh had just been published in the then-latest issue of Jay Hinman's Dynamite Hemorrhage fanzine, a podcast/magazine devoted to underground alternative music; it was that article that sent him on a search that led him to my site.

Information on the great but obscure World Of Pooh is extremely hard to come by in this day and age, so of course I was champing at the bit to read the story. As the article was (then) not an online posting, but a print story only, Jon kindly scanned it for me from the magazine copy he had in his possession.

All in all, "World Of Pooh: The Oral History" is a superb and informative article. Band members (guitarist Brandan Kearney, bassist Barbara Manning and drummer Jay Paget) and other friends/scenesters from that time offer up their recollections and reminiscences of those heady, frenetic bygone days, the creation, rise and dissolution of an underground and generally unheralded-in-their-time rock band. The piece filled in a lot of gaps in my knowledge about the group.

I was especially interested in the section regarding the writing and recording of The Land Of Thirst, the band's sole LP release and one of my all-time favorites. When I did my write-up on this album all those years ago, I did so under the assumption (based on clues provided in the Trouser Press Record Guide review and other sources I'd found like this blog posting from almost a decade ago) this this disc was the brilliant but intense product of a vicious, painful breakup saga then unfolding between Kearney and Manning. To quote that post:

Apparently, [they] had been dating for a while, and by the time the record was being recorded, their relationship was on the rocks. They took out their relationship strains not directly on one another, but like most other couples with problems they addressed their angers and frustrations with one another indirectly, in their case through the songs (I understand they broke up soon after this record came out - which makes sense, since the band also ceased to exist around that time).

However, in the course of reading "The Oral History", I became aware that what I considered to be gospel and the "true Hollywood story" regarding WoP and their music wasn't quite accurate.

The first (and most important) point of correction is the most pertinent and far-reaching, in terms of my understanding this band - Manning and Kearney were never a couple, per se. Sure, they spent a lot of time together in their musical and social pursuits... but this didn't develop into any sort of romantic attachment. There was already more than enough madness swirling around in their lives while they were in the band. But that craziness had nothing to do with any sort of long-term "lover's spat", and more to do with the weird, tense and uncertain atmosphere inherent in being in an obscure band playing in San Francisco's indie/underground scene in the late '80s/early '90s.

That isn't to say, however, that the members of World Of Pooh didn't play up on this boy-boy-girl dynamic. The back cover of The Land Of Thirst infamously displayed an S&M/bondage-themed photo of three people that the band found in a porn shop on Polk Street in the city, with the implication being that the picture portrayed the actual band members and their relationship (it wasn't, and it didn't). Barbara Manning said:

"We chose the picture on the back on purpose - I think it might have been my idea, even... The idea [was] that we were selling ourselves as this threesome."

Brandan Kearney continued:

"We did have some misgivings about using the photo... but it looked enough like us that it was hard to say no... Besides, we were always using sexual imagery... I sometimes worried that we were confining Barbara, or that she'd feel like we were. The picture is ambivalent, which struck me as poignant at the time. It's not very well thought out, but you could say that about any decision we made back then."

In short, the group played at being weirdos and freaks, with Kearney and Manning upping the ante by semi-pretending to be more than just band mates... and people believed it. And oddly, after a while, the members of World Of Pooh began buying into that narrative as well. As Manning observed in the article:

"I feel like we were people with a weird relationship portraying people with a really weird relationship. Over time, the distinction vanished."

In the wake of the album release, and in the process of living up to this created narrative in the city's music atmosphere of the time, tensions began rising within the group. This led to bickering and conflicts between the members that eventually began being displayed in their live performances - many times exacerbated by prodigious booze consumption before and during their act. A friend of the group provided the following memory/assessment in the article:

"[Those] onstage disagreements of whatever were literally showstoppers. The big question was always: would they stop sniping at each other long enough to play another song let alone finish the set? Intraband relations seemed to be getting worse the more shows they played, but musically they kept getting better and better... For a while they were one of the best bands in the city. Talking to other fans at their shows, we had the feeling that they weren't going to be around much longer... The last time I saw them, it was their biggest show to date and by then they were outright arguing on stage in between songs... Despite how great the music was, the set felt like a fiasco and, by the time they left the stage, I had the distinct impression that it was going to be their last show."

This friend was almost correct regarding the timing of the band's demise - it was pretty much over for World Of Pooh by the end of 1989. However, circumstances intervened somewhat in early 1990.

Brandan Kearney: "People assume we broke up after our East Coast tour, but we'd essentially broken up before the tour... the strain Barbara and I were under was not sustainable... In the midst of this uncertainty, we accepted an offer to tour the East Coast for about a week... This gave us a reason to hold things together, but I think it also gave us the sense of an attainable endpoint..."

After (and despite) well-received shows in Boston and New York in March of 1990, World Of Pooh broke up immediately after the end of this tour.  There were a couple of posthumous EP releases (G.H.M. later in 1990; A Trip To Your Tonsils in 1991), but even those led to more trouble and conflict within the group.  The tracks on the latter EP were part of a set of eight or so that World of

Pooh had been developing for a planned full-scale album follow-up to The Land of Thirst (the EP included the only four tunes closest to completion, remixed and remastered by Kearney). During the final mixing of these EP tracks, Kearney added some sound effects that Manning, when she heard it/them, interpreted as negative coded messages directed at her personally... with the result being that the relationship between the two fully ruptured, and they didn't speak for many years. Fortunately, they eventually reconciled, even reuniting for a one-off show in late 2015.

Kearney pithily summed up the rise and fall of his band, and their overall dynamic:

". . . when you scrape away the dazzling veneer of also-ran indie-rocker glitz, you're really just talking about emotionally unstable people with very little impulse control and a dangerously high alcohol tolerance."

He also had this to say regarding their only album:

"The only thing that bothers me about the album's latter-day reputation is the myth and lore of Our Unhappy Relationship, which I sometimes worry is the only reason people are still listening to it. The fact is, Barbara and I were getting along just fine when we recorded The Land Of Thirst. People sometimes present it as some indie-pop version of Rumours or Shoot Out The Lights. I know we brought this on ourselves through public displays of madness and worse, but most of that stuff happened after the LP had been written and recorded. Love it or hate it, The Land Of Thirst was the product of a somewhat crazed but extremely close and supportive working relationship, and I dislike seeing it portrayed as an album by and about people who were at each other's throats. Terrible things happened, to our eternal discredit, but most of them happened later on."

So, from the horse's mouth itself, I hereby stand corrected.

The very end of the article listed World Of Pooh's entire discography, all of the music they released on Nuf Sed and all of their compilation appearances. I knew that some of the stuff listed there (like the band's rare early-career cassette-only releases No Little Taxis Shining Their Light and Dust) I'd never have any hope in hell of ever tracking down. But as for one-off compilation tunes, my WOP collection was fairly complete, except for one selection: a cover of Blue Öyster Cult’s “Dominance and Submission”, included on an obscure 7" EP in 1992. Being the obsessive completest that I am, I made it my mission to track down a copy of this record and song, and after an exhaustive search, found the vinyl for sale from an overseas source - couldn't buy it fast enough.

Enjoy the Not All That Terrifies Harms 7", a ridiculously hard-to-find joint release by Ajax and Nuf Said Records in 1992, scorched off of my vinyl copy, featuring some rare releases by San Francisco bands both legendary and obscure - including Thinking Fellers Union Local 282's "Trevor" (a track otherwise only available on a 1995 Japanese import compilation) and the only source for World Of Pooh's Blue Öyster Cult cover (which, of course, is excellent).

And as an added bonus, here's a link to the entire issue of Dynamite Hemorrhage #3, now online, containing "World Of Pooh: The Oral History" - a much cleaner version of my scanned copy from earlier last year.

Enjoy, and as always, let me know what you think.

Please use the email link below to contact me, and I will reply with the download link(s) ASAP:

Not All That Terrifies Harms EP: Send Email

S.F. Seals - Baseball Trilogy EP

Years ago in this blog, I wrote effusively of my affection for the work of Barbara Manning. A longtime indie music stalwart out of San Francisco, Manning has sadly had little mainstream success in her career. But in indie circles around the world, her name is considered sacred. For more than thirty years, pretty much everything she has been involved in as a solo artist or band member has been nothing more than gold.   And this little EP is no exception; it's a weird and wonderful gem of a release.

Apparently, Barbara Manning has always had a thing for baseball. Note the cover of her first major solo compilation, 1991's One Perfect Green Blanket (a poetic euphemism for a ballfield).  This album includes a sample from the broadcast of the National League San Francisco Giants' 1989 Western Division victory (the same year they were swept by their cross-bay rivals the Oakland As in the infamous "Earthquake Series").   And after working as a solo artist in the early 1990s, her first post-World of Pooh band was named The S.F. Seals, after the famous minor-league team that represented San Francisco in the Pacific Coast League for more than fifty years. So it was only a matter of time, apparently, before Ms. Manning addressed her love for baseball in song.

Barbara's selections for inclusion on this disc are varied and eclectic. The lead song, "Joltin' Joe DiMaggio", was originally released in 1941 by Les Brown & His Band of Renown (fronted by singer Betty Bonney), just after DiMaggio's famous 56-game hitting streak with the New York Yankees ended (prior to joining the Yankees, DiMaggio played for the Seals). Manning and her band faithfully recreate the jazzy, big-band sound of the original recording. It's a fun, funny record for indie alt-rockers to perform, yet they pull it off brilliantly.

For the stomp-rocker "The Ballad of Denny McLain", Barbara cedes vocal duties to bandmate Lincoln Allen. This song is another cover, originally recorded by the legendary and eccentric Bay Area band Mad V. Dog & the Merchants of the New Bizarre. It documents the story of the infamous Detroit

pitcher, the last Major League pitcher to win 30 games in a season (in 1968), but who got involved with organized crime figures and ended up serving several long stints in prison in the '80s and '90s for various serious charges (his first conviction was for cocaine trafficking, embezzlement and racketeering; his co-defendants were Anthony Spilotro (Joe Pesci's character in Casino was based on him) and later John Gotti, Jr.).

The final (and in my opinion, the best) song on the EP, the fuzzed-out psychedelic guitar workout "Dock Ellis", celebrates the Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher who allegedly threw a complete no-hit game on June 12th, 1970 while tripping on a massive dose of LSD.

Soon after finally acquiring World of Pooh's The Land of Thirst in 2000, I went on a big Barbara Manning buying spree, tracking down everything of hers that I could find: much of her solo work, the rest of her World of Pooh stuff, and her collaborations with 28th Day, The Original Artists, The Go-Luckys! and The S.F. Seals - including this disc. I'm glad I did; this is a superb addition to her canon. Check it out and see for yourself.

Here's The S.F. Seals' Baseball Trilogy EP, released by Matador Records on November 1st, 1993. Enjoy, and as always, let me know what you think.

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World Of Pooh - The Land Of Thirst

World of Pooh was an extremely short-lived experimental/indie/alternative/post-punk band based out of San Francisco in the late 1980s (I classify the band under so many heading because in a lot of ways, it really didn't fall under one particular category . . . but I digress). The band was one in a long series of stops for seminal San Fran indie musician Barbara Manning. In 1987 she joined forces with Brendan Kearney and drummer Jay Paget (later of Thinking Fellers Union Local 282), and for two years they were in the semi-forefront of the Northern California indie scene. I won't go into the history or anything regarding World of Pooh or Barbara Manning in particular; better men than I have already scraped together the few scraps of information on this band in other places, such as here.

Suffice to say that I am a big Barbara Manning fan, and over the years have collected just about every recorded noise she's ever been associated with, either as a solo artist, with 28th Day, World of Pooh, the San Francisco Seals, and with the Original Artists. And, like another semi-unknown musician I'm a fan of, Lisa Germano, Barbara Manning is someone who I probably ran into once or twice in my life, without realizing it. From what I understand, Manning used to work at one of the used record stores on Haight Street in SF that I used to frequent quite often in the '80s and '90s (I'm not sure where she worked, or when, but it was around that time). And Lisa Germano worked briefly

at Book Soup on Sunset Boulevard in LA (right across from Tower Records) at a period when I was making brief visits to LA for work, and frequenting that store when I was there (note that in both cases, this was before I was into either musician, so it's not like I would have lost my mind or anything if I saw their name tags or something).

The first time I had ever heard of World of Pooh was while reading the Trouser Press Record Guide sometime in the early '90s. Now many of you may have forgotten or don't even know this, but in the pre-Internet, pre-Allmusic.com age, thick books like the TPRG were the best sources available for information and reviews of various bands, records and genres. I'm pretty sure that All Music also had a book out around that time, but I preferred TPRG, because it specialized in covering really obscure New Wave and alternative bands. For example, they had a great section of the complete works of Suburban Lawns and Frank Sidebottom (God rest his soul), and scholarly dissertations on the likes of Wall of Voodoo and Romeo Void. Not all of the information contained in TPRG was on target (one of the earliest editions I have came out soon after the Red Hot Chili Peppers' first (and then only) record - the book dismissed the band as destined to be short-lived flashes in the pan . . . ), but it was always great and entertaining. No matter how many times I went through that book, the next reading always revealed something new.

Anyway, TPRG had a small section on the collected works of Barbara Manning, and devoted some space to World of Pooh and their legendary lone album, 1989's The Land of Thirst. The book's near-mythic description of the album immediately piqued the interest of a collector of obscure music treasures like me: supposedly, only 1,000 copies were ever printed, by a mysterious record label (Nuf Sed Lubrication Inc.) located at a non-existent address in SF. I'll quote the book here:

"The group's sole album . . . commands high prices from collectors, and with good reason: it's a magnificant record. The terrible tensions within the band are hidden by wan melodies but come out in the brutal lyrics [publisher's italics] . . . "

Apparently, Manning and Kearney had been dating for a while, and by the time the record was being recorded, their relationship was on the rocks. They took out their relationship strains not directly on one another, but like most other couples with problems they addressed their angers and frustrations with one another indirectly, in their case through the songs (I understand they broke up soon after this record came out - which makes sense, since the band also ceased to exist around that time).

With that kind of praise, and that level of obscurity, I knew I HAD to get a copy. Thus, the odyssey began. For years, I scoured the bins of every hole-in-the-wall record shop in every city and country I found myself in. I subscribed to mail-order catalogs and record shoppers guides, and tried to make friends with music wholesalers who, I thought, might give me the inside scoop on how to find such a treasure. I made long-distance calls to retailers in London, Sydney and California, following up on vague rumors of the record being in their possession. I did EVERYTHING to find it, to no avail.

Fortunately, technology caught up with me. Specifically, the Internet happened in the last half of the 1990s, and the search became much less onerous. Less onerous, but not any easier. I still had no luck in tracking The Land of Thirst down. It apparently was as obscure as TPRG said.

Then, a miracle happened. One day, while doing a random search for the record in Google, it popped up as an item for sale on eBay. I had checked eBay countless times, but with no luck, and figured that this lead would also prove fruitless. But, lo and behold, when I checked, there it was, just put up for auction, with no bidders after 3 days. I couldn't believe it! My hands were actually shaking as I put in my bid, a hefty amount for me at the time. I figured that, with no bidders after 3 days, I would win the auction with a fraction of my top price. But apparently, like me, there were several others who had been searching for this World of Pooh record who had just stumbled over it. My lone bid soon turned into an all-out bidding war! I monitored that site hour-by-hour, and during the last day, minute-by-minute, to ensure that I put the final, winning amount in for this obscurity. And as the final second in the auction ticked away, and other potential buyers amped up their prices, I countered and recountered until, at the end, I reigned supreme - The Land of Thirst was mine, finally!

It was nine years almost to the day that I first heard about the album and started looking for it.

Usually when you wait for something this long, it turns out to be a major disappointment. I was semi-prepared for that, as I waited for the seller to send me my package. When it arrived (very securely and rigidly packed - the seller apparently knew its worth), I took it out of its box, carefully placed it on my turntable, and listened to both sides, all the way through.

And for once, TPRG was right - The Land of Thirst is an outstanding album. As good as the songs are, the underlying tension beneath each of them, due to Manning's and Kearney's situation, is palpable, and brings a razor-sharp edge to all of them. The epitome of this lyrical edge is in what I consider the album's centerpiece song, "Mr. Coffee-Nerves".

In actuality, Mr. Coffee-Nerves was a villianous cartoon character created by the Postum Decaffinated Coffee people back in the 1940s and 50s. He was the spiritlike presence that appeared whenever people drank shitty non-Postum coffee, the kind that caused people to get jittery, irritable at family members, and just plain jumpy - "coffee nerves". Here's a place that has a number of the cartoon ads that Postum published, featuring this character (the accompanying commentary by the author of this site is equally hilarious).

In the song, the singer (Brendan) describes the events in this life with his (unnamed, but we all know who she is) lover as driving him to the same level of irrational irritability. "The house is like a waiting room, and waiting always puts me on edge - the slightest sound may set me off". "I can't sleep, it's three a.m; you're rolling close to me again - stay away, your flesh disgusts me". And the chorus between each verse is brutal: "Seems that fear always closes our eyes as we connect the dots" - he's too afraid of the consequences of realizing and articulating his dissatisfaction with his relationship, so he chooses to just live in this horrible atmosphere, getting more and more agitated with no apparent way out.

In addition to the cold. biting lyrics, the things that make this song so devastating are:

1) the relentless, ticking-clock beat and nagging guitar, which all but make you FEEL the tension the singer is under;
2) the fact that Brendan sings the song not with anger, but in an indifferent monotone that signals his complete lack of affection for or interest in his partner; and
3) Barbara Manning joins him in the monotone "la-la-la-la" chorus - she had to know the song was specifically about her and the way her boyfriend felt about her.

The complete song is just crushingly effective . . . and yet it's a brilliant song, one of many on the album.

Sadly, The Land of Thirst has never been released on CD, and as far as I know, there are no immediate plans to do so, despite much yip-yap about it over the past fifteen years or so. As happy as I am to have such a rare piece of music in my possession, I still would like for everyone to hear it, and discover how brilliant this band was, and Barbara Manning is and continues to be.

And thus, here you are, carefully cooked off of my treasured and pristine personal vinyl copy:

Please use the email link below to contact me, and I will reply with the download link(s) ASAP:

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