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

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:

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