ARMAND SCHAUBROECK STEALS:
JAILHOUSE ROCK
review of a lost classic from the past
by Dr Elwood Mole, musical expedictionary
(April 2006)
with Schaubroeck and Julian Cope, for his illuminating article "The Illustrated Armand Schaubroeck")
BABE WE'RE NOT PART OF SOCIETY
"-see that door, m'boy?
It only opens one way
to let you in."
"It's the music that kept us all intact.
It's the music that kept us from going crazy."
Lou Reed, "The View from the Bandstand"
In 1962, after a series of 32 burglaries that included groceries, hardware stores, schools and a church, seventeen year old Armand Schaubroeck was sentenced to three years in jail. He was charged with safecracking and thrown in the Elmira State Reformatory, a maximum security prison in New York. He would get out a year and a half later on parole but the impression would remain vivid in his mind. Apparently his imprisonment acted as a catalyst to the birth of his very unique and somewhat deranged rock 'n roll persona- he named his band Armand Schaubroeck Steals and all his music seemed to be a cathartic exorcise to the obsessions that haunted him.
His sound borrowed elements from Lou Reed, Iggy Pop and Kim Fowley, spiked with a provocative Andy Kaufman-esque weirdo sense of humor (the monogram of his name reads A.S.S.) and a distinctive fuck-you attitude that came mostly from the fact that he didn't need music to make a living. He and his brothers would found a musical store that is today one of the most successful in the business. Not only did he have relative monetary independence, he also had a whole place full of instruments for himself. He built a studio in the store's basement, created Mirror Records and recorded a handful of albums that were personal, obsessive, ironic and deliberately abusive to the public ears. He even wrote sneering remarks in the back of his record covers saying "I doubt if you'll ever hear this record on the radio."
Although his music remains an obscure oddity, it's hard to stand indifferent before the attractive strangeness of his album covers. From the maniac blood-soaked grin in his triple debut epic A Lot Of People Would Like To See Armand Schaubroeck... Dead to the weird-ass humor of I Came To Visit But Decided To Stay, the sheer deviousness of Ratfucker and the plain weird Shakin' Shakin' and Live At The Holyday Inn.
In 1978, his record making career ended the same unexpected way it began. When interviewed in 1992, Schaubroeck explained that when he recorded those LP's, he really wanted "to get it out real bad," but now with a shop doing annual sales in excess of 7 million dollars he seems to have lost the craving to record his own brand of inspired bile. But before we start rambling about the soothing effects of money, let's get back to where it all began.
After getting out on parole, Armand began looking for other ways to make a buck. He and his two brothers started selling guitars from his mother's basement. This was 1964 and almost every kid that had heard a rock 'n' roll record had a good reason to buy a guitar. A year later, the Schaubroeck brothers would gather enough money to buy a big place in Rochester, New York, where they opened the House of Guitars (H.O.G.). One of its main characteristic was its policy regarding the handling of instruments. While other stores proihibited customers from touching their merchandise, the Schaubroecks encouraged kids to try them freely without the compromisse of having to buy anything - "We were putting the guitar in their hands, plugging them in, and letting them go."
Around the same time, Armand and some friends began using the store has a recording place for their garage band, the Churchmice. A single called "Babe We're Not Part of Society" was self-released and sold in the store. It featured a young Armand ranting behind a jangling guitar and a compulsive Moe Tucker lo-fi drumming. The cover is a black and white picture of Schaubroeck leaning on a brick wall with one hand holding a cigarrette and the other hanging from his pocket, looking like some kind of street criminal from the 1930's. He had previously released a single as Kack Klick, titled "Lord My Cell is Cold/One More Day, One More Night." This were all rough sketches of what would later become his megalomaniac debut LP.
A LOT OF PEOPLE WOULD LIKE TO SEE ARMAND SCHAUBROECK... DEAD
"But amongst all those weirdoes, one album always stood as being even weirder. For a start, it was a triple album in a gatefold sleeve, and the front showed a photo of a smiling, curly-haired Lou Reed-ian late-20s punk with a poorly executed fake bullet hole right through the center of his head, and fake blood cascading down his face... What the hell was this all about?"
Julian Cope
With the help of his former crime-partner, Dan McCabe and his two brothers, Bruce and Blaine, Armand began making tapes of dialogue and music that depicted scenes from his prison days in Elmira. These recordings were sent to Andy Warhol who liked it so much that he proposed to do a play based on it. He also suggested that they should play themselves, but the brothers were too busy with their blossoming shop. They convinced him to make a movie instead of a play - "It would be Warhol's first commercial film" says Schaubroeck.
But in 1967, angry Valerie Solanas shot the pop pope and Armand was left with some songs and a rough script of what would later become A Lot Of People Would Like To See Armand Schaubroeck... Dead. "I had my crime partner with me. We would figure out what we wanted to bring in each scene. We just ad-libbed it after we discussed it and taped it like that... We didn't do the songs in two takes or anything, but if we did, the second would be different because the words would change."
What came out was something of a sound movie, a rock opera if you will. In a mixture of spoken word, music and sound collages, Schaubroeck poured his guts on 6 sides of vinyl, revealing his prison experiences in a very crude and unclean way. It featured powerful and intense songs cut in-between dialogue that chronicled the different stages of Armand's grim saga behind the bars of the reformatory. The album was recorded at the H.O.G.'s home studio in a sophisticated quadraphonic audio system and was released somewhere around 1971 (or was it 1975?) by his own Mirror Records.
It begins in the confessionary booth of a church, young Armand is admitting to a shocked priest of having committed 32 burglaries in the last 3 years - "and one of them was a church, father." We are then taken to the robbery scene, where we find Schaubroeck and McCabe struggling in the dark to get to the collections safe. Armand lights up a match and is appalled by the terrifying vision of a Virgin Mary staring down at him. A ghostly church choir fades in behind the sound of a speeding heart beat as he goes into a freak out scat about not wanting to "bump into a statue of Mary" while he's "knocking out God's house."
-are you truly sorry?
-somewhat, father.
After the spoken introduction the album kicks in with the magnificent "King of the Streets," a celebratory ode to his outlaw days as a juvenile safe-cracker. As the band grooves to a rocking cajun march, Schaubroeck spills out glee profanities in an Iggy Pop-like abandon - "We rob the churches 'cuz the churches make money." He explains that he "hits the streets" so that his girlfriend Suzie won't have to hustle rich kids for money. As the song evolves to a boot stomping rhythm, Armand goes into a fit of religious frenzy and starts singing like a deranged gospel preacher - "Oh my brothers!" It ends with a Greek tragedy-like choir of degenerates marching cheerfully down the road to hell.
The following "Armand and Dan Go Down To The Ol' Rock a Bowl" is a recreation of the two friends going out to a bowling alley to steal dimes from a bowling ball polisher. The piece is driven by an hypnotic acoustic guitar riff and a solemn lost-soul choir, adding a spine-shivering intensity to the music. And while we're at it we might as well add that, as far as intensity goes, this obscure guitar dealer from upstate N.Y. was able to create (in the D.I.Y. sense of the word) a piece of such epic proportion and raw emotional quality, that at it's highest moments, makes Roger Water's The Wall sound like cheap Broadway sentimentality.
The proof comes with the utterly brilliant "Elmira Bound," a cinematographic slow-motion journey through the corridors of the reformatory. While the music progresses in a slow shuffle, with gentle guitar chords and a wailing trumpet reverberating through the prison halls, Armand is led away by the guards as a declared social menace that must be isolated from the outside world. His half-sung/half-spoken vocal delivery has a rare emotional authenticity, somewhat reminiscent of Patti Smith's "Birdland." But while Patti's "going up, up," Schaubroeck's "going down, down"... to purgatory.
"Walls, tear-gas, loose dogs, spot-lights.
Doesn't bother me, I can beat the place."
WARDEN'S CIRCUS
"Picture Elmira has a big factory where hundreds of sick minds come to be mended.
Our program can only show you the way, we don't have any control over the finished product."
Prison is described as a cold and indifferent place packed with hostile characters alienated by their forced reclusion from the outside world, while the prison staff appear as dumb, authoritarian figures emotionally disconnected from the grim reality they help preserve. The new inmates are received by the bizarre Mr. Tomato, Elmira's public relations and are privately interviewed by Dr Leiderman, the state psychologist who asks questions like "have you ever had sex with your mother?" in a monotonous routine like way. This, of course, is the que for another weird A.S.S. freak out.
"The damn bastards are playing Games..."
"Streetwalker" is a sharp bluesy rock theme driven by a vicious harmonica. The song works as a sort of parenthesis in Schaubroeck's saga. It tells the weird story of how his cell mate, H. Quincy Sappy, got arrested for attempted suicide. Sappy was a junior accountant desperately bored with his work routine in some New York store. One night, he decided to go a bar to have a couple of drinks, but then he had more - "and more and more" - until he knew he was in "the right row" to where he was heading for. The music stops, suspended only by a background organ and a discreet bass, struggling to push the song back to it's rocking dynamic.
"So I decided I was going down to the bridge.
I was gonna jump... jump... jump!"
In comes the whole band again, backed by the same devilish harmonica. He now has one leg hung in a rail and the other is going "on its way." But just as he's about to jump, somebody grabs him by the shoulder. An extremely attractive woman is asking him: "Why don't you come home with me?" As he stares at this "fine, fine woman," the song unexpectedly shifts into a sensual, lascivious mood. Just moments before, Quincy was balancing at the edge of the bridge, staring blankly at the quiet waters; now he's licking his lips at the sight of this lustful creature - "uhhhh... I don't wanna jump no bridge i wanna go home with that fine, fine woman."
He wakes up the next morning terrified to find that the sensual woman who saved him the night before is actually a transvestite. On top of all that, he's 10 minutes late for the office. He's been working for five years in that department and never arrived late. He'll blow the gold watch.
During coffee break, he's bragging to his mates about how he picked up this "fine, fine woman" at the bridge last night - "She felt right into my check... She was easy." But as laughter fills the air, a police officer walks in and arrests him for attempted suicide. While being dragged away to prison, Quincy comes to the twisted conclusion that he's laughing at the only woman that ever cared about him. As the music builds into an ecstatic, never-ending electric blues riff, Armand goes into an intensively desperate scat around the line "He/She was the only woman that ever cared about me." Pure rock 'n' roll dementia.
The weirdness proceeds with the amusing, gay doo-wop of "Young Boy (an inmate reminds Armand of his girlfriend)" and the mad intensity of "I Wish To See Colour." Schaubroeck sings solemnly about being "tired of living in the black and white world of prison." The song comes after a tense dialogue piece that depicts Armand arguing with another inmate over a comic book - all he wanted was to see some color. His obsessive vocal delivery sort of gives new meaning to Lester Bangs' words about Van Morrison:
"He repeats certain phrases to extremes that from anybody else would seem ridiculous, because he's waiting for a vision to unfold"
OPEN THE GATE, BABY
"I'm tired of being fucked around, kicked around and stepped on..."
As the album drives to it's conclusion, more unique gems begin to appear. The minimal "Fading Out" opens with a low key harmonica that sounds like a duck-calling horn playing in a weird middle-eastern tone, and is carried by a spellbinding acoustic guitar and a shoe-box percussion. The song's about Dan McCabe being sent to solitary confinement, a solid metal box with no windows, no bed and a bucket. It also deals with jail paranoia ("When I walk past someone, I walk sideways...") and subsequent mental breakdown ("The mouth won't tell them, but the eyes they talk").
By this time the young burglars are growing weary of their grievous saga in the reformatory. "We Like Lost Sheep Are All Drifting" is a redemption theme with strong religious overtones. It features two other voices singing, probably the other two Schaubroeck brothers (one of them slightly reminiscent of Sparks' vocalist Russel Mael). The spoken piece "New Young Inmate Meets Lifer" is an hilarious two-person dialogue between a stuttering young Armand and an older convict, who apparently missed Beatlemania.
-You got some pretty hair... you wanna be my friend?
-This is the style now... you know? long hair...
-It's fag, kid.
-No, it's not... English bands wear hair like this now...
-English bands?
-Haven't you ever heard of the Beatles?
-Beatles?! What the fuck's a Beatle?"
The following songs are among the best ones in the album. "Sweet Sister Suzie/Turn Off The Sound" is a beautifully raw piece that stands somewhere in-between the acoustic tenderness of the Velvet Underground's "Jesus" and the laid-back white boy blues of the Stones' "Parachute Woman"; the desperate urgency of "Visiting Day"; and the first-take acoustic rambling of "One More Day, One More Night", dissolving it's way into the atmosphere. The album closes with the haunting "Warden's Circus," a slow shuffled blues with a mean, vicious saxophone and a Link Wray-like pounding bass line. Armand sings in a low menacing key, addressing ominous words to the prison's warden.
"Warden, warden look out your window
there's a cloud in your lawn..."
Soon after releasing this album, Armand Schaubroeck ran for the New York State Senate. Apparently, he knew he had no chance of winning, instead he wanted to act as a catalyst to the discussion of such overlooked issues as prison reform and the way the state "rehabilitates" its devious sheep. He was probably thinking about this when he delivered the last lines in the record:
"Don't wanna be your private cloud
wanna be a national cloud."
The smaller parties had a chance to confront the two bigger parties on radio and TV debates. "I sorta stopped when they started having the minority candidates just debate themselves, and the Democrat and Republican candidates would debate each other", he says. "It sorta lost the reason to run."
KILL ME MOTHERFUCKER, AIN'T EVER DIED BEFORE!
"You've gotta make sure to use all the dirty words and don't let them clean things!"
Andy Warhol's advice to Lou Reed
After his ambitious triple debut, Armand released the weird and wonderful I Came To Visit But Decided To Stay (1973/74), a twisted gothic tale about a priest's forbidden love with a nun. Blinded with passion, father Michael decides to kill sister Jennifer. He puts a gun to her head and pulls the trigger. This way, he can be with her forever - and that's the cover, showing Armand dressed as a priest laying over a tomb, with a bottle and the picture of a nun. He came to visit but decided to stay.
The first song is a surprisingly catchy pop tune, probably the closest he ever got from having a hit single, had he not decided to release a deranged version of "Auld Lang Syne" instead. The album also includes the best vocal rendition of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Bells" ever committed to music, and two dazzling frat-rock ballads - "Cry Myself to Sleep" and "I Came To Visit But Decided To Stay." The last one depicting father Murphy's lonesome walk down the snowy path that leads to the cemetery - the Grand Finale in this playfully obscure fable.
His three other releases would come out some years later in 1978, all at the same time. The fake live double album Live at the Holiday Inn, with extended versions from his debut LP, drowned by an overdubbed Beatlemania-like audience on the verge of hysteria; the more accessible (but still quite deranged) Shakin' Shakin' - "a meditation on the eternal Saturday night boogie" as Julian Cope so eloquently wrote; and finally, his last masterpiece, the mischievous "Ratfucker" - dedicated to the late Peter Laughner (co-founder of Rocket from the Tomb and Pere Ubu).
"Listening to "Ratfucker" is like stopping to look at a car wreck, awful really, but you can't look away."
- anonymous post on the internet
In terms of content, this comment summarizes the record quite well. Armand plays the roles of an assorted range of devious characters - everything from a rapist to a male whore, a pedophile and a ruthless hit killer. Musically, the album sounds like it's being played by a "disgusted bar band", while Schaubroeck stays faithful to his deranged, amphetaminic vocal style. Other thing worth noticing is the gratuitous use of very explicit language. Armand delivers at least five "fucks" for each sentence he sings. Hence the "I doubt if you'll ever hear this record on the radio" phrase in the back-cover.
The LP shares some obvious similarities (both lyrically and musically) with Lou Reed's Street Hassle, released the same year and also featuring the main performer in the cover with sparkling shades. Once again, the difference lies in a degree of intensity (others might call it taste) - the cover of "Ratfucker" shows Armand trespassing a rat with a switchblade. The album is an insane collection of cult classics from this bizarre misfit who would soon return to his shop counter. It featured such timeless moments as the sick and twisted humor of "Preteen Mama," a bizarre clap-along about lusting pre-teens that could well be music to exercise to; the menacing urgency of "Ratfucker"; the anthemic "Buried Alive"; the lose and devilish "Gigolo Gigolo"; and "I Love Me More Than You", where Schaubroeck sounds somewhere in-between an uncontrolled Iggy Pop and someone channeling Elvis.
After five albums, Armand apparently ran out of things to say. He continued working as a producer/manager to some Mirror based bands (he already had produced a friend of his in 1966, Jerry Porter's "Don't Bother Me" - an irresistibly strange but delightful collection of solo acoustic rambles). Besides the occasional record production, business went as usual in the House of Guitars. Throughout the '80's and '90's, the H.O.G. began gaining some notoriety for supplying equipment to mainstream acts like Metallica, Aerosmith and Motley Crue. Recently, it attracted some attention again with a bogus competition for the world's worst guitar player. The prize was free guitar lessons and a ticket to Canada.
He also had a series of memorable TV spots featuring himself dressed as the Easter Bunny, with dark glasses and a switchblade, adding "hop, hop" to the end of each statement, while a group of dancing groupies and zombies chanted: "Guitars! Sale! Guitars! Sale!"
In the '90's, some interest began to form around this musical oddity, mainly due to Julian Cope's very entertaining article, "The Illustrated Armand Schaubroeck" (featured in his site Head Heritage). An American web-designer named Jason Hall also got interested enough to create a web page about Schaubroeck, including pictures, some songs and a small video showing a local news cast reporting the release of A Lot of People...
For those interested in listening to Armand Schaubroeck, I suggest you go to the weirdest second-hand record store you can find. Since his LP's were pressed in limited quantities, it's extremely difficult to find an A.S.S. record for sale. But don't despair, there's always the Internet. Occasionally, some of them emerge on Ebay. But for those who can't afford it, there's always mp3 download - the fastest, cheapest way for musical expeditionaries to find out lost pearls from the past.
Someone told me last year, that a friend had dropped by the H.O.G. and had returned with the news of a forthcoming A.S.S. release. Apparently, it's going to be a double-album and will include some old material featuring Cream's drummer Ginger Baker. But the same person who told me this also said that Armand has a tendency to say things that sound good, but aren't necessarily true. Well, for good or ill, he has already left his bizarre mark in the shady pantheon of unsung heroes. It doesn't really matter if it's true or not. The Schaubroeck myth will be continuously fed by its own creator, who will remain chuckling sarcastically behind the counter.