The Mojo Wire build their debut album Battery Acid Blues, with two of rock's primary colors: blues and surf.First albums, by anyone, are almost always momentous and fun: some bands stick their toes in the water, working their way up to greatness and competence on later records; some jump in head first, splashing their pent-up talent (or lack thereof) all over everything. Committing the creative impulse to posterity for the first time often results in outpourings of good, bad, and ugly originality, but it's rarely unmemorable for everyone involved. Some debuts seem to come out of nowhere with surprising freshness, and some crawl out of the distant artistic past via long-ignored or discarded stylistic roots (and routes). Some are labors of love, some are by-blows made to avoid boredom, some come from improvised chaos, and some are complete accidents. All of this can be said about the Mojo Wire's debut album Battery Acid Blues.
By the time they got to make their first disc, the three main guys in the band had more than a year to learn to write and play music together (with and without drummers), all without any agenda other than to have a fun and fruitful outlet for two of their main impulses: being creatively expressive, and cracking each other up, which were hardly mutually exclusive. All the other usual, motivations applied too- friendship, discovery, revenge, guilt, and impressing girls- so when the three Mojos arrived in Isla Vista after cutting their musical teeth with an individualistic take on standard improvisational twelve-bar rock and pop, they had more than enough to throw into the broth called "your whole life up to this point" that is usually poured into a debut album.
Recording had been a part of the band's existence from the beginning, but the actual proper recording of what would become Battery Acid Blues began in Isla Vista during November 1997, only a week or so after Adam, Bryn, and Keir had recruited drummer Brandon Klopp for some jam sessions and a few initial keg party shows. The band's ignorance of established recording methods and procedures helped create a unique sound on tape, which Brandon (whose technical knowledge far outstripped the others' at this point) put the finishing touch on when he improvised a simple solution to a potential problem. Microphones to record drums, and the money to buy them, were thin on the ground at the Bedrock, so the drummer played his practice kit for the recording, a drum machine that condensed its output to one cable. This setup allowed the band to play and record the songs' backing tracks live to four-track, then bounce the tracks down later for overdubs, giving the overall album a strange and original mix of old-school, low-fi, and cheap-tech sounds. Songs that began life as basic blues and surf numbers now resembled the wall-of-sound mono recordings from the early '60s.
The older, simpler blues songs arrived with ease. Bryn's galloping "12:15 Blues" had grown from its embryonic three-verses-and-solo take to a wild showcase for the whole group, with each player taking their own twelve-bar solo before the song ran out. It became the perfect way to "introduce" everyone in the band, as well as the raucous pace of the entire album. "Long Black Leather Boots" followed, as the strongest, if not best song in the set. Worlds away from its beginnings as a piano dirge, "Leather Boots" became an collaborative blooze belter, and crushed everything in its path, abetted by Bryn's and Adam's dueling, double guitar solos. Other songs captured in the first rush included the laconic "FM Blues", Keir's slapstick take on radio dominance, which featured another Adam versus Bryn solo-fest, this time pitting Adam's Hamer six-string against Bryn's baseball stadium organ/keyboard blasts. Also checking in was "Your Mama's a Ho", the oldest and most notorious song in the band's short repertoire. That piece of crudely scatological satire was, like everything else, topped off by Adam's forceful vocals, themselves punctuated by endless and hilarious improvisation and asides.
Surfier-sounding songs, as well as anything else on the album, took a little longer to realize. A cover of "Nobody Knows You When You're Down And Out" was easy enough, and the instrumental "Whitecap" became an unstoppable force of nature when powered by Brandon's drumming, but an attempt at the similar "El Nido Thunder" never got past first gear with this Mojo lineup (it was included on initial pressings of the disc, but later removed, as was the semi-instrumental "Sammy's Spitcan", which later became "Fatal Flaws"). "Wishing Well Blues", the newest and most overtly pop-rock tune of the album, became easier to deal with once it got a permanent arrangement, and much funnier after Keir and Bryn added their "Pinky and the Brain" backing vocals to compliment Keir's ambition-parodying lyrics. Adam's characteristic ballad "Stay With Me" also got a hearing, providing the album a mellow, mushy middle before the home stretch. Two quick-and-dirty blues songs rounded out the set: "Can't Keep Warm", another lazy groove from Keir a la "FM Blues", though more non-descript, and Bryn's Stevie Ray Vaughan pastiche of an instrumental titled "The Witching Hour" on which the dueling guitar solos were in fact Bryn versus himself.
The overall feel of Battery Acid Blues was simply a good time party record (even if it was a party from 1966). The album took its name from Keir's concurrent semi-fictional, surreal music columns for the student-run Daily Nexus newspaper, and most of the lyrics, though probably written in all seriousness at first, became riotous parodies and pastiches of every cliched theme in classic blues-rock. This is almost completely down to Adam's delivery of twelve-bar lyrics ripe for snide over-emoting, but anyone playing songs like "FM Blues", "Leather Boots", "Wishing Well", and, especially and obviously, "Your Mama's A Ho" (the ultimate "your mom" joke) would be hard-pressed to present this stuff with a straight face. The lasting result of this, despite dashes of other stronger emotions on Battery Acid, would be a streak of bent humor in all their records not unlike the snide goofiness of Camper Van Beethoven or the dirty sarcasm of Frank Zappa.
Even so, it should probably be unsurprising that the Isla Vista/UCSB scene in 1997/98 was not in the least bowled over by the Mojo Wire and their new disc. Everybody and their dog was in a band, everyone threw backyard kegger shows, and everyone who really thought they cared about music went to downtown Santa Barbara clubs to see "real" bands. Locals were paying more attention to a dying ska revival, the usual lifeless jam bands, and the ever-present punk and metal monoliths. In playing styles at least a generation older than their peers, the Mojo Wire ensured they would be hopelessly out of touch with their immediate surroundings, but of course that didn't matter. The CD languished on the (now defunct) I.V. Morninglory Music shelf, but songs from Battery Acid came alive at every show, and the band was able to pull a score of hard-core friends and fans to each appearance.
Still, like all great stretches of pure fun, it didn't last. By the time of their first album's completion the band were already getting deep into much more bizarre and experimental sonic territory. Though it would eventually result in a temporary dead-end, Adam, Bryn, and Keir eagerly jumped from the straight blues and surf staples of the mid-60's to the self-indulgent auditory excesses of cheap psychedelia. A logical progression, perhaps, but it is telling that twelve-bar structures and traces of crunchy blooze-rock popped up on every subsequent Mojo recording, and many of these first songs stayed in the live set until the band folded in 2001; apparently some musical reflexes just aren't forgotten, especially if they're the all-important formative ones.
Play this album (with 6 bonus tracks!):
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