ratty scurvics | A memoir of rants and reflections on 25 years as a performing musician | Page 2: “Musician, heal thyself
A Denton shrink plumbs the murky psyches of self-destructive rock artists and concludes they don’t have to die young, drunk, and depressed
By Matt Weitz Thursday, Jul 3 1997
Closer to home and on a more recent note, innovative Dallas weird-o-rama producer Matt Castille of the Vas Deferens Organization was working with a performance-artist band heavy on psychedelic drum bombast named Coprolingus. Although Castille admits in retrospect that the name should have been a tip-off, he thought things were going swimmingly. ‘They were really excited because they felt like I understood them and could help them,’ says Castille, who often works with bands who interest him on the cheap or even for free. The playing was inspired, but when Castille stepped out of his control room and into the performance space, something assailed his nostrils. What was that smell? He looked at the band. Could a person really get himself to smell that horrible?
‘I couldn’t believe it–I was stunned,’ Castille says of his discovery that the source of the odor wasn’t unwashed music fug, but feces strewn about by one over-stimulated member of the band. ‘The band had erected a plastic tepee around their stuff for when they do their rituals and everything, but still. Eric [Lumbleau, Castille’s partner in VDO] is very, um, germ-aware, and he freaked out.’
The overexcited ‘artist’–who earlier had spent two hours masked and babble-singing into a microphone on the sidewalk outside the studio, his utterances recorded for future use–was ejected. Unfortunately, that cast a pall over the evening, and indeed–for a while–the entire creative relationship. ‘The last we heard of that guy,’ Castille says, ‘he was hitchhiking to Austin in a thunderstorm, wearing only his underwear and a turban he’d made himself.’
But hey, that’s rock ‘n’ roll–soul-crushing defeats, madness, best-laid plans going awry all over the place, and whirling vortices of bullshit–right? Besides, what are you gonna do?
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