andysrhythmicregression-blog

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Young Caucasians Soundcloud playlist

https://soundcloud.com/user-405314491/sets/young-caucasians/s-roJuO

The Young Caucasians 1980-1989

Matt Hahn- Vocals

Judd Lees- Guitar

Andy Kaulkin- Keys, Guitar

Jerry Hergenreder- Bass

Bill Kalish- Drums

also:

Ted Vanderclute: Vocals; Jack Lees: Drums; Bob Bullock: Bass; Go Go Tim: Rapping & percussion; Mark Philips: Guitar

Albums:

Pop Quiz- 1983;  The White Stuff- 1986; The Shroud Of Elvis- 1987

The Young Caucasians was my band from '79 or '80 until '89 when we split up and i moved to LA.

The band was started by myself and guitarist Judd Lees with his brother Jack on drums and a really interesting bass player named Bob Bullock and our good friend Ted Vanderclute on vocals.   Judd was a musical omnivore.  More-so than me, and very studious.  He was good at playing pretty much any style he wanted to.

We started out doing Grateful Dead and classic rock covers plus a lot of 60s r&b, which i was obsessed with, as well as some originals that were written by myself and lyricist, Andrew Ellen.  By the time we started gigging and recording, we had morphed into an r&b flavored 60s garage punk type of band with a bit of early rock and roll and more of a focus on originals.  

Right around this time, Andrew died in a car accident, but left me with stacks of lyrics that i continued to write music to for the next few years.  all the songs on this playlist up until the "white stuff" sessions are his lyrics.  After that the lyrics are mostly mine.

About the lyrics.  Lyrics were never supposed to be an important part of the band.  We knew Andrew was a talented lyricist, but I was not sophisticated enough to really pay attention to what he was writing about.  I was really only going off of the sounds of the words.  He is the one who got me into all the big lyric writers like Bob, Tom, Neil, Bruce, etc.... but, even though i loved those artists, i really only listened to them phonetically as well.  I didn’t really start taking it seriously until i started writing them, and even then it was a while before i started to understand it.  The point of this band wasn’t lyrics though.  it was about fun and energy and crowd interaction.  I talk about lyrics on this blog because the process of learning about them became important to me, and i feel self consious about my lyric writing in this band.   Listening back now, I really like Andrews lyrics a lot.  He died when he was 18 so they were all written by a teenager, but they were youthfully fatalistic, ambitious and passionate and actually fit what we were doing really well most of the time. Most of my lyrics in the band were way worse.

Around '82 we had a big personnel shift and the real band started coming together with the addition of Matt Hahn on vocals and Jerry Hergenreder on Bass.  Matt is a big personality and a great performer.  He created the personality of the band, which was really fun and energetic.  To me, he sang a lot like Buddy Holly (in the early days), which was very unique for this type of band.  Matt loved the Beatles.  Matt and I both loved the Ramones.

Jerry has a very natural musicality and had a great feel for r&b.  in addition to bass, Jerry wrote most of the background vocals and wrote songs for the band as well. He probably was the most tuned in with the funky stuff and we probably couldn't have done the Go Go as well without him.  Because of these guys, we were incorporating a lot of showmanship and flashy r&b cadences in the arrangements and got a reputation as a really great live band.

At this point, Judd had become a very serious guitarist and was deep into chuck berry, steve cropper, and roots music in general which is actually my favorite part of this music when i listen back to it now.  any actual toughness in our sound would definitely be attributed to him. He was probably the most professional player in the band as well.  on some of the live recordings he is the only one holding it down while the rest of us are flailing, caught up on our stage moves.

Jack was younger than us and was more into commercial hard rock, but he was a very accomplished drummer and his precision gave us a punky edge.

In my mind, we were The Ramones meets The Rascals, but the other band members brought their thing into it so that was really just a starting point.

Our Pop Quiz ep was made half with this band and half with a new drummer, Bill Kalish, who was an NRBQ fan and brought a little of that looser vibe into the band.  Jack was great, but we wern’t really his taste in music, and Bill ended up fitting in with us really well.

the song "Natalie" from pop quiz got played a lot on local radio station called WHFS, and we started doing really well at our gigs and playing out of town more.  Local promoters liked us and we opened for a lot of national touring bands including multiple shows with bands like the Fleshtones and The Ramones (5 times!).  We were a smaller band in the same scene as local heroes, The Slickee Boys, Tru Fax and The Insaniacs, and The Insect Surfers, to whom we were sort of the little brother band.  In fact Pop Quiz was on the same label as the Surfers, Wasp records, owned by local record store owner, Bill Asp.

I think this is when we were at our best.  we were a fun, goofy band and in addition to club gigs, we got invited to play at a lot of schools and dances.  We were very proud of our live show and always working on it.   The originals were catchy, but we also knew a lot of old r&b tunes and we enjoyed winning over tough crowds.

Around this this time, a local studio offered us free studio time to make our next album thinking that being associated with us would bring them business...big mistake!  we took forever and never finished the record.... i included a couple from this session (unmixed).  there were actually a bunch of good songs from this period but unfortunately the recordings are lame and wimpy.  We probably should have released it anyway.  This was the last of Andrew’s lyrics and sort of the beginning of the end of the band. First of all, this is the point that i started writing lyrics which weren't very good.  a lot of word vomit….nothing to say…swaying from portentous to silly and back...  But even worse, this is when i started taking myself seriously as a songwriter and started wanting the band to be taken more seriously.... without the actual songs to back it up, of course.  I started playing guitar more live with the band because i was writing on the guitar, and the band was getting less fun. Also, the focus on lyrics and the switch to writing on the guitar made the music simpler and less distinctive than the earlier stuff.

  Luckily, while this was happening, we stumbled into the DC Go Go scene where we had a lot of fun playing those kind of shows.  There was a guy named Kenny Marshall that i worked with at a record store who introduced me to the scene and he was in the band for a short while.  Kenny was a good rap writer and he wrote the rap in “Right On Time” He also introduced us to Go Go Tim, who was a really talented mc and percussionist.  Tim was actually in the band for a while and played on our 2nd ep, The White Stuff, which included one of our attempts to mix gogo and rock&roll, the very catchy but ridiculous, “Right On Time”.  It’s a dumb song but it was popular at our shows and got played on our cool local radio station.  It may have been the first lyric i ever wrote.  Its literally random rhyming words and phrases put together with no meaning.  Another early song that i now think was much better than Right On Time was “Your My Reason”.  I think i was trying to write like Andrew, but was ultimately embarrassed by it’s earnestness so I didn’t want it on the album. Instead, we had a bunch of songs that made no sense.  I have a hard time listening to this album because of the words,  but i included some of the songs because we were definitely trying some new things musically.  Its a little more “professional” and “accomplished” than Pop Quiz. For better or worse, we were evolving.

I should also mention that before we recorded the White Stuff, we had an unfortunate episode where we worked with a pop producer and recorded some of these songs with really slick, un-listenable production.  The only redeeming value of these recordings is that the version of Right on Time features Kenny doing his own rap in that classic 80s broadcaster style.  i still couldn’t stomach putting it on the playlist.

Live, the Go Go thing was pretty awesome.  We did some crazy gigs, like the time we opened for Trouble Funk and r&b star, Shannon at a football stadium at North Carolina A&T for thousands of people.   We had a lot of cool experiences that were way outside of the scene we came up in and it really kept things interesting on the surface.

Unfortunately, as a rock band, we were getting more unfocused. The next record, “The Shroud of Elvis” is sort of all over the place…. some stones-y rock with the 2 guitars….some awkward attempts at a funk rock hybrid,  some really portentous songs, but some good ones.  I was listening to a lot of Television, Clash, Velvet Underground, Husker Du, Replacements...None of it really fit in with the Go Go stuff the way our earlier music had.  Having said that, the band was playing really well at this point, especially Judd.  Some of these tracks did come out pretty good.  In particular, I Don’t Love You, which is a total stones rip off, but is still kind of clever and catchy.  I also included Real Things which is closer to the stuff i was doing on my own, but the band and Matt sound great with it.

Judd quit at some point after that and was replaced by a guy named Mark Philips.  He was younger, more from a punk/post-punk background and, listening back, did not fit our sound as well as Judd.  I have some recordings with him, but i didn’t include them because they sounded really forced and the songs were also pretty bad.  

We did end up back in the studio one more time in 88 or 89 before the band finally broke up.  We did a lot of straight up go go in our shows but never recorded any, so we wanted to do that, and that is “This Joint Is Bumpin”…. i actually think it came out pretty good, for what it is, and was in the spirit of our early stuff in its own way.

I don’t remember exactly how and when the band broke up, but i think it was late ’88; early ’89.  I spent most of 89 working on my own music and i moved to LA at the end of that year.  

I hadn’t really much thought about the Young Caucasians (or my own music from that time)  since my life took other directions in the mid ‘90s  The band existed before i fell in love with chicago blues, or delta blues, or Erroll Garner, or took piano lessons, or listened to classical music or electronic music or latin music and so much more of what informs my tastes these days.  However,  I recently discovered forgotten tapes of the band and remembered what a big part of my life this music and these people were.  It was a very odd feeling.  It all sounded so alien but intimately familiar at the same time.  I feel a very strong sense of gratitude for all of it and I’m actually proud of a lot of it now.

At our best, we had no “artistic” motivation.  We just wanted to have the most fun, exciting show around and I believe we achieved that on many nights.  The recordings don’t really capture it, but I now enjoy them.  The ones on this playlist are my favorites in sort of chronological order.  It’s an odd journey.