The Doughheads started near the end of my junior year at Northern Kentucky University. I worked in the radio/tv studio office booking time in the rooms along with Paul McDonald (BPK) and a ton of students who would come into the office and hang out, among them Doug Cribbs and Tim Eviston. One day I brought my guitar in to do some mucking about with recording for a class project I needed to do. What ended up happening is hard to explain, and much of it is utter crap. Good utter crap though, and I stand by that assessment.

Doug, Tim and I ended up in the radio production room and discovered plugging my guitar directly into the broadcasting board and cranked up all the way sounded rather like an electrified banjo (for lack of better description). We also had recently discovered that recording to a cart (old-school single-play tapes used in broadcasting – essentially the pro version of old 8-tracks) and feeding the signal back into itself generated a not-quite-unpleasant tape echo. So… I started playing, Tim banged on my guitar case for a beat, and Doug made up words in a bad British accent. The Doughheads were spawned. Genius material like “Plastic Money”, “The Slow Loris Song” and “Youth Out Of Place” were dragged into existence.

Later, the recording process got a little more refined down the hall in the new studios of WNKU, and a cast of others started mucking about with us in different planes of existence, and the band began to form characters. Doug was Bobby Manangus, I was Otis Spivey. Paul became Marci O’Schmitsky. Doug Duekker was Mad Angus Pa’gorney, Sarah Greek was Xerox Pink. I’m surely forgetting some, but some weird magic happened here, songs like “Black Lung”, “The World is So Beautiful”, “Living My Life in a Box”, “Dr. Ruth” and “The Spring Break Balcony Blues” all got committed to tape. There’s even video of some of this, I kid you not.

Alas – almost none of those songs seem to be in my archive, and that’s bizarre beyond all reason as I -know- I’ve got them on tape somewhere. I’ll have to keep digging, ’cause they need to be added to all this, if for no other reason that to remind me how goofy we could be, with the weird exception of “Plastic Money” that is in the playlist below, as is “Aborigines in Suburbia” which though technically wasn’t a Doughheads song, it was a multi-track experiment from that same time.

So, why then am I writing about this if so much is missing?

I was between jobs, trying to figure out what to do next since the freelance production market in Cincinnati had pretty much evaporated almost overnight, and I was working at the Crown Shoes store Paul was managing. Keep in mind, I had at this point worked as a grip and location sound recordist on sets in swamps, alleys, houses under construction – in short, all manner of places I could have been seriously injured – and never suffered a scratch.

Then some null unit delivering new display shelving managed to drop about two hundred pounds of the stuff off the back of the semi trailer onto my big toe and broke the hell out of it. Yay.

Which meant I was layed up for about a week and a half til the docs were ok with me doing a job that basically had me on my feet all day every day.

I was bored.

I had a studio.

I had recently discovered They Might Be Giants.

I think you know the rest. Me and some of the above cast along with Rob Henriquez, my then-girlfriend-soon-to-be-wife Jo, Paul, and a couple others contributed general weirdness to my exploding flurry of utter madness, including musings about shoe sales, and a super special guest appearance from one of my all-time heroes, physicist Julius Sumner Miller in “Intertia”.

Funny thing is, though – some of the tunes turned out not half bad. One day I might revisit some of the more solid tunes and -maybe- make them a little less bizarre. But probably not.