Fred Mills
March 21, 2007
They came, they saw, they destroyed—minds, morals and monsters, sometimes all at once. That was Detroit's legendary Destroy All Monsters, who shuddered into existence circa 1973 as a kind of twisted, avant-garde art project by University of Michigan students Cary Loren (vocals, guitar), Jim Shaw (guitar) and Mike Kelley (drums, tapes) and, eventually, fellow artist/singer Niagara —think Velvet Underground meets the Plastic Ono Band.
An underground outfit in every sense of the term, the group played around
the
In 1994 Kelley assembled a sprawling, wigged-out three-CD box set of the group's early years for Thurston Moore's Ecstatic Peace! Label, Destroy All Monsters 1974 1976. Now, against all odds, comes an actual Destroy All Monsters DVD, due April 24 from MVD Entertainment Group.
According to the label, "Grow Live Monsters is a selection
from short home-made no-budget 8mm, super 8 and 16mm film fantasies made between 1971-1976. Most of the films revolved around a group
of friends and the wall of noise they would create in basement cellars and in
live performance. This was Destroy All Monsters, one of the most avant-garde 'bands'
of all time. Featuring artists
The 90-minute DVD will feature the following material: MONSTERS REDUX:
outtakes, concert footage, band memorabilia, and photos; SHAKE A LIZARD TAIL or
RUST BELT RUMP: montage of late night TV ads; HOMETOWN HORRORS: Band photo and
production stills; DAM INVADES SEATTLE: performance footage from
Meanwhile, if you want to brush up on your Destroy All Monster lore, here's "A Manifesto of Ignorance," penned by Cary Loren in 1996, for one of HARP's favorite webzines, Perfect Sound Forever. It's reprinted here by the kind permission of PSF; for Loren's complete text, go to the original Perfect Sound Forever article.
destroy all monsters began as an
anti-rock band. our menagerie of words, images and
sounds were an attempt to thumb our noses at the pretentious circus of
rock-star bullshit and musical emptiness that filled the air-waves during the
early to mid-1970s. the images that moved us then were
a strange combination of film-noir, monster movies, psychedelia,
thrift-shop values and the relentless drone of a crazed popular culture. our
influences were a combination of audiovisual stimuli such as man ray, the
velvet underground and NICO, the hairy who, silver apples, captain beefheart, stanley mouse, SUN RA,
comix, stooges, beardsley,
and the mc5. we were mid-west art student loners
flying through time in a blur of art and noise. it"s predictable that it would take twenty years
to gain some perspective. our music sometimes
contained a narrative or storytelling direction that was never well explored. a sense of gloom, disaster and apocalypse mixed with doses
of anarchy, comedy and absurdity kept us together and were some of the major
themes which colored our small scene. our alienation
and heightened anxiety was a PSYCHOTRONIC view of life we each shared to
various degrees. i felt we
were creating sounds we wanted to exist but weren"t
to be found in the slick desolate landscape around us. with
virtually no audience and little support, we continued expressing our
end-of-times messages and outsider beliefs; a sort of paranoiac-critical garage
band. emerging from the
jim"s noise guitar added invaluable textures and a super-sonic resonance weaving throughout our jams. mike"s experimental sound-net meshed well with his sense of the comedic. my girlfriend at that time, niagara, also had a gift for grande black-comedy , her voice a blend of betty-boop and off-key nico. her scratchy violin playing was equally anti-musical but lent a strong visual statement. indeed her costuming, and ghostly-complexion helped lend the group a nightshade quality. we understood our limitations but as an underground band of mad-scientists we expected our delusions to expand and contaminate society. there was also the fact we were each strongly developed visual artists, sensitized to the decadent, theatrical, and off-beat. our constant flow of music, films, drawings, paintings, photographs, collages and magazines were a romantic imitation of an art movement in progress. the history of the band seems episodic, dreamy, and self-obsessed. i"ve often wondered at the possibilities if we had only been given more time and opportunity. although reflections of the past are a sad excuse for our DUST, the time now seemed right for some tolerance.
after mike and jim"s departure, our direction slowly progressed into the kind of a band we were originally in revolt over; it was an odd/sad demise to witness. replacing jim and mike with ben and larry miller in 1976 gave the new dam a more formal turn, but i felt we remained true to our abstract origins. the miller"s gave the band a focused, "refined" jazzy chaos, but within six months i had invited ronald asheton (stooges) and michael davis (mc5) to join and we had given up abstraction for power. it was a small bid for fame and fortune. asheton and davis were glorified deities in the rock pantheon, and we had envisioned a band that could blend experimentation with high energy. soon, dam totally lost it"s direction and became a raging fiery entity of out-of-control energies and egos. punk rock was at it"s apex and dam became aligned with it. niagara had soon turned her affections toward asheton which made for some awkward relations and powershifts within the group. there were a few high moments, but most of it lacked the sincerity and imagination of early dam. i had felt deceived and exploited by this later version of the band and within a year would be thrown out, with the miller brothers not far behind. dam continued on until 1985 as a typical tired power-pop band, a victim of it"s own excesses and flatulence. i hope not to distract from any of the successes of later dam, as the band had some exceptional moments captured on the singles released on the idbi label.
(Destroy All Monsters-Warhol photo courtesy MVD Entertainment Group)