... then came the ACCIDENT.
The band first came together -- by accident, if you will -- in the first few seconds of 1981 at a New Year's Eve party. In its first formation, the primary players were Thymme Jones (piano), Mike Greenlees (drums), and Jim Drummond (stream-of-consciousness vocals). For the next five years the band, in conjuction with a rotating cast of other additional musicians, defined their muse and worked their mojo through the release of several independ ently released cassettes. The band began making the occasional live appearance in the summer of 1987 with a trio of Chris Block (bass), Jeff Libersher (guitar), and Thymme Jones (drums).
In 1988 the trio recorded their first LP, SEVER ROOTS, TREE DIES, with producer Phil Bonnet at the helm. On their next effort, DUMB ASK, they enlisted the services of well-known studio agit ator Steve Albini (former member of Big Black, current member of Shellac, engineer of bands as disparate as Zeni Geva, Pixies, Whitehouse, Nirvana, and Brise-Glace); the result was successful enough to net them a multi-album contract with England's N eat Records. The same year, in light of their growing interest in dissonance and dissatisfaction with the limitations of the single-guitar format, they added Phil Bonnet as a second guitarist.
In June of 1991 they recorded their third LP, BABIES SHOULDN'T SMOKE, a harmonically and rhythmically challenging piece of work. The same lineup can also be heard on the Pravda compilation 20 E XPLOSIVE DYNAMIC SUPER SMASH HIT EXPLOSIONS!, deconstructing "Theme from Shaft".
1992 was a year of relentless productivity, in which the band recorded two full albums worth of material, but also a year filled with tension. Bassist Chris Block, increasingly unhappy with the band's ex panding boundaries, was asked to leave in June and was replaced by Dan Forden, whose presence led to several fruitful years with Cheer-Accident. In addition to his contributions to the live shows, he contributed to the nearly three hours of music tha t were recorded at that time.
In late 1993, Cheer-Accident -- with the help of Fred Krueger -- helped bring into existence the cable access show COOL CLOWN GROUND. In 1994, much to the surprise of all involved, the show's popu larity continued to grow significantly -- especially odd in light of the show's subject matter, which has ranged from an entire hour of Thymme Jones playing a single maraca, to four one-hour segments of the band annoying the homeless by playing a sin gle chord endlessly in a public park.
The band worked together again with Steve Albini in 1994 to record NOT A FOOD, a tight and confounding roadblack on the road to rock. This recording turned out to be possibly their best outing wit h Albini to date. In August of that year Forden married and retired from the band, to be replaced by ex-Flying Luttenbachers member Dylan Posa. In November they released THE WHY ALBUM, their sly (and eccentric) take on nominally Beatlesque pop ; this month also marked Posa's first live performance with the band.
The live shows suddenly became quite treacherous: much more physically demanding, with a dynamic range moving instantly between a whisper and a 140 dB shout. Posa's addition to the band introduced an ele ment of unbridled insanity, pointing the band in the direction of exploratory noise and "pointless theatrics," as evidenced by their appearance at the annual Skin Graft "Oops!" festival on July 14 and 15, 1995, where they performe d the ambient one-chord jam "Filet of Nod." In 1996 they actually got around to releasing NOT A FOOD on Pravda, to generally excellent critical reception.
In 1997 Cheer-Accident released their most riveting and ambitious album to date, ENDURING THE AMERICAN DREAM, a complex and highly-structured album in which dissonant trance noises move seamlessly into interludes of tweaked pop and impenetrable sound collages. At this point the main players are Phil Bonnet, Thymme Jones, Jeff Libersher, and Dylan Posa, with many guest appearances. With several more albums in the can and the support of an enth usiastic label in Pravda, their future as cryptic and byzantine musicologists should be assured, if not terribly predictable.
LATEST NEWS:
Cheer-Accident now have an official web site that you should visit. Since it now exists, I will not be updating the Cheer-Ax site here regularly anymore. It will remain here as a source of information for Cheer-Ax fans, but for more current and recent news that would be the place to go first from now on. Now that the site here is going into "archive mode," I probably won't be updating these pages again for six months to a year from now (the beginning of June, 2001).
OLDER NEWS:
For those of you not already aware, Cheer-Accident guitarist Phil Bonnet died unexpectedly on February 2, 1999, apparently of an aneurysm. The Slugs, a Chicago band who were good friends with Phil, have erected a tribute page at their site that I strongly recommend you to visit. I didn't know Phil very well, but the handful of times I had the opportunity to talk to him, he struck me as a funny, intelligent, and sincerely unpretentious kind of guy. I miss his email messages already. My condolences go out to the rest of the band and Phil's family.
An interesting document regarding Cheer-Accident's appearance at the final Lounge Ax show recently fell into my hands. Would you like to read it?