When I was in junior high, my obsession with the granular data of popular music took on strange, pointless forms. I would listen to American Top 40 every weekend, and keep track of the rankings in a notebook. If I missed an episode, I would go to the library to look through issues of Billboard to see what action had happened in my absence. The rapid successes and dwindling fortunes of PM Dawn, Color Me Badd, or George Michael’s aching ballad “Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me” were somehow very important to my info-hungry mind. In 8th grade, I found an old childhood friend who was equally fixated on such things, and we started a new project: making a list of every single band that had a number in their name. I don’t remember what sparked this idea (maybe US3? their infectious single “Cantaloop”, which predicted my love of sample-based recontextadelia by many many years, was all the rage then), but we spent weeks swapping a wrinkled piece of paper that we filled every centimeter of with number band names.
It is quite an effort in pre-internet mental projection to imagine how we went about finding these names. The indexes of various library books were helpful, as was my growing collection of magazines and mailorder catalogues. A few other friends knew about our quest and would pitch in names as they came across them. Finding a new number band was a little thrill, the more mysteriously goofy the better. For a band to put a number in their name was like some dazzling magic trick, defying logic: 10,000 Maniacs? Preposterous. Front 242? Zany. Timbuk3? An ingenious pun. What did these bands sound like? We had no idea.
When this list-making ran out of steam, I kept the piece of paper for awhile, not knowing what to do with it. We’d put so much time into compiling all these names; it felt like an important document, not to be lost. Several of the names burnished themselves in my mind; more than any other, it was the longest name on the list that I couldn’t stop thinking about. Thinking Fellers Union Local 282. It didn’t just have a number, but also so many words. So hard to say; difficult to memorize, but then impossible to forget. That spelling of “Fellers”, so pleasurably odd to pronounce. Not knowing, at the time, the taxonomy of trade union organizations, the name seemed more like a jumbled run on sentence than the description of an actual thing. As the years went by and I got deeper into music, I would encounter fleeting references to the group; sometimes they were called TFUL282, which implied that enough people cared about them to shorten their name, the better to revere them. Entranced by ‘Daydream Nation’ and the endless lore of Sonic Youth, I’d see TFUL listed on bills they played. When I discovered old Matador catalogs, there they were, pressing at the margins next to even more confusingly-named bands like Bullet Lavolta and Bettie Serveert. The double-disc sampler the label released in 1997, ‘What’s Up Matador’, included one tantalizing Fellers tune: “My Pal The Tortoise”, a punky-poppy gem that charmed you quick with its chuggy beat and then ended just when you wanted more. What I couldn’t ever find, despite hours and hours spent scouring used CD stores, was a single Thinking Fellers album.
Now that I am old and presumably able to do what I want, when I want, I have at last scratched this ancient itch and procured myself a handful of TFUL records, mainly the recent reissues done by the Bulbous Monocle label, which are impeccably designed and restored with all the added archival oomph you could ask for. Last spring, I was in NYC making a mandatory visit to the incredible record store Human Head, when I came across a copy of TFUL’s Matador debut, ‘Lovelyville’, for the nice price, which I added to my obscene pile so quickly I almost forgot about it until I got home. After a couple of spins, I realized that this band waited for the adult version of me for a reason. There is simply no way I would have had the attention span or the referential vocabulary to unpack what they were doing when I was in high school.
Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 were a five-piece collective that relocated from Iowa, the nation’s alternative music breadbasket, to the Bay Area, the nation’s ergot-encrusted petri dish, in the late 1980s. They are the type of band where every member plays every instrument, and they all sing too, so it feels like you are listening to a new band on each song. Themes and ideas repeat, but you never hear the same sound. There’s usually an instrument listed that I Have Never Even Heard Of. What’s an erhu, for instance. Oh, its a Chinese spike fiddle. The influence of Captain Beefheart is here, in its ramshackle yet all-encompassing worldview that seeks to expand rock and roll to its breaking point, as well as the Fall, in that it feels literate but inscrutable at the same time. TFUL songs conjure up sentient objects that wield mysterious powers; philosophical tautologies are made flesh, and then mocked mercilessly. They share the papier-mache world building mentality of fellow Berkeley-freakers and run-on sentence crafters Caroliner. Some songs can have a sketchy, almost throwaway feel, only to lead into a gorgeous swirl of three guitar wizardry in an alien tuning. In the course of ‘Lovelyville’, one hears spoken word harangues, noisy garage raveups, delirious horn and fiddle drones, pounding detuned punk, inside jokey skits ala the Frogs or Ween, and moments of pure pop brilliance-in-the-rough that made 90s indie rock what it was, and makes their brief stint on Matador all make sense. They fit in nowhere, and thus everywhere: the gatefold flyer collage on their recent odds and ends compilation has them playing shows with Sonic Youth, Caroliner, and Cows, as well as with Operation Ivy, Crimpshrine, and the Mr. T Experience. What a band! I’m glad it took me so long to find them.