The Gizmos | Eddie Flowers | Interview | “I didn’t choose to be an outsider”

The DIY ethic of The Gizmos from Bloomington, Indiana predates pretty much everyone. The band released some of the most honest music from that period of time.

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The original 1976-1977 line-up reformed in 2014 and continues to perform. Eddie Flowers and Rich Coffee moved to Los Angeles in the late 1970s and became active in the underground rock scene there. Flowers started Crawlspace with members of the Lazy Cowgirls in 1985. Coffee sang and played in Thee Fourgiven and the Tommyknockers.

“I didn’t choose to be an outsider”

Where and when did you grow up? Was music a big part of your family life? Did the local music scene influence you or inspire you to play music?

Eddie Flowers: I was born August 8, 1957 in Jackson, Mississippi. My dad worked a construction job, which moved around a lot, so I had also lived in Texas, New Mexico, Arkansas, Maine, and other places by the time we settled in the small town of Jackson, Alabama (yes, another Jackson in a different state). That was in 1962 when I was five years old. My parents had no real interest in music—they had maybe a dozen LPs and a primitive self-contained mono record player with a heavy turntable that seemed like it was made of cement. I do remember my mom had LPs by Liberace, Roger Williams, Ferrante & Teicher, and a Frankie Laine LP called ‘Hell Bent for Leather’! (which I liked). But I had a brother who was nine years older, so he was a 60s teenager who had a handful of LPs that were very influential on my pre-teen mind: Otis Redding, Johnny Rivers, Jan and Dean, The Ventures, The McCoys, Dee Dee Sharp, Chubby Checker, Dave Brubeck, and a few others.

There was no music scene of any kind where I grew up. It was a dry county too—alcohol was illegal. But it was the 1960s! There was great music on the radio, TV, and seemingly everywhere in a casual way that modern kids can’t possibly understand. I remember doing ‘The Twist’ to a Chubby Checker record with a group of other kids on a school stage in first grade. The first LP I bought was ‘Wooly Bully’ by Sam The Sham & The Pharaohs when I was nine years old. When I turned 10 the next year—summer of 1967—I decided I was a teenager since my age was now in the double digits! I started saving my money for records. I was into comic books, but those were cheap, so the real challenge was buying LPs. My first favorite band was Paul Revere & The Raiders, who were on TV almost every weekday from 1965 to 1967 on Where The Action Is, an afternoon rock music show. I would rush home from school to tune into reruns of Superman from the 50s followed by Action. I started buying stuff by The Raiders, The Monkees, and The Beatles. But shortly before Christmas of 1967, I decided to buy ‘Freak Out!’ by The Mothers of Invention. My older brother, who had heard it in his Navy barracks, warned me it was the “worst record ever made.” That made me want it even more! It blew my mind! I was too young to understand a lot of it, but that didn’t matter at all. It was like a text book for music and weirdness. The list of Zappa’s favorite artists on the inside gatefold influenced me for decades.

In 1967, I also started buying rock magazines. First it was teen mags like 16 and Tiger Beat, which were marketed towards teenage girls. That didn’t do a lot for me. Then I discovered Hit Parader, a magazine about rock music aimed at musicians and serious listeners. That was soon followed by Teenset and Hullaballoo (soon to become Circus), which also wrote about the music itself and sometimes related counter-culture stuff. I was brainwashing myself totally! Before I hit my teen years, I had already found my way to The Lovin’ Spoonful, The Byrds, Bob Dylan, The Rascals, Cream, Hendrix, The Stones, and lots more. But because I was a pre-teen, I also dug Kasenetz-Katz Singing Orchestral Circus bubblegum music and The Cowsills. It was all rock to me. I discovered bargain bins, where I bought lots of cheap LPs from only a year or two earlier. A couple of older female cousins in Mississippi passed on stacks of 45s and 78s from their teen years in the late 50s and early 60s: Elvis, Bo Diddley, Little Walter, Little Richard, John Lee Hooker, Buddy Holly, Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, et cetera. I found out about the burgeoning fanzine scene in late 1970 from an article in Rolling Stone. I sent away for Greg Shaw’s Who Put The Bomp and Lenny Goldberg’s Stormy Weather. Both were then focused on 1950s rock ‘n’ roll. I started networking with other rock fanatics. Bomp printed letters with addresses. I was 13 by then. 1971 and ’72 were very important for me. In 1971, I bought ‘The Velvet Underground & Nico’ in a cut-out bin for 47 cents. Like Zappa and The Mothers four years earlier, it changed the way I heard music. A little later that same year, I got my first subscription to Creem, which came with a freebie of the MC5’s just released ‘High Time’. Boom! Lester Bangs and Richard Meltzer writing about rock music (and whatever else) blew my mind as much as the music. A primitive aesthetic started to form. In 1972, at age 14, I started writing for fanzines. The first was Teenage Wasteland Gazette edited by Andy Shernoff about a year before he started The Dictators. My life was now permanently warped! I had almost nothing in common with the people who surrounded me in small-town Alabama.

“The list of Zappa’s favorite artists on the inside gatefold influenced me for decades”

When did you begin playing music? What was your first instrument? Who were your major influences?

When I was 10 or 11, my parents bought me a cheap acoustic guitar, since I was so obsessed with music. My dad had played guitar casually in the 1930s, so he remembered how to tune it. He showed me a couple of chords, and I immediately wrote a couple of songs. This led to a supposed group with two of my cousins called The Young Americans, and then Lord Stenny & The Umberduck. My first name is Stenson (Eddie in the middle), hence Stenny, but I don’t remember where we got the made-up name Umberduck. Besides the guitar, I also had a tambourine. This would’ve been 1967 or ’68. It was just kids goofing off. In 1969/1970, I had another band of sorts with my friend David Rikard. We called it The Diesel Airplane. I had borrowed my cousin Tommy’s Silvertone guitar, which had an amp built into the case. I knew about feedback from side two of The Plastic Ono Band’s ‘Live Peace in Toronto 1969,’ so our theme song ‘Diesel Airplane’ was just learning the guitar against the guitar-case amp to create noise while we beat on a marching-band snare-tom, pot lids, and other debris. We had another song called ‘Lake Daddy Jim,’ which I actually re-wrote decades later in the 90s for my band Crawlspace. But that was as far as my musical career got before The Gizmos in 1976. I tried to take drum lessons, but I just couldn’t focus enough to make it happen. I saw myself as a writer—not a musician.

What kind of records, books and fanzines would we find in your teenage room?

Well, let’s say it was 1975 when I would’ve been 17/18. I was already three years into writing, so I was getting lots of promos and had connected with lots of people around the country. My favorite records then would’ve been ‘The Dictators Go Girl Crazy!,’ ‘Beserkley Chartbusters’ with Jonathan Richman and Earth Quake, Creme Soda’s ‘Tricky Zingers,’ Patti Smith’s first 45 and then ‘Horses,’ New York Dolls, MC5, Stooges, Velvet Underground, Flamin’ Groovies (their comeback Bomp 45 came out that year, and I had the two ‘Grease’ EPs on Skydog), Dr. Feelgood, Can, Captain Beefheart, Chess blues comps, Sun Records 45s, and lots more. I still read Rolling Stone, but it had gotten pretty bad and had been replaced by Creem as the standard for coverage of current rock music. Lots of fanzines came in the mail: Bomp, Jamz and The Rock Marketplace from Alan Betrock, Jymn Parrett’s Denim Delinquent, Phast Phreddie Patterson’s Back Door Man, John Bialas’ Boogie (a Mississippi zine I wrote lots of stuff for 1973-1975), Krazee Ken Highland’s Rock On! and Trash, Gary Sperrazza’s Shakin’ Street Gazette, Crescenzo Capece’s Cretinous Contentions, et cetera. I had a poster of The Flamin’ Groovies on my wall—a United Artists promo thing from 1972 or ’73. Next to that were 8×10 promo photos of The Dictators and Jonathan Richman. I was into science fiction, so I had lots of books from the usual guys: Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, Isaac Asimov, et cetera. I also liked H.P. Lovecraft a lot. And I had discovered Jack Kerouac’s On The Road the year before when Ken Highland gave me his beat-up high-school copy. I had a bunch of underground comics and current reprints of EC Comics from the 50s. Still picked up an occasional Marvel or DC too. I had a few rock books, but there weren’t too many around yet. The most useful was Lillian Roxon’s Rock Encyclopedia from 1970 or so.

You started writing your own fanzines when you were only 14 years old in 1972. Tell us about them. What kind of stuff did you write about? What were the names of the fanzines?

Well, I started writing for fanzines in 1972, like I mentioned before. But I didn’t really do my own, although I occasionally co-edited fanzines in the coming years. I think I covered most of this in an earlier question.

Tell us about Gulcher magazine… How did it all start?

My first trip away from Alabama on my own was in the summer of 1974. I was not quite 17 years old and had dropped out of high school earlier that year. I hated school, and my parents didn’t stop me. Bob Richert and Ken Highland came down from Bloomington, Indiana, to pick me up and then drive back to hang out with them. Bob was about ten years older than us and had started a fanzine in 1973 called Beyond Our Control in Bloomington. Ken and I both wrote for it. Ken was a year older than me, and when we started corresponding in 1972, we were both still in high school. He was in upstate New York in the small city of Brockport. He had a fanzine called Rock On! along with another student from their high school. I wrote for a couple issues of that zine too. After Ken graduated in 1974, he hitchhiked to Bloomington. So we all hung out in B-town for a week or so. Another fanzine writer Bob Morris hitched in from Michigan to hang. Ken, Bob Morris, and I then hitched to Chicago to meet up with some other writers. We almost had a little traveling fanzine convention, which had been a fantasy of mine—to actually meet some of these writers I knew through the mail. Anyway, a year after all this happened, I returned to B-town. Ken was now living there. I went up specifically to edit the first issue of Gulcher (#0). That was the summer of 1975, and we had subtitles on the cover that read “Search & Destroy!” and “The PunkSheet” (a reference to The Wius Tipsheet, an earlier college-radio zine Richert did). We put the MC5 on the cover. Contributors included Lester Bangs, Richard Meltzer, Metal Mike Saunders (later of the Angry Samoans), and edited letters to me from Cub Koda (Brownsville Station). Ken and I did a long, in-depth review of the first Dictators LP. I was excited when that first Gulcher came out—it brought together most of the stuff I cared about at the time. I heard through the grapevine that Lester Bangs raved about it to people, saying it was what Creem should be!

You were leading DIY style before everyone else…

Well, I was pretty early, but gotta give credit to Greg Shaw for kickstarting the whole fanzine movement at the beginning of the 70s. It’s like he promoted it so much that it opened up a Pandora’s box of frustrated teenagers who often wrote badly but with passion! You can draw a direct line from that to American punk-rock a few years later. I had my problems with Shaw, but you can’t deny his importance in the DIY world.

“Gulcher magazine led directly to the formation of The Gizmos”

And this led to the formation of The Gizmos?

Gulcher magazine led directly to the formation of The Gizmos. Ken Highland was already living in Bloomington when I went up to help Bob Richert put together the first issue of Gulcher. After a year in B-town, Ken was fed up with rock music and hippies, so he decided to follow in his late father’s footsteps and join the U.S. Marine Corps. I thought he was nuts! But before he left, Bob wanted to release some of Ken’s cassette recordings as a 7-inch EP. Ken countered that offer by suggesting they put together a band and make a brand new record. That became The Gizmos. It was all based around Ken’s songwriting, but he was generous in bringing in other contributors. Ken and I had talked about forming a band in 1974 called The Rockabilly Yobs (after a line from a T. Rex song). We even wrote a couple of songs then. One of them was ‘Chicken Queen,’ which became one of the four songs on the first Gizmos EP. So I was automatically part of this instant band. Next was Ted Niemiec, a student at Indiana University in B-town. He had met Ken and Bob because he read Gulcher magazine and eventually wrote for it too. He had a goofy song called ‘Muff Divin USA’ that he had written with his college roommate and set to the music from Chicago’s ‘Saturday in the Park’! Ken took the lyrics and re-wrote it as a raunchy garage-rocker called ‘Muff Divin (in Willkie South)’.

Willkie South was the dorm where Ted lived on campus. The rest of The Gizmos were from a hard-rock band out of Highland, Indiana, called Cerberus. Ken had jammed with them. Their leader was Rich Coffee, a guitarist and vocalist who ended up being the fourth of the main creative Gizmos members. The other Cerberus guys were Dave Sulak (bass), Rick Czajka (guitar), and Jim DeVries (drums). They came down to practice with Ken and me in Bob Richert’s apartment, and the next day we recorded six songs (two outtakes) at Home Grown Studios, which was just a bedroom in a dude’s house. Ted had met the Cerberus guys the night before, but hadn’t practiced with us because noise complaints got us shut down twice, with a warning that a third visit would result in an arrest. Oh yeah, and there was a background singer Davey Medlock, who was a friend of Bob Richert. It was all done very fast—recorded live to a stereo tape. No overdubs possible.

The band was located in Bloomington, Indiana, but you were from southern Alabama?

Yep. I already covered most of that earlier. I visited Bloomington four different times—once a year from 1974 to 1977. I really like that the Gizmos were the first Indiana punk band, but Ken only lived there for a year, and I lived in Alabama. I spent up to a month or so at a time there, but I would just crash at Richert’s place and go back to my parents in Alabama. Now I’m living in Bloomington! Life is very strange!

What were some of the first gigs you played? What venues did you play and what were some other bands that you shared stages with?

The original Gizmos only played two shows: two nights at the Monroe County Public Library in 1977 with MX-80 Sound opening (?!). But I was so sick that I could barely talk, so I didn’t perform at all. Except for singing at a drunken teenage party in 1976 with The Gizmos, I didn’t perform live until Crawlspace started playing shows in 1987 in L.A. Weird, huh?

The Gizmos came together in early 1976 as a recording project and recorded three EPs, which were released in ’76, ’77, and ’78. What are some of the strongest memories from writing, recording and releasing those three EPs?

The 1976 sessions were fun! I was in B-town for a few weeks. Ken, Bob, and I interviewed Patti Smith a few days before the sessions happened. Best of all, I discovered the great MX-80 Sound because they opened for her. Ken and I would cruise around town in my 1968 Mercury Montego with my newly acquired cassette deck blasting an MC5 live tape, Yoko Ono, Sir Lord Baltimore, The Dictators, The Velvet Underground, Hackamore Brick, Creme Soda, and various mix tapes I made long before I ever heard the term mixtape. There was a crazy teenage party in Highland, Indiana, with Rich Coffee, Cerberus, and their friends. Somebody got a keg of beer. I got very drunk for the first time in my life.

The Gizmos played the six originals we had. Cerberus played endless covers, ranging from the MC5 to Santana. After the sessions, Ken and I split for points east. He was headed for the Marines and wanted to visit his family in upstate New York. I just wanted to see stuff and meet new people. We drove through Ohio, where we stopped to meet two high-school girls. We walked through the school halls like we were students. Then up through Pennsylvania to New York state till we got to Brockport, Ken’s hometown. Saw Patti Smith again because she was playing at the university there. Made out and felt up a Brockport chick while we watched Saturday Night Live with Richard Pryor on TV. Went to Armand Schaubroeck’s already legendary House of Guitars in nearby Rochester, where we met Greg Prevost and Armand’s brother Bruce. Eventually ended up in New York City, where we stayed a couple days with Solomon and Jay Gruberger, who’d had a living-room band with Ken called O. Rex. I played drums and we recorded a bunch of primitive garage-punk. Lots of weird stuff on that trip. A year later, for the 1977 sessions, I drove up from Alabama with Russell Desmond, a fanzine writer from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He edited an excellent fanzine called Can’t Buy A Thrill. But the sessions were fragmented and weird. I got sick and almost lost my voice, although I still sang on a couple of tracks. I had a song called ‘Hey Beat Mon!’ and we convinced Rich Stim from MX-80 Sound to play sax on it. Ken didn’t show up until the last day of recording, so only appeared on two songs, even though he wrote most of what we recorded. Bob Richert convinced Johnny Cougar (Mellencamp) to come record one of his songs with The Gizmos. I had reviewed his first LP in some magazine and gave it a mediocre review, saying he was a Springsteen imitator. He hated me—haha! So I boycotted the session—just walked out of the studio. The song was such crap that it only appeared on a CD comp that came out in 2000. The first EP got lots of underground attention. We were reviewed in Creem, and appeared on The Sounds alternative chart in the UK right between Alex Chilton and The Saints. The second and third EPs came during the deluge of 1977/78, and didn’t get as much attention. They also, frankly, weren’t as good as the first.

What runs through your mind hearing ‘Muff Divin’ / That’s Cool / Mean Screen / Chicken Queen,’ ‘Amerika First,’ and ‘World Tour’ today?

I dunno. The songs—mostly written by Ken Highland alone or collaborating with others—were all good. They are very teenage and kinda goofy. But that was always what it was about—humorous songs delivered totally straight and with as much passion as we could muster.

Just like The Dictators and Ramones. Except we hadn’t heard Ramones when the first EP was recorded because their first LP wasn’t out yet.

What kind of gear, effects, pedals, amps did you have in the band?

I wasn’t a musician, so I didn’t pay much attention. But I do remember in 1976 that Ken was playing a baby blue Fender Mustang through a tiny Alamo amp that he blew out while recording the EP.

What led to the reunion in 2014?

There had been discussion between the four main Gizmos—Ken, Rich, Ted, and me—for a while. Ted was especially hyping the idea on the old Goner Records message board. I guess what got the revival going was Bob Richert releasing Gizmos CDs on Gulcher starting in the early 2000s. This led to some good press and mentions on the newly emerging internet. My favorites were long pieces in a Memphis mag called Cimarron Weekend and in Chicago’s Horizontal Action (the mag that led to HoZac Records). Our underground reputation took off in the internet age. We had a couple of misfires before finally returning in 2014. It happened because of the combined efforts of Max Damata, who was a visiting professor at Indiana University from Italy, and Seth Mahern from the band Apache Dropout and Magnetic South, which was then a label and studio in Bloomington. Max was also a garage-punk fanatic, who played in his own Italian band Sonic Daze, and played bass for the first three Gizmos reunion shows. After that, we were fortunate to have Craig Bell on bass for the rest of the 2014 Midwestern shows and two in 2015. Craig had been in the legendary Rocket From The Tombs and Mirrors, two Cleveland bands from the pre-punk 70s.

You now live in LA? How do you like it there?

Nope, I now live in Bloomington. I moved here in 2018 after living in L.A. since 1979. I loved L.A. when I first visited in 1977 and then for a while after I moved there two years later, but by the time I left, I hated it. I was living in poverty and mired in deep depression. L.A. was getting more expensive, but also getting more unlivable. The homeless situation was out of hand and I hear it’s only gotten worse. I was briefly homeless myself. The reformation of The Gizmos in 2014 kinda saved my life. I visited Indiana a few times and loved it. It was relaxed and friendly. People appreciated that I was from The Gizmos. That never meant anything in L.A. Almost every young punk in the Midwest has at least heard of The Gizmos. I don’t miss L.A. at all, but I’m glad I was there up through the mid-90s.

After The Gizmos you had a band in LA called Crawlspace that existed from 1985 to 2015. Can you elaborate on the formation of this band?

When I moved to L.A., the intention was to put together a band with my fellow ex-Gizmo Rich Coffee. We were roommates at first and practiced a few times, but it just never came together. The other musician we found for our proposed band was Bill McCarter, who I had met in 1977 when I was in Bloomington for The Gizmos. He had moved to L.A. too. I was talking to Richard Meltzer and he told me somebody who knew me had given him a cassette of demos. It was Bill. Meltzer gave me Bill’s phone number and we re-connected. Bill and I kept hanging out and getting drunk together after the planned band with Rich disappeared. Wrote a few songs, but still didn’t get anything going. In 1981, Steve Wynn came by my house to jam with us once not long before he formed The Dream Syndicate. And we played once with Greg Davis, who went on to form Blood On The Saddle. That time we had a bass player and drummer from a band called Gloria, who soon morphed into the Lazy Cowgirls with a different drummer. The bass player was Keith Telligman, and the new drummer was Allen Clark. These guys were also from Indiana. It’s odd how much The Hoosier connection ran throughout my life. In 1985, I convinced Keith and Allen to join Bill and me to form a new band. They were still very much in the Cowgirls, but were itching to do something weirder and looser. It was a perfect match. I already had a few songs, some dating back to the later Gizmos days. By 1987, we had a lead guitarist Mark McCormick, who was from Vincennes, Indiana, the same small city the Lazy Cowgirls and Bill McCarter came from. On bass was an L.A. guy Lenny Keringer, who later played with The Creamers and then the Cowgirls after Keith and Allen’s time with that band. We started playing shows in 1987 and then recorded our first stuff in 1988. There were three tracks used for a comp called ‘Gimme The Keys,’ and then a 7-inch EP called ‘Silent Invisible Conversation’ released by David Laing’s Grown Up Wrong! label in Australia. In 1989, we put out our first LP as a co-release from Behemoth Records in Las Vegas and another label I won’t mention because the guy who ran it was a thieving idiot. That was ‘In The Gospel Zone’.

By the beginning of 1990, the band had rearranged quite a bit. Allen Clark had been replaced by a young drummer named Bob Lee, who went on to play with Claw Hammer, Mike Watt, and tons of other people. Joe Dean had replaced Lenny’s Ramones-like approach to bass playing with a style steeped in prog-rock, post-punk, and “krautrock.” Oh yeah, in between Lenny and Joe, we had Sarge Adam on bass for a short period—he was also in a crazy trash-punk band called Fearless Leader with Allen. Mark McCormick and Keith Telligman remained on guitars, but Bill McCarter was gone. We were quickly heading towards an all-improv format. Free rock, you could call it. We were very into free jazz and the most outside psychedelic sounds. Punk and garage-rock had been almost totally stripped from the music by then. We had always been into Can—we covered ‘Little Star of Bethlehem’ on the first LP—but we started paying more attention to “krautrock” as a whole. We had released a couple of singles on Sympathy for the Record Industry, and in 1992, our next major release ‘Sphereality’ came out on Sympathy. It was our first CD, and we took advantage of the extended format by including four long tracks, the last being just over half an hour nonstop. Eventually, Keith and Bob left. They were replaced by guitarist Dave Fontana and drummer Greg Hajic, who were old friends of Joe’s from his 1970s prog days in Santa Barbara. Allen Clark returned, but instead of playing drums, he was playing trumpet, Casio keyboard, and various percussion instruments—adding color to the band. It was a good lineup while it lasted, but I got very discouraged after a bad romantic break-up in 1994 and the dwindling support we had in the L.A. club scene, which was then dominated by what I saw as pointless recycling of punk-rock and some very annoying power-pop type things. I had very little patience for most rock music at that point. I hated grunge. It was getting very repetitive to me. So Crawlspace ended as a live band, and didn’t return till 2009.

By the way, let me mention psychedelics here! I mean, LSD and psilocybin mushrooms—not music styles. They had a HUGE impact on Crawlspace. When we started in 1985, Keith, Allen, and I had just begun exploring acid, albeit speed-laced crazy shit that produced vivid horrific hallucinations. But we were sick enough to dig it! Eventually, though, we found a connection to very clean but also very powerful LSD from a weird dude we met who was somewhere in between a Deadhead and a speed-freak Motörhead fan. Our world was turned upside down. By the end of the 80s, I had shifted from the intensely focused punk-rock misanthropy of 1979/80 to something approaching universal love. Haha! I remember going to see my old buddies the Angry Samoans after dropping acid, and it was like the two things cancelled out each other. The punk didn’t sound very exciting, and the acid didn’t seem to be working. As soon as I walked out of the club, I felt immense waves of relief and a sense of possibilities—tripping hard and realizing life had changed. I guess I was growing up!? But I didn’t fit into square society any more than I ever had. In fact, I felt myself moving ever outward. We knew a guy who grew ’shrooms in the 90s, so that became a pretty regular source of ritual cleansing and spiritual unfolding. Broadly speaking! I’m a deep non-believer, so I never saw any gods outside of the general human comedy. I still occasionally trip, but it’s not the same thing. The doors have been open for a long time.

But Crawlspace didn’t end after we stopped playing live in 1994. It just became a recording project with an ever-shifting loose-knit group of musicians. I started playing guitar, synthesizer, percussion, and whatever. Everything was up in the air. We released a couple of LPs on Majora Records, a label I loved because of the amazing Sun City Girls records they were putting out. Those were ‘The Exquisite Fucking Beauty Of Crawlspace’ and ‘The Dark Folds Of Infinity Grow Pink With Desire’. Then came many years of releasing stuff and exploring sound in many ways—from feedback-drenched noise to manipulating blank tapes to literally banging on the walls of my house—lots of ambient recordings, playing with toy instruments, taping down the keys on synthesizers so they would drone while we passed the bong, et cetera. By 2000, it was basically Greg Hajic, Joe Dean, and me playing an ever-increasing number of instruments and non-instruments. Bob Lee would sometimes play drums with us too. The four of us made up the lineup when we returned to live action in 2009. We kept playing shows up through 2015. Grady Runyan joined us on second guitar in 2010, I think. Grady was in some great bands like Monoshock and Liquorball. It made for a potent two-guitar attack. But it didn’t last long. At this point, I was going through some very difficult times, which included a short period on the street and in a homeless shelter before three days locked up in a mental hospital. I remember being on the phone in the hospital telling one of the guys to NOT cancel an upcoming show because I’d be out soon. I found places to stay, but I was in a very bad mental state. I found the bad side of being on the eternal outside of normal life. The band continued playing shows and releasing CDs through Bob Richert’s revived Gulcher label. Greg and Grady both left at different times, although Grady returned. We also had Jonathan Hall and Richard Jones on guitars during that later period. Bob Lee brought in John Collinson as a second drummer and percussionist, which created an interesting new dynamic. And there are a couple of other people who came and went briefly—I’m straining to even remember names. Like I said, I was NOT mentally together during this period. It all ended in 2015 with a 30th anniversary show at Cafe NELA. Instead of playing free, like we usually did, we played a set of our “hits” from over the years. I remember somebody in the audience yelling out, “When are you gonna get freaky?!” I guess we were confused to the very end. We did play one more show without Joe Dean, which felt kinda weird and untogether. That was also at NELA in early 2016 by request of our friend Chris Guttmacher for his farewell-to-L.A. show. Chris played drums with Cul De Sac in the 90s and ran Blue Bag Records, where he had played an in-store show a couple years earlier. But Crawlspace was over.

You released countless albums and I think there’s not enough written about your albums, which were always done in a warm DIY style. From your early starts playing acid punk to later experimental works. Would it be possible for you to make a longer essay about the albums you recorded, its differences, how the band evolved et cetera?

That’s really difficult. There’s just so much stuff. We released 74 different things over almost thirty years—LPs, 7-inch records, one 10-inch, CDs, CDRs, cassettes, tracks on comps, and a VHS videotape. It’s a big mess of stuff! I don’t even own all of it myself any more. Strangely, we do have a new CD on Weird Cry Records out of Ojai, California. Release number 75! It’s unreleased stuff we recorded in 1997/98. The title is ‘The Burning At Midnight’. It’s on Bandcamp.

What about Wax-Lip-Swamp-Dub?

That came about when I was visiting Bloomington in 2016 to do a 40th anniversary Gizmos show along with the later Dale Lawrence version of The Gizmos (which included no original members—another long weird story) and Dow Jones And The Industrials. (Side note: Greg Horn, the main guy behind Dow Jones, just passed away. RIP). The Wax-Lip stuff was recorded at Magnetic South with John Dawson (Thee Open Sex/co-owner of Magnetic South), Tyler Damon (Open Sex and lots of improv stuff), Will Staler (Purple 7 at the time), and Eric Weddle (owner of Family Vineyard Records in Indianapolis). WLSD was free-form swamp-rock! Tony Joe White lives! We also played a couple of live shows in 2016 before I returned to L.A. When I moved here in 2018, I finally decided to get the studio stuff released and play some more shows. The cassette—Eddie Flowers & The Wax-Lip – ‘Swamp-Dub’—came out in 2019 from Long Gone Sound System, a label in Indianapolis run by Mark Tester (Burnt Ones/Creeping Pink), Jordan Allen (Crazy Doberman/Mere Man), and Landon Caldwell (Creeping Pink). Then my old bud Byron Coley got it released on LP through Feeding Tube Records in early 2020. We played about ten shows over a year or so—every time with a different lineup. But among the semi-regulars were Mark McWhirter (from The Cowboys and later in my band Heavy Mother) and Craig Bell.

This brings us to Heavy Mother, a return to basic punk-infused rock ‘n’ roll. You released your first LP in December. Tell us about it.

I wanted to form a straight-ahead R&R band when I moved to Bloomington in 2018. It was fun doing The Gizmos shows and having people enjoy us. Crawlspace was never a real crowd-pleaser—haha! It alienated as many people as it attracted. I just wanted to have fun! When I first got here, I was at a show for ABC Gum at the Bishop. I went behind the club to smoke some pot when Mark McWhirter walked up. He was in ABC Gum and The Cowboys, who had opened the very first Gizmos reunion show in 2014—oddly, also at the Bishop. We smoked a joint and started talking about writing some songs together, which we did. But Mark was busy with two bands, so it was hard to get anything going. We did have a couple of lineups which practiced a couple times in 2018 and then again in 2020, but the second was especially doomed because it was in the middle of the pandemic. Finally, in early 2021, we got a lineup together and started practicing regularly in my basement. That was Mark on guitar, Clarke Joyner on drums, and Will Staler on bass. Plus me on vocals, of course. We practiced for a few months before Will had to split. So we got Zack “Chode” Worcel, the bass player from The Cowboys. It was perfect! We worked up a solid set of mostly originals, with a few favorite cover songs like ‘Louie Louie’ and Eddie Holland’s ‘Leaving Here’. We played our first show in July 2021, once again at the Bishop. Over the next 15 months, we played 20 shows in Bloomington, Indianapolis, Fort Wayne, Cincinnati, and Columbus, Ohio. Unfortunately, Mark moved to Mexico in November of last year. ‘This Time Around,’ our LP on Feel It Records, came out the next month. We played our first show since last October on March 11 with a new guitarist named Pete Doyle. We are back in action!

The EP is also being released as we speak.

Yeah, we have a brand new cassette called ‘Comical Uncertainty,’ again from Feel It Records in Cincinnati. It has six songs clocking in at 26 minutes—a couple of longer jams on there, including a live take on The Velvets’ ‘Foggy Notion’ with Craig Bell playing rhythm guitar. It’s all stuff we recorded with Mark McWhirter before he left town.

What was the highlight of your time in the band?

Heavy Mother is still happening, so I’m not looking back very much so far! But one of my favorite shows was a house show in Indy last year. A big basement packed with young punk-rockers who seemed to dig us a lot. It was run by a very cool young woman Susie Sullivan, who was part of the Big Hog crowd of young punk-rockers I befriended when I moved here in 2018. The other band that night was the Pops, fronted by Connor Martin. He had another called Skull Cult, which has achieved worldwide notoriety among the HC/lo-fi punk underground, and he also played drums in Big Hog. Another special show was in Fort Wayne, Indiana, last autumn. That was with Craig Bell & the Dead Man’s Handle, and a groovy young Fort Wayne garage-punk-pop band called Namen Namen. It was packed, including a big group of people from a wedding party. Two very drunk young women at the side of the stage offered me a big inflatable penis, obviously from the party. I shook my head no, and put my hand on my crotch. “That’s okay, I’ve got my own.” They laughed. It was a fun show! I like all of our songs. I don’t really know what to say beyond that. Most of them are about real experiences or observations from my life, including three or four that came from the pandemic lockdown madness. Most I co-wrote with Mark McWhirter, but a couple I did on my own. I know three chords! And one of the songs from the new cassette, ‘Psychic Attitude,’ is a song by our bass player Zack “Chode” Worcel that I re-wrote the lyrics for.

Is there any unreleased material by any of your projects?

There’s tons of unreleased Crawlspace, but it’s not organized at all, and a fair amount of it is on media that’s no longer easily transferable. I was surprised when I found that an unreleased CD, which I mentioned earlier, has just been released by Weird Cry Records.

What else currently occupies your life?

Not a lot! I’m officially retired, I guess. I scrape by on Social Security and waste my time as I see fit. I’ve almost always lived for my art, broadly speaking. Much of so-called normal life still puzzles and eludes me, although I have no grudge against people who make that work. In fact, I think we need them! Without a stable society, beatniks like me don’t have much of a context within which to exist. Not to mention the resources to make things happen. There is way too much supposed weirdness in the modern world. It’s fake—it’s fashion—it will pass. I didn’t choose to be an outsider. The outside chose me. But don’t be foolish—keep your eyes open.

Let’s end this interview with some of your favourite albums. Have you found something new lately you would like to recommend to our readers?

Oh man! That’s gonna be a very long list. As for new stuff, I kinda lost track again after working on reconnecting with new music from 2014 to 2019—the period of The Gizmos comeback and me editing a fanzine called Vulcher (with Kelsey Simpson and Sam Murphy, younger folks who played in some of the reunited Gizmos bands). The lockdown really fucked with my head, and I’m having a hard time focusing on new stuff right now. But I will list some of my fairly recent faves up front—like within the past ten years or so. It’ll be obvious when I get to the earlier stuff. I’m only gonna list one record by each artist or this will go on forever! This is in no particular order.

Thee Open Sex [first LP]
Tropical Trash—’Southern Indiana Drone Footage’
Model Zero [self-titled LP]
ABC Gum [self-titled LP]
The Cowboys—’The Bottom of a Rotten Flower’
Skull Cult [self-titled LP]
Big Hog—’Flower’
Protruders—’Poison Future’ [12-inch EP]
Itchy Self—’Here’s the Rub’ [12-inch EP]
The Stools—’When I Left’ [7-inch EP]
Sex Tide—’Possession Sessions’
Weeping Bong Band [self-titled LP]
Civic—’New Vietnam’ [12-inch EP]
Matrix [self-titled 7-inch EP]
Warm Bodies [12-inch EP]
Jimi Hendrix Experience—’Electric Ladyland’
Pink Floyd—’The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’
The Stooges—’Fun House’
MC5—’Kick Out the Jams’
The Velvet Underground—’White Light/White Heat’
Captain Beefheart & the Magic Band—’Trout Mask Replica’
The Mothers of Invention—’Freak Out!’
Various Artists— ‘Zappéd’
Ornette Coleman Double Quartet—’Free Jazz’
Albert Ayler Trio—’Spiritual Unity’
The Art Ensemble of Chicago—’Fanfare for the Warriors’
Sun Ra & his Solar Arkestra—’The Magic City’
Miles Davis—’In a Silent Way’
John Coltrane—’Interstellar Space’
Pharoah Sanders—’Black Unity’
Archie Shepp—’The Magic of Ju-Ju’
Charles Mingus—’Blues & Roots’
Otis Redding—’Dictionary of Soul’
Sly & the Family Stone—’There’s a Riot Goin’ On’
James Brown—’It’s a Mother’
Funkadelic—’Maggot Brain’
Parliament—’Mothership Connection’
Doug Snyder & Bob Thompson—’Daily Dance’
Can—’Ege Bamyasi’
Neu!—’’75’
Faust [first LP]
Cluster—’II’
Amon Düül II—’Phallus Dei’
MX-80 Sound—’Big Hits’ [7-inch EP]
Pere Ubu—’The Modern Dance’
Jerry Lee Lewis—’Live at the Star Club’
The Allman Brothers Band at Fillmore East
The Grateful Dead—’Anthem of the Sun’
13th Floor Elevators—’Easter Everywhere’
Country Joe & the Fish—’Electric Music for the Mind and Body’
Love—’Forever Changes’
The Scientists—’Blood Red River’ [12-inch EP]
Bill Orcutt—’Untitled’
B.O.R.B.—’Trailer Full of Smoke’
Skullflower—’Transformer’
Sun City Girls—’Torch of the Mystics’
Ascension—‘LP’
Gibson Bros.—’Memphis Sol Today!’
Opal—’Happy Nightmare Baby’
Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band
Mott the Hoople—’Brain Capers’
David Bowie—’The Man Who Sold the World’
T. Rex—’Electric Warrior’
Slade—’Alive!’
Sweet—’Strung Up’
Faces—’Long Player’
The Pink Fairies—’Kings of Oblivion’
10cc—’Sheet Music’
ABBA—’Waterloo’
The Soft Boys—’Give It to the Soft Boys’ [7-inch EP]
The Fall—’Early Years 77-79′
Public Image Ltd.—’Second Edition’
Sex Pistols—’Never Mind the Bollocks’
The Damned—’Damned Damned Damned’
The Saints—’Eternally Yours’
Angry Samoans—’Back from Samoa’
Fear—’The Record’
The Dictators ‘Go Girl Crazy!’
The New York Dolls—’Too Much Too Soon’
Ramones [first LP]
AC/DC—’Highway to Hell’
Grand Funk Railroad—’Live Album’
Blue Cheer—’Vincebus Eruptum’
Blue Öyster Cult—’Tyranny and Mutation’
Sir Lord Baltimore—’Kingdom Come’
Dust [first album]
Black Sabbath—’Master of Reality’
Alice Cooper—’Killer’
Led Zeppelin [IV]
The Animals—’Animalism’
The Troggs—’Wild Thing’
The Creation—’How Does It Feel to Feel’
The Misunderstood—’Before the Dream Faded’
The Who—’Sell Out’
Small Faces [first LP]
The Beatles—’Rubber Soul’
Having a Rave-Up with the Yardbirds
The Shadows of Knight—’Back Door Men’
The Seeds—’A Web of Sound’
The Sonics—’Explosives’
The Move—’Shazam’
Fairport Convention—’Unhalfbricking’
The Byrds—’The Notorious Byrd Brothers’
John Cale—’Slow Dazzle’
Big Star—’Radio City’
Chuck Berry—’One Dozen Berrys’
Huey “Piano” Smith & his Clowns—’Having a Good Time’
Lee Dorsey—’The New Lee Dorsey’
Steppenwolf—’The Second’
Spirit—’Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus’
Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band—’Gorilla’
Nilsson—’Son of Schmilsson’
The Beach Boys—’Smiley Smile’
The Monkees—’Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd.’
Paul Revere & the Raiders—’Midnight Ride’
Kasenetz—’Katz Super Circus’
Big Brother & the Holding Company—’Cheap Thrills’
Bob Dylan—’Highway 61 Revisited’
The Lovin’ Spoonful—’Hums of the Lovin’ Spoonful’
John B. Sebastian [first LP]
Moby Grape [first LP]
Buffalo Springfield Again
Neil Young with Crazy Horse—’Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere’
Crazy Horse [first LP]
The Holy Modal Rounders—’The Moray Eels Eat the Holy Modal Rounders’
The Fugs First Album
John Fahey—’Volume 4: The Great San Bernardino Birthday Party & Other Excursions’
Michael Hurley—’First Songs’
Fred Neil—’Bleecker & MacDougal [aka Little Bit of Rain]’
Sandy Bull—’Inventions’
Cosmic Invention—’Help Your Satori Mind’
Fushitsusha—’Allegorical Misunderstanding’
High Rise II
The Birthday Party—’Prayers on Fire’
Butthole Surfers—’Locust Abortion Technician’
Tav Falco’s Panther Burns—’Behind the Magnolia Curtain’
Roky Erickson and the Aliens [first LP]
Black Oak Arkansas—’Raunch ‘n’ Roll Live’
Various Artists—’Nuggets’
Sam the Sham & the Pharaohs—’Wooly Bully’
The Stalk-Forrest Group—’St. Cecilia: The Elektra Recordings’
Hackamore Brick—’One Kiss Leads to Another’
The Flamin’ Groovies—’Teenage Head’
The Rolling Stones—’Beggars Banquet’
Family—’Music in a Doll’s House’
The Kinks—’Something Else’
The Butterfield Blues Band—’East-West’
Quicksilver Messenger Service—’Happy Trails’
Gene Vincent and his Blue Caps—’The Bop That Just Won’t Stop’ (1956)
Elvis Presley—’The Sun Sessions’
Warren Smith—’The Legendary Sun Performers’
Dock Boggs—’Country Blues’
Jimmie Rodgers—’My Rough and Rowdy Ways’
Hank Williams—’24 of Hank Williams’ Greatest Hits’
Robert Johnson—’King of the Delta Blues Singers’
Muddy Waters—’Hard Again’
John Lee Hooker—’The Folk Lore of John Lee Hooker’
Jimmy Reed—’I’m Jimmy Reed’
Hound Dog Taylor and the House Rockers [first LP]
Howlin’ Wolf [rocking chair LP]
Bo Diddley’s Beach Party
Johnny Winter—’Second Winter’
The Doors—’Morrison Hotel’
Roger Miller—’Golden Hits’
Waylon Jennings—’Dreaming My Dreams’
Willie Nelson—’Shotgun Willie’
Gary Stewart—’Your Place or Mine’
Joe Ely—’Honky Tonk Masquerade’
Merle Haggard and the Strangers—’Songs I’ll Always Sing’
Schoolly D—’Smoke Some Kill’
Boogie Down Productions—’By All Means Necessary’
Beastie Boys—’Licensed to Ill’
Public Enemy—’Yo! Bum Rush the Show’
LL Cool J—’Radio’
De La Soul—’3 Feet High and Rising’
Armand Schaubroeck Steals—’Ratfucker’
Patrick Sky—’Songs That Made America Famous’
Johnny Burnette and the Rock ’n Roll Trio—’Tear It Up’
Carl Perkins & NRBQ—’Boppin’ the Blues’
Brownsville Station—’Yeah!’
Creedence Clearwater Revival—’Cosmo’s Factory’
Creme Soda—’Tricky Zingers’
Hawkwind—’In Search of Space’
The Red Crayola with the Familiar Ugly—’The Parable of Arable Land’
Fifty Foot Hose—’Cauldron’
Gong—’Magick Brother’
Amon Düül—’Psychedelic Underground’
The Godz—’Contact High’
Kak—’Kak-Ola’
The Rascals—’Time Peace: The Rascals’ Greatest Hits’
The Modern Lovers [first LP]
The Monks—’Black Monk Time’
The Shaggs—’Philosophy of the World’
X-Ray Spex—’Germfree Adolescents’
Meat Puppets—’In a Car’ [7-inch EP]
Terry Riley—’Reed Streams’
Tapper Zukie—’Man Ah Warrior’
U-Roy—’Dread in a Babylon’
Various Artists—’The Harder They Come’
Sonny Sharrock—’Monkey-Pockie-Boo’
Group Bombino—’Guitars of Agadez Vol. 2′
Rocket From The Tombs—’Life Stinks’
The Screamin’ Mee-Mees—’Live from the Basement!’ [7-inch EP]
Various Artists—’Anthology of American Folk Music’ [Harry Smith’s compilation]
every version of ‘Louie Louie’ EVER!

And I’m gonna stop now or this will literally never end! Hope you can use this list—doubt I can get it any shorter….

Klemen Breznikar

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