The first album by the Crawdaddys, Crawdaddy Express – recorded in monaural; talk about looking back! – came out in 1979 as the initial LP on Voxx Records. Mike Stax, who later founded and edited Ugly Things magazine, was so impressed with the album that he eventually moved to California from London so that he could join the band. As quoted in the Simon Reynolds book, Stax admitted that the band wasn’t “original in any shape or form”, but that their “total purity was thrilling in its audacity”, and that their debut album was “virtually indistinguishable from the real thing”.
Mike Stax, who later joined the Crawdaddys as their bass guitarist, says of their EP: “5 x 4 is one of the greatest records from the post-’60s era. I think the original lineup was important, as they were one of the first bands to operate on such a purist level. Had they been able to maintain a stable lineup, pursued more original material, and continued to release records on the same level as 5 x 4, they would have been much more well-known today than they are.”
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Mike Stax was born in England and had tried to interest locals in starting a 1960’s style R&B band without success. Stax wrote Ron Silva in 1980, who invited him to join the band on bass guitar. Numerous changes in the line-up took place over the next several years – even Mojo Nixon joined up on guitar at one point – and some are remembered by other bandmembers only by their first name. Once the band tried to soldier on without a guitarist, and another time without a drummer; for a time, the band changed their name to the Howling Men, named for a Twilight Zone episode. Eventually, the Crawdaddys basically squandered their reputation as one of San Diego’s greatest rock bands. After just 6½ months in the States, Mike Stax returned home to England.
Mike Stax’s return to San Diego in May 1982 triggered the exit of the original Crawdaddys bassist Mark Zadarnowski. This time, Stax came to town with an agenda; Stax is quoted by Ray Brandes: “I returned with lots of tapes of obscure ’60s beat, R&B and garage stuff, and we began to learn a lot of new covers, stuff like ‘Chicago’ by the Phantom Brothers, ‘She Just Satisfies’ by Jimmy Page [which I had figured inspired the band’s original “I’m Dissatisfied”], the Boots’ version of ‘Jump Back [Baby]’, and the Sorrows’ ‘You Got What I Want’. The rest of the band was finally open to doing stuff like this, which I’d been advocating all along, rather than being a purist R&B/blues band who only did songs by the original black artists.”
While these preferences would inform Mike Stax’s sensibilities as the founder of Ugly Things magazine, also in 1982, they created friction within the Crawdaddys. Keith Fisher for one hated American garage rock music; after finding a very rare 45 by the Texas garage rock band Zakary Thaks, he threw it across the room at Mike Stax on his 21st birthday and ruined it. Stax quit the band on the spot after that, though he was planning to leave the Crawdaddys in the summer of 1983 anyway.
The bandmembers in the Crawdaddys listed on the Here ’Tis CD are Ron Silva, Fred Sanders (actually Keith Fisher, with the name petulantly changed due to his threats to file suit to prevent the release of the CD), Peter Michael Miesner, Jack Lopez, Mike Dixson Stax, Gordon Moss, and Steve Horn. Also mentioned are Carl Rusk as “production consultant”, Josef Marc as “sort of the producer” on some tracks, and Jeff Scott as “definitely like a father to us”.
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Members of the Crawdaddys went on to populate many other California bands; I have already mentioned several of them. The future UARB (probably by year’s end) and another like-minded San Diego band called the Tell-Tale Hearts (named after a famous Edgar Allan Poe story, “The Tell-Tale Heart”) has numerous connections with the band. Former Crawdaddys bass guitarist Mike Stax was a founding member, as were Mystery Machine alumni Bill Calhoun and Ray Brandes (I praised and heavily borrowed from Brandes’s fine biography of the Crawdaddys in preparing this post). Another past Crawdaddy, Peter Miesner contributed guitar on two tracks on the Tell-Tale Hearts CD that I have, High Tide (Big Noses & Pizza Faces), with the name adapted from that of the first Rolling Stones retrospective album, Big Hits (High Tide and Green Grass) (1966).
(January 2015/2)
