And now it's time for a startling revelation: It's not easy to find innocence in rock and roll. I know--I recently thought I'd located this rarest of commodities right here in the Queen City of the West, only to discover that just beneath its surface lurked emotions, passions and conflicts of a considerably less guileless sort.
This cautionary tale begins a little over a month ago, when I was at long last plowing through the enormous reservoir of local recordings that had been sent my way since my previous slew of review columns. Perhaps a hundred rough demos, polished cassettes and/or full-blown CD projects awaited me, and in listening to them, I found that they fell into the usual qualitative categories. Some were excellent--so good, in fact, that several of them wound up on my roster of local favorites from 1996 (see "Get Local," page 59). A larger number prompted me to apply to them more cautious, less enthusiastic adjectives, such as "solid," "competent," "listenable," "average," "modest," "well-played." Most of the rest ranged from terminally dull to actively offensive.
There was, however, an exception--a recording that did not fit into any of the ordinary pigeonholes. The Collective Works of Shitbox, by (yes, it's true) Shitbox, was a true curveball: weird, sloppy and indescribably amusing. A product of an organization called Stupid Records, the tape itself was of the ultra-cheap variety (the type that are used for dictation) and came packaged in a flimsy, yellow-paper sleeve. The handwritten liner notes included a couple of fine illustrations--the first was of a toilet with musical notes emanating from its bowl, the second a sketch of the "Shitbox Core": Cindy Wonderful, Amy Fantastic and Cynthia Cool. Also included was a list of Shitbox "studio musicians"; a claim that all of the songs on the package were written by Shitbox with the exception of "Oooh-Oooh Man," by the GTOs; and a special thank-you to someone named Christian McIntire "for not appearing on this album."
More typical information--like, for instance, a list of the tunes on Collective Works--was entirely absent from both the recording and a Cindy Wonderful cover letter that accompanied it. But this missive, scribbled in a childish scrawl on a sheet of lined notebook paper, did contain a couple of additional, and intriguing, details. First and foremost was the fact that Wonderful and her friends had recorded the entire package on a karaoke machine.
For many of you, this description might have left you expecting Shitbox's music to constitute a form of torture outlawed decades ago by the Geneva Convention. But I was immediately filled with a keen sense of anticipation--and I wasn't disappointed. Even though it was virtually impossible to determine where one cut ended and the next began, the music as a whole was so spirited, buoyant and downright zany that such minor details rapidly became completely unimportant. In short, this collage of sound effects, guitar racket and off-kilter wisdom ("I like cops!/Cops are cool!") put a smile on my face that didn't fall off for hours.
Unfortunately, Ms. Wonderful had neglected to enclose a contact number on her off-the-cuff Shitbox biography--but she did include a Stupid Records address: 865 Northridge Road, Highlands Ranch 80126. This suburban locale completed the picture for me: I imagined Shitbox as a trio of affluent high-school girls rebelling against their parents (and society in general) by recording the most chipper brand of racket they could cook up between episodes of Melrose Place and Party of Five. In short, it sounded like a swell story that you, gentle reader, might find amusing and heartwarming. So I wrote a letter to Wonderful expressing my fondness for Collective Works and asking her to phone me if she had any interest in my writing about her combo.
Inside of a week I received a return call--but I could tell from Wonderful's replies to my questions that the image I had of the outfit wasn't quite accurate. For one thing, Wonderful implied that Shitbox wasn't a real band or even a going concern. But when I asked her directly if this was the case, she hedged her bets in a manner that struck me as oddly vague and indirect. Her tone was much the same when I recommended that she contact Amy Fantastic and Cynthia Cool in order to determine what day might work best for an interview. She said she would do so, but I got the sense that there was more going on behind the scenes than I realized.
My suspicions were confirmed a few days later when I received a long, very well-written letter from Cool, who referred to herself as "author of 'Let Me Be Your Alien,' 'Shitbox Kitchen'; co-author of 'Hi-Fashion Hobo,' 'Luna,' 'I Like Cops.'" In the missive, Cool revealed that Shitbox (a slang term for the karaoke machine suggested by Damien Cooper, the drummer for the punk band Four) was born in the summer of 1995 at a warehouse that Wonderful shared with Amy Fantastic and Amy's boyfriend. The three of them were part of a so-called serious band dubbed S-FRO-7, and as the Shitbox sessions began to proliferate, Cool claimed that Amy's boyfriend began pressuring them to devote their energies to their main group rather than to a "joke."
