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House calls
Columbus’s Great Plains scene
BY FRANKLIN BRUNO

There’s a poignant, even grim moment at the close of Obsessed (Moses Carryout), the solo debut by Great Plains/Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments frontman Ron House. After tracking his middle-age-crazy protagonist’s troubles — first romantic, then existential — through 11 songs, "Implicated" ends with an acoustic guitar that won’t hold its tuning, a woozy lead part from TJSA guitarist Bob Petric, and House dismissing the value of the whole enterprise: "Don’t condescend with music/Don’t throw the scent off with music/Don’t send me dead music."

Obsessed isn’t a confessional album in any strict sense; its accompanying press is at pains to note that the songs were written in the aftermath of a close friend’s marital difficulties. But House has spent the bulk of his adult life as a prime mover in Columbus’s fecund rock underground — the scene that gave us the New Bomb Turks, Scrawl, and Moviola, among others — as fanzine writer (the Offense Newsletter), record-store co-owner (Used Kids), and musician. When someone who’s been banking on the music’s saving power for this long calls it into question, you can’t help hearing the doubts as his own.

Another recent release gives us a snapshot of House and compatriots in, as the photo captions say, "happier times." Cornflakes (Old 3C) unearths 26 live and studio rarities by Great Plains, one of the Columbus scene’s standard bearers. Most active between 1982 and 1989 (with the odd reunion gig since), the Plains are most often remembered for a single college-radio hit, the indie in-joke "Letter to a Fanzine," with its knowing references to 4AD and SST and its promo-scamming critic’s rallying cry: "I like everything I get in the mail for free."

If you’ve heard only a single Great Plains song, it’s probably this one, which is a shame. Although House’s unsingerly whine helped pigeonhole the band as "geek rock," he was also capable of microphone-shredding desperation and unhinged vocalise, and his lyrics celebrated everything from civil rights ("Martin Luther King and Martin Luther Drinking") to bakery overstock ("It’s day old, but it tastes great"), a combination that one previously unheard song on Cornflakes aptly labels "Po Mo Fo Po Folks." Behind House, the band’s main sonic architects, brothers Mark and Matt Wyatt, conjured loose swirls of trashy guitar and cheap combo organ more akin to a Nuggets obscurity than to by-the-numbers barre-chord punk.

The 2000 double disc Length of Growth, which compiled Great Plains’ early, self-released EP and three Homestead albums, is the best road map to the band’s work. Still, Cornflakes fills in important peaks and valleys, with alternate takes of their rawest ("Chuck Berry’s Orphan") and craftiest ("Serpent Mound") material, oddities like the country-styled "History of Sin," and songs slated for their never-completed final album. The real revelations are the discs’ cover versions, which seem to have been chosen on the principle of maximum inappropriateness for House’s voice. To hear "Everyday People" or Dusty Springfield’s "Every Day I Have To Cry" run through the art-garage grinder is to hear the very foundations of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame cracking underfoot.

Cornflakes compiler Paul Nini was just one of several Great Plains bassists. But he’s become the unofficial archivist/torchbearer for the band and, to an extent, the scene they helped build. Nini also fronts the Plains’ sporadically active Web log, runs both Old 3C and the on-line distributor Popstream, and releases modestly scaled solo recordings at irregular intervals. The Mannerist Age, his latest, is split between sleek, clockwork instrumentals and understated vocal numbers with somber melodies and careful four-track arrangements akin to Elliott Smith’s. But peel away the drum programs and delay-blurred guitars and you’ll find Nini, like House, giving notice of his diminished expectations from a career in rock. "The Next Seattle" (which Columbus briefly appeared to be in the mid ’90s) makes an earnest case for music’s private satisfactions: "I don’t want to be around/When the circus comes to town . . . I’m happy by myself."

The Columbus music community, though still productive, has suffered some tragic losses in recent years. The prolific, hard-living Jim Shepard (Vertical Slit, V3) hanged himself in 1998; guitarist Jerry Wick of punk-rock true-believers Gaunt was killed by a hit-and-run driver while bicycling home in January of 2001. Their stories may be one factor in the self-questioning, sometimes bitter tone of both Obsessed and The Mannerist Age. But life and music go on: a recent e-mail from Nini announced that a re-formed Great Plains (along with fellow lifers Mike Rep & the Quotas and Screaming Urge) played a home-town show on January 4, with House planning to "finish the lyrics" to some of Cornflakes’ rougher numbers for the occasion.

The next big thing? Not likely. Condescending, or "dead" music? Definitely not.

Issue Date: January 16 - 23, 2003
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