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The Red Crayola: Soldier-Talk 12” (Radar Records, 1979)
Back in October, my friend Mike invited me and a handful of our friends to spend his birthday weekend at his family’s beach house in Carolina Beach. Pretty much everyone on the trip is a music fanatic, so of course we visited the one record store in town. If I had been there on my own, I doubt I would have bothered… my appetite for visiting record stores has decreased considerably since the days when I would hit every single shop I could when I went out of town. There are so many shops now, and I already buy more records than I actually have time to listen to. However, the entire group wanted to go to this one, so of course I was game.
When I walked in, my first thought was that this would be an awkward shopping experience. The store was tiny and most of the bins were only half full. It seemed like one of those situations where I’d try to leave quickly, interacting with the owner as little as possible lest they realize I’m thinking to myself that their store totally sucks. However, once I started flipping through those half-full bins, I kept finding things that interested me. I ended up buying 5 or 6 LPs, more than anyone else in our group. A couple of those were Soft Machine albums that, upon returning home, I realized I already had. The one I was most excited about, though, was this 1979 album by the Red Crayola.
The Red Crayola has a wild history. The brainchild of Texas musician Mayo Thompson, the band started in the 60s and operated in the same world as the 13th Floor Elevators. The Red Crayola’s two 60s LPs came out on International Artists Records, the same label as the Elevators and another notable 60s Texas psych group, Bubble Puppy. The Red Crayola was the most fiercely experimental of all these groups, their music reflecting Thompson’s interest in the avant garde. As the Red Crayola’s music moved away from psychedelic and toward more experimental horizons, interest in the group waned among their fans and their record label. Eventually Thompson left Texas, first for New York, where he served as a studio assistant to the artist Robert Rauschenberg, then moving to London as he started collaborating with the avant garde art collective Art & Language.
While in London, Thompson fell in with the post-punk world of Geoff Travis and Rough Trade Records, the second landmark underground scene with which he was involved. With Travis nervous about his lack of studio experience, Thompson became the de facto in-house producer for Rough Trade, producing sessions by post-punk legends like the Fall, the Raincoats, Stiff Little Fingers, Cabaret Voltaire, and countless others.
My interest in the Red Crayola stems mostly from their work on Lora Logic from X-Ray Spex’s 1982 solo album, Pedigree Charm. I’ve mentioned Pedigree Charm in previous staff picks, as it’s one of my most-listened to records of the past several years. While I don’t hear other people mention it too often, it’s become one of my favorite records, and one that never gets old for me. When a record is so interesting to me, I can’t help but pull all the threads that connect to it to see what I find. The first and most obvious was Lora Logic’s work with her band, Essential Logic, and I’ve covered my exploration of their discography in previous staff picks. But while Logic was presumably the driving creative force behind Pedigree Charm, it stands apart from the rest of her work. Given that I hear a very similar sound on the Red Crayola’s 1980 single “Born in Flames” (again, covered in a previous staff pick, LOL), I knew the Red Crayola material from this period was worth exploring.
Which brings me back to Soldier-Talk. I was excited to drop the needle on this album, but as soon as it started, I knew it wasn’t precisely what I was looking for… it didn’t have that bright, bubbly sound of Pedigree Charm and “Born in Flames.” It turns out that, even though Soldier-Talk came out only one year before “Born in Flames,” it’s a completely different iteration of the Red Crayola. Mayo Thompson is still there, but aside from drummer Jesse Chamberlain and Lora Logic, the rest of the band for this album is made up of members of Pere Ubu, including Dave Thomas on lead vocals for many of its tracks. I think fans of Pere Ubu’s records from this period will get the most out of Soldier-Talk, as (even with Mayo Thompson writing all the material) it has much of the darkness and density of The Modern Dance and Dub Housing, both of which Pere Ubu had released a year earlier in 1978. Those are great records, and while Soldier-Talk is even more difficult than those albums (which plenty of people already find abstruse), it’s still very interesting.
While I like Soldier-Talk, I’m still left jonesing for more of what I hear on Pedigree Charm. After doing more research to write this piece, I think my next stop should probably be the Red Crayola’s 1981 album (in collaboration with Art & Language), Kangaroo?. The Discogs credits on that one show that Pedigree Charm bassist Ben Annesley appears on the record, and since the bass lines are one of my favorite parts of Pedigree Charm, I’m definitely intrigued. Should that exploration bear fruit, the Red Crayola has several more collaborative releases with Art & Language over the next few years, though it appears most of those don’t feature Annesley.
Checking out these albums should be pretty easy, as Drag City re-released most of these recordings in the 2000s, and they’re all available on streaming services. Along with those reissues, Drag City also released a spate of new Red Crayola material in the 2000s and 2010s, when Thompson connected with another vital underground scene—the Chicago post-rock world—and added another act to his life story. But that’s a tale for another time.