Easy Goings - Most Of All There's You

(Bee-Fast, 1989)

Released by the Breakfast Without Meat folks, and performed by Gregg Turkington and John Singer of the Zip Code Rapists accompanied by Gary Strasburg and Stephen Hanson, the first Easy Goings single is a natural musical outgrowth of that magazine and its various obsessions: two bizarre/obscure genre-tribute cover songs, artwork that nods to cigarette ads and Solo plastic-cup queen Dora Hall, and a general air of mind-bending in-jokiness that hangs around the sonic weirdness. Much more “musical” than the work of ZCR, the band delivers its lewd charms via a half-hokey, half-creepy sound best heard on “Most of All There’s You,” with its wheezing carnival keyboard and Turkington’s insect-like croon. It’s sentimental sap done in a nightmarishly psychedelic fashion, but still catchy as all heck – a repulsive triumph. “The Straight Life” and “Hoboes Need Lovin’” (an original) take a rootsier, more stripped-down approach, the latter being the disc’s closest stab at an outright joke; it even features a Neil Hamburger-esque apology for poor sound quality at its end. This single is a tough one to find, but it’s a pretty vital precursor/companion to the Amarillo catalog that makes for some fun listenin’.

Historical notes for the nerdy: According to an ad in Breakfast Without Meat issue 14, this was a record the band was “trying to sell in order to raise enough money to build a 40 feet high, 20 tons of steel monument to the human thumb.” Or howzabout this description, from an ad in issue 13? “Wildness at its way-out-est, to the pitch of furious frenzy – the height, apex, acme, epitome – the living END!!! That is The Easy Goings. Singing and playing the young sounds of today. Wind up the Gramaphone, turn the horn towards the action and let’s dance, let’s listen…it’s the sound you asked for! This rocking group, with all its many knobs, buttons, and doo-dads, looks and sounds like it might launch a rocket. The sounds of ‘freakout’ heard on this record are sure to please the most discerning palate.” Sounds about right.