Exfoliating The Mystery: More Than You'd Ever Care To Know About Clarinette And me

A Hardly-Brief-Enough Musical History

By D. Vallor

After an adolescence of music obsession, I began making music in 1979 with a band called The Wild Boys out of the San Francisco Bay Area suburb of Concord, CA. The Wild Boys were unashamedly inspired by No New York and the Beirut Slump 7” and played a sort of hapless and pseudo literate version of No Wave. With our brother band The Church Police and mentor Kevin Army's White Silence, we staged a theater concert at a local college, calling it Maybe Contra Costa (after the recent No New York & Yes LA albums) and caught on (nominally) playing regularly at the Mabuhay Gardens, the premiere punk club in San Francisco. The original Wild Boys line-up (David Jones, myself, Matt Schwarz and Marti Schwarz) lasted about a year and then splintered into the duo of David Jones and myself. We eventually recruited Bruce Gauld (Church Police) and John Stuart (later of Flying Color, Barbara Manning’s band & Map Of Wyoming) on drums and Paul Stuart on 2nd guitar. This lineup lasted for about a year and a half before I got irritable and quit the band onstage over the decision to cover a Sex Pistols song (I was pretty musically self-righteous back then).

After the band’s subsequent split, John Stuart and I briefly formed a band with the San Francisco's band The Wounds former-singer Paul Casteel (see the compilation Red Spot for some amazing Wounds recordings), but it never got off the ground and Casteel joined up with The Black Athletes. I went on to join with the aforementioned Bruce Gauld and former Animal Things member Laurie Bailey to form the short lived The Green Table, eventually disassembling this outfit and making my vinyl debut with a band called Every Ten Axes (Laurie Bailey, Suzanne Ramsey, Jay Stebley, Regent St. Claire, Agnes Stebley & myself) on a compilation put together by San Francisco’s College For The Recording Arts for their Summer Class 1982 album (my friend Dave Baldwin was attending the school and the recording was something akin to an exam). The LP was more like a yearbook than a proper release, so only 100 were made, which is just as well as the music is pretty weak, dated and gothy sounding (I was listening to way too much 13.13 at the time).

Every Ten Axes were likely just put together for the session (if memory serves) and we splintered almost immediately. This is apparent in the knocked off quality of the songwriting (the lyrics were forgotten at home and completely rewritten in the minutes before the tape ran).

Over the next few years I would gradually begin developing the sound that would become Clarinette. Inspired by my friend Ray Farrell, who had a program on Berkeley’s KPFA called “Assassinatin’ Rhythm”, I bought my brother’s mid 70’s “sound on sound” reel to reel deck and went about recording guitar, cornet and percussion pieces which would end up broadcast on KPFA when I guested on the “Assassinatin’ Rhythm” show a number of times.

During the late 70’s I had helped out with equipment (apprenticed if you will) with the SF band The Flamin’ Groovies and so in 1982, Ray and I hit the road as crew for the Memphis band Tav Falco’s Panther Burns. This changed my involvement in music for the rest of the 80’s and I would, at this point, slow down dramatically in the development of my own music and head out on the road in varying capacities as a guitar tech, tour manager and sound technician for a collection of bands mostly from California (Game Theory, Rain Parade, Thin White Rope, Long Ryders, Robyn Hitchcock And The Egyptians), as well as helping out locally with Alex Chilton (a former Panther Burn) & The Three O’Clock.

Touring and sound mixing led to aspirations towards record producing and this proved much less successful and much more dispiriting. Sessions with Thin White Rope demo'ing their classic Moonhead album went well and produced some fine material (only a couple of these tracks have been released…one on the TWR’s Spoor anthology and one with a horrible load of echo added on the Davis scene compilation “Out Among The Cows”). A subsequent series of indie rock star studded sessions with the power pop band 3D Blackboard produced an as yet unreleased album (seems unlikely it will ever be at this point) and in a series of sessions with the band Field Trip, I produced the band’s debut album “Beautiful” on Slash/Ruby/Warner Bros. Records. As a final stab at studio participation I was a secondary co-producer (really just consulting) for Game Theory’s final recordings, these remain unreleased.

A period of musical inactivity followed. Frustrated by dealing with Slash Records over the Field Trip album and pretty much convinced that I didn’t really fit in the music industry, I avoided the issue all together.

Marrying my lovely & wonderful wife Shannon in 1993, we moved to Boston in 1995, here we met Leslie Gaffney & Frank Van den Elzen who were publishing Popwatch magazine. At Leslie’s suggestion, I did an interview with Dean Roberts from Thela for Popwatch #8 and then began writing obsessively for the magazine for subsequent issues, turning out a major piece on the Xpressway label and a Flying Saucer Attack interview (Issue #9) and an major overview of New Zealand’s Vanguard D.I.Y. scene (Issue #10), along with countless record reviews. This led to review work with Muckraker Magazine towards the end of that magazine's run and a Spanish translation of the Xpressway piece for the Spanish magazine 100.000 Luciérnagas (100,000 Fireflies).

It was while we were living in Boston that I began recording new material as Clarinette. I pulled out some old tapes and combined some old material from the early to mid-1980's and new material onto a CD-R and passed them around to some friends. An offer to release the material came from Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and former Forced Exposure co-editor Byron Coley on their collective Ecstatic Yod imprint. I edited some material, re-recorded one track and saw the release of the first Clarinette album, “Haze”, in the Spring of 2002.

Loads of equipment failures (along with my conveniently developing sense that there’s just too much music coming out these days) delayed the completion of Haze's follow-up, “Transmuting Fall” until early 2005. More recording followed, though sporadically and a new record will hopefully be completed in the next year (2008) provided time allows.

Follow this link to my Myspace page to listen to some sample tracks, including new unreleased material.

Click here to email me at: vallor@comcast.net
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