THE NOTEKILLERS

The Notekillers were an all instrumental guitar/bass/drums band I originally (why originally? see last paragraph...) led and composed the music for from 1977 to 1981. After a year (Sept 1973 - May ‘74) of playing in ensembles led by (pianist/composer) Cecil Taylor, I was pretty psychologically exhausted and wondering what in the world to do next. I knew that for some reason, I didn’t want to explore "free jazz" any further for the time being. Whatever I was going to do, I wanted it to be more of a hybrid - more personal than I felt this music would allow at that point in its evolution. I had begun exploring the new minimalism music (Glass/Riley/Reich) that had started to come out on records and it definitely resonated with my "rock" roots. I had also fallen in love with reggae and listened to it to the exclusion of almost everything else for at least a couple of years in the early mid-70’s. Here was a minimalist "pop" music that still had a depth, energy, and sense of purpose that, for me, American and British rock had lost (and therefore lost me) in the early seventies.

During this period I had also gained access (through a grad student I had befriended) to the classical electronic music studio at Princeton University and spent many a night using every patch cord I could plug in to create these wild real-time improvisations on the Buchla modular synth. I also did my first computer music at this time.

So all of these things started percolating inside me. At the same time my old high school drummer/best friend, Barry Halkin moved back to town after college. The two of us rented a basement somewhere and started jamming on what we were calling "free rock". I don’t exactly know when I/we decided to start making songs out of our experiments, but by 1975-76 word of the whole CBGB’s thing was reaching Philadelphia and I’m sure that was at least part of the inspiration. By early 1977, joined by another old friend, Steven Bilenky on bass, and Richard Bloom as full-time sound person, we started to play in the punk clubs of Philadelphia. Not that we were ever much a part of the "punk scene". We certainly dug the music that was coming out of it, but we had absorbed many other influences and were plain too weird for Philly. Everyone there hated us. Except for David Carroll, who happened to run the Hot Club - the punk club in Philadelphia. David, God bless him, would keep booking us even though nobody liked us - or would even talk to us. Especially the other bands. By 1980 we were pretty much ready to give up when we decided to make a 7" single and see if we could get beyond our hometown. In fact, the plan was to make the single and take a break from our six nights a week practicing in our basement.

A couple months into our hiatus we got a call from Ed Bahlman (owner of 99 records - the label that put out the Bush Tetras, Liquid Liquid and the first couple of Glenn Branca recordings.) saying that he loved our record and wanted to bring us up to New York. We ended up playing NYC a few times (Hurrah/CB’s/Maxwells/etc.), but unfortunately by that time we were pretty burned out. Too many years of intense playing met by intense antipathy mixed with inter- (and inner) personal problems. So sometime in 1981 we broke up in frustration and disappointment figuring that we had accomplished next to nothing.

I spent the next couple of years kinda floundering around and recuperating (the Notekillers had left me a wreck - more about that some other time), trying to figure out what to do next. I finally moved to NYC in 1984, and never much talked about the Notekillers again.

Then in January of 2002 I got a call from Barry Halkin. Someone had called him to tell him that none other than Thurston Moore had name-checked the Notekillers in some magazine (Mojo Collections). The friend said that Thurston didn’t know anything about us except that we were from Philly. I was flabbergasted and emailed Thurston to tell him "hey, that was me!" Turns out that he used to hang out with his friends at the record store Ed Bahlman ran and that they were all really into our single.

So anyway, here we are over twenty years later and I’ve been inspired to revisit what was - when all is said and done - not necessarily the happiest time in my life, but it was, without a doubt, the most intense. And just maybe some of the most original stuff I've ever done. And I'm very excited to announce that we've just released a CD compilation on Thurston's Ecstatic Peace label of the best of whatever recordings we made back then. But the only thing that could possibly be crazier than all of this, is the Notekillers are playing again! We started playing around Philly over the summer and now just did a couple of gigs in NYC -- doing a combination of old favorites, a bunch of brand new tunes and even some hacked up cover tunes. It's taken some serious work, but I think we all feel we're actually better than we ever were(!). Definitely looking forward to continuing and doing some touring -- stay tuned...

Meanwhile, you can listen to some of the single that Thurston's talking about, "The Zipper", on the MUSIC page. Or go to the official website below for more.

The official Notekillers web site
View notekillers's EPK