"I felt a little light headed. I wondered what was wrong. I was sitting in a huge overstuffed chair. Then Adam walked in the room. He said, 'It looks OK to me'. I looked towards him and in the palm of his hand was a human heart, beating with a faint pulse. The arteries coming off of it had clamps on them so none of the blood inside could come out. I realized it was MY HEART. I started to panic. Adam said, 'Maybe we should put it back in'. Then he started to squeeze it really hard like a balloon. I could see the blood squeeze out towards the arteries but the clamps held hard. I said, 'Please put it back. Pleeeze?' "The next thing I knew I was lying back on my bed. Julia came in the room. She said, 'Maybe you should get a real doctor to put it back in. Look at this'. My heart was now in a jar with a fluid. The fluid was filled with blood. It looked like my heart had sprung a leak. My first thought was that Adam had squeezed it to hard and busted it. I put my finger in the fluid and twirled it around. The liquid changed to a clear color. I looked at my heart for awhile to see if I could see any leaks. I could see one little hole where some blood was slowly leaking out. I started to feel more faint. I said, 'Just put it back in!' Then I blacked out.

When I regained consciousness, I was sitting alone in a room in the big chair again. I could tell my heart was inside of me again. I was worried about the leak. Although my heart was inside of me again my chest felt hollow. This is the first vivid dream I've had in a long time. Seems like I stopped having dreams (at least ones I remember when I wake up) a few years ago. I don't know what the heck to make of this one. I have no idea where Adam fits into the picture. Some people say that everyone who appears in your dreams is actually a manifestation of some aspect of your own personality. Does Adam represent the rational pragmatic side of my personality?"

Ted Gray, one of the main collaborators in one of Chicago's strangest and most underrated rock bands, was describing his dream from the night before. Although Ted plays bass on two songs in their current set and guitar on another song, Narrantanz (which he wrote for volume four of the Belgian compilation, "Fuck That Weak Shit") he describes his job in the band as creating noise. For many of the songs he uses a four track tape machine to drop in samples and add heavily effected white noise to the songs. The sounds which he generates are an essential part of Dragking's live performances. DragKing live can involve up to seven people collaborating on strange post-punk performance pieces which strain the boundaries of rock.

The rest of the band was standing around in their basement practice space in Chicago's much-hyped and rapidly gentrifying Wicker Park neighborhood. From the outside the tiny, two story house in which DragKing practices looks abandoned. It's the kind of house where the neighborhood kids know that no one is home during the day so they play under the front porch, on the front porch, in the yard, running around shouting to each other in Spanish. It's neutral territory. In fact Lavon Washington, who plays drums with Dragking, does live there, but you would never know it. There is nothing but the empty cardboard container for a six-pack of Schlitz in the refrigerator. Both of the two rooms on the first floor are completely empty. Lavon lives in the basement, crammed in with his drum kit, and all the amps and electronics which his accomplices in the band use to make noise.

It's amazing that such a large band could practice at all in such a small space. Stel Valavanis is nominally the bass player. He has two large cabinet speakers to play out of and four or five effects boxes spread out on the dusty concrete floor. Sometimes he plays bass, sometimes a six-string guitar he bought from Crag White of the seminal Chicago art rock band, Repluse Kava. Sometimes he spreads out a mat with a key-board printed on it. The signal from this children's toy is fed through several effects units manipulated by Adam Harris, normally the saxophonist.

I asked Stel about his shifting role in the band. He explained, "I began as the primary composer, engineer, organizer, motivator but have now evolved into more of a back set tweaking role. I haven't written any material for a while but always do my share of contributions to mostly Sluggo's compositions. Ted and Adam have become the primary engineers. I still have a lot to do with the sound of the recordings as well as the experimental concepts but it's not as hands on."

KK: What do you mean by experimental concepts?

Stel: A lot of the experiments began as simply exploring techniques and playing 'math games' with time and structure. All of us are tripped out by such ideas but for me it really is about understanding how the concept translates to a piece and therefore how the concept translates to the experience. Besides that there's the extra intellectual challenge of making dissonance sound pretty to you and forcing awkward times until the rhythm seems natural. There's something powerful about seeing the infinite possibilities from the peephole of familiarity. So I'm coming up with ideas to make us discover new perspectives and make us play something unfamiliar.

Adam: Yeah, Stel used to pistol-whip us into doing weird shit like putting mikes inside of toilets and what-not, but those days are gone. Sometimes he still makes a feeble effort, but we shut him down pretty fast. Married life has taken a lot of the fight out of him. Heh.

Both Dragking's first single on Chicago's Trixie Records, "Jazz monster" b/w "Backburner", and their second, on New Jersey's My Pal God label, "Miscegenation" b/w "Combustion" and "Spontaneous" exhibit this approach to music.

"Backburner" is a lo-fi cooker which quotes Dead C and Slint as precedents(in fact, Tim Adams of Ajax Records called "Backburner" a "Dead C/Slint hybrid"). But the lyrics are belted out in a brazen style more reminiscent of mid-eighties American hardcore, "Backburner burst into flames, dry ground gone too long without rain". The tune begins with an eruption of feedback and white noise, shudders, and lurches along to it's inevitable conclusion like a Grand Marquis with a broken axle. The folks at Sweet Portable You talk about "lyrical intent that might pass for harDCore-p-force....a nice, unsettling effort". And they're probably right too. But that does not preclude the possibility of having moved on and digested 'other' influences as well.

However, it was the flipside of that record, "Jazz Monster", which really earned the band the kudos. The song is a huge sprawling instrumental composition whose "full bore psychotic freedom" (to quote Jay Hinman of Super Dope) was dressed to impress. The suit may have been borrowed from Beefheart or Zappa's experimental jaunts out into free jazz territory, but the nasty stains on the crotch were pure Punk. Shane Williams wrote in Flipside, "Color them extremely post-punk and post-modern as they prove there are always new, fresh approaches to intense tunage". The song blasted through some genre boundaries, bringing the lo-fi-garage-grime of bands like the Bassholes, 68 Comeback and the Trashwomen to the structural experimenting of bands like Bastro, or Don Caballero(or is that the other way around?). Jazz punk had gone into the garage for a complete overhaul and when it roared out again, outfitted with all new Mopar parts, it was ready to kick some ass.

And that was the first single. A year later they were back with another thin disc on another obscure label. The A side was a heavy, unwieldy rocker "with just enough hook to keep you running back to your turntable"(Cyndi Elliot in Alternative Press). The song "Miscegenation" kicked out the jams, fusing a Neil Young guitar build-up, a Sonic-Youth-dissonant power chord chorus, a saxophone led, sparse, groovy jam, and ending up with a raucous rave-down. The song seems to be about race-mixing or some such thing. Whatever, it rocks, and it recombines riffs with an almost Zorn-like proficiency. On the reverse were two strange instrumental pieces, one, we can surmise from the samples, is about drag racing, and the other is, well, strange.

KK: How does the group write its songs?

Ted: Generally one of us will have an idea of a basic riff. We each then add our own parts. So in that sense a lot of the songs are very much written by everyone in the group.

Adam: As far as song writing goes, generally Sluggo will come up with a riff or a structure, which we will attempt to add our parts to. Then Stel starts bitching about how he doesn't want to do any pop stuff, so he adds some twisted bass part, or tweaks the structure. Then we do it again, tweak some more.... That's how we go about it. It seems to encourage a, uh, density of sound, in that we're trying to overlap different versions of a primary riff.

Sluggo: I'm always concerned with how the narrative of the song, the lyrics, which are a really the most human point of reference for the listener, and which make our songs "pop music" as opposed to noodling ...how the lyrics are integrated with the music. It's really hard with several different people making musical contributions, to keep the songs focused. My question is always what is this song about? What is it trying to communicate? Hopefully we don't write songs which have nothing to say, and I mean this in the sense of communicating feelings. That's what songs are for, I think, communicating feelings.

Ted: DK is never finished writing songs. We're always taking our old material and adding new parts, changing things. I think that's important.

KK: I read a description of show you guys played at Lower Links a few years ago. It sounded pretty wild. Why did you guys decide to tone down your live shows?

Sluggo: Yeah, Weasel Walter from the Flying Luttenbachers wrote us up in Nice Slacks after our first show. He only caught our second set however, which, although he didn't realize it, was entirely improved. Shit, we were awful. Just awful.

Ted: We used to do more "noise jams" as a self indulgent exercise. We felt like just going up on stage and making noise and having fun. Some people are into that but a lot aren't. We feel our newer material is much stronger. We want to try as hard as we can to get our newer songs across to the audience. We also have found that a shorter set is more desirable. The audience doesn't get tired of you. You can maintain their interest for longer with a short tight set.

Stel: I think Barrett leaving the band had more to do with stripping down our live shows than anything else. On top of that there's been a heavy influence from a lot of quieter music, not less noisy, notably CDC for me at least.

KK: Stel, what is this quiet noise which you are talking about? Isn't quiet the opposite of noisy?

Stel: Well, I mean noisy as opposed to melodic and contained. By being quiet we're also less muddy and everything can be clearly distinguished. I'm not saying it's better, just more in terms of what I want to do.

KK: Do you feel like you need encouragement from your audience?

Ted: It seems that over half of the audience at our shows are our friends so when they come up after we're done playing and say, "you guys were great!" I never know if I should believe them or not.

KK: What do you think when you play a show which you thought sucked, and then someone comes up to you raving about how great it was? Does that make you lose respect for your audience? Does that make you cynical, like, "shit we could do anything and these shits would love it"? Because I think that's a big reason bands like Urge Overkill suck, they've been told that they rocked out when they knew better and they lost respect for their audience, and when you lose respect for your audience, you'll feed them any old shit. Dig?

Stel: That reminds me so much of Bundy [Brown, ex-Bastro, ex-Gastr del Sol, ex-Tortoise] who always says his shows sucked no matter what. It's just that what the musician wants and what the audience wants are two different things. What I mean is that it's not just the different perspectives in play. I certainly don't lose respect for anyone who liked a show I didn't or visa versa.

Ted: The fact of the matter is that we really don't care what people think. It's nice to get compliments but we really do it for ourselves. We know when we play well and when we don't.

KK: The Dragking songs with vocals seem to be concerned with political issues. There aren't many bands these days willing to address social issues in their songs. Is Dragking a political band?

Ted: We would like to think so, but not really. Its certainly not up front.

Sluggo: I have to emphatically disagree with Theo. The guy is stoned out of his mind. He can't be held responsible for what he is saying. Of course we are a political band. Every band is a political band. Even the lowly DragKing. It's only a question of what type of politics. Skrewdriver is a reactionary band because they advocate racial purity and racial violence. Smashing Pumpkins are an establishment band because they encourage their audiences to ignore the structures of oppression and discrimination which exist in our society. DragKing tries to expose oppression from a very personal perspective. A lot of the songs are about how working every day in a situation where you are systematically disempowered sucks. And more importantly, DragKing songs are about resistance. They are battle hymns. You know, something you can sing to yourself when you confront the Beast to make yourself stronger.

Stel:...and we say fuck and shit and piss and stuff like that.

Adam: The issue is how rock simulates dissent rather than really offering it. What needs to be thought through is how "alternity" as presented in the form of any entertainment, either does or does not offer any real challenge to the current order. For me this is an open question. I'm just not happy with: "we're saying something slightly outside of the mainstream, so we're not a part of it".

Sluggo: Yeh, that's the crux of it. Are you just standing on stage saying, "Fight the Power", or are you involved in organizing resistance. I do, however, think there is value in letting people know where you stand. You know, like the song, "Which Side are you on boys?". I mean Smashing Pumpkins would never come out and even mouth the slogans. Probably because they don't agree with them. But, as far as political music goes I think the important political music isn't preaching, to the converted or otherwise. It's encouraging. It's message is, "keep up the fight, don't give up hope, we're with you".

KK: What is the relationship between rock and music? Why is style so important to rock? Does that assist in taming and commodifying it?

Ted: I think "rock" is a dead thing. Rock is quickly becoming a dead form of music like classical or jazz, that has a set standard of atheistic values that defines it. There are certain styles that have defined what "rock" is. In that way people can quickly identify it and relate to it easily. In that way it has become tame and commodified. No longer is rock the "dangerous" music it was in the 50's. Now its the music of the Pepsi Generation. The best music has no real label. I love listening to stuff and thinking, "what kind of music is this?" Most of that type of music gets lumped in the huge "alternative" category.

Adam: Alternative, I propose, was never meant to challenge anything. Remember, there's a difference between the celebration of minoritization, and really challenging the framework. I think The Baffler had it right here: "alternative" culture is just minorities made safe for the common market .

K.K.: Like high school kids trying to figure out who they want to be, as expressed by what they wear?

Sluggo: Right. Culture is taken out of context and sold. It's the post-modern condition. No sooner is there a cultural resistance to the Capitalist Babylon we are forced to live in, than they have separated the signifiers of that resistance, from the actual resistance, and reduced it all to a tee shirt which reads "Destroy Capitalism", and they're selling them in strip malls. And that's the only type of resistance most people have access to. It's really tough to fight that kind of thing. You have offer more than a different hair style. Every identity is on the auction block.

Adam: Certainly being on stage and being the center of attention gives us an unusual opportunity to be heard. On the other hand, it's a dangerous situation, since "messages" delivered at such times are generally the projection of image. Style---not substance. I think it's important to struggle against that, however, in whatever way we can. I think we all know that the real work of constructive political change goes on in unglamorous settings: late night union meetings, weekly workshops on Sundays, hourly confrontations with the boss. And I would not say that all expressions of political sentiment in the entertainment world is irrelevant or gratuitous. For instance, mid- to late-seventies punk, whatever it's political value, is valuable political and socially because it expressed, or rather, generated "truth". It's that truth which gave power to the more limited stylistic trappings of punk. Sure, the whole image thing was there, up front, but it had authenticity because of the way it really pinned something down. I don't think I could really express what this something is, but I sense it, for what that's worth.

Sluggo: I guess the difficult thing about political music is that as grassroots activists are forced out of political discourse, the only people who can get a word in edgewise in the capitalist media are entertainers. And so you've got some shit like Bono being quoted in Rolling Stone saying some inane shit like, "torture isn't nice", and all the kids read it. But if someone like Mumia Abu Jamal or Leonard Peltier tries to say something he's shut up in a death row cell. Then you're left with nice entertainers like Bono with polite, reformist sentiments, and angry kids like Snoop Doggy Dog, who can't focus their anger. I mean he's an idiot, no less of an idiot than Axel Rose. Remember that Guns N' Roses song about killing all the faggots and immigrants? Fuck those guys.

Adam: I see two lessons to draw here. First, the generation of truth has as it's raison d'etre the social environment from which it came. It's not exportable. It wouldn't be the same if punk emerged today.... You can't appropriate it from one time to another and maintain it's validity. Second, the stylistic baggage which accompanies lifestyle-type politics (like leather combat boots, whatever) usually overcome the original meaning which gave credence and authenticity to the style to begin with.

Sluggo: Speaking of punk, the biggest influence on me from the seventies was Crass. Those guys had their shit together. Their music was integrated into a real social resistance movement. The music was adventurous and exciting. They developed a really cool graphic style, which was consistent as it developed. They were able to use their status as performers to galvanize people. And their music was really about something. and I don't think they were just using their political stance to sell themselves. They really opened my eyes. I mean I started out listening to the Beatles, then I heard the Clash who were like, "no Elvis, Beatles, or Rolling Stones, in 1977", then I heard Crass, who were saying, "why don't they just drop the 'L' and call themselves the Cash?". And it really opened my eyes to the difference between a band like the Clash, for whom everything was just Left-wing punk fashion, and music which could help challenge the status quo. But then I read that where-are-they-now article in Option which quoted Steve Ignorant as saying, "if we hadn't stopped when we did, we'd be in jail".

Adam: For us, today, I think it's appropriate to fight against style and against the supposed appropriation of politics, which is really political adventurism. That seems to be a trend so far in most of the music I like on more than a musical level. I'm not saying that we should toss out politics or politicized lyrics. I just think that they need to come out of their indigenous terrain: that is, as lyrics, as integrated with the music. I object to all didactic political expressions and overt political opportunism which is motivated by insecurity rather than real integration.

Clearly Dragking is a band which is not only involved in making music, but also band involved in the uncommon practice of examining their own motives and assumptions as well as how their music fits into the real world. Most punk rock bands are so busy trying to write songs, perfect their live show, get shows, and record their songs that they have no time to wonder about the social implications of their efforts. DragKing on the other hand are less concerned with promoting themselves and their music than they are with examining their music and discovering how it might or might not effect the rest of us. Their honesty and humility are as refreshing as their music.

Kangrore Kulpsky
Tuesday, August 15th 1995

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