True grit

Doin' time with Random Road Mother

by John O'Neill

As the nineties slowly tick off what little time remains till the much anticipated millennium, you can already begin to look back and say that the decade's music, for the most part, was pretty inauthentic. I mean, how angry could Alanis have been? She needed a guy to articulate her feminist "rage." And can anyone really get the meaning of what Marilyn Manson were trying to do, other than move a lot of product via the tick-parents-off-equals-kids-will-buy-records route? And that Vedder guy. How much weight can one martyr carry? Phony anger, phony schtick, phony angst, it all added up to big money. Everyone's got a schtick that, generally, you can poke a hole through at some point. In the case of Allston's Random Road Mother, who choose to sing about the time-honored topics of losing, drinking, and jail time -- sophomoric, moronic, ill-mannered, and essentially harmless fun -- you have to wonder where the truth falls. There's no way any band could actually live that life of enduring foolishness. Right?

"We got beat up our last time out here," states RRM frontman Thud as if it were a semi-regular occurrence rather than a surprise. Apparently, while searching for a local "gentleman's" club after a Sir Morgan's Cove gig, the Road Mothers, lost and looped, found themselves near the Centrum as the L.L. Cool J show emptied out. It is here that three of the quartet received a lesson in civic pride from what, through hazy recollection at best, appears to have been a single concertgoer.

"I yelled, `Worcester sucks' and offended a local. We all got beat up," Thud says. "I yelled and screamed that I quit the band, then fell under the van into the gutter. Only [guitarist Dr. Paul Loosechords] remained unscathed. He was off buying a cigar."

While that may offend some, intrigue others, and make for easy writing for a music scribe, it is, unfortunately, one episode in a long line of self-induced idiocy that began a little more than two years ago when Thud phoned Loosechords to start a band.

"I met Paul cause he threw-up on my shoes," Thud fondly recalls. "With a love of beer and sweaty practice spaces, we got together and wrote a bunch of tunes."

From there things went immediately south for Random Road Mother (rounded out by the rhythm section of drummer Electric G and new bassist Joe Bag-O-Donuts). It began with their first gig at the legendary Rat, where they played the majority of their set to the bartender because no one at the club bothered to open the gate to let patrons in. They lost original bassist Frank E. Smiles after a particularly horrendous Wormtown date at the Espresso Bar, and even their hometown Allston Community Street Party went down in flames when they showed up.

"We got there figuring it would be a party," relates Thud. "It was full of five- and six-year-old kids and parents in lounge chairs. We cut out all our heavy cuss songs. But [we] had to do the one about LSD, because we only had five non-cuss songs. All the kids came up and danced, it was a beautiful moment. Kids dancing to the LSD song."

The one thing RRM have apparently done correctly is put out a self-titled tape that has actually been met with critical praise across the board. Broaching the diverse topics of cross-dressing hookers, dating chicks with Tourette's syndrome, Mad Cow Disease, techno raves ("I was at a rave once. It took me two hours to figure out why I was the only guy standing by the keg," says Loosechords), and, naturally, substance abuse, the band crank out six tunes of punk brilliance that are every bit as infantile as they sound, which is okay with them. It's a formula they will continue to explore with their impending full-length CD.

"The new shit we're doing is all Big Rock," says Thud. "Were doing a song called `ZZ Top Car' (working a crummy job and wishing ZZ Top would come take you away) and `Mandatory Teenage Devil Reference.' We're going into New Alliance next month to record. Hopefully, someone will put it out. Otherwise, we'll throw shit to the wind and put it out ourselves."

Random Road Mother, almost despite themselves, are currently on an upswing of popularity. They're averaging a show a week and have been invited to open for Hüge this Saturday, July 11, at Ralph's. What is their appeal?

"Depravity, hedonism, drinking, losing, that sums us up," say Bag-O-Donuts. "We try to have the best time we can, and we really want to be uplifting, in our own moronic sense."

So, though they may never amount to anything more in their career than a bar band full of screw-ups and knuckleheads, let it be written for the ages, that in a time ripe with musical frauds and fakers, Random Road Mother, for better or worse, are most certainly the real deal.