Flat Old World, 1990–1996
A band history by Mark Lerner
Diane Stockwell – violin, mandolin, melodica, vocals
Mark Donato – drums, harmonica, vocals
Bill Fink – guitar, vocals
G. Doug Pierson – tuba, euphonium, concertina, guitar, vocals
Todd Weeks – trumpet, harmonica (until 1992)
Robin Goldwasser – cello, ukulele, melodica, vocals (1992 on)
Flat Old World was the first band of my very own. Prior to it, I was a sideman or one of a few writers. I am a pretty bossy guy, really, so even when a band isn’t “mine,” I tend to assert myself a lot as an arranger and general loudmouth. Partly this is due to my musical role: Bass player. When a song is well arranged, the simple task of playing a simple, grounding part in a groove sounds really great. So I’ve always tended to offer lots of arrangement advice in any band I play with.
In 1989, the band I’d been playing with for 2 years, the Oswalds, split up. I found myself wondering if maybe it was time to stop playing music (I was 26). I had always felt that songwriting was the center of a band, but I wasn’t all that keen on doing it myself at the time. I could, but I knew (and played with) so many writers who were better than me. I’m not really a virtuosic bassist, but I have my own quirky strengths, and I started to think that somehow, by basically subtracting songwriting—subtracting pop and rock, really—and focusing on my personal playing style and arranging, I might have some sort of band of my own to offer. I was also eager to play with my new girlfriend, Nancy, who was a great singer.
So I started writing some instrumentals and digging up some old folk songs to mess with. I pictured a very serious, meditative mix of ultra-slow country music like Souled American, chamber jazz like Red Norvo’s band, and the idiosyncratic guitar techniques of Joseph Spence and John Fahey. It was to be my new project. Luckily, reality intervened, and my theories were soon filtered through the sensibilities of a motley assortment of bandmates into something much more musical and fun than my Grand Plan.
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| Flat Old World in my kitchen, Brooklyn, 1994. From left: Mark Lerner, Robin Goldwasser, Diane Stockwell, Bill Fink, Nancy Lynn Howell, Mark Donato, G. Doug Pierson. I’m washing the dishes. Nancy is very pregnant. |
An ad in the Village Voice (!) led to a phone call from Diane Stockwell, a violin player fresh out of college; after a classical background, she was eager to try some more improvisatory music. After a few rehearsals with a concertina player named Thomas who disappeared, I asked Todd Weeks, a college friend of my old friend Eric, to join us on harmonica. Todd was eager to play trumpet as well, having just learned to play for a film role as Bix Biederbecke. My longtime musical colleagues Mark Donato and Bill Fink joined up on drums and guitar, and a band was born. I played a Fender VI bass, a strange hybrid instrument I’d fallen in love with and on which I’d spent an outrageous amount of money. After a few shows, we started adding Doug Pierson (the guitarist in Nancy’s band Clovis Noches) on tuba, euphonium, and concertina.
I’ve always loved the idea of a musical collective, with no central ego, but the best I could do was fake it by asking everybody to sing and to often play instruments they weren’t comfortable with. Despite this, and even though the band was everybody’s “other” band and played a lot of instrumentals and relentlessly slow music, we caught on. We got great gigs and people liked us.
The Band Flyers
To make things just a little more difficult, I had begun printing hand-set letterpress postcards and flyers for every show. At this link you can see, chronologically, every flyer from every show we ever did. After about a year of sad xeroxed clip art and blown-up typewriter letters, the letterpress stuff arrives. Over the next few years’ worth of flyers, you can see me gradually beginning to become a designer (which is what I do for a living now).
It Grows...
After about a year, Todd left the group, and I recruited Robin Goldwasser to play cello and ukulele and sing; we met at a gig where she was playing banjolele and I liked her so much I wanted her in the band whether she could play the cello or not (it turned out she could, reluctantly). I had also started amassing a collection of melodicas from various stoop sales, and everybody sooner or later got handed a melodica to play. Diane had taken up mandolin, and I played banjo on some numbers. The pile of instruments on stage at our shows grew as impressive/oppressive as the length of time between songs.
Nancy and I were married in 1992 (Diane, Doug, and Bill played our song “Flat Old Waltz” as we walked down the aisle). Soon afterwards, we moved to Williamsburg and I got my own printing press, which sat in the middle of our large one-room space. Real printing and design work started coming my way.
We made an EP for the Hello Recording Club, run by Robin’s then boyfriend (now husband) John Flansburgh, of They Might Be Giants, which exposed us to people all over the country, many of whom became fans. We were commissioned to do music for a dance performance, we played radio shows, we got good press and lots of it. It was almost unnerving; this band that was a side project for most of us, and a rather weird one, was really popular.
Every chance I got, I'd herd us into Al Houghton’s Dubway Studio to record some of our music. When we finished our full-length album, Musicale, Tom Prendergast of Bar/None Records offered to put it out, but I turned him down. I had started a label of my own, Rag & Bone Shop Music, and wanted to do it myself. I printed an elaborate letterpress package that I diecut at home on the press. As we assembled the package, the cheap cardboard I’d bought for the package kept cracking when we’d fold it along the scores, so we had to carry the 2000 printed pieces into the bathroom in batches of 100, with the shower running, to steam them and then hurriedly fold them while they were still pliable.
In 1994 my twins, Edith and Lukas, were born. With both Nancy and me in the band, having babies obviously slowed down the group’s pace, but we kept getting great shows (though rehearsals and performances now required a babysitter). The record was a favorite on local tastemaker station WFMU. We got nice reviews, including a lovely one in the Village Voice where Richard Gehr called me “a flat-picking Jean-Luc Godard,” which puzzled me, but not as much as it pleased me.
We started recording a second album. I was getting more comfortable with sounding good. That may sound odd. But on the first record I usually shied away from anything that sounded too normal; I’d throw in something ugly or weird, an unreasonable tempo, traffic noise, a bizarre vocal sound. This time around, I was more content to just let us play. We’d learned how to work together and our sound was a simple equation that didn’t require as much intervention on my part (although I was also adding in elements of dub music, which I was listening to constantly at the time). I felt better about letting Nancy and Robin sing more without feeling like the beauty of their vocals somehow detracted from the seriousness of our purpose, whatever that was.
... As It Goes
In late 1995, I told my bandmates I was going to end the group. Here’s what I wrote the night before our final show. I’m not sure what I did with this fragment when it was written. I stumbled across it in some old files:
I don’t know what I’ve done. I broke up my band. I had reasons and I can’t remember them. Somehow I was failing to live up to the band, that had something to do with it. And I’ve always been obsessed with breaking up the band, anyway. I think maybe I put this band together just so I could break it up, so it could be part of the past. The good old used-to-be.
We went into the studio a little while ago to record a few new songs and mixed a dub version of one new song and one old one. Dub always appeals to the necrophiliac, playing with the corpse of a song after the spirit—and the band members!—have departed, amusing himself with a dumb puppet show, lifting the song’s pale cold arm and waving “Hello!”
With the vocal stripped out of this five-year-old song (it was me singing originally), I can hear that the band really has a sound, had it even then, a trademark clunk and wheeze that shows the sweet genius of the best bandmates I ever had. I listen and I can still see us gathered in the dim chill of Al’s studio, everyone paying too much attention to my ridiculous instructions, and then gradually falling in with their own interpretation. That song is called “Angel’s Voice,” and though I was not born with one, for a blessed five years I could fake it pretty well thanks to this band that will play its farewell show tomorrow, January 5, 1996, in New York City. —M.L.
Which is all very nice, but in retrospect I wasn’t being completely honest with myself. There was a pretty specific reason I broke up the band. I’d been depressed out of my gourd for about a year by then. I owned up to it a few years later and got myself well and have been quite lucky in that regard ever since.
Running a band is stressful. You need a tremendous amount of self-confidence to ask so much of your bandmates: to play shows that might turn out to be lame, to play your songs that might suck, to try out your potentially dumb ideas. You make great demands of their time and talent, with no guarantee you’ll do anything worthwhile with either. I never heard an iota of complaint from the members of Flat Old World. I couldn’t ask for better friends or bandmates. But when eventually I found myself in a fairly dark place, I couldn’t summon or even fake the confidence needed to lead a band.
At any rate, we went out with a bang. I put our album-in-progress together with an outtake from our first album and made a cassette-only EP, The Abasement Tapes, and we played a very fun final show. Life went on. You can still hear and download most of our recorded output at Bandcamp.
The past is never dead etc etc
