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August 14, 2008
Ego Summit: The Room Isn't Big Enough
If one day in the not so distant future every U.S. city is forced to pull all their resources together
in order to stave off an alien race whose only weakness is an adversity to low-fi underground rock, well, in that specific scenario, the city of Columbus, Ohio will certainly be ahead of the game. This is because in 1997, 5 veteran members of the Columbus musical tradition pulled together for a few nights in an Ohio barn with the sole mission of recording an album that would “reflect the Blues, Folk, and Punk roots/ heritage of all involved.” The band was named Ego Summit, and the album, which has just been re-issued, was claustrophobically titled The Room Isn’t Big Enough.
True, the story of Ego Summit does sound like an underground musical version of the A-Team, and for the most part if you have a problem, and if no one else can help, and if you can find them, Ego Summit may or may not be able to offer the sort of assistance that you need. But all of that is a wash since they did make a record stamped with a uniqueness that still resonates in mystery eleven years after it was recorded deep under Ohio skies.
The members of this Columbus troop of musically inclined soldiers of fortune were Don Howland, of the Gibson Bros. and Bassholes; Ron House of Great Plains and Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments; the late Jim Shepard, of Vertical Slit and V3; and Tommy Jay and lo-fi legend Mike “Rep” Hummel of Mike Rep and the Quotas.
The last member listed in the Ego Summit lineup should flutter a wavelength. We interviewed Mike Rep whose delicate ears brought us some of our favorite sounding records ( e.g. Guided By Voices’ Propeller and Times New Viking’s Dig Yourself) back in ’07 and he recently introduced us to his work with the band Mors Ontologica.
From the first drum clicks over hiss on the first track of Ron House’s “Beyond the Laws” the album takes on something much more layered than just a recording of five friends playing together in a barn (though the barn does add a level on its own). There is something else at work here, a musical urgency sounding like it is being recorded deep in space and played back through a loudspeaker at mission control in Houston. The resulting sound is familiar but distant. The enigma that an album can sound so remote when it was aptly named The Room Isn’t Big Enough for all literal purposes is Exhibit A in arguing for the recording astuteness of Mike Rep/ Tommy Jay /and engineer Jerry Wick.
Matched with the sense of desperation caused by the dripping of magnetic guitar lines that could make Lou Reed himself check his soundboard, there is a sense of humor dark enough to cause someone to need a flashlight to see the Aurora Borealis.
One song has particularly managed to float around my head for over three weeks. This is Ron House's "Rise Sherry." The repetitive pull of the hazy guitar riff must still be moving on some wavelength. The deep bluesy dragging rhythm of the song could have easily been penned as a Ray Manzarek organ line in the Doors’ Morrison Hotel.
There are truly lyrics in this album that distinctly stand out for their unique pungent philosophy that go along with a musical sense of comedic timing. Don Howland’s snappy list of matrimonial grievances, “Wife Blues,” could have been told by one of the pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales and in futile misogyny ends with the quip:
I like the looks of women
I like the way they smell
but never met the woman
that didn’t take me down to hell
Included in the re-issue is a Mike Rep bonus track called "Fuck the Clock" in which he says he “wrote it about Jim Shepard but it didn't make the record because I had already sung too many of the songs ha!” The spoken piece winds through syncopated verses until it poetically collapses on the great line:
he takes his copy Patti Smith’s Babel
he’d tare out a page and eat it
but he’s not that god damn cool
he reads one line instead
tic/toc tic/ toc
fuck the clock!
The comedically timed kicker however would have to be Shepard’s own rasp in “We Got It All” where he blurts out along with a list of things going wrong with the world that he; "got some naked pictures of your wife/ that I bought from bartender in Houston." There is something in the bizarre phrasing that comes out of nowhere along with the crackling inflection that Shepard gives in his pronunciation of “Houston” that I have to admit just makes me laugh.
But it might not have been until I listened to the album’s sendoff into ether, Tommy Jay’s “Small Piece of Germany,” that I recognized the full power of The Room Isn’t Big Enough. After 13 tracks in which the five explore their roots all of the sudden they seem to arrive on something new. A wordless track that just patiently flickers on and off. The hushed subtlety of this track serves as a cushion/ trampoline for the harder hits from tracks that push in different directions against the plastic of the album’s packaging. “Small Piece of Germany” is able to phrase all of these other pieces and in the end works both like a coat of enamel and an x-ray that shows the flickering under-belly of the sound of Ego Summit.
There is a great Nietzsche quote that says “He who climbs upon the highest mountains laughs at all tragedies, real or imaginary.” Certainly there were misfortunes at the top of Ego Summit such as the untimely death of Jim Shepard two years after this album was originally released. But after following the five trails to the top of Ego Summit, these five musicians were able to do what people have done since the first chord progression; laugh for a moment at the state of humanity and then play some f$cking music.
// The Room Isn't Big Enough is available through Old 3C Records
Posted by Yonah Korngold at August 14, 2008 12:19 PM
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