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Newsletter No. 18: KEEPING YOU IS NO GAIN, LOSING YOU IS NO LOSS THE UGLY "There are two types of people in the world, my friend," Tuco scratched his chin and continued, his eyes cut like slits. "The enemies of art," he spit these words and crossed himself, "and the friends of art. Which type are you?" "Well I guess I'm a friend." "Bullshit. Art has no friends. Art is: if there is a choice between me and you? I choose ME." So it goes. Despite the mewling of family, friends, associates - known and otherwise, and even members OF OXBOW who maintained that the show would: 1. "suck" 2. "fucking suck" 3. "fuckety fuck fuck suck" 4. "suckety suck fuck suck" 5. "is fucking ridiculous" the DOUR Festival (go to http://www.dourfestival.be, click the 'francais' version, click on OXBOW on the bandlist at the right side for photodocumentation of how fucking handsome Eugene is) in Brussels was genius. Especially if by genius you mean 1500 people trapped in a space, appropriately called The Magic Tent, having OXBOW stick our collective cocks in their large and yielding asses. It was great. We flew over on Friday morning, arrived Saturday in time to eat at Le Renard with some of the best hookers Belgium has to offer, staggered in sleep-tinged stupor back to Hotel Vendome, gobbled sleeping pills, picked up the "lovely and talented Nendie Pinto-Duchinsky from London," the next morning along with Manuel the Intrepid and Elisabeth the Patient, and waited for our Man Friday to drive us out to the Festival location. Which he did. At 11 AM sharp.

THE GOOD Everything after that was all big rock show blur. Catered food, a dressing room with ROLLINS' photo anchored outside our door. Drinks, walkie-talkies, a sober help staff of fucking hot Belgian beauties who rejected each and every one of our entreaties to "wrestle" and of course thousands of totally ripped Belgians. Belgians, under the best of conditions, are a wild and primitive people. Throw in multiple stages with bad hip hop, ethereal hippie rock, and MTV primed earnest boy rock, mix in the bad Frankenstein monster of Euroceuticals, and 4 days of living in the woods and you have an OXBOW audience just the way we like them: Confused. Greg (he of the "suckety suck fuck suck" pre-show critique) Davis walked into The Magic Tent behind a healthy contingent of English soccer hooligans who he overheard opining "When they played in England I heard their singer fucked this woman from the audience right on the stage." Yeah. Sure. Anyways we played. It was great, and with the possible exception of the 6 foot high riot cage, which Eugene had given serious thought to leaping onto before he remembered that crushed nuts is only a good punchline in jokes about buccaneers, there were no complaints. Like they say in the horror movies "it was smooth... TOO smooth." But sometimes that's okay. Extra Points to * Niko Wenner for his three hour Bataan Death March to a restaurant that had long ago closed. * the fellas from RAGING SPEEDHORN for having the good taste to be OXBOW fans and even better taste in plants (having correctly chosen the plant outside our dressing room door to piss in). * to Elisabeth for the best make-up job yet

THE BAD We cancelled all of our Midwest shows for the end of August. No Empty Bottle. No Bloomington Festival. No Cincinnati. No Louisville, Kentucky. No WNUR. We've canceled one show previously. In Arizona. In 1994. Explanations are unimportant but the hard-working Pole Robert Iwanik says it best "Life minus OXBOW = DEATH" We're going to have a Telethon just to keep him alive. Goddamned right.

ALL OF YOUR BITCHIN' OXBOW NEEDS CAN BE FULFILLED. FOREVER. NOW. ASK ME HOW. The OXBOW mall and big giant shopping motherfucker is in order at: www.theconnextion.com Shit you will find nowhere else. The prices on the Order Page are right. Any other ones you might find are wrong. If the prices are too high under any circumstance, we are indifferent.

IT'S ONLY A "SHOW" IF SOMEBODY GETS HURT AUG. 2, 2002, SAN FRANCISCO: THE BALAZOS GALLERY in THE MISSION: The OXBOW Orchestra plays The Infernoval. SEPT. 12, 2002, SAN FRANCISCO: THE EAGLE... OXBOW plays the leather bar battlestar galactica with Touched By a Janitor. It's a Thursday. A rock nite. Bring your chaps. Show up. Get down.

WHAT THE FUCK ARE THEY YELLING? MORE WORD ON THE LARGE SAC'D AND EIGHTH WONDER OF THE FUCKING MODERN WORLD: OXBOW'S AN EVIL HEAT New as of 7/10/02 Oxbow An Evil Heat (Neurot Recordings) Williamette Week Online As one might expect from an album whose title seems gleaned from a Birthday Party song ("Sonny's Burning"), frenzied psychosexual fever-dreams come to a boil within Oxbow's misbegotten swamp. We're talkin' 'bout sweaty, incestuous tales of backwoods preacher sex, knotted bodies and ritual skullfucking. Metallo-skronk guitars split open like pig meat cloven by the butcher's knife, then congeal into clots of dissonance. Vocals whimper and wail. Drums scuffle and pound. Depravity abounds. Evil? Oh, my, yes. (John Graham) http://www.wweek.com/flatfiles/Music2941.lasso Oxbow An Evil Heat (Neurot) SF Bay Guardian If you asked me to describe Oxbow's music in three words, I'd call it "abstract blues rock." Then again, they've always gone those one or two steps over a line that most modern-day practitioners of "da blooz" would rather not tiptoe near. On their 1990 debut album, Fuckfest (Pathological), the mood is not "I'm blue 'cause my baby left me"; it's "Someone's throwing dishes at me, a baby's crying in the next room, and there's a grown man in a diaper passed out on the kitchen floor with a bottle of liquor spilled all over the place." Twelve years (and four albums) later Oxbow are still dealing with grand-scale disaster, and they sound as unhinged as ever. But An Evil Heat is actually an improvement on their early albums, which is strange because real rock bands aren't supposed to age this well. You can't chalk it up to "maturity," because just listen to Eugene Robinson's "fuck"-filled lyrics and shriek-and-moan vocals. The band have sharpened their feel for dynamics and for creating a sense of flow throughout an entire album, which they didn't always do. The next-to-last track, "Sorry," is the highlight, veering from heartbroken minor-key guitar strums to violent, free jazz-unto-grindcore outbursts (with Robinson muttering phrases like "a handful of ass" and "I fuck like I pray" in between). Like the rest of the album, it's a catastrophe, but a really well-orchestrated catastrophe. (Will York) http://www.sfbg.com/36/33/x_local_grooves.html Thrash Til death OXBOW "An Evil Heat" CD--- Fractured dysfunctional vocals. For some reason this has a decidedly unwholesome appeal. Like razor blades in Halloween candy. MELVINS-style experimental heaviness. Pissed + wallowing in anguish. Beyond the norm. OXBOW are from San Francisco and have been kickin' it since at least '90. Actually the vox kinda remind me of some early BUTTHOLE SURFERS. In their press pack OXBOW are compared to fucks like NICK CAVE, JESUS LIZARD, and THE SWANS and have worked with Albini, Lunch, Kern, and Klaus Fluoride. Pretty great powerful emotional stuff going on here. Dark, brooding and then screaming and rumbling. Demented like a psycho killer rambling and sputtering in a squalid den before breaking out and going on a kill crazy rampage (over + over again). "OXBOW does not soothe the savage beast. Yeah, OXBOW are the savage beast." NEUROT recordings POBox 41209 San Francisco, CA 94141 Diverse music weblog covering leftfield electronic, experimental sounds and alternative rock music. Details of forthcoming and new... ...Intense powerful rock music from Oxbow - An Evil Heat Like The Jesus Lizard after a stay in prison, Oxbow's music is dangerous, in-your-face and utterly... ...posted by DJ Martian 8:44 PM Oxbow - An Evil Heat DigitalMetal.com review Oxbow - An Evil Heat ..massive, 32-minute closer ³Shine (Glimmer)² could be... ...section high on Pink Floyd¹s Meddle. Like Cream on intravenous Quaaludes, Oxbow remain both wildly inventive and deceptively dangerous. posted by DJ... 52% Mon, 22 Jul 2002 01:09:23 GMT http://djmartian.blogspot.com/ THE FOREIGN LANGUAGE PAVILION "house of fuck" war einmal. "fuck" ist geblieben. textlich. angeblich vierzehn mal gibt's auf der platte "fuck" oder "screw" zu hören. ich habe aber nicht mitgezählt. denn "an evil heat" macht das denken schwer, vielmehr verfällt man schwitzend dem noise der gitarren und dem hämmern der drums. die musik ist laut und gewalttätig. eugene robinsons stimme bis aufs letzte ausgereizt: kreischend, krächzend, jammernd. und er soll sich manchmal die ohren zukleben, um den noise rock nicht zu hören, sondern zu fühlen. diese apokalyptisch verzerrten gitarren und nervenzerfetzenden feedbacks. "an evil heat" braut sich aus neun heißen stücken zusammen zwischen all den feedbacks vernimmt man sogar mal einen chor, orgel oder streicher! diese platte ist nicht cool. sie ist krank. heiß! erinnert an helden wie JESUS LIZARD oder die frühen MELVINS. nach vier vorgängeralben haben OXBOW wieder etwas großartiges zusammengebracht. brachial sind sie noch immer. aber auch feinfühliger . (8/10) milan http://webplanet.lion.cc/jupiter/320109/cd_oxbow02.htm

NEXT MONTH: NOTHING. MORE NOTHING. AND A LITTLE BIT OF MORE NOTHING. Hmm. It dawns on us that maybe you all might be wondering what we do between times. Maybe between times when you get this Newsletter. Maybe between times when you see us live. Maybe between records. Maybe you just want to know what we do in those gray spaces between doing this. Or that. Or whatever. I mean it's probably a good guess that The Red Hot Chili Peppers are off somewhere counting cash and this makes sense. But what does a band that very few people give a single goddamned fuck about do when no one is watching. Well since the great part of not being cared about is that no one IS watching and you can do just about anything, you might be wondering what it is we really do when not penning songs from the Apocalypse. So forthwith an end game: Pick from the list below and match to whatever best suits your world view. When you finish email us with what you feel are the most significant 5 and for which OXBOW member they best match. We'd say "have fun" but we think irony is a bullshit post-modern construct and we really don't give a shit whether you have fun or not doing this. We want you to do it because we're hopelessly self-involved and if you've read this far then so are you. That is involved with our selves. Which isn't a bad past time as past times go. So do it, email it back, have sex with someone you shouldn't, steal a car, eat lots of meat, "abuse the privilege," celebrate Cocksucking Prick Day, and let us know whatever the hell there it is to let us know. And if we're dead by the time you read this, know that we tried. We really did. Especially if by "tried" you mean "almost escaped from the cops that had surrounded the garage that we live in." 1. Eating peaches 2. Taking the train to work 3. Playing with the kids 4. Scratching the dogs/cats stomach 5. Buying steroids 6. Listening to Jerry Vale sing like an angel 7. Tuning into Bishop PP Mobley's Hour of Power 8. Going Wild Boar Hunting 9. Fucking married women 10. Working on laser leveling devices 11. Eating bad Mexican food 12. Staggering around the house barefoot and drinking red wine 13. Lifting weights 14. Welding 15. Reading a political biography of Pol Pot 16. Gossiping about all the people we know who have fucked animals 17. Arguing with the assholes we live with before throwing up our hands and saying things like "Jesus. You know I absolutely forgot who I was talking to about this. But THANKS for the fucking support." 18. Going to the gas station 19. Dreaming about cash. And lots of it. 20. Jerking off and laughing bitterly about some past wrong 21. Shopping for groceries 22. Watching Ultimate Fighting Videos. Or Joseph Losey films. Strangely enough, not very much porno... unless we're in it, of course, then well, hell yeah. 23. Calling our parents to say "hi." 24. Unless you're Eugene and you don't speak to your parents 25. Cleaning the fingerprints off of every single bullet you own. [ Newsletter ]