A decade ago, I was considering whether my wife would enjoy attending an early performance by my friend’s fledgling band. Helpfully, my friend offered: “Not unless she takes up hard drugs and S&M between now and tomorrow.” Accurate though the assessment was, this anecdote amuses me now primarily in the respect that there was a moment in my life when I considered taking my wife to see Elephant Rifle. Things change; things stay the same. I am perhaps a wiser husband. The band is fouler than ever. She’d still hate their performance.
As a leading expert on the band’s anthropology and chemistry—and by chemistry, I mean pH balance—I'm tasked with making sense of its achievements, its trajectory, and its preoccupations with sweat and fried food. But only with context can you begin to understand why we are here, why you are bothering to read this in 2020 or whenever you are reading it, with apologies to whatever future classroom has unearthed this grotesque time capsule.
You need to understand, for instance, that without original drummer Troy "Division" Micheau, this particular Greyhound bus would have never left its filthy station. His time with the band was the spark that lit the fire, but he soon departed to join a Pacific Northwest tantric sex cult. Fortunately, erstwhile tennis prodigy Ty Williams was there, ready and waiting, energetic and versatile. Although he too departed, Caine-like, to walk the Earth, his manic DNA remains sprayed and encrusted across the band’s figurative furniture.
But for being arrested at a long-ago county fair, renowned Texan Brad Bynum may have never climbed up on a gen pop mess hall table holding a microphone. Or fellated one in front of a live audience. Likewise, had he not vengefully renounced his vegetarianism after obtaining his bachelor’s degree (Astronomy, Vassar ‘03), we may have never beheld his trademark beauty-queen physique.
While you’ve surely observed and cowered from the fury with which Clint Neuerburg punishes his guitar, you may not know that he owes his technique to a horrific welding accident on his family’s Carson City ranch that left him incapable of perceiving temperature, but imbued him with the ability to visually apprehend sound waves. He initially sought to use this power to hunt ghosts, before discovering there are no such things as ghosts. There is only music, pain, and lingering sorrow. So he chose music.
Of Michael Young's life, little is known. The commonly held origin story that he grew up alone in the Alaskan wilderness is now considered apocryphal, though he is a known orphan. How he surfaced in America with a wife and four children, none of whom retain any long term memory or possess any official documentation, remains the subject of an active (though stalled) US Customs investigation. He is rumored to have never played music, or even listened to it, before joining Elephant Rifle and instantly learning its whole catalog.
Prodigal son Scaught Bates was present for the high school science project that was the accidental genesis of the band (an operational scale model of a cow’s digestive system) but abruptly left the area after suspiciously turning up as the only survivor of a warehouse fire in Sparks. He returned after being designated a person of interest in a series of Los Angeles County missing person cases, all involving aspiring models. Though no one in the band trusts him or dares to be alone with him, his steady hand is welcome—even comforting—compared to the tumultuous “Mayhall Years,” which consisted of a lengthy shared hallucination of a preternaturally gifted jazz musician who ultimately succumbed to radiation poisoning. Audiences also experienced the delusion that this spectral bassist existed, and the time he put in with the band—if it occurred at all—is heartily appreciated.
These facts may not be entirely accurate, but they are the truth. You already know it if you’re reading this. The power of the band’s collective output—its Voltron-like aggregated strength—is that when fully assembled and chugging along, the details blur as it swallows the inanity of your real life, digests it halfway, and retches the remains onto the barroom floor, rendering it the pointless, disgusting, absurd heap you always suspected it was. This truth sets Elephant Rifle apart from other bands of their ilk. (Kidding. There are no other bands of their ilk.) The collective persists in spite of grown-up jobs, family demands, financial strain, decaying social skills, mass shootings, anti-vaxxers, vape culture, Spotify, cancer, and the popular opinion that bathing is necessary, or that entertainment should be “enjoyable.” Often, it persists precisely because of these things, because these towering legends each need other towering legends to lean on once in a while. To share some tears, some Kleenex, and probably a bucket of wings. And then more Kleenex, because there’s no way they remembered napkins.
The songs on this compilation are not “hits” so much as they are the songs that have anecdotally resonated with the suspect breed of people who attend Elephant Rifle shows in hopes of commingling bodily fluids with hirsute strangers and/or who value musical compositions about intense scientific rivalries, vampiric healthcare workers, aspiring ax murderers, barbecue, and the like—all set to pure cacophony. What I am saying is that these songs are here because you put them here. And as strange and creepy and ugly as Elephant Rifle can be, that makes
you even stranger and creepier than the band that composed and performed these songs. You’re not ugly though. You’re beautiful. So hop in and come for a ride, baby. Watch out, though. They’re bad at driving.
Mark W. Dunagan, Esq.
January 1, 2020
Track 1 from “Christian House of Girls” EP.
Tracks 2, 3 previously unreleased.
Track 4 from “Teenage Lover” EP.
Tracks 5, 6, 7 from “Party Child” LP.
Track 8 from “Dirty Pillows” mixtape.
Track 9 from “I Can’t Believe You’re Still Alive” single.
Track 10 from Alphabet Cult/Elephant Rifle split 7”.
Tracks 11, 12, 13 from “Ivory” LP.
Track 14 previously unreleased.
Track 15 from “Fiends in Low Places” compilation.
Tracks 16, 17, 18 from “Hunk” LP.
credits
released February 21, 2020
All songs by Elephant Rifle who was/is:
Scaught Bates, Brad Bynum, Mike Mayhall, Troy Micheau, Clinton Neuerburg, Ty Williams, Michael Young
Recorded by Kevin Bosley, Robert Cheek, Colin Christian,
Zak Girdis, Tim Green, Scott Murray, Morgan Travis, Ty Williams
Mastered by Jared Hirshland
Clones & Clones Lyrics by Mark Dunagan
Photos by Darden Bynum, Chris Costolupes, Metal Jeff, Jaxon Northon
All songs from the decade 2010 - 2019. HTR-041 Thank you.
