Warlock Pinchers review from 1990
The Warlock Pinchers are long time Colorado legends, partly for their memorable songs that caught the Denver zeitgeist and partly for their on-stage antics ranging from the benign (handing out muffins and pancakes) to the weird (throwing raw bacon on the audience) to the crazed (setting fire to the stage at Penny Lane or getting banned from Quigley’s where either they or the Haters reportedly took a chainsaw to the club). The Warlock Pinchers were unfailingly offensive, surreal and remarkably entertaining.
While you didn’t really want to be in the front row at any of their shows you did want to be close enough to see what, exactly, was coming next so you could be ready to get out of the way.
The review below is for the band’s 1989 album, “Deadly Kung Fu Action”, which includes their absolute best moment on vinyl, the obscene, scabrous and perhaps libelous, “Morrissey Rides a Cockhorse.” The song is three minutes of hilariously juvenile insults and name calling, elevated above a schoolyard throwdown by the sheer energy and gob-smacking unfairness of the attack – heck, I don’t like Morrissey, and even I feel a bit for the pathetic wanker after listening to this!*
The review was printed in Waste Paper #26 from March, 1990, the same issue that included the ‘Captains of Industry’ article posted to this newsletter awhile back.
The Pinchers, alas, are no more. They terrorized us from around 1987 to the mid-’90s and made one glorious return for a show in August, 2010 at the Gothic. I still occasionally see EE-Rok (aka Eric Erickson) and K.C. K-Sum (aka Andrew Novick), both of whom still pursue creative work. Satan seems to have done right by them and so far they haven’t been dragged down into the bowels of Hell.
So, if you want to hear what the house band in the Red Room at the Black Lodge might sound like on a night the Man From Another Place spiked the punch causing Agent Cooper to strip off his FBI suit and paint his butt blue while shouting out riffs to old Beastie Boys screeds, this crew is for you – check out some of the links below the review: but be careful, don’t get any on you.
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*Nah, I really don’t. The Moz deserves it all!
Warlock Pinchers – Deadly Kung Fu Action LP (on Boner Records)
“‘Reference is discreetly but absolutely displaced in the workings of a certain syntax, whenever any writing both marks and goes back over its mark with an undecidable stroke. This double mark escapes the pertinence or authority of truth: it does not overturn it but rather inscribes it within its play as one of its functions or parts.“‘ —Jacques Derrida, DISSEMINATION
The Warlock Pinchers are back in black with an LP of hilariously bent-up songs, out this time on Boner Records from San Francisco. The Pinchers are a Denver based group whose particular covenant with Rock n Roll allows them exclusive claim to being “The Official Sound of Satan.”
Fronted by the irrepressibly evil K.C.Kasum and King Scratchie, the Warlock Pinchers state their goal with refreshing candor: “We work for Satan – We’re his henchmen/ Collect souls for him – We’re the middlemen/ So come on now and prove you’re a fan/ On the dotted line – Sign it in blood, man.” Ah, the smell of brimstone and sulfur, the rustle of leather wings in the distance and the prospect of a one-bedroom, four flight walk-up address on one of the more exclusive inner circles of Hell.
In the 10 songs collected herein (including a furious mauling of AC/DC’s “Back in Black”), the Pincher’s excoriate:
Crispin Glover for failing to show up for band practice 100 percent of the time (Crispin, if you’re reading this, some friendly advice: take up the Pincher’s offer of a spot in their line-up – you’re new LP is worse than bad, it’s dull. Even Satan fell asleep while you were describing your rather unimaginative masturbatory techniques);
Morrissey as a “crybaby son of a bitch, no talent motherfucker” who wears baggy shirts and indulges in fantasies about having sex with the corpse of James Dean;
Quigley’s, a Univ of Colo night spot the Pinchers helped to redecorate with sledgehammers and chicken livers one night with the Haters; and the mimes who are apparently ruining San Francisco by standing around on streetcorners trying to get out of glass boxes.
They also describe how the Ayatollah hired Curious George to rub out Salmon Rushdie and why Gary Coleman is their favorite tv star.
The best piece though is ‘Anthem Five,’ a five minute essay on the political economy of noise that brings us to the rather recondite quote that begins this review. Jacques Derrida is the French philosopher who coined the term. “deconstruction”, the activity by which a concept or idea is shown to be self-contradictory or incomplete by its exclusion of something that, if incorporated in that concept’s definition, would necessarily lead to its self-destruction.
“Anthem Five” is the Warlock Pincher’s Statement of Principles, a claim to their particular territory: ‘What you want what you can’t have? Don’t be quiet, start a riot / You say that’s not a good attitude? I don’t buy it / Like KRS-One said, ‘You’ve got to have style / And learn to be original. We did and we’re on trial / For displaying feelings or better yet rage / Make a little noise and we’re on the front page.”
So, in this statement what is true? Well, everything and nothing.
The Pinchers are working a well worn schtick: The Beastie Boys defined the style and the music – The Pinchers have added some more naughty words and a few cultural targets other groups had not gotten around to yet. At this point in their development, their attack on mimes rings with a certain irony in that the Pinchers themselves are playing inside a glass box of their own choosing and one that is just as imaginary as one of Marcel Marceau’s.
But, and this is the point, boxes are necessary: we cannot fight against an enemy we have not taken the trouble to identify. The Pinchers are working at making a “certain syntax,” a particular version of a transformational grammar that says what it is and contradicts that at the same time. In the simplest terms, this is the act of parody, the double movement within a certain identity that both confirms and erases that set of uncritical axioms that make up a cultural, social or political definition.
An example: “I’m just a R-A-G-A-M-U double F-I-N/ King Scratchie Crown Prince of Ragamuffins / Ranting and raving on the rhythm perfect timing / A vocal collision provided by the rhyming.” This is parody in a nutshell – an internal collision within a coherent form. The Pinchers take a musical style, Rap, with its mania for order (a strong, relentless beat, straightened vocal patterns, emphasis on end rhymes and strong sense of line endings). and careen around in it like mad molecules heating up in a Brownian apocalypse.
What has not happened yet is the melt down, the moment when the heat of the internal chaos becomes enough to violate the boundaries of the self-imposed form. In a piece like “Morrissey Rides a Cockhorse,” that state is almost reached by the purity of the scatology – the parody almost takes over the entire complex of reality as defined by the song’s cultural references. If that should ever happen (either on vinyl or on stage), a lurching Frankenstein will rear up out of the band: a new life pieced from old lives, dangerous, awkward, ugly.
Highly recommended: just sign on the dotted line:
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Some links for further study:
YouTube: ‘Where The Hell Is Crispin Glover?’
YouTube: ‘Morrissey Rides A Cockhorse’
YouTube: ‘Morrissey…’ at Gothic Theater, Reunion Show, 2010
YouTube: Pinchers ‘Introduce Themselves’, Reunion Show 2010
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