Childress


Two-Disted Dongus


SCR 001


1995





500 pressed on black


~200 color covers





NoahVail (bass, guitar)


ShayneHansen (drums)





Artwork: Mike The Mailman Philipsen





Recorded By: Floyd Freeman & George Feldner at The Dungeon Recording Studios

I love Childress. I love NoahVail. ShayneHansen, I always got along with, but... I love Childress. The first time I saw Childress playing at Churchill's I thought they were father and son. NoahVail looked to be about 16, standing front stage, plucking his bass and singing his absurd angst vocals. ShayneHansen was behind the drum kit, at the back of the stage. He looked to be about 45 in my opinion. Somehow, it seemed to me to make sense that they were father and son. It wasn't so much the looks as the way they presented themselves. It was probably the second or third time I saw Childress that I realized NoahVail and ShayneHansen were too close in age and too disimiliar in most other ways to be father and son. Still, they had a closeness. ShayneHansen said he could never play with anybody else, and he made good with that promise, at least as far as I know. After Noah moved to Albuquerque to rejoin an old friend in Chicken Soup, Boots and later to form pop music icons Young Adults, Shayne went on to perform several times at Churchill's solo. Basically, Shayne would put together tapes of hockey fights and show them on the wall of Churchill's while giving a running commentary and accompanying the action with drums.

One thing that impressed me with Childress was their approach to the crowd. Childress always liked to go on last at Churchill's, which could be past 2 AM. Shaynehansen did not want to end a show before every last member of the audience left. My earliest memories are of NoahVail taking over the drums (ineptly) and ShayneHansen donning a pink shiny wig and grabbing the mic to do a rendition of INXS' "Need You Tonight". This worked for only a few shows, and Childress applied myriad means to disperse the audience. I mean, they could keep "Need You" going for 15-20 minutes, at 3 AM and people would be loitering. I've also seen Childress replay sets and make up songs on stage to outlast the audience. Even when they would play songs on stage they never played before, they were still entertaining.

ShayneHansen was a veteran of the Florida punk scene, most notably as the drummer for BrokenTalent who released the anthemic "My God Can Beat Up Your God" single. He lived north of Miami, I think somewhere in Broward County, which you can take for what it is worth.

NoahVail had played bass in HumanOddities and was on both of their 7" releases, I believe. NoahVail was also known for his zines, which included El Zine de Eugene and Icky Girl Stories, and was also a contributor to Scrape.

Childress also released a tape on ESync Records recorded by [Frank "Rat Bastard" Falestra].

NoahVail decided to add guitar parts to the recording. He never played guitar on stage and hadn't recorded guitar tracks on any other Childress songs. I still don't know how I feel about the added guitar. It is catchy, and adds a bit of playful absurdity, but Childress was a bit darker and I loved how damn catchy their songs were with only bass and drums. Oh well, its what NoahVail wanted, and listening to the 7" now, I can't complain.

After a Childress set at Churchill's, the band was approached by an unassuming gentleman who accoladed Shayne and Noah on the night's performance. He returned to another show and presented Childress with a drawing he had done of the duo. This is the drawing on the back cover of Two-Fisted Dongus. The gentleman was in reality a mailman and went by the moniker Mike the Mailman. We asked him to design the whole cover layout, and Mike the Mailman had free reign. I am still blown away by what he was able to come up with. He wasn't an artist, just a Childress fan.

Starcrunch didn't want to spend money on getting full color covers and hadn't relayed this to Mike the Mailman, so when he gave us his layout, we decided not to have the covers printed. A friend of ours, John Lopez, was working at Kinko's and ran off a bunch of covers for us on their color copier for a pretty cheap price. John could only do small runs, so we ended up with about 200 color covers. The single sold so poorly I still have some of the covers left. On a side note, John became a gay crack head junkie and taught at a Christian grade school. He also wrote a lot of the lyrics for the early AAA songs.

Josh Hooten designed the Starcrunch logo appearing on the back cover. Josh was involved in the first issues of Punk Planet and went on to have a regular column. I met him through his brother Todd who worked at Y&T. Todd was a cool dude, and Josh was pretty cool too.

I don't know what a Two-Fisted Dongus is. I don't know what NoahVail's lyrics mean.

__Tracks__

*Waterboy

*Florence King

*John