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Last Modified: Aug 23, 2000 at 1:13AM (EST)
What is Skuntry?
The origin of the term "Skuntry" extends back into the mythy past, a time
before amazon.com and "Smells Like Teen Spirit," before the Meat Puppets crept
to the middle of the dial, when Paul Westerberg was still drinking and the
Uncle Tupelo creature walked the earth as one, not yet evolving into the two-
headed Son Volt-Wilco hydra we know today. Beer was involved, and a river,
and a rehearsal with a guy who didn’t even intend to learn the tunes.
Be it noted, sadly, that the reputed author of the word was the first to leave
the fold and never look back.
That man was Marshall Boswell who, like half the founding members of Enormous
Richard, was a graduate student in English in Washington University. MaBo had
also coined the band name, when he excused himself from a date at a summer
fair to employ a portapotty. "Is the little Elvis in trouble?" his friend
asked. "That’s the Enormous Richard to you," the man replied. Marshall would
later put his phallic wit to well-paying use, twice publishing his fiction in
Playboy magazine.
The birth of Skuntry places us in the winter, crossing the Mississippi River
on an icy bridge. Beer is flowing freely even if the frozen river is
sluggish, and the enthusiasm that infects new bands has everyone pondering
what kind of music it is that we play. Country had to be in there somewhere,
thanks to Chris King’s severely limited vocal range and childhood attachment
to Johnny Cash – not to mention Matt Fuller’s craving for the Carter Family,
and Elijah Shaw’s new (but terribly used) banjo and fiddle. Punk was there,
too, what with all the early Replacements and Meat Puppets and Iggy Pop
haunting our every ambition. But where did those opening consonants come
from? Who put the "Sk" in Skuntry? Founding member Richard "Skoob" Skubish?
The deep answer is Pepe LePew, described by his creator, Chuck E. Jones, as a
skunk hopelessly convinced of his own desirability. Because we were
undesirable: Chris sang like a hurt dog howling, Elijah joined the band to
learn new instruments (that fiddle and banjo) and it was a painful education,
Matt had soul to burn but his timing dragged, John Minkoff’s guitar was
chronically out of tune, Joe Esser played bass with his thumb (he had ten to
pick from), Skoob only picked up his guitar for gigs. But we liked ourselves,
or our songs, anyway, and we loved each other. This band was a skunk that
liked its own smell.
All that is post-hoc exegesis (we made it up later). At the time, Marshall
supplied the missing element, and it was something else: "Skuntry" = "country
+ punk + … ska"? Yes, indeed, ska, and this was long before the ska
phenomenon, and indeed long before ska appreciably transformed our sound (as
it never did). But Marshall had rhythm, and he wanted the people to dance,
and no matter how hard Chris tried to weigh him down with lyrics based on
George Orwell (Homage to Catalonia), MaBo threw this funky, dare we say
cheezy, little groove in there, which he – or someone – misnamed ska. So
there you have it – Skuntry was a lie, or its first consonants were, until we
smelled the skunk in Skuntry.
 Let’s finish the picture of that wintry river-crossing before dissecting the
historic term. The vehicle of passage was Chris’ 1987 Cavalier, a warhorse
still operative (as of winter, 1999); when Chris is in New York City you will
find it parked out back at Pops Farrar’s spread, next to his chainsaw
sculpture of a Civil War general. The destination across the river was the
fabled practice loft maintained by Judge Nothing, a beautiful, now-departed
pop-punk band from Alton, Illinois, who were loaning us a rehearsal space and
a drummer, Andy Dykeman. And this webpage and genre were very nearly
preempted later that night on the way home when The Birthplace of Skuntry (as
the Cavalier came to be known) nearly skidded into an oncoming tractor-trailer
on that icy bridge.
Country, punk and skunkiness continue to linger in Skuntry music, but we must
enrich the definition for it to make sense of the current endeavor, as it now
includes characters of dubious Skuntry standing such as African tribal elder,
Nymah Kumah. Really, it all shakes out of country, punk and skunkiness, if
you know how to shake those words. "Country" implies down-home, rooted, out-
back (this is country independent of The Ascension of Garth Brooks and His
Feckless Ilk). "Punk" always had an edge of do-it-yourself, for-yourself, and
juck ‘em if they can’t take a foke.  And "skunk," as redacted through Pepe
LePew, suggests a peculiar odor that is at once natural, forgivable, even a
bit charming, and we promise that once you learn to forgive a few sour notes
and scratchy technical glitches, you will come to welcome Skuntry in your life
– you, too, may find yourself smelling a skunk on the highway and, without
thinking, popping up a Skuntry salute (effected by throwing back the head with
pride and pinching your nostrils with the thumb and forefinger of your guitar-
strumming hand).
As is the fate of any aesthetic, Skuntry emerged from artistic particulars
(Carter Family picking patterns, Minutemen urgency) but ultimately leaves them
behind, becoming an essence – "eau de Skuntry," as we like to say. Today we
would like to claim as Skuntry (and, thus, as the provenance of Skuntry.com)
anything that is heart-felt, rooted, off-kilter, a little unloved perhaps, but
loving. If our goods lean a bit towards our own music, well, you can’t shoot
a dog for hunting for himself, and we have so many songs nobody ever heard but
us. Hang with us, though, and you will see our records joined by African
folktales, Merchant Marine concertina, a hitchhiking epic from the 70s, a
mystical horse trainer, an Irish bagpiper, a jump blues legend, the last of
the northern Mississippi fife makers … and those are just the folks we already
know!
Post-script: After authoring the band name "Enormous Richard," the aesthetic
term "Skuntry," chords to the Skuntry chestnut "All the Greatest Matadors were
Fascists," two Playboy stories and a heart-breaking review of (Why It’s) Enormous Richard’s Almanac, Marshall Boswell disappeared. Just …
disappeared. He was finishing his Ph. D. at Emory and trading occasional
letters with Chris when he suddenly went incommunicado and has thus remained.
Until VH-1 researches their "Skuntry’s Forefathers: Where are They Now?"
segment, or MaBo gets drunk, nostalgic and weepy while surfing the internet,
bumps up the dogpile search engine, types in "Skuntry" and reads these words,
all we have are the memories.
Where can I find an authoritative treatise on the glorious history of Skuntry?
Um, right here.
Why Skuntry.com?
Where walks a musician walks a repertoire of record-label and distributor war stories. At least ours are warmed by scruffy humor, and not accompanied by unpayable debt.
After releasing a cassette and CD ourselves, Enormous Richard landed a distribution deal for Warm Milk on the Porch, which was recorded on the $150 budget allotted us to record one song for a compilation (Lyrics by Ernest Noyes Brookings, a nursing home poet). The distributor, encouragingly titled Fruit of the Tune, was cashing its checks on writer of detective novels and funny songs Kinky Friedman, with the additional distinction of carrying Charles Manson’s record ("Cat Stevensish with a twang," our man at the distributor described it). We delivered the distributor a hastily rehearsed and badly recorded disc of mud, and they returned the favor by promptly folding. Our contact, who remains nameless so we cannot be linked to him as accomplices, actually got a pinch of money and a few of our records to us before he disappeared to Puerto Rico to surf, open a fish taco stand and skirt the U.S. tax goons.
We next observe our Skuntry heroes scattered to all corners of the country. Chris King has been left alone in St. Louis unsupervised, and snuck into a pawnshop for an Alvarez acoustic and started picking out song patterns while leafing through old notebooks. Weird songs with lyrics from ancient Egyptian food spells emerge, and he starts a hobby band with some of St. Louis’ best underemployed musicians. This ensemble, Three Fried Men, attracts the ear of a trust fund Maoist recently relocated to the city from an Ozark hippie commune, and this man does what trust fund Maoists do, he offers them a record deal. Maoist money is temporarily diverted from the people’s struggles into the pockets of a guy named Wally running a really cheap studio occupied by a cat who promptly pees all over the Birthplace of Skuntry.
When the record, Dance for an Orphan’s Wedding, is in the can, the Maoist label magnate has absconded into madness. What do you do? Mail out demos, of course, and here comes a good response, a record deal! The old Skuntry troops rally around; Three Fried Men is recast as a new flicker of the Skuntry flame; recording masters and artwork go to the label and … nothing happens. We move, bury a parent, move back, get a divorce, have a baby, move again, get pregnant, remarry, lose a baby, get pregnant again, get pregnant again, and … still no workable contract, still no record. By now we have visited the label, run by a very decent man but housed in an insufficiently renovated former nursing home in rural Vermont; we foresee future trouble.
Holiday season, 1998. Elijah Shaw has come from Nashville and Matt Fuller from the City of Angels to write songs with Joe Esser (living in his native village, Wayne, New Jersey) and Chris, now situated in Queens, New York. For yes, you may separate these boys by a continent and many crowded, conflicting calendars, but they will still find a way to get together, stay up late and make up songs. But how long can this go on when the fruits of our tunes rot unheard by anyone but us? This was the topic of discourse at the Irish Rover tavern in Astoria, Queens, as the barman poured the third (and complimentary) round of stout. The Skuntry forces assessed themselves. Elijah is a studio engineer, he can make recordings; Matt is an artist, he can design a CD; Joe has a CD burner and an internet server, he can manufacture and sell records. You can see where this is headed.
The next morning as Chris percolated coffee and nursed the cold that kept him from attending the Irish Rover summit the night before, the lads sprung it on him, expecting a hard sell, knowing he had done most of the dung work back in the day pushing the Enormous Richard catalogue. But Chris had been sagging under the burden of unfinished records from the Hoobellatoo archives, field recordings he and Elijah had collected, so he embraced the label concept -- if it could be expanded to include Hoo’too. The Skuntry gods were consulted in prayer (an occult ceremony we are not permitted to describe) and as the unmistakable odor of skunk rose up steaming from their coffee, the will of the gods was made clear. Of course Nymah Kumah and Pops Farrar all our elders -- are Skuntry! Of course we all belong together. All we had to do was dot our com, and here we are.
Post-script: Still in the first flush of excitement over the new endeavor, Elijah excused himself. Then a voice rang from the commode he had been reading the book kept there for just that purpose, Locusts at the Edge of Summer by John Balaban, when his eyes fell on a fitting line. The poet consecrated our project:
Everything about us, for better or worse,
we make ourselves …
I played on one or more of the records in the Skuntry.com catalog, or I spent many a sleepless night recording and/or engineering them - how do I get my copies?
As an artist or technician on a Skuntry.com record, you are part of a huge, loosely knit family of pretty talented folk who have either done hard time as members of one of the various personalities of ER/3FMen, allowed us to stick a mic in your face and beg you to sing, or sat in for any number of recording sessions. And if we were a huge multinational record syndicate making gazillions of semolians by pushing countless units of product, we'd be gleefully screwing you out of your rightly deserved and hard won royalties.But, alas, no-one is making any semolians, much less a gazillion, from this endeavor, so the best we can hope for is to make it fairly easy for all you wonderful folk to get your hands on copies of the products, as they emerge, for what it costs to punch them out. That way, hopefully, nobody goes broke or gets the shaft. So here's the deal and how it works:
- Anybody whose name is on the musician/artist credits for a particular CD (or who can prove they were wrongfully omitted) is entitled to one free copy of that CD when it is released. He or she is also entitled to an unlimited number of additional copies at cost (plus postage).
- Anyone who helped in some way to make a CD possible, such as by recording, mixing, providing cover art, etc., is entilted to unlimited copies of that CD at cost (plus postage).
- Anyone else who can provide some good excuse why he or she should get a CD at cost should e-mail us and await patiently our decision. For example, if you bought us several rounds at a show 8 years ago, gave us a couch or bed to sleep on during a nomadic tour, or have participated somehow in any of our Hoobellatoo projects, there's a good shot we'll cut you a deal.
- To claim your prize, e-mail us at info@skuntry.com (or write us at P.O. box 4308, Wayne, NJ 07474) and provide your credentials, a mailing address, and the item(s)/quantity you want, and we'll respond with your free copies as appropriate and/or a quote for the at-cost copies.
- There will be no exceptions to this policy, except when we make exceptions.
Hopefully this is straightforward and fair enough. Contact us if you have any questions about any of this.
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