The first Flaming Wieners album was created in 1994 or 1995, when I was 13 or 14 years old, still at Fannin Middle School, just getting interested in current popular music thanks to bands like Green Day and Weezer. The first Flaming Wieners release, if you want to call it that, was actually just the band name, the album title, and song titles and song lyrics on a fold out cassette liner. There was no actual music. There were no actual musicians. I can't remember who was involved in conceptualizing this album but I am sure my friends Kelly Tipton and Shannon Wheeler were involved.
One big influence was a tape Shannon had made with his kid brother Shawn -- Shannon plays weird dissonant chords on an acoustic guitar and Shawn screams out variations on the song's title, "Die Dead Dog." I'm pretty sure Shawn had been exposed (via Shannon) to Sepultura and similar metal bands, and his singing is kind of a seven-year-old's approximation of that.
High School was released in very early 1996 but recorded throughout the previous year. My friend Stephen Miller played guitar on some of it. He would remain in the band until the final break-up. 70 tracks in 90 minutes, High School was my attempt to do a rock opera album like the Who's Tommy, which I discovered while exploring a flood-damaged but mostly playable collection of LPs belonging to my mother and father. A friend's father had turned me on to Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, too, and this album is heavily influenced by the thematic consistency and social satire of the first three Mothers of Invention albums, Freak Out!, Absolutely Free, and We're Only In It For The Money, as well as Zappa's later rock opera Joe's Garage.
The storyline of High School is unintentionally vague, although it most certainly has to do with "some weird kid" named Jimmy going on a shooting spree at his high school (pre-Columbine, but just barely -- there had been several smaller-scale shootings at this point). Only a handful of the tracks actually have to do with this main narrative, however. Most of the tracks don't have anything to do with anything. I was focused on quantity over quality, filling the time that I felt like I had to fill.
90 minutes is of course rather absurdly lengthy compared to almost any LP you could name, but I happened to be recording on a 90 minute cassette and felt like it wouldn't be finished until the cassette was completely filled up. As you might imagine, this cassette is mostly unbearable, very close to what would be called "outsider" music by enthusiasts. I sold copies of it to my classmates for three dollars. People tried to find nice ways to tell me how terrible it was.
In early 1996 I had enough money to purchase a guitar amplifier. I bought a four-track tape recorder instead. I was at this point heavily into the Beatles and the possibilities of overdubbing parts. I was able to get a few of my other friends/classmates to participate on Cosmic Folk Destruction, including Gene Nix on bass guitar, Ben Brackett on drums, and Amber Eichler on vocals. I remember this time period very fondly, the four-track had opened up so much possibility and I was slowly becoming more comfortable singing and playing guitar. Pretty much all of the early Flaming Wieners stuff was recorded during sleep-overs.
I wasn't comfortable with Gene and Ben in the band. I can't remember why. It could be that we wanted very different things. I remember being horrified, for example, when Gene said he wanted to write a song about his Christian religious beliefs (I was at the time an outspoken atheist). But moreso than that, I suddenly started feeling intense hatred for him -- not sure why. It could have been that I felt like he was seeking some amount of creative control, it could have been that he was pursuing the same girls I was pursuing, it could have been that just something about his personality rubbed me the wrong way.
There was a pretty terrible moment recording parts of Cosmic Folk Destruction at Gene's house. We could hear backwards voices on the cassette and Ben and Gene insisted on me flipping it over, and it had me and Steve doing this dumb sound collage thing but one of the things I was chanting was "Gene, Ben, Wieners: Which two don't belong?" And it hurt Gene especially, because he was very excited to be a part of the group. I was very underhanded and cowardly in kicking him out, employing the classic "break-up/immediately reform without the undesired member" technique.
I don't know why I was in such a rush to finish the next cassette, Sneakyfoot. It was like I wanted to do one per month or something, like editions of a magazine. This one was back to just me and Stephen and primarily acoustic guitars. Stephen and I would write and record three songs in a night, and the lack of care or craft shows. There is a real drop-off in quality on this tape. In my singing I would sometimes adopt this embarrassing macho/aggressive voice (heard on "Groovy Day") as if I were some kind of badass.
Ben was welcomed back into the band in the summer of 1996. He had at this point acquired an actual drumset, which was first heard on our 15-minute, eight-track Son Of Sneakyfoot EP, written and recorded for the most part in the garage of Stephen's parents' house.
This was another story album, having to do with the character Jill trapped in an abusive relationship with the character Norman. I was fifteen years old and from a relatively safe and sheltered family environment, and listening to this stuff I feel like once again I was trying too hard to be hard or dark. Plus my ignorance/fear of all things to do with sex is just astounding. The song "Girl With A Disease" has Jill escaping from Norman's clutches by infecting him with oral herpes.
With Stephen playing guitar, Ben playing drums, and me playing bass and singing, we became a more conventional garage band, developing a set for live performance. Our first proper concert was August 24, 1996 at the New Ryder Auditorium in McCaysville, just down the street from my parents' house. We opened for the band Top (later known as Surgeon General and featuring future Titan of Filth Ian Mittler), who at this point was still primarily a Nirvana cover band. I would still record weird little things on my four-track by myself and would arrogantly include them on the Flaming Wieners cassettes without consulting the others.
Stephen and Ben both loved Led Zepplin and the blandest of mid-90s modern rock radio (Tonic, Days Of The New), while I was interested in anything that seemed weird or artsy, although if I'd had my way all the time, we probably would have ended up being an equally conventional novelty punk band, but who knows? I was at this point listening to Beck to the point that my father accused me of being a "one trick pony" musically. But that would soon change as I got into the Velvet Underground, the Ramones, and the Jimmy Miller-produced Rolling Stones albums. "Lily Doesn't Like The Overly Excited Girl," from our next tape, Palmer Express, is one of the first songs to show the Velvets/Ramones influence.
Timed for a Halloween 1997 release, Lonesome Songs For Lonesome Folks was a looser and perhaps therefore more successful concept album than had previously been attempted, featuring somewhat humorous or campy songs of death and despair, somewhat country and folk-influenced, but more influenced by rock musicians who were themselves influenced by country and folk, like especially Beck's One Foot In The Grave album.
I was also getting into what you might call the post-Nirvana expanded canon of classic rock -- I kind of leared the revisionist history from sources such as Spin Alternative Record Guide, From The Velvets To The Voidoids, and subscriptions to Spin and Rolling Stone and the still very new world wide web. So the Velvets and punk bands were in and Led Zepplin was out, which I think was inspiring to me as a young musician but caused its own problems (like trying to appear hard or transgressive as opposed to worrying about blistering guitar prowess).
I had acquired at this point albums by conventionally well-known and well-regarded artists such as Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan. Dylan's Bringing It All Back Home in particular would prove difficult to avoid attempting to emulate ("The Invisible Man Is On My Mind Again" is probably the most obvious example). The Rolling Stones' country songs led me into country music, which is kind of funny considering they're from the UK and I'm from a small town in Georgia.
I had probably never heard of twee pop at this point, but it would be pretty easy to attach that label to "Deenie," based on Judy Blume's young adult novel about a teenage girl with scoliosis. It wasn't just that I was a longtime Judy Blume fan -- although I certainly loved her books when I was in 4th and 5th grade -- there were any number of authors I was more into by this point (Kurt Vonnegut especially), but more that I very self-consciously thought it would be clever and precious to write a song about a book written for girls. Plus there was a darkness to the idea of the pretty girl with scoliosis that was appealing to me.
The final Flaming Wieners cassette, recorded late 1997/early 1998, was Here's Something Fun For You To Do!, with the exclamation point. Stephen and Ben were losing interest and becoming more difficult to pin down for practice/recording. And it wasn't like I was actually very encouraging of them -- On this cassette for the first time I refused to make words for any of Stephen's songs, so three of his songs appear here as instrumentals and all the other songs have words and lyrics by me, although usually with full band arrangements.
They were spending more time with the local Baptist youth group and the large social scene surrounding it. They would soon quit the Flaming Wieners entirely to focus on playing in the youth group "praise band." I don't think there was really much bad blood or tension, though. I think we knew it would be the last album and wanted to make it a good one. I think I was ready for the break-up and had actually already commenced recording a music solo project that would eventually be called Teen Hygiene, about which more later.