A Natural Transgression

Suburbia is an interesting conundrum - not quite rural and not quite urban, it exists in a murky realm somewhere in-between. Suburban areas are traditionally an escape from the oppressive, crime-ridden confines of major cities, but for Johnny Anglo Tango, frontman of Fleshies, a noise-punk four-piece out of Oakland, California, his time growing up in the trashy suburbs of the East Bay Area was an entirely different experience.
"Personally, the area I was in - and it's pretty much the same for the other guys [in Fleshies] too - was ringed by industry and huge oil refineries," Johnny says of his hometown environs, easily conversing despite just waking up. "Very trashy, lots of [drugs]. I remember when I was a kid, the Hell's Angels had a clubhouse a few blocks away from where I grew up, and they got busted in the late '70s / early '80s for producing more PCP than had ever been produced in one facility, anywhere. That's pretty much what it was all about."
The Fleshies' lead vocalist continues, abating preconceived notions of suburban areas.
"The funny thing about the Bay Area is that the suburbs were never really a full-on white-light kind of thing," Johnny says. "They were always trashy suburbs that were way trashier than the cities. Essentially, they were homes for a lot of the dock workers and a lot of the blue collar workers from the various refineries. [The suburbs have] always been a lot seedier than pretty much all of San Francisco and even parts of Oakland."
Johnny is originally from El Sobrante, an area marked not only by its heavy industry, but, according to the engaging frontman, "by what I believe is the longest continuous strip mall in the Western United States." He elaborates by describing this impressive monument to capitalism as El Sobrante's "primary employment ground and the breeding ground for more suburban proletarian discontent than any place I can imagine."
While this may not have been the best environment to grow up in, Johnny acknowledges that living in El Sobrante did have an affect on the music he makes now with Fleshies.
"I think what we're doing can be defined as sort of a suburban soul type thing," says Johnny, who lists The Circle Jerks and early Metallica as some of his earliest influences before finding a connection with post-punk and experimental noise. "It made sense for us to be a little more trangressive, a little bit more of an affront to, not necessarily the tranquility of the environment, because it wasn't that, but the hypocrisy of the area trying to be a suburb. The fact was that it was essentially a rundown proto-urban area that produced a lot of drugs and crime in its own right, but with the pretensions that it was some sort of an escape. The seedy underbelly was so obviously bloated that it was about to pop. When it comes down to it, it basically just makes sense to be as noisy and transgressive as possible to reflect where you really feel it's at."
For a while, Johnny tried to get things going musically in his own hometown, but he ran into many pitfalls along the way. Not only did his locale frown upon live music, especially that of the loud and aggressive variety, but the bands he became a part of didn't seem to be the right fit. It wasn't until he moved to Oakland, where he and the other members of Fleshies - Mr. Kavetski (bass, vocals), Mattowar (guitar, vocals) and Hamiltron (drums, vocals) - converged, that things began to fall into place and Johnny was able to expand his horizons. With his new bandmates, Johnny found three individuals who not only grew up in the same environments, but also wanted to explore the same territories musically.
"We all had similar experiences growing up and similar musical aesthetics. Oakland was the place where we all seemed to merge," Johnny says of how Fleshies got together. "We had all been playing with other people in different periods of time. But, it was nice to find some people who had similar musical backgrounds and to play music that was more organic as opposed to trying out all of these weird synthesis things with people with whom we didn't necessarily share a musical or personal background. [With Fleshies], we get to play music that feels really good and do it right. It's taken us however many years to figure out that this is what makes the most sense."
It was obvious from the start that Fleshies just seemed to click, so much so that the band began booking and playing shows without a concrete set list. The band's early performances bordered on improvisational. Propelled by insidious amounts of alcohol, Fleshies showed a tendency to turn the few songs they had at the time into "10-minute mini-epics that would make everyone's eardrums bleed."
As for how he believes these first shows influenced Fleshies' direction, Johnny says with a laugh, "Well, we were pretty much doing whatever the fuck we wanted, and we didn't give a shit about how anybody reacted to it. We were having a grand old time, and we were so blind drunk that we could barely tell what was going on anyway. I guess that's permeated into what we're doing today. Some parts have gotten a bit more complex, but we're still just blind drunk and we don't give a fuck what anybody else thinks."
Whether or not the band cared how their music was received, it wasn't long before their over-the-top live shows began turning heads among concert-goers, especially once Fleshies began playing dates with The Phantom Limb. According to Johnny, the two bands seemed to share a "visceral connection" from the start. Just how visceral? Johnny serves up the gory details.
"We were [on stage], and this was before I'd even seen [The Phantom Limbs], and their singer dropped down on his knees when I had my pants down around my ankles, and hovered kinda close to my dick," Johnny says of Fleshies' first show with their "sister band." "I couldn't tell if he was going to give me a blow job or punch me in the balls. It kind of froze me in fascination - like, there's this naked screaming guy and this other guy just drops to his knees and drunkenly sways right in front of [the screaming guy's] cock. There was something transgressive about that moment. And then [The Phantom Limbs] played, and we kept shoving things down [their lead vocalist's] visible ass crack that was coming out of his weird cow-print tights. It may have sounded like were coming from different musical standpoints, but just the visceral aspect of it made sense."
Together, Fleshies and The Phantom Limbs garnered enough of a buzz to attract the attention of indie labels. One such label was ex-Dead Kennedys frontman Jello Biafra's Alternative Tentacles. After hearing about the two acts through the AT grapevine, Biafra himself checked out Fleshies and The Phantom Limbs at 924 Gilman Street in Berkeley.
"[Jello] signed The Phantom Limbs on the spot," Johnny says. "He said that we were a bit sloppy, but he'd like to get some of our stuff. We gave him a copy of our first demo CD, which sounded like rat garbage; it had some good songs, but the guitar was turned down far too low. He wasn't super impressed with that, but then Jello saw us again. He asked us what we were going to do for our next record, and we told him that we were going to put it out ourselves. Then he said, 'Talk to me before you do that.'"
As a result, Fleshies released their first full-length, Kill the Dreamer's Dream, a wickedly insane and surprisingly catchy collection of drunken punk rock noise, on Alternative Tentacles in 2001. On April 1st, 2003, Fleshies are set to release their follow up for AT, The Sicilian, a title that stems from a conversation between the band and Jello Biafra backstage at a Queens of the Stone Age concert.
"Matt was fucking with [Jello] and told him that our next record should be on 800-gram vinyl with a quadruple gatefold cover," Johnny explains. "And Jello said, 'Oh yeah? Why don't you just put it out as a picture disc of a pizza and call it The Sicillian and put it out with someone else?' So the album's called The Sicilian."
Johnny notes that Fleshies' latest release is a definite evolution from the band's previous effort and this is in no small part thanks to the work of The Sicilian's producer, Alex Newport.
"It's a little more complex, the songs are a little weirder," Johnny says of the new album. "I think the lyrics are more coherent and a little more pointed. It's a little more concise and well put-together. We spent a little more time on it. We had a great producer, Alex Newport. He fucking rules. He did a lot of good stuff with us. He understands our aesthetic and our need to simultaneously rock and make weird acid punk noise. He knows what's going on."
Though aided by a talented producer, The Sicilian marks a natural progression in the band's sound. Their similar upbringings and musical aesthetics seem to have led Fleshies to where they're supposed to be. Now, it's just a matter of further refining their collective experiences for even greater potency.
"It seems that we're distilling the different aspects of what we do down to their own entities instead of mixing everything within one framework," Johnny says, then pauses, perhaps trying to mull his own words over in his still groggy mind. "Basically what I'm trying to say is that there isn't any pop-punk on this record, or anything that can be mistaken for pop-punk. Now, when we're sweet, we're very sweet - very lilting and falsetto-ed out - and when we're abrasive, it's ridiculously abrasive now. I guess we've embraced both ends of the sound dichotomy. Wow, that sounds pretentious. We're having fun, we're doing what makes sense."

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