Born on July 10, 1953, Zoogz issued more than 20 albums,
many of them on Black Flag’s label SST, beginning with the cassette only With
No Apparent Reason (1976) and ending with
2001’s Born in the Wrong Universe. They
include the brilliantly-titled Can You Smell My Genitals From Where
You're Standing? (cassette only; 1983),
1988’s Murdering Hell's Happy Cretins and Five Billion Pinheads Can't Be Wrong (1996).
Feted and hated in equal measure, Trouser Press described Zoogz as ‘an iconoclastic original… as
imaginative and stimulating as he is irritating and vitriolic.’ Keyboard
Magazine described Rift’s album Island
of Living Puke as ‘moments of outstanding
free-form rock, sandwiched between scrupulously obscene interruptions.’ Often
chaotic and cacophonous, his collaborators included Henry Kaiser, Marc Mylar and
John Trubee, known to everyone here for writing the lyrics to Blind Man's
Penis. I hear traces of Zappa, Beefheart and Barnes and Barnes in
his work: I will leave it up to you to decide if the guy was a genius or simply
a chancer.
In the mid 1980s Zoogz
began to discuss his plans to enter professional wrestling. ‘If somebody
would cut me the break I’d love to get into that business,” he said. ‘Either as
a performer or even front office. I have over 600 hours of wrestling on video
tape, and I’m still taping, watching, studying. I’ve been heavily into the WWF
since the late Sixties. Nothing is more fun than watching wrestling. It’s
better than eating. It’s better than getting laid. It’s better than taking a
shit.’ He joined the Universal Wrestling Federation (UWF), becoming
Vice-President in 1995 alongside founder Herb Abrams. After Abrams died the
following year, the UWF promotion closed and Zoogz was left without a job.
Undeterred, he went on to host an online wrestling show, Puke-A-Mania, with Zoogz giving insight on wrestling issues. Zoogz died on March 22, 2011, at the age of 57, due to complications
from diabetes.
Here, for your edification, are a couple of tracks from the extensive Zoogz Rift canon: ‘I Did
So’ from the 1979 album Idiots on a Miniature Golf Course, and ‘Rediscover Downtown Patterson’ from his 1986
album Island of Living Puke.
Enjoy!
Rediscover Downtown Patterson does not work :-(
ReplyDeleteNot sure what happened there Martin, but I've replaced it with another link that does work (well, it does at the moment!)
DeleteThank you very much :-)
DeleteDid Zoogz Rift ever perform live? One of his concerts would be an interesting experience, to say the least :-)
ReplyDeleteThe answer is yes. Hundreds of live shows in the US and Europe. One side of Murdering Hell's Happy Cretins was recorded in Utrecht, Holland. Europe 1990, recorded in 1990, was entirely live board recordings.
Delete