Saccharine Trust - The tightrope walkers of free-core

In the early Eighties, after an initial phase built entirely on supersonic speed, hallucinated distortion and wild vocalizing, hardcore entered a phase of reflection, opening itself up to other sounds, an influence that spawned a myriad of sonic experiences making up one of the most fascinating bodies of work in the entire rock landscape of that decade so full of contradictions. Among the most adventurous outfits, Saccharine Trust certainly deserve a place, a band whose influence is still felt today within so much hardcore bastardized with the complexity of progressive and the anarchic tension of free-jazz or improvisation in the broadest sense.

“We don’t need freedom”

The beginning of our story dates back to a scorching summer day in 1979, when in Wilmington, a neighborhood of Los Angeles, Joe Baiza (of Latin American descent), looking for a job to scrape together a few dollars, ran into Joaquin "Jack" Milhouse Brewer, guitarist of an obscure local band who made ends meet working for a mail delivery company. "Jack lived with his parents in a house crowded with other relatives. His father worked in the merchant marine and was rarely home. His mother was from Cuba and always seemed to be cleaning and yelling at the little kids and anyone else who happened to be around. Jack had these beautiful sisters who hung around the house with their friends. When I first met him, I thought he was kind of awkward but, at the same time, very special and creative in an unusual way."

Thanks to a good word from his new friend, Baiza too was granted the thrill of sticking addresses onto the letters and packages that then had to be distributed around the city. It certainly wasn't much for someone who, at the time, was already nearly twenty-eight and desperately trying to find his own path in the visual arts. Still, during working hours time flew by thanks to the passionate music discussions the two carried on. While, at the time, Brewer showed a certain interest in glam and new wave, Baiza had recently grown passionate about punk, arriving there through a varied listening path that ranged from Jimi Hendrix to Cream, from Led Zeppelin to the Stooges, by way of Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart.

At the time, Jack played lead guitar in the Obstacles, a band devoted to a hybrid of punk and new wave. One day, with nothing better to do, Baiza went to watch them rehearse, and ended up, almost without realizing it, playing bass, an instrument he'd never picked up in his life. Despite being the newcomer and having practically zero knowledge of his instrument, within a few weeks Baiza managed to push the band toward an increasingly punk sound, something that, over time, ended up alienating the other members of the band (including the excellent singer Marshall Dana), who, one after another, dropped out. At that point, Baiza took the reins. First he set the bass aside and picked up the guitar, an instrument he had first played at the age of eleven, only to abandon it within a few months. He picked it back up, though, at the age of eighteen (around 1970), to play in a classic-rock band.

The second thing Baiza did was convince Brewer to set the guitar aside and become a singer instead. "I got the impression that Joe knew something I couldn't quite grasp. So I trusted him and started singing. And things seemed to click right away. Still, singing has never been easy for me, never. I even started taking singing lessons. I remember practicing several times with a metronome in a van parked in an industrial area. I was always scared someone might suddenly show up and make me feel awkward with some unpleasant comment. I didn't tell anyone about the singing lessons. I was too self-conscious. I went through four teachers, because the first three dropped me within a lesson or two. Once I brought a copy of 'Surviving You, Always' to my third teacher. He put it on the turntable, listened to a bit of it, and then told me: 'Jack, I can't help you anymore.' In the end, my last singing teacher managed to get me to understand how to properly use my diaphragm, and that finally put me on the right track!"

During their early rehearsals, instead of playing the chord progressions, Baiza (who had always been fascinated by the possibility of shaping sound on the spot) preferred to focus instead on guitar figures ideally akin to jazz, whose sense of freedom had been passed on to him, some years earlier, also through reading the works of Jack Kerouac, who considered himself less a writer than "a jazz poet blowing a long blues in a Sunday afternoon jam session." Once he had entered, with a punk spirit, the wildest territories of free-jazz (which he approached via be-bop), Baiza felt the urge to carry those sounds over into his guitar style, succeeding only after hearing "Free Lancing" (1981), the third album by guitarist James Blood Ulmer, who built his dissonant, "free" style on the "harmolodic" theory devised by Ornette Coleman. Baiza would, however, always have only a very vague grasp of harmolodics, so he relied mainly on his punk background to cut loose and launch into improvisations in which the guitar became nothing more than a tool for bending the white-hot magma of his feelings and emotions into a feverish sonic continuum. "What I play on guitar," Baiza explains, "is like a stream of thought. I've noticed that if you start listening to some of my stuff without starting from the beginning, it's hard to understand what I'm doing. Ultimately, what I do is tell a story in an abstract way, mixing different emotions to stimulate the listener's ear."

For the Saccharine Trust to become a reality (for the record, the moniker came from a line in a David Bowie song, "The Bewlay Brothers" — "And how they bought their positions with saccharin and trust"), they were still missing at least a bassist and a drummer. For a while, to fill the bassist slot they considered Mike Watt, at the time already busy with The Reactionaries, the band that would go on to spawn the Minutemen. Baiza had come to know Watt through The Reactionaries' own guitarist, D. Boon, who at the time lived on 19th Street in San Pedro, in an apartment near the one Baiza shared with poet and musician Gary Jacobelly. Watt didn't want to commit to yet another band, so in the end the bassist slot went to Earl Liberty.

As for the drummer, the search took longer and was eventually settled with the addition of Rob Holzman. Within a short time, Saccharine Trust became one of the standout acts of the punk scene in San Pedro, a port district of Los Angeles whose population was mostly made up of dockworkers. Within that scene (on average more experimental and "artsy" than the one in Los Angeles proper: "Pretty much every local band prided itself on being different from the others," Baiza recalls), our band was soon hailed as one of the most innovative and promising acts, on a par with their friends in Minutemen.

After making their live debut sharing a bill with the latter, Saccharine Trust recorded their first track, "Hearts And Barbarians," for "Cracks In The Sidewalk" (1980), a compilation released by New Alliance Records, the label that D. Boon and Mike Watt themselves had founded together with Reactionaries singer Martin Tamburovich, inspired by what Greg Ginn, guitarist of Black Flag, had already been doing for a couple of years or so with his SST. Though still rough around the edges, "Hearts And Barbarians" nonetheless captures the band's sound at its source: a syncopated art-punk, marked by Baiza's acidic, erratic guitar progressions, but also by Brewer's emphatic vocal flow, forever teetering between singing and spoken-word, with one eye on 1950s beat poetry.

Thanks to the Minutemen, Saccharine Trust came into contact with Black Flag and the SST crew. They met at the so-called "Church," an old Spanish colonial-style building that for about forty years had housed the Baptist community of Hermosa Beach. That's where Greg Ginn's band lived and rehearsed. Through his SST label, Ginn intended to give a voice to the most interesting acts of the emerging hardcore scene, but up to that point (around 1980) the label had only released his own band's first three EPs and the first two by the Minutemen. New musical talent was needed, and Saccharine Trust fit the bill perfectly. First, he invited them to open a Black Flag show at the Star Theater in San Pedro, after which he showed up backstage together with Chuck Dukowski and offered them the chance to join the "family." Baiza and Brewer didn't drag their feet and accepted. As a welcome gift, Saccharine Trust got a logo all their own: it was designed by Raymond Pettibon (stage name of Raymond Ginn, Greg's brother), overlapping the band's initials: the S (shaped like a snake) nailed to the T (depicted as a wooden cross).

A few months later, Saccharine Trust went into Media Art Studio in Hermosa Beach to record their first EP, Paganicons (8 tracks; 16:47), released in December 1981. Although it has, over the years, built up a solid reputation in the underground, bolstered too by the seal of approval Kurt Cobain gave it at the height of the grunge era, including it in his list of fifty favorite albums, Paganicons is a record that only in flashes manages to convey the band's explosive force, torn as it is between the urge to sound like a synthesis of certain English post-punk (The Fall, Gang Of Four, Pil) and the already-evolved hardcore of their friends in Minutemen.

In any case, the opening "I Have" is a decent manifesto of this sonic hybrid, with Baiza and Brewer setting the guidelines, amid guitar sparks and raspy vocalizing. Tracks like "Community Lie" and "Effort To Worst" set aside the above-mentioned synthesis, relying instead on a less compelling post-punk groove. There are also sarcastic sketches ("Mad At The Co."), punk stompers ("I Am Right," already part of the Obstacles' repertoire), and a "Success And Failure" with a measured pace and a relatively more jagged structure. If, musically speaking, the most interesting track is the long (over five minutes) "A Human Certainty" (in which Baiza's guitar and Brewer's voice recall, respectively, Keith Levene and John Lydon of Pil), conceptually the most interesting one is without a doubt "We Don't Need Freedom," whose lyrics (written by Brewer following an anti-hippie rant from his father) essentially contain a declaration of freedom from the very same, overused concept of freedom. Freedom must not be turned into a dogma, lest it be downgraded into yet another model of repression...

We don’t need freedom

Freedom is what ruined your brain

With creativity drugs and pain

Freedom is what let you run wild

Explain freedom to your fatherless child

We don’t need freedom

Do we now

Paying homage, in their own way, to the tradition of Christmas albums, for Christmas 1981 they therefore released the single "A Christmas Cry," a mix of scorching guitar work, nervy drum rolls, resonant backdrops and free-jazz piano, all seasoned with some of Brewer's most sarcastic lyrics, focused on the devaluation and consequent commercialization of the most important Christian holiday.

I think 'Christmas Cry' was my first attempt at putting together a poem. I wrote it when I was fifteen, hoping to read it aloud during an English class. But I never did. It was Joe Baiza who wanted to record it using that kind of arrangement.

“I can’t believe/ We are still desperate”

With Rob Holzman out of the picture, having plans to move to San Francisco for study reasons, his spot was taken by Tony Cicero. "I was friends with and bandmates (we played together in the Meathooks) with a singer named Ernie Maez, who in turn knew Joe Baiza and his girlfriend Rachel Garcia. After seeing Saccharine Trust live together with the Minutemen at the Alpine Village, in Torrance (I loved Saccharine Trust and wanted to play drums with them), I became friends with Joe. Then, in 1981, he got in touch with me while they were on tour with Black Flag, asking if I wanted to join them once they got back to Los Angeles. They sent me a copy of 'Paganicons' so I could study it, and my first show with them was at the Whisky-A-Go-Go alongside Angry Samoans and Overkill."

Cicero was a drummer with a very open musical vision: "Having grown up in the 60s and 70s, I was influenced by jazz, classic rock, blues, garage-rock, progressive, etc. My father was a drummer and owned some great records. So I started taking lessons from him when I was just five years old."

As a teenager, his first role models were drummers of the caliber of Art Blakey, Elvin Jones, Max Roach, Tony Williams, Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich. Later, he fell for John Bonham, Bill Ward, Ian Paice, Bill Bruford and other drummers from the hard rock and progressive scenes. Then, when, between the late Seventies and the start of the following decade, he discovered punk and then hardcore, it was Robo of Black Flag, Bill Stevenson of the Descendents and George Hurley of the Minutemen who showed him the way. By the time Cicero joined the lineup, Brewer and Baiza were already working on new material, but that didn't stop him from becoming a co-writer on tracks such as "The House, The System, The Concrete," "Speak" and "Our Discovery," which would appear on the band's first LP.

Earl Liberty's spot (he had been tempted by the adventure of the Circle Jerks, at the time one of the most high-profile acts on the hardcore scene) was instead filled by Mark Hodson, already active in punk outfits like the Adapters and Factory (with the latter he had also recorded a four-track demo and a single, "Smile"/"World Gone Mad," on Kick In The Eye, the label he himself founded to distribute his own music). "When Earl Liberty left, Joe asked me to join his band and... what the hell! Factory was a small Orange County band that only played local shows, while Saccharine Trust was a huge name at the time and played the biggest, coolest venues in Hollywood. So there wasn't much to think about!" Baiza and Brewer also offered Hodson the chance to take part in writing some of the songs for the new record: "I told them: 'I know you guys have been around for a while already and you're very tight, but I feel like a songwriter and I'd like to contribute.' They told me there was no problem, and so I became co-writer of three songs on the new album: 'Cat Cracker,' 'Lot's Seed' and 'Our Discovery.'"

The new lineup's first show was held at the Metro in Chicago, in front of about a thousand paying spectators. Tony Cicero took a beer bottle to the face thrown by a clearly overexcited fan, while Brewer was repeatedly forced to defend himself from a girl sporting a regulation punk mohawk who was desperately trying to pull his pants off... Crazy stuff. Punk stuff! The Chicago date was one stop on a tour Saccharine Trust were doing at the time as Black Flag's support band. It was a pivotal period for their growth, both musically and personally. A period that also deeply marked Brewer's poetic universe: "I had the chance to see a lot of places across the States up close while rereading Jack Kerouac's 'On the Road,' a book Joe had given me. The times were different from the Beat Generation era, but the feeling was the same. We traveled twelve to a van, and I honestly can't find any other reasons that pushed me to do what I was doing. Every night was crazier than the last. As I slept in the back of that van, there was always wind blowing in my face."

Between September 1983 and January 1984, at Total Access Recording Studios in Redondo Beach, and under the direction of Spot, the storied producer behind much of the SST catalogue, Saccharine Trust recorded the tracks for their first album. "The sessions were fun but also very frustrating," Mark Hodson recalls. "All in classic SST style: cheapskate bastards. They'd book us the studio at midnight, two in the morning, or other insane hours, all to save on rates! To get the job done, we were forced to drink a lot of coffee. But that ended up making the record even more manic. It doesn't sound trite or self-indulgent, in other words."

Housed in a cover that reproduces the photo that photography student Robert Wiles took on May 1, 1947 of the body of bookkeeper Evelyn McHale, who had killed herself by jumping from the eighty-sixth floor of the Empire State Building and landing on the roof of a limousine, Surviving You, Always (12 tracks; 40:23) is one of the most creative and important records in jazzcore, but, all told, it also represents one of the founding moments of what would come to be defined as post-hardcore. It came out in March 1984, about four months before "Zen Arcade" by Hüsker Dü and "Double Nickels On The Dime" by the Minutemen, two works that, also on SST, would over the years earn enormous standing among rock fans. "Surviving You, Always" won't enjoy the same fortune: and yet, even if it doesn't measure up to the two "sacred monsters" mentioned above (two of the greatest masterpieces of all time, just to be clear), it certainly deserves to stand alongside them, forming a fabulous trio that over the years would point the way for numerous other bands faithful to hardcore's heterodox roots.

Surviving You, Always opens with "The Giver Takes," a psychedelic jazzcore track built on lightning-fast stop-and-go dynamics, convulsive progressions and vocals steeped in intellectual rage, with which Brewer unleashes an "angry philosophical song" centered on the theme of sharing and bookended by the imperatives "circumcise me!" and "...un-circumcise me, now!"

Compared to those of the still-raw Paganicons, the Saccharine Trust of Surviving You, Always are an incredibly tight band, one that got to rehearse the material over and over to the point of exhaustion before recording it. They resemble, in short, a mosaic in which every tile fits perfectly with the others: Cicero's powerful and dynamic drumming, Hodson's booming, versatile bass, Baiza's jagged, magmatic guitar ("the first time I heard him," Cicero recalls, "he made me think of a fusion of John McLaughlin, Robert Fripp and Carlos Santana") and Brewer's fierce balancing act between singing and spoken-word, a sort of hallucinated preacher born from a short-circuit between the most introspective Jim Morrison and the most scathing Bob Dylan.

"Jack was simply Jack. His phrasing was absolutely unique, his lyrics were genius/psychotic/inspired/cursed... take your pick! I've never seen a singer put so much of himself into a performance. Sure, Henry Rollins was someone who gave a lot onstage. But his was a total farce. Black Flag was just the start of his career as a bad actor. Brewer, on the other hand, was 100% genuine and spontaneous. A true artist in every sense. It wasn't always easy to get along with him, but it has to be said that he always stayed true to himself. Genuine: there's no better word to describe him."

Jagged funk grooves thus underpin the knife-edge assaults of "Sunk" (Brewer struck down and sunk by a girl named Venecia...) and "Lot's Seed," the latter a track centered on the story of the biblical patriarch Lot grappling with sexual violence, incest and the natural disasters that formed the backdrop to God's destruction of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. "At the time, I couldn't believe that all this could even be taught to children," Brewer points out.

Biblical references – often, however, so decontextualized as to seem almost indecipherable – are one of the pillars of the album's lyrics, as the singer himself confirms: "I remember reading the Bible a lot when I was a teenager. My family wasn't religious at all, but I liked reading it. I also liked the televangelist Gene Scott. I listened to his radio show and watched his TV program every day. I had a portable radio and I'd follow him even during my many bus trips, going to or coming back from work, or heading to parties." And yet Brewer was not, and is not, exactly a practicing Christian: "The last time I tried to set foot in a church, the pastor started spewing a hate speech against homosexuals. I believe in Jesus Christ. But I don't believe he hates homosexuals or any of God's other children. There's a plan for each of us."

The possessed fervor of "Speak" (the exhortation to speak is aimed at a girl who's evidently far too shy) finds in Baiza's guitar inventions glimpses of acid redemption, while Hodson tracks him step for step without flinching. "At first," the bassist recalls, "it was really hard to keep up with Joe, but little by little I managed to get inside the mechanism. It seemed like pure chaos, almost as if he were improvising everything on the spot, live. But once you managed to get inside it, you realized that, actually, it was all pretty structured."

After "The House, The System, The Concrete," a little over two minutes of tortuous interlocking parts (featuring one of the album's funkiest basslines), comes "Remnants (Of The Last Supper)," introduced by a profane sermon ("…Satan is a motherfucker…") that Brewer recorded in the parking lot of Total Access Recording Studios, also capturing the sound of police sirens and fireworks marking the end of 1983 and the arrival of the new year. About a minute in, Brewer screams: "I can't believe/ We are still desperate," and the instruments take off like a rocket, blending geometry and psychedelia.

The sinister noir atmosphere of "The Cat Cracker" (with spoken-word by Baiza and sax inserts courtesy of Rick Cox), on the other hand, brings to mind the Pop Group digging through the precious nuggets of The Double Nickels On The Dime by the Minutemen. The lyrics for this track were written by Baiza, who drew inspiration from his work experience at an oil refinery.

"Our Discovery," on the other hand, is a two-faced creature: three minutes of gothic torment (evoking the Flipper tackling The End by the Doors) followed by three more of post-punk mathematics. In the lyrics, Brewer blended a love song, references to the OAHSPE book (the so-called "cosmic Bible": in 1882, the psychic John Ballou Newbrough claimed to have composed it in a trance state induced by spirits), and memories of a trip to a San Pedro cliff with his poet friend Fred Torres.

On a sunday, cool and clear

An ocean breathes life in a bottle

And we unravel, ancient myths

From the deepness, of this cliff

Where ever sense, the lost of eden

We were so inconvenienced

And I wanted nothing more

Baiza's harmolodic digressions then carve deep electric wounds into the punk-funk weave of "A Good Nights Bleeding" and the rock'n'roll filigree running through "Craving The Center" — the former a mini crime novel, the latter a concentrate of "philosophical sexism." "Yhwh On Acid," meanwhile, is the album's hallucinatory climax: Brewer, taking on the perspective of the Hebrew god on acid, immerses himself in memories of his teenage years in New Orleans, while the rest of the band shakes up a dub-oneiric cocktail that the keening wails of Russell Conlin's cornet turn into an odyssey worthy of Pil (imagine a noisier, slightly less listless "Albatross" and you're on the right track).

Calls from you still ring through my eyes

Those sounds i cursed when we were also lost

Still i sized it all never seeing further

Then the fainting image on a talkative mirror

That said my head holds thoughts, my head holds

Thoughts, my head holds thoughts, my head holds

Thoughts

Of what we were before we were bought

To close the album, the band chose to rely on a powerful cover of "Peace Frog" by the Doors (from "Morrison Hotel," 1971).

"Words Left Unspoken"

Having reached the peak of their jazzcore phase, Saccharine Trust wanted to experiment with new approaches. It was Baiza above all who showed signs of restlessness, to the point that, for a while, he even thought about starting a new band. Entirely improvised and recorded live on June 9, 1985 at McCabe's Guitar Shop in Los Angeles, Worldbroken (12 tracks; 41:45) featured the collaboration of Mike Watt, standing in for the departing Mark Hodson, who really no longer felt up to setting off on another grueling tour across the United States. Infinitely less exciting and innovative than Surviving You, Always, Worldbroken reflects a transitional period for the band, here grappling with hybrids of free-form guitar work (with psychedelic wah-wah in a Peter Green orbit), funky bass and spoken word ("The Worm's Quest," "Hail Our Web," "Words Left Unspoken," "Fred Presented Himself To Joseph"), along with forays into more reflective territory, with Baiza playing a Jerry Garcia figure filtered through James Blood Ulmer's harmolodic lens ("Just Think," "Merciful Mother," "Estuary," "In This Sandbox") or edging toward psychic drift ("The Testimony," a track that already mapped out the path toward the acid-drenched expanses of the very long "Certain Way," which in 1987 would open the first, self-titled album by Universal Congress Of, the band in which the guitarist would get to explore sounds split between improvisation, progressive and punk-jazz). Brewer's religious upbringing, meanwhile, is on full display in "II Samuel Chapter 4," while "On The Verge Of Finding" and "No Compromise Here" let themselves be wrapped in blazes of jazz-noise.

A year later, with bassist Bob Fitzer recruited, the foray into jazz-psychedelic jamming attempted on "Worldbroken" translated, with We Became Snakes (9 tracks; 37:46), into a work that was slightly more focused and built around the idea of a jazzcore song with mutant structures.

The sparse, mysterious introduction to the title track leads into a survey of the territory of "Surviving You, Always," though its lessons are somewhat defused by a less explosive intellectualism, as also shown by "For Her While," the remake of "Effort To Waste" (which appeared on the EP Paganicons) and "Longing for Ether" (with vocals by Gary Jacobelly), in which scattered echoes of their past still surface.

Brewer's spoken-sung vocals are also more restrained: on "The Need" he even comes across like an old-school crooner, bathed in the dim lights of a nightclub and backed by Paul Roessler's piano, while on "The Redeemer" he has the calm awareness of someone who knows that, in the end, nothing will change. The tenor sax solos (Steve Moss) and guitar solos, meanwhile, stay firmly anchored to the rhythm section, which greatly limits the chances for truly adventurous music. Traces of post-punk crop up instead in "Drugstore Logic," while the walking bass of "Frankie On A Pony" is the steady line over which Baiza stretches out his guitar musings. "Belonging To October" finally brings down the curtain with a wistful folk sketch, embellished by Louise Bialik's accordion and Lame Dude's twelve-string acoustic guitar.

After the 1987 release of the cassette The Sacramental Element, which collected Paganicons and Surviving You, Always plus tracks drawn from compilations and singles ("Heart And Barbarians", "A Christmas Cry" and the orthodox hardcore of "Disillusion Fool", which had first appeared on the 1982 compilation "Life Is Ugly So Why Not Kill Yourself?"), in 1988 the band broke up due to Baiza's increasingly pressing commitments with Universal Congress Of.

Within a year, however, the name Saccharine Trust was back on music fans' radar thanks to the release of Past Lives (22 tracks; 73:45), which collected material recorded live over a span running from December 1981 to September 1986. Most of the recordings covered songs from their studio albums, while the rest was filled out by the romp of "Young Lamb", by "A Last Thought For A Dying Cell" (an acoustic track Brewer had been carrying around for years), by the resurrected "Heart And Barbarians", by a cover of "Six Pack" by Black Flag, and by a quartet of tracks featuring saxophone contributions from Steve Moss: "Devin's Poem", "Express Yourself" (a cover of a 1970 track by Charles Wright & the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band), "Take Us Now" and "No Lunch", the latter two steeped in a funk-jazz-soul groove.

Meanwhile, as Baiza carried on his work with Universal Congress Of (at one point, joking about Ornette Coleman's concept of harmolodics, he took to calling his new band's music "mecolocics"), Brewer launched a project of his own (the Jack Brewer Band), blending noise-rock and post-hardcore across a couple of uneven albums ("Rockin' Ethereal" in 1990 and "Harsh World" the following year).

He then recorded two jazz-poetry albums with Bazooka ("Saved From Death In The Dream World" in 1994 and "Elysian Intervals" in 1997) and also "Rhythm Or Suicide (Poems And Writings)" (1995), on which he collected some of his poems.

With the Universal Congress Of adventure over (at the very least the 1987 self-titled album and "Prosperous And Qualified" from the following year are absolutely worth tracking down — the first more geared toward improvisation in the vein of the Grateful Dead, the second a perfect example of their prog-punk-jazz phase), around the mid-Nineties Baiza threw himself back into the fray, first with the Mecolodiacs, then with Putanessca and, finally, with Kool Ade Acid Test. Something, though, kept pulling him back from the past. So, in 1997, he picked up the phone and asked Brewer to pick up right where they'd left off.

“Legends Die Behind The Wheel, At Least”

With Chris Stein on bass and Brian Christopherson on drums, Saccharine Trust rose again with The Great One Is Dead (18 tracks; 47:02), an album recorded in 1999 but released only two years later by the German label Hazlewood. It marked a return to the sound of Surviving You, Always, tempered, however, by a more pronounced noise-rock approach (just listen to the opener "The Sinister Rain") and enhanced by a more balanced production. Across its eighteen tracks, which also feature psych-funk instrumental interludes not unlike the more relaxed moments of Universal Congress Of ("Grotian Phraseology", "Antecedent Satisfaction", "Against Faustus"), the album bounces between jagged, acid-tinged outbursts ("The Sadness Of Apollo"), no-wave-flavored bluntness ("Legends Die Behind The Wheel, At Least"), hints of lysergic jazz-funk (the title track), Minutemen echoes ("Birthing The Ancestors") and jazz-noir musings ("This Is Wilmington"). A more pronounced narrative framework, meanwhile, can be found in "Untitled No. 1 (The Creative Fluctuation)", "Water On The Dancefloor" and "Resuscitate The Worm", while "Neruda's Wave" sees them take an unorthodox stab at surf-music (it was producer Gordon Friedrich who suggested the experiment), and on "Reggie's Plateau" we find them noodling away at a bit of jazz under the Hawaiian sun. Only the closing "Now That You're Dead" comes close to a classic song structure, complete with a catchy chorus.

While the music of The Great One Is Dead came together over a relatively short period, Brewer's lyrics ended up reflecting an existential and poetic journey that had lasted roughly a decade. "I spent ten years writing the lyrics for 'The Great One Is Dead'. Usually, writing good lyrics quickly is easier when you're young, when your mind isn't so worn down by the usual problems of survival. What I remember about that decade is the loneliness. At first, I tried to keep making music with the Jack Brewer Band, but it all fell apart after two albums. At that point, I focused solely on writing poetry. When Joe called me up to reform the band, I had a notebook full of lyrics. So we managed to write the new songs in a fairly short time. To this day, I think 'The Great One Is Dead' contains the best lyrics I've ever written for Saccharine Trust."

Despite everything, though, with their third full-length the band failed to really connect with new generations of rock fans. There were a few shows here and there, but everything soon slipped into a kind of limbo. Baiza and Brewer would find themselves chewing over sounds very similar to those of Saccharine Trust in Unknown Instructors, a band formed around saxophonist, poet and singer Dan McGuire. Rounded out by Mike Watt on bass and George Hurley (another Minutemen alumnus) on drums, Unknown Instructors released, between 2005 and 2009, three albums that essentially updated the lesson of Saccharine Trust's Worldbroken, with results that were decent but hardly memorable (the best of the bunch, in any case, is the second in the series, "The Master's Voice", which also featured David Thomas of Pere Ubu on vocals).

Saccharine Trust had not, however, been shelved for good, even if the difficulty of landing live bookings was hardly an incentive to keep pushing in that direction. Even recently, a tour that would have brought them to Europe and to Italy was cancelled due to organizational problems. But perhaps fate had other plans, since — as was reported just a few days ago (early December 2018) — bassist Chris Stein has passed away after losing his battle with cancer. At this point, the Saccharine Trust story may well have reached its end.

You are below me heartfully soulfully

What I would to do possess the love you so

Freely give

And stick something sensible inside of you

But the last time i saw you, you were lying on

Allegence fields

As you gave a solemn stare into the heavens

(You're on your own now)

("Yhwh On Acid", 1984)

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