The Atrocious Music Collection: #37 in a series
Artist: Tennie Komar and the Silencers
Album Title: Future Stories
Category: Obscure BandsYear: 1980
Cover art style: Post-apocalyptic cartoon
Audio samples: Children of the Night and Slippery Jack
Acquisition: Princeton Record Exchange, Princeton, NJ, date uncertain, but as always, the sticker is still on the record.
Click on picture for full-sized image
Although I began to frequent the Princeton Record Exchange around 1990, I believe this record was purchased by one of the Hamilton boys who then brought it along to the first (and only!) Atrocious Music Party and left it behind. Consequently, I can claim it was someone else s evaluation that placed this record in the Collection.
I say this because I am of two minds here. Tennie Komar and the Silencers seem to have been a somewhat beloved band in Boston, part of a punk-infused new wave scene circa 1980. This EP appears to be their only record, and little other information can be found on the internet.
What can be found: Tennie shows up in the 2015 documentary Women Who Rocked Boston. She appears in an article about the passing of J. Geils, where we learn they dated for about five years. And she has had other musical ventures, including a solo album in 2007, Temptation. One cut from that album can be found online here. It seems her musical style had not changed much despite the intervening 25 years.
Plus, this is a signed copy of Future Stories, made out to Tennie s good buddy Eva, who may not have been a true "through thick-and-thin" kind of good buddy, as the record eventually got sold to the fine folks at the Princeton Record Exchange. But never mind that. Tennie's signature makes the album far more personal for me. Tennie held this copy of the record in her hands. That's her signature.
On the other hand, this EP clearly fits into the collection. The cover alone is worth spending some time with, so I recommend clicking on the image above to see it in all its glory. You can also read all the lyrics by clicking on the back cover image, which is also worth the trouble.
This is a concept album involving an apocalyptic event in the near future (as explained in the song 1985), an apocalypse which likely involved nuclear bombs (Too Hot to Handle). This seems to have resulted in vampire-like Children of the Night, whose parents got a strange disease working in (nuclear?) powerplants, as well as hermaphrodites who can t get help from the Sexual Identification Gender Hotline Service (S.I.G.H.S. (Ring! Ring!)). There is also a song about Slippery Jack the Ripper and another about black magic (It s So Tragic), which may not fit into the storyline as well.
I did find the album mentioned in Billboard's "First Time Around EPs" (for the week ending 10/17/81), where the songs are accurately described as being "about World War III, 'Mutant lust,' and 'atomic age vampires.'" So for those looking for those topics to be covered in verse and melody, check!
There is a dated quality to the EP that produces an effect that occurs often in genre music, namely that it begins to sound like a parody of itself. This record, from packaging to singing style, ends up feeling closer to a Fred Armisen project than to what it actually really is.
And so I challenge you to leave all your modern-day troubles behind, and, instead, go back in time, into the hell-scape of 1985, as viewed from the heck-scape of 1980, before everything was parody, before we were so jaded, back when we really believed in the coming of World War III...
Addendum: I had the great fortune to hear from the bass player on much of the album, Tom Reid, who reached out on seeing this post. He provided some additional inside information. Tom let me know that most of the songs on the album were written by Jonathan Goldman, credited on the album as Jonathan Shade. The concept of this concept album seemed to very much his 'thing' as well. The label "Future Stories" was release on, Spirit records, was Shade's label, and in 1980 Spirit also released the Tennie Komar and the Silencers' ode to the great American pastime on a 7" record, a "non-apocalyptic reggae-influenced song" called Baseball.