Published on Jul 10, 2000
The usual mode of operation here in the Pierce Memorial Archives
is I get a disc in the mail from a label, and I finally get to it
after a few weeks (thanks to the growing pile of discs I have to
review and the disgusting fact I have only 24 hours in a day to
balance work on two sites, a full-time job and a family).
One disc that I was planning on getting to was
Noise Monkeys, the second release from Cub Koda & The
Points, and their first release in 20 years. Then, I got an e-mail
from my friend at J-Bird, letting me know that Michael “Cub” Koda
had passed away on July 1 at the age of 51.
I blew it. I blew the chance to write a review without such a
sword of Damocles hanging over my head. I blew the chance to have
Koda read a review of his work while he was still alive — and my
chance to tell him how impressive and irreverently funny the disc
could be at times.
You, the gentle reader, might think I’m invocating the old Irish
proverb of never speaking ill of the dead, but I’m here to tell you
this just isn’t the case. Koda — who had earned immortality in the
world of rock as the leader of Brownsville Station and the author
of “Smokin’ In The Boys’ Room” — truly recorded an album that was
admittedly a little rough around the edges, but is a more than
fitting final statement from Koda.
The first thing you have to do is to take the “formatted rock”
portion of your brain and leave it at the coat check. Then, slip
the disc in the machine and push “play”. Within seconds, you’ll
understand why Coda is considered one of rock’s clown princes.
Relying on a mixture of off-beat humor you’d find on records in
jukeboxes at truck stops and the three-chord purity of early rock,
the band — vocalist/guitarist Coda, guitarist/vocalist Joey
Gaydos, bassist/vocalist Petey Bankert and drummer Cool Fred
Schmidt — plow through 10 studio tracks for the sheer joy of the
music.
And you can’t help but share in the joy of some of these songs.
Tracks like “Fast Food – Slow Death,” “Next Time” (written by
“Louie Louie” legend Richard Berry) and “Spit It On The Floor,”
Noise Monkeys blares through the speakers like Todd
Rundgren, only without the studio shine. It’s kind of like
listening to the musical equivalent of a car race.
This isn’t to say that everything works on
Noise Monkeys. Tracks like “Yommo Yommo… Yow!” and “The
Fang” just fail to develop into anything on the positive side of
mediocre, while the two live tracks at the end don’t add anything
significant to the picture. I almost would have preferred to have
heard a few more studio numbers from the one-day marathon
session.
Still, tracks like “He Couldn’t Say No,” “Look At That White
Girl Dance” and “Pusherman Of Love” revel in the pure joy of music
— something that I haven’t heard since the days when Country Dick
Montana took the mike at Beat Farmers shows. (Cripes, there’s
another irreverent rock godhead we lost far too young.)
It’s raw, it’s gritty — hell, it’s even occasionally ugly. But
Noise Monkeys is rock that goes back to the daring side of
the genre, something you rarely hear in music anymore. It’s too bad
that Koda & The Points only did two albums in their career, and
it’s a damned shame that Koda’s voice has now been silenced for the
ages. Yet we should not look at this disc as an epitaph; instead, I
choose to look at it as a reason to be thankful that the rock scene
had Koda for as long as it did.
He wasn’t afraid to take a chance – a hell of a eulogy that
anyone should wish for.