Music like this doesn’t get songwriting accolades. That was your first mistake, World.
As someone who has tried, and failed, I am here to attest to the difficulty of making four or five people in a room sound exactly like a sentient pinball machine with an addiction to Jolt cola and a fondness for the obscure corners of Sci-Fi comic imagery. Like their song says, “Nobody said it was easy.” This essay is a few words about one of my favorite bands of all time. This is a eulogy for Ho-Ag.
Ho-Ag’s existence as a band came about just as people were beginning to major in online-shit-talking all across the country, and the ‘Ag gentlemen themselves were spared no insult on an internet cul-de-sac called The Noise Board, which was based loosely around the Boston music scene and causing self-esteem issues in casual and frequent posters alike. Its mean-spirited menace was so powerful that even poet Amanda Palmer name dropped the Noise Board in a song, acknowledging the psychic scars keyboard-bullies had managed to land upon her person. Anyway, these message-board-people hated the way the members of Ho-Ag dressed, how they closed their eyes while singing, their hair cuts, and their song titles. This was before creative people knew, perhaps, not to read every criticism of their work that appeared on the internet and I think this can help explain the protective force-field that Ho-Ag frontman Matt Parish soon created around himself for live performances. His onstage persona became detached, snarky, almost careless– but luckily this weirdly complemented the musical acrobatics the band were blasting into the crowd. The more impossible the song sounded the more unbelievable its existence seemed in light of the easy-breezy demeanor of Mr. Parish. Like a sleepwalking sword-swallower, Parish’s leadership was eerily unsettling.
And so it went that Ho-Ag became a truly great band when, sometime after the first album’s release, Parish’s childhood friend moved to Boston from Ohio and became the perfect foil for the frontman’s unique brand of showmanship. Enter Tyler Derryberry who dragged a Moog, theremin, and megaphone onto the Ho-Ag stage plot and, with it, brought a focused intensity that often made it seem as if finding the correct setting on his keyboard would be the key to disarming a nearby ticking nuclear bomb.
People who felt compelled to dance at Ho-Ag shows were often made to look super-foolish as their songs would unexpectedly stop in their tracks once, twice, or eight times in the span of two minutes and thirty seconds. There was no internal, conscious intent to make dancers look the fool, mind you– these stops and starts were how the band experienced the world, and can’t we all agree that true expression of one’s point of view is a beautiful thing and must trump the wants and needs of dance hungry concertgoers? Besides, thwarting your own body’s sense of rhythm became its own joy.
Ho-Ag began to tour so hard that they cycled through several transmissions of their Dodge Ram (which, by my count, was their only true misstep as a band – guys, it should have been a Ford) which they nicknamed Handsome and then wrote a very good song about. On one tour Matt got jumped by some thugs in Oakland, CA and had his jaw broken. You can see what that broken jaw looked like by examining the front cover of 2008’s Doctor Cowboy. You can know that Dead Kennedy’s founder Jello Biafra visited Parish in the hospital by reading this sentence.
I should mention, the story is weirder than we have time to get into here. Someone named Walt Meadornack, a band briefly named Kilbosbee, a hand crafted original soundtrack to the movie Goonies, a law firm with a certain name, a sign in a local burrito restaurant that became the inspiration for one of their best songs.
Transcript of a voicemail from a friend in Texas in 2007: “Your friends Ho-Ag were here last night. They were great but Matt told all of the crowd that they seemed super trashy. That’s ok for Austin but they’re headed to Odessa tonight and if he talks like that he’s gonna get shot.”
During one particularly rowdy Ho-Ag show I threw an empty Pabst Blue Ribbon can at drummer Eric Meyer’s head, landing a direct hit to the forehead. He was not pleased. Meyer was an excellent drummer but an unlikely candidate for this type of music– eventually coming very much into his own, thriving on successfully completing each song like a difficult Sudoku puzzle you finish up right before the train pulls up to your stop. Without him, and there was a time before he joined the band, Ho-Ag’s songwriting could come off as somewhat academic. Meyer was the key to dumping technicolor paint all over the entire band and making the ideas to turn into jabbering 3D heart-beats, dribbling themselves all over town.
In a town where a lot people “enjoy” concerts by folding their arms and staring straight ahead for 45 minutes, Ho-Ag consistently disrupted the room’s business as usual routine and forced strangers to glance at each other with dropped jaws, mouthing “holy shit!” This is not hyperbole. This is what often happened at their shows here in Boston.
For eleven years now this sentient pinball machine of a band has been lighting up, spinning around, and delighting or alarming on-lookers everywhere they plugged in their amps. But now, the galactic party is slated for a definitive stopping point this Saturday night. Their final proper album, this past spring’s World Destroying Zig-Zags, is a surreal assault of ideas, hairpin turns, and trap doors. Its logic is internal and its excellence is unmistakable. The band leaves the building at the top of their game.
Unplug the machine. Decode the word from Pluto. Float away into the Hoodoo Sea.
Ho-Ag (The Band)
2002 – 2013
– by Ryan Hamilton Walsh
Ho-Ag perform one last time at Great Scott, Allston MA on Saturday September 7, 2013.