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Richard Derrick Biography
Richard Derrick has been making music as part of Los Angeles' underground scene for over 25 years, and is preparing to release an extensive archive project on ITunes in the spring of 2008 through his label, Box-O-Plenty Records.
Currently displayed on Itunes.com are the label's initial three releases: D. Boon & Friends, Alive in California by Kevin Ayers, and Derrick’s own improv side project Solo Career, whose lineup includes Wilco guitarist Nels Cline. Scheduled for release this spring are seven hours of archival recordings (spread out over 11 individual releases) by Another Umbrella, a largely instrumental group centered around Derrick’s loop-driven guitar and at various times featuring Paul Roessler, vocalist/flutist Emily Hay, and multi-instrumentalist Crane.
Derrick was born in the Southern California suburb of Torrance in 1961, and is a lifelong resident of nearby San Pedro. He began playing music at an early age, starting with piano at age four and guitar at ten, also teaching himself bass and drums by the time he was 15. Around this time one of his classmates had acquired an open-reel recorder from his father, and although not musically inclined himself, he invited the musicians in Derrick's circle of friends to be recorded by him.
"It was a basic stereo reel-to-reel recorder with no overdub capabilities, but he also had a pretty decent cassette deck, so we'd bounce back and forth between the two machines and do overdubs that way. We didn't even have a mixing board or EQ or anything like that. There were no punch-ins either - you'd just play straight through, and if you made a mistake, you'd start over. Most of our instruments weren't the highest quality either, and we still had a long way to go in our playing, especially learning to blend with other musicians. It was pretty bare bones, and musically it wasn’t very good either, but it really opened us up to the possibilities."
One of the main participants in this scene was Todd Apperson, who would eventually play with The Reactionaries, the short-lived punk group which eventually evolved into the highly-regarded Minutemen. "I remember visiting a friend in town, must have been late 1977, and there, with their instruments set up in the living room, were Todd on guitar, Mike Watt on bass and Joe Boon on drums. Joe was Dennes’ younger brother. By the following spring Watt and Dennes were playing together, and they started The Reactionaries with George (Hurley) and Martin (Tamburovich). Then Dennes quit, and Mike brought Todd on to fill in, but then Dennes came back a few weeks later. I saw them play in ’79 at a house in Long Beach, might have been their only gig as a five-piece. I think Todd was welcome to stay in the band, but chose to leave on his own. He didn't think there was room enough in the sound for two guitars. Looking back, he was probably right."
The other core player was Brian Wells, with whom Derrick would continue making music on and off for several years, and who also coined the name for the label. "I met Brian and Todd in the seventh grade, they already knew each other from grammar school and lived around the corner from each other. Even back then, Brian already had the most incredible way with words. He was a pretty good piano player too, even though it took a few more years for him to integrate that with his own original melodies. And Todd was like a prodigy on guitar. By the time we were 16 he had a Gibson SG and developed this incredibly fluid style that was equal parts Bill Nelson, Zoot Horn Rollo and Tom Verlaine, but with his own original spin on it. It certainly raised the bar musically and challenged Brian and me to improve our playing."
Derrick finally purchased his own recording equipment in 1979, and began making recordings with Wells and Apperson in earnest. "At this point Todd was the strongest writer, so we tried to start a band around his songs. We found out soon enough that getting several good musicians to play together doesn't necessarily equal a good band. For one thing, when we were deciding who would play what, we must have drawn straws or something, because we stuck Brian on the drums, which wasn’t the best move. On top of that, both Todd and our other friend had trouble keeping their guitars in tune, and the singing was completely hit-or-miss, usually miss. Looking back, it was really awful. In fact, the more we practiced, the worse it got over time! Fortunately, we never got out of the garage with it, so other than the poor neighbors who had to listen to that dreck night after night, no one really had to get subjected to it."
For many teenagers growing up in the often musically conservative 1970s, the burgeoning punk rock scene was a breath of fresh air. For Derrick and his friends, however, "It was cool, but it's wasn't some major revelation, big Year Zero moment for us. I suppose for people who depended on the radio to supply their entertainment, things probably were pretty boring. But we weren’t in the middle of nowhere, we lived in a big music city. We were curious, and we had access to some amazing record stores, so we’d already found plenty of interesting music by then and knew how to find more. There didn't seem any reason to throw all that away just to embrace something new, we figured, you could just enjoy it all, right?
"But in the ‘80s, you know, people were so strident about all that stuff – what you didn’t like was more important than what you did like. It got really ridiculous after a while. Todd was a big fan of the early punk groups, so that’s how we heard a lot of that stuff by ’77-78 - the Ramones and Television when their first albums came out, Pere Ubu, singles by The Dils and bands like that. Around this time he also discovered both Trout Mask Replica by Beefheart and Duck Stab by The Residents. We were still in high school, so we took Duck Stab to school and everybody loved it, just got the humor right away I remember not being too sure about the Beefheart, though, until I listened to it on headphones. The guitars are separated hard left and right, so you can really hear what they’re doing. Todd started writing in that style, with the guitars doing all this bizarre counterpoint."
Meanwhile, their interest in the European progressive scene, whose popularity by this point was beginning to wane, led them into other, deeper musical waters. "For a 15-year-old, it was enough to look at the names of musicians listed on the back cover of Eno's Another Green World and explore their work, and you’re off and running. Eventually we worked our way to the Canterbury Scene, which to this day resonates with me more than almost anything else I've ever heard. And this was when you could find the most amazing records in cut-out bins, sometimes still sealed for three or four dollars. It was a shame to see that music fall out of favor, but at least most of the folks who played it are still alive to enjoy the current revival."
Derrick was also exploring the world of British folk-rock, particularly Nick Drake, Fairport Convention and Pentangle, which "almost seemed more out of fashion than prog back then. People would automatically think 'wimpy singer-songwriter with an acoustic guitar' and dismiss it outright, but they sure missed out on some great music by doing that At least now we have a whole new generation of people who weren't even around in 1977 and couldn't care less whether something's ‘punk rock’ or not. Sometimes it takes a while for things to catch on. That's why you have to do what you love, whether people appreciate it at the time or not."
Eventually Derrick realized that the other guys weren't as serious about taking their show on the road: "They'd practice and practice and practice, but when it came time to actually set up a gig, I dunno - maybe the fun in it for them was just working something up, but not actually taking it anywhere and doing something with it. In a way I finally gave up on it, but there really wasn't anything to walk away from, other than blowing my ears out from two hours of really bad music every night. They could have kept going on their own, but they didn’t." By this point Wells was beginning to write melodies to match his own words, and a few recordings of these songs recorded by Wells and Derrick in 1981-1982.
After a year of looking for other musicians in his immediate area, Derrick began spending more time in Los Angeles in 1982, eventually meeting a group of older musicians who rehearsed at a garage on Lookout Mountain in Laurel Canyon. "I had just sold my bass and amp out of frustration when I saw an ad in The Recycler looking for a bassist that seemed really interesting. Turned out they had a bass and amp already there, I just needed to show up We ended up playing together twice a week for about eight months, sometimes playing songs the guitarist wrote, but mostly just having a blast and improvising things out of thin air. On a musical level there was just total anger and catharsis, but it never spilled over into our personal relationships, everyone got along great the whole time. And we had maybe 30 or 40 friends who would come by at various times to listen, so it became a nice little scene. It was my first opportunity to play with people who not only knew how to improvise like that, but all had distinctive styles and blended together into something unique and special."
The four musicians eventually adopted the name Middle Sleep and spent the next four months trying to establish themselves on a scene that had virtually no interest. "We were loud and aggressive, but the music was more crazed psychedelia than anything close to punk, so it withered on the vine pretty quickly. But I managed to do some things together over the years with the drummer, Mark Segal. And I met a lot of people who are still friends 25 years later."
By 1984 Derrick retreated to San Pedro, where he resumed playing music with his old school friends. "By this time Brian had become really prolific with his songwriting. He and Todd decided to start playing together again and invited me along, but this time with Brian on guitar, where he belonged. Meanwhile, Todd got rid of his distortion pedal and was using a much cleaner tone, and his own writing had taken a more folky turn, so the two of them meshed perfectly. It was a snap to come up with bass parts for their stuff."
Wells, Apperson and Derrick made several recordings of their songs, with Derrick doubling on drums, but the same problems came up again: "lots of practice, lots of talk about how great things were going to be, but somehow never making it to the second gig." Their only live show, billed as Hot Moon (after one of Wells' songs - "we could never settle on a band name, which was part of the problem"), was at The Lhasa Club in West Hollywood, opening for an acoustic set by their friends in the Minutemen, who at this point were at the apex of their career.
Their situation was compounded by their inability to find a drummer "We just couldn't find any drummers interested in playing this music. And even if we did, the club scene wasn't exactly clamoring for it, so the prospect of gigs wouldn't have been so hot either. It was good music, but there was a lot of Tin Pan Alley in it, so no one wanted to know. Punk was supposedly about doing your own thing, but there were only so many ways you were allowed to go off the beaten track. You still had to play by the rules, such as they were."
By the end of 1984 Derrick had become roommates with Minutemen guitarist D. Boon, attending several Minutemen shows and other concerts with him. "It was a great time in that a lot of music was happening all over L.A., it seemed all any of us could do to keep up with it. I'd shuttle my four-track between my room in that house in Pedro and the practice pad I was renting in Long Beach with Brian and Todd, and I always kept a portable cassette in the living room with a blank tape in it. This is when I met Crane, who was playing trumpet at Minutemen gigs. He played lots of other instruments too, and was looking for new things to do."
Crane and Derrick hit it off instantly, both personally and musically. "Crane would bring his portable keyboard over, Dennes would plug his guitar into a tiny battery-operated amp, and we would have these impromptu jam sessions that had us laughing hysterically for hours." Derrick ended up with about three hours of tapes from these sessions, "but most of it isn't very listenable, to be honest. It wasn’t meant to be, we were just having a laugh. We even thought about starting a band on the side for fun, but other than a couple of private parties, we never really did anything with it. Dennes got more and more busy with the Minutemen, and Crane and I just went ahead and started recording together."
Isolating themselves for days at a time in Derrick's rehearsal space in Long Beach, he and Crane recorded prolifically in the summer of 1985. "We actually had several different projects going on at once. We did a lot of Crane’s vocal rock songs, overdubbing everything between the two of us to create a full band sound. He was also writing these short instrumentals based around his portable keyboard, these wonderful two-minute songs that sounded like they could have been in some European film in the '60s."
Around this time they also began experimenting with loops and drone music, starting with the keyboards and four-track machines before adding digital delays (at the time a fairly new effect) and other sound processors. "We tried to find a guitar player to start a band, with me on drums and Crane on bass, but after a year and a half we were still looking. Then Crane bought this gorgeous Fender Stratocaster which he eventually sold to me, and I spent a few months developing a lead guitar style of my own. I'd been playing guitar about 15 years by then, but I never had a flair for playing blues-based lead guitar, and still don't. I approached playing solos in a more pianistic way: basically I'd picture a keyboard with an almost four-octave range, then imagine different chord formations on those keys and play those notes on guitar, one at a time. It was a fun way to approach it, and one that seemed within my ability. Once I decided to be our guitarist, we started looking for a drummer, but we had no luck with that either. So we worked out a system where I'd pre-record drum tracks while listening to Crane play bass in headphones, then play along to those drum tapes at the gig, which basically made us a trio with two members!"
Derrick and Crane’s new project, which they eventually named Another Umbrella, relied heavily on digital delay loops, pre-recorded instruments and pure improvisation. Despite being perhaps their least commercially-minded music, Another Umbrella managed to play live shows on a semi-regular basis, including two performances at Los Angeles’ Museum Of Contemporary Art. Derrick continued on through 1997, either alone or with other collaborators, including keyboardist Paul Roessler, flutist/vocalist Emily Hay and drummer Bob Lee.
By the late 1980s the Los Angeles music scene was going through several changes, including the emergence of coffeehouses as regular venues for live music, which benefited not only the large network of musicians with whom Derrick and Crane had formed alliances, but also the members of established local punk acts who wished to try something stylistically different. Before long, several coffeehouses were featuring live music nightly, including the Onyx/Sequel in Los Feliz, The Pik-Me-Up on 6th Street, and The New Thai Ice Cafe in Hollywood.
Around this time Derrick was introduced to Rick Chafen, a Kansas City music promoter who was friends with several members of England's Canterbury Scene and was interested in bringing them to do small, fan-based tours in America. "This was years before the Internet, so it was all about huge phone bills for transatlantic calls. The musicians didn't make a lot of money, no one did, but it was great to know this music still had people caring that much about it, all scattered around the globe." Between 1992 and 1994 Derrick produced concerts in Los Angeles for noted Canterbury musicians Kevin Ayers, Richard Sinclair, Gilli Smyth and Tim Blake. Derrick would eventually bring Ayers back in 1998 and 2000 for two well-received California tours, with Ayers playing in Los Angeles and San Francisco accompanied by local musicians. These shows were part of Ayers’ return to music, ushering in a new period of activity for him which has resulted in his first studio album in 15 years, The Unfairground, released in 2007.
In 1997, just as Derrick was bringing Another Umbrella to a close, he began playing regularly with ex-Clawhammer drummer Bob Lee in an improv band which they eventually called Solo Career ("I had that name sitting around for over a decade, and this seemed like a good time to use it"). The rotating line-up of guitarists included Joe Baiza of Saccharine Trust and Universal Congress Of; Sort Of Quartet’s Mario Lalli; Woody Aplanalp (currently playing with Bobby Womack); Ken Rosser; and Nels Cline, currently in Wilco. Derrick also played bass for a few months in 1998 with Rick Lawndale, whose previous band Lawndale recorded two albums in the 1980s for SST Records.
In 2003 Derrick founded Box-O-Plenty Records, beginning with the release of D. Boon & Friends, a collection of live and home recordings mostly taken from Derrick's private archive. Along with the highlights from their home jam sessions, the album includes six songs from a Minutemen show in 1985 where Derrick was the substitute drummer, the only such instance in the Minutemen's history. One song from D. Boon & Friends, "Plight," was featured in the Minutemen documentary We Jam Econo. Derrick has also been including a 23-minute disc of outtakes as a free bonus with direct mail orders to box-o-plenty.com. Derrick also licensed and supplied audio for We Jam Econo: The Story of the Minutemen, the documentary produced by Keith Schieron and directed by Tim Irwin.
http://www.theminutemen.com.
In 2004 Derrick compiled the highlights from Ayers’ US shows and released them as Alive In California, with Derrick playing bass on 11 of the 15 tracks. The following year saw the release of Solo Career's debut effort, Season Finale, featuring artwork by British artist Paul Whitehead, best known for his work with Genesis, Van Der Graaf Generator, Le Orme and other progressive rock legends. Finally in March 2008, Derrick has issued the first series of recordings by Another Umbrella, seven hours released over 11 albums.
For contact info, look under the umbrella:
http://www.box-o-plenty.com
http://www.myspace.com/boxoplentyrecords
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