OBSCURO! Blog: Jim Shepard/Vertical Slit/V-3 Megapost

Back in 2014 at the OBSCURO! blog, Bizzaro Jerry compiled all of his Jim Shepard and related recordings and posted them for download. Now, generally, I am opposed to posting music for people to download for free. In this, due to the relative obscurity of Jim Shepard's work, and near impossibility to track down for a purchase, I'm posting. However, if you can pick up a copy at Discogs, I also suggest that as well.

VIDEO: "SPIRIT DOMINATES MATTER" BOX-SET TRIBUTE FOR JIM SHEPARD DVD

Our Hearts Of Glass - The lost tapes of Jim Shepard

Our Hearts Of Glass - The lost tapes of Jim Shepard

August 15th, 2018

I first discovered Jim Shepard in the middle of a wildfire haze, which couldn't be more appropriate. Jim exists in a space tinged with a thick layer of smog, clouding both his history and our post-humous image of him. Even after hours of research, I've only been able to salvage a few pixelated photographs and second-hand, tale-like information about him.  

Through these obituaries and memories, I know that Jim was a blue-collar worker who lived in both Columbus, Ohio and also somewhere among the sun dirt roads of Florida. I know that he suffered through a horrific work accident that completely mangled one of his hands. And I know that due to this accident, Jim decided to dedicate all of his time to his many musical projects such as V-3, Vertical Slit, Ego Summit, and countless solo recordings. 

New Additions: Jim Shepard w/ V-3 / Lacquer ‎– Evil Love Deeper Album

Sometime over the winter, I was able to grab a copy of Evil Deeper Love from Used Kids. Like with the V-3 and Vertical Slit recordings I've acquired prior, Jim Shepard is an acquired taste I'm still trying to wrap my head around. Some of the elements hit me right, and others leave me scratching my head.

Know Yer Artist: Jim Shepard

Artist: Jim Shepard

Bands
Creature
Ego Summit
Lacquer
Phantom Limb
Skullbank
Snooks
V-3
Vertical Slit

Releases
1977 - Slit and Pre-Slit album (Not On Label)
1987 - Jagged Flash album (Old Age/New Age)
1991 - No Big Deal album (Iron Press)
1991 - Amsterdam album (Iron Press)
1991 - Whiskey Priest With A Master Plan (Iron Press)
1991 - The Folk City Aztec Drama Series: Volume One album (Iron Press)
1995 - Picking Through The Wreckage With A Stick album (Siltbreeze)
1995 - Morphine Monogram album (Iron Press)
1995 - Evil Deeper Love album (Thrill Jockey)
1995 - The Folk City Aztec Drama Series: Volume Two album (Iron Press)
1996 - The Evil Twin album (Iron Press)
1996 - Plays The Songs Of Kim Fowley - The Hollywood Hills Are Alive And Well 7" single (Anopheles)
1998 - Motorcycle Movie album (Iron Press)
1998 - Collisions compilation album (Iron Press)
2001 - The Dispossessed w/Charles Cicirella album (Shrimper)
2009 - The Voices Of Men 7" single (Columbus Discount Records)
2010 - V-3 Next Album (Not On Label)
2018 - The Letter Tapes album (Feeding Tube Records)
2019 - Heavy Action album (Ever/Never)

New Jim Shepard Compilation Available

It's not often I get to post about current events or new releases, but here is one that is very relevant to the project: ever/never records has a new compilation of Jim Shepard rarities titled Heavy Action. Here are the details from Tom Lax of Siltbreeze:

When Charles and Josh tapped me to spill some ink for this project, I couldn’t say yes fast enough. Culled from Charles’s vast personal collection, the contents herein abide no formality and as such, ushers forth an insider’s take into Jim’s frantic, restless genius you’ll not likely find again. Timelines? What are you, some kinda cop? It’s fresh ears all around on this one, folks, none of this material has seen the light of day till now. It twitches, it grunts, it flares, and it soars. It ain’t no one type’ve nothin’, unless that’s Loaded. In my king fu village, this pivotal document to the blood spilt across the floor of an iconoclastic career is right up there with the Velvets, Caught Between The Twisted Stars, Beefheart’s, Grow Fins & those Blorp Essette comps. Who knows if the official vaults will ever be opened? And even if, what you’d likely get is the known entities anyway, trussed up in new boots ’n’ panties. This is mud fresh from the private swamp. And as you’ll soon find out, Jim could make it crackle. 

- Tom Lax, Philadelphia, Pa 3/15/19, From the liner notes, "BRING ME THE MOUSTACHE OF BERNADINE DOHRN"

Newcity Music: Quotas System - Mike Rep and Tommy Jay’s Creative Life is Best in a Basement

True Believers wasn't the last time Mike "Rep" Hummel and Tommy Jay played and recorded together, not by a very long shot. This article at Newcity Music from 2013 digs into their history, here's a snippet:

The music whizzing around Rep and Tommy Jay eventually found itself synthesized in scores of recordings—the overwhelming majority of which remain unreleased. What got set to tape during those formative explorations didn’t become immediately available. 

And when “Rocket to Nowhere” showed up in 1977, it seemed like no one was listening.
“We were more influenced by our isolation than by being part of a scene, pre-’78,” the multi-instrumentalist says of his first few years tinkering with recorded songcraft. 

Rep, though, was undeterred and continued recording at a prodigious rate, woodshedding in basements, goofing off with his friends but only emerging later in the decade as a member of the True Believers—a group orchestrated by Tommy Jay. 

The band issued its lone recording, “Accept It” on Rep’s fledgling New Age imprint. It was 1980. The three songs toss off a surprising range of music, considering the players seemed wrapped up in punk concerns. Even the title track reveals a gentle melodicism alongside the genre’s quick pacings. 

Rep, again deferring to Tommy Jay’s talents, says the album ranks as an UR-recording and that his companion’s recognition is usually glossed over by virtue of the Quotas using Rep’s surname. 

By the time the True Believers were kicking around, though, Rep says a concerted scene had begun to coalesce around groups like Ron House’s Twisted Shouts and Jim Shepard’s Vertical Slit. There were even a few venues daring enough to host performances. Rep and Tommy Jay persisted, this new enclave serving as proof that what they were blindly pursuing had pent-up meaning. And someone cared, somewhere.

Agit Reader: Ego Summit - Summit Talks

Veteran Columbus writer Stephen Slaybaugh wrote about Ego Summit for The Agit Reader back in 2008, here is some of that article:

When the annals for the rock scene of Agit hometown Columbus, Ohio are written, there are certain names that will stand out, their direct input and/or influence sewing a thread that cuts across decades and perhaps generations. Taking their cues from the “anyone can do it” ethos of punk, but losing some of the urbanity for distinctly Midwestern accents and skepticism, a close knit bunch of book-fed and alcohol-bred minds formed the nucleus of the indie-genous scene in the late ‘70s and throughout the ‘80s and into the ‘90s. Don Howland, Mike “Rep” Hummel, Jim Shepard, Tommy Jay, Ron House—among others, the contributions of these five to the Columbus pantheon (if there is one) can’t be overstated. Gibson Bros., Great Plains, V-3, Quotas, Bassholes, Slave Apartments—Columbus’ musical DNA can be traced directly to these bands. 

But despite crossed paths in various combinations, it wasn’t until a weekend in 1997 that those five all got together so that, as Hummel put it, “some documentation to that fellowship (would) be recorded on tape before the participants doddered off into old age.” With Jay, Hummel and friend Jerry Wick (of Gaunt) manning a four-track, the group convened at Jay’s studio barn in the rural suburb of Harrisburg and recorded over two days. The result was The Room Isn’t Big Enough, an album released on Hummel’s Old Age/No Age label under the fitting moniker of Ego Summit. While the contributors’ credentials spoke for themselves, the album received little attention when it was released.

Know Yer Band: Ego Summit

Band: Ego Summit

Members
Don Howland
Ron House
Mike "Rep" Hummel
Jim Shepard
Tommy Jay

Releases
1997 - Ego Summit album (Old Age/New Age)

Rolling Stone: Lo-Fi Loss - Jim Shepard Dead

The death of Jim Shepard reverberated not only through the Columbus music and art community, but the nationwide music scene, particularly the lo-fi and experimental scene. Rolling Stone wrote about this death in 1998, here is some of that article:

Shepard, who was forty-four, began his primordial assault on the collective consciousness back in the late Seventies, presaging the lo-fi revolution to come on a slew of self-released cassettes and micro-pressed albums. After an enforced break — one caused by a work injury that left him with a severely mangled hand — Shepard turned the Vertical Slit “project” into a full-time band, with an attendant name change to V-3.

Shit-Fi.com: Vertical Slit

Over at Shit-Fi.com, the reissue of Jim Shepard's Slit and Pre-Slit release is reviewed. Here is some of that:

By now many have surely noticed the increasing interest in the peculiar formation that was the Columbus underground rock scene of the 1970s and 1980s. If Mike Rep and the Quotas’s “Rocket to Nowhere”—the most aptly titled record of all time—is the lodestone to which fascination with the roots of this scene was initially drawn,* Vertical Slit’s “Slit and Pre-Slit” has long been the talisman, the mysterious record that one knew existed and suspected was the explanatory key that would reveal how to fix not just Columbus but perhaps Ohio and even the United States into a historical accounting of punk’s emergence in what I call “the long 1970s.”** Upon finally hearing this record, I am not sure that it reveals the keys to mysteries; instead, we can be grateful that it actually creates more mysteries for us. This record is unlike any other. Its original pressing size of 100 copies had mundane causes, but where the obscurity (and hence fetishism) of it seemed to turn on its unobtainable material character, in listening to it, the obscurity strikes me as embedded in the music too. It wasn’t just that one couldn’t find the record, it’s that once one found it and heard it, what one heard was nearly void of referents. In time, of course, punk and industrial and noise and UK DIY, and even bedroom psych and folk that preceded or coincided with it, would all echo it, giving it a strong premonitory and otherworldly quality, even as none of these forms in general took any influence from it. Is it a Rosetta Stone of underground music of the post-1960s, pre-punk moment?

New Additions: Under The Blood Red Lava Lamp album by Vertical Slit

Digging into the various releases and projects of Jim Shepard has been an interesting experience. The music is far more experimental and avant-garde than anything I'm used to as a music listener. While a number of discoveries have tipped me to new favorites, I'm still getting used to Shepard's work, such as the 1986 album Under The Blood Red Lava Lamp by Vertical Slit, which was originally released as a cassette on Old Age, but re-released on Siltbreeze in 1999 on CD with additional tracks.

Know Yer Band: Vertical Slit

Band: Vertical Slit

Members
Jim Shepard - vocals/guitar/piano/tape/other
Dan Juranko - bass/vocals/tape/effects
David Mikula - drums/percussion

Releases
1979 - Urban Imprint 7" single (Not On Label)
1980 - New Thrill / New Pill 7" single (New Age)
1986 - Under The Blood Red Lava Lamp album (Old Age)
1988 - Basement 2215 album (Iron Press)
1990 - Vertical Slit And Beyond compilation album (Ropeburn)
1991 - Your Wife Is Licking My Strobe Light And Grinning album (Iron Press)
1997 - Twisted Steel And The Tits Of Angels album (Spirit Of Orr)

Video: Jim Shepard's V-3 play cover of The Gun Club "Preaching the Blues"

SPIN: Blame Nirvana - 40 Weirdest Post Nevermind Major Label Albums

Back in 2013, SPIN magazine compiled a list of the 40 weirdest albums released on major labels after the release of Nevermind, otherwise known as the alternative rock gold rush. Landing on the list is Jim Shepard's V-3 and their 1996 album Photograph Burns released on Onion/American.

By the time of his first and only major-label release, the late Columbus, Ohio musician Jim Shepard had compiled a body of work that was a veritable maze of home-recorded D.I.Y., stretching back to the late-'70s. Photograph Burns is a chaotic, from-the-gut amalgam of Neil Young and Crazy Horse, post-punk, and the muddy sounds of the "lo-fi" explosion, from a guy who lived through it all.

New Additions: Evil Love Deeper by Jim Shepard w/ V-3 / Lacquer*, etc...

Jim Shepard, and the various bands he was part of like V-3 and Vertical Slit, have some of the most obscure recordings that I've been trying to track down. Many are simply not available thanks to being released on limited runs of cassettes, and others are so long out of print even CDs are nearly impossible to track down. Luckily, recently Used Kids Records here in Columbus somehow ended up with a small batch of V-3 pressings specifically the 1997 album Evil Love Deeper credited to Jim Shepard w/ V-3 / Lacquer*, etc..., released on Thrill Jockey. Perhaps Thrill Jockey had a few extra copies in their vaults, who knows, but I was able to pick one up. Every release I've come upon for Shepard has been equally perplexing and fascinating, as he definitely an acquired taste most mainstream listeners would quickly turn off, yet there is something intriguing to his art I cannot quite put a finger on.

Know Yer Band: V-3

Band: V-3

Members
Vocals/Guitar - Jim Shepard
Vocals/Guitar - Roxanne Newman
Bass/Keys - Nudge Squidfish / Leland Cain
Drums - Rudy Smith / Dave Mikula / Sam Brown

Releases
1991 - Psychic Dance Hall album (Ropeburn)
1991 - Monsters Of Hollywood 7" ep (Iron Press)
1991 - The Earth Muffin 7" ep (Siltbreeze)
1992 - Negotiate Nothing album (Ropeburn)
1995 - Evil Love Deeper (w/Jim Shepard, V-3, Lacquer, etc.) album (Thrill Jockey)
1995 - W.N.U.R. Chicago Radio Show album (Iron Press)
1995 - American Face / Son Of Sam Donaldson 7" single (Anyway Records)
1995 - Russian Roulette (Chinese Style) 7" ep (Birdman Records)
1996 - Photograph Burns album (Onion Records)
1996 - Elevator To The Gas Chamber ‎7" ep (Spirit of Orr)
1997 - Live '97 album (Old Age / No Age)
1997 - Launchpad Explosion 2x7" single (Spare Me Records)
1997 - The Other Side Of Darkness ‎compilation album (Not On Label)
1998 - Pimping In The 90's (Action Painting #Ninety-Eight) ‎album (Iron Press)
2014 - Live At Bernie's '97 album (Not On Label)