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.

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. 

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)

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.

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.

Video: Vertical Slit - Slowly The Music Plays

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)

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.