Randy "Biscuit" Turner RIP
The_Hook_Up
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Big Boys singer put funk in punk Musician found dead in South Austin home; police investigating By Joshunda Sanders, Joe Gross AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF Friday, August 19, 2005 Beloved punk icon Randy "Biscuit" Turner was found dead in his home Thursday afternoon, the same day a feature story about him appeared in the The Austin Chronicle. Marc Savlov, a Chronicle reporter who wrote the cover story about Turner, told a group of neighbors who stood outside of Turner's South Austin home that he was the person who went to house, looked inside and called police. "I opened the door, and it was dead silent," he said, his hand shaking as he held his cell phone. He said he had just come from giving a statement to police. Police investigators at the scene did not release details about Turner's death Thursday night. Investigators from the Travis County medical examiner's office did not return calls. Kevin Buchman, an Austin police spokesman, would not confirm the identity of the body Thursday night. He said it was not being considered a suspicious death. Nationally, Turner was best known as the frontman for punk-funk pioneers the Big Boys. With the Big Boys, Turner subverted the rapidly entrenching dogmas of American hardcore punk in the late 1970s and early '80s with humor, eclectic songwriting and outrageous costumes. With guitarist Tim Kerr, bassist Chris Gates and drummer Rey Washam, the Big Boys, which lasted from 1978 to 1984, became known for explosive and funky live shows. They slowed down punk tempos to allow for syncopated rhythms and played with nonpunk bands such as the Washington, D.C., go-go act Trouble Funk. The Big Boys can be seen as a direct precursor to funky rock acts such as the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Fishbone. The band's encouragement of audience participation made them iconic punk rockers. "It's hard to overstate how huge they were in Austin," Butthole Surfers drummer King Coffey said Thursday evening. "They weren't just a punk band. A really wide spectrum of people would check out the shows. It was due in a large part to Biscuit. Everyone in the crowd would be dancing and having so much fun, and Biscuit was like the ringleader of this band that would sometimes have a full horn section on stage. The band's motto was 'fun, fun, fun,' and that was Biscuit to a T. "People like Biscuit created an amazing community here," Coffey continued. "The Big Boys were the heart and soul of it, and he was the heart and soul of the Big Boys. He meant so much to the music scene here in Texas and to punks throughout the U.S." Influential punk rockers such as Coffey, Minor Threat and Fugazi frontman Ian MacKaye, and producer Steve Albini paid tribute to the Big Boys in essays included in the band's two anthology CDs, "The Skinny Elvis" and "The Fat Elvis." The East North Loop record store Sound on Sound is named after a Big Boys song. Turner went on to sing with Cargo Cult, Swine King and was working on new projects, including visual art. Neighbors said that Turner was an artistic, off-beat personality who often retreated into his house for days to work on visual art. His neighbors gathered at the corner where his house was and reminisced about the Austin Music Hall of Fame inductee that they knew as a character who took pride in the tree full of plastic blue bottles in his yard, being quirky and creating art. "He brought such a touch of humor and life to the block," said Robert Goyer, 46, who lives across the street. "He's irreplaceable." Goyer said Turner would do things like paint snakes on the road. Last year, he hosted an open house where everything in the house was orange ? right down to the Cheetos and soda. Other neighbors said that he would offer to watch their animals when they were away. Goyer said that Turner had been looking forward to an art show in Nacogdoches and was excited about the Chronicle article. "It's my world, and sometimes I retreat to it knowing full well that beyond that front door right there is horror and destruction and death and mayhem," Turner said in the Aug. 19 cover story. "But I know I can't control any of that, and so this little world that I've created here, well, I can barely control that, too, but it's much more fun."
Comments
And the Big Boys were about as influential as a band could be.
Goddamn...much, much respect.
Such a cool dude. Downer news.
Big Boys - Spit
Big Boys - Funk Off
(edited links because the putfile.com links weren't working)
The text from the Texas Funk Compilation insert:
"TEXAS FUNK COMPILATION:
It must have looked strange at first, a punk band like the Big Boys bringing a horn section on stage for some funk in a small Austin club circa 1982. Audiences in the bigger, white-mainstream, blues-rock clubs certainly wouldn't have welcomed such experimenting. That scene made it touch for a wave of integrated funk that then appeared - DoDat, Bad Mutha Goose, Slackface, and Stick People. The DayLights in Dallas and Sprawl in Houston were also struggling with thier local scenes. The clubs were so unsupportive that Slackface and The DayLights both made plans to move, figuring they'd have a better chance in New York. Perhaps it was the night of Slackface's farewell show that Austinites realized that the new funk could sate their appetite for heavy guitar. Sprawl and DoDat were also on the bill, and a sweaty audience packed The Cannibal CLub (Then Club Cairo.) iN dENTON, A small college town north of Dallas, crowds began to show up consistently to see a new wave of bands - Bouffant Jellyfish, Retarded Elf, and Joe Rockhead. Realizing how much the market had changed, Slackface flew down a few times from New York, where they were members of The Black Rock Coalition. In Denton, Ten Hands spewed forth its most ludicrous member, who then started BillyGoat, which, along with GoodFoot, established solid funk in the north. Fleshmop also formed in Denton before moving to Houston.
Now Texas is knee-deep in funk. The same clubs that once rejected the alternative funk bands now have weekly funk shows and draw consistant crowds. But the drinking age remains an impediment. Austin might seem the only significant city in the schmea, but it is only Houston, at The Axiom, that bands have been able to have all-ages shows, developing large high-school crowds. Austin's 18 and up shows are acceptable, because the potential crowds are mostly college students. Dallas' almost entirely 21 and up policy, however, reflective of its overly commercial alcohol-dependant scene, is unnerving.
At Rastaman Work Ethic Productions we have selected, recorded, re-edited and re-mixed the best Texas Funk we could find for this compilation. We decided to start it off with a Big Boys song named for a club that wouldn't let them play a second set because they were distracting the audience from drinking. Though we include funk songs from Fleshmop and Stick People, neither is primarily a funk band. Stick People is subtle and melodic, whereas Fleshmp is raging and heavy.
The compilation is a collective venture of the bands involved; RWE will retain no profits. If you need to know exactdly where one of the band's profits are being sent, please contact us. Also, bands anywhere in the world, please send us your demos, we like to hear what's going on elsewhere. SO get on the good foot, get up on the downstroke, and don't ever let another person decide what music you can't listen to."
http://www.wfmu.org/listen.m3u?show=16095&archive=22030&starttime=1:48:16