REASONS FROM THE THREE OF ME
Kids were making noise music in Florida in the 80s and 90s, but most of them were idiotic rich kids who kept buying equipment but didn’t know what to do with it. There were a few exceptions and they were glorious. Frog was raised in a trailer outside of Gainesville, him and folks living in the same small space until he left the nest. I didn’t know him in those days, but he lived wild and got the nickname Frog because he had knocked out his front teeth in some teenage misadventure and his parents couldn’t afford cosmetic replacements. By the time I met him, his teeth were fixed, his hair was long and scraggly, and he was known in the town to be a sort of hillbilly savant genius. He had a yard overflowing with insane objects he had made out of spraypainted doll heads and “Great Stuff” expanding foam. When you went onto his porch he had a children’s record player hooked onto a motion sensor that was turned all the way up and would blast you with insane kiddie music when you got close.
Frog would make strange masks from the expanding foam, which started when he sprayed it all over a mannequin head and inadvertently made a mask. He would paint the masks and work out the rest of a costume, and perform mind-bending sets of freaked-out music on a variety on instruments and non-instruments under the name The Amazing Mr. Slug. When he was playing in town we would usually go just to see what he was getting into.
Once Frog surprised us with Punch-and-Judy style puppet show, performed on a Sunday evening at a totally normal disco. He played a prerecorded soundtrack that sounded a bit like “Eskimo” by The Residents, the lights dimmed, and the puppets came out. Except they weren’t puppets, they were two whole raw chickens from the grocery store with his hands shoved inside. Frog crouched behind the puppet stage and wiggled the chickens along with the soundtrack, in which they conversed in gibberish for about fifteen minutes. Immediately after the performance he walked out from behind the puppet stage with the chickens still on his hands, went over to the bar and ordered a beer, and took the chickens off with great effort and put them right on the bar, much to the horror of the bartender.
Another legendary Frog performance was supposed to be a “mellow noise” show organized by an idiot at an Indian restaurant in downtown Gainesville, FL. A couple of dumb Florida noise guys performed, including a particularly obnoxious set by me and Ed Ballinger, while regular people on dates tried to eat Indian food. It was Frog’s turn to play and no one could find him. He bursts out of the bathroom completely naked with a pant leg stretched over his head, holding a red school fire alarm, which is going off at full blast. The place cleared out.
Another slightly less insane show was when he played a house party with 25 different automobile horns wired together, which all went off when he plugged them into a wall outlet. Then he walked around with an oversized bullhorn, which he would aim at people, pull a trigger, and absolutely blast them with further white noise.