Early Years: Hog Wash!
Hog Wash! 2012 reissue (ZB023)
In the beginning, The Fussbudgets were Larry O. Dean and Chris Lehmann. The two met in 1985 in San Francisco, through a carefully-worded ad looking for musicians Dean posted at Haight Street Music Center including such influences as The Go-Betweens, Big Star, The Jazz Butcher, and Bob Dylan. By 1986, they began demoing material at Room 26, a project studio located above Streetlight Records on Market Street, with engineer Steve Shaw. These recordings (to be released at a later date by Zenith Beast) naturally whetted the duo's collective whistle to rock, so bassist Ned Doherty (who worked with Larry at snazzy Marina district movie rental emporium Captain Video) was enlisted, and plans for an album were made. Lacking a drummer, another ad was placed, bringing the mysterious Paul into the fold for the purposes of recording.
The band's debut, Hog Wash! was not intended to be a demo, but within The Fussbudgets discography, even considering the band's laissez-faire attitude on releasing future recordings, its availability was relegated to local radio and more ideologically sympathetic factions of the independent music press. Because of its excessively low-profile status, some of its songs would be revisited on later recordings, the intention being not to improve on them per se but to bring them to a wider audience. It includes such Fussbudgets mainstays as Lehmann's withering take on Talking Heads acolytes, “Jacqui Digs the Heads,” and Dean's dissection of romance gone bad, “The Old Stomping Ground,” featuring violinist Stephen Kaufman, who later achieved notoriety as the subject of the Academy Award-winning documentary, Thoth.
The band's debut, Hog Wash! was not intended to be a demo, but within The Fussbudgets discography, even considering the band's laissez-faire attitude on releasing future recordings, its availability was relegated to local radio and more ideologically sympathetic factions of the independent music press. Because of its excessively low-profile status, some of its songs would be revisited on later recordings, the intention being not to improve on them per se but to bring them to a wider audience. It includes such Fussbudgets mainstays as Lehmann's withering take on Talking Heads acolytes, “Jacqui Digs the Heads,” and Dean's dissection of romance gone bad, “The Old Stomping Ground,” featuring violinist Stephen Kaufman, who later achieved notoriety as the subject of the Academy Award-winning documentary, Thoth.