Musician Fred Lane resurfaces as Tim Reed
“I can always work out the very worst concept and make it worser.” So said Fred Lane, the notorious “stripmine crooner”, via email, when asked if he ever thought of a song idea that went too far.
Depicted sporting a suit jacket, boxer shorts, a sculpted mustache and bandages on his face, Lane built up an underground cult following in the '80s with two simultaneously brilliant and twisted albums: From the One That Cut You and Car Radio Jerome.
Take the sing-songy “French Toast Man” about a man who gives children moldy french toast in a sock, or “Rubber Room”, a big-band portrayal of violent madness, involving hardware supplies and chicken.
“What I encountered was so sufficiently strange, pants-ruiningly hilarious, utterly confusing, psychotic, mysterious, and beautiful that it continues to haunt and perplex me to this day,” said Chattanooga musician and composer Evan Lipson via email, about discovering Fred Lane years ago.
Information about Fred Lane—who sometimes uses the honorifics Reverend and Doctor—was scarce, but in 2009, after moving to Chattanooga, Lipson was informed by Dennis Palmer (vocalist and keyboardist of The Shaking Ray Levis) that Lane was not only alive and well but also a resident of Chattanooga.
“All sorts of bizarre and wonderful rumors surfaced—that he was a demented recluse constructing sculptures out of vegetables, living in a pyramid, became a Nazi, etc.,” said Lipson.
“Shortly thereafter, I learned of a fellow out of Baltimore with the unusual name of Skizz Cyzyk who had been filming a documentary about Lane and the criminally unknown Alabama aesthetic terrorist/rag-tag Southern surrealist group Raudelunas since 1999,” said Lipson.
“Several years later, I finally had the pleasure of meeting the man himself at the Raudelunas exposition (at the University of Alabama) in 2013,” said Lipson, about Lane’s surprise appearance and performance—his first in decades. “I’ll say this much: he didn’t disappoint.”
One mystery was unlocked—Fred Lane was one Tim Reed, now devoted to creating colorful, unique wood sculptures—his “Odd-Creachter” whirligigs—sold at art fairs across the South and Midwest.
After Reed revealed that a whole album was written (dating from the '70s and mid-’80s) but not released, to be entitled Icepick to the Moon, Lipson and Bob Stagner (percussionist of The Shaking Ray Levis) persuaded Reed in 2014 to complete the album, recorded at Steve Hickman’s studio in Chattanooga.
“Icepick was recorded crudely on cassette New Year’s Eve and Day 1992 by Dick Foote (Roger Hagerty) on guitar and myself on vocals,” said Reed. “Basically, that cassette sat on the shelf until 1999 when I handed it to Cyd Cherise (Davey Williams), and nothing happened again until 2014 when we began sporadically and spasmodically recording bits and pieces until it was completed in 2017. Whew. So it was roughly 30 years in the making.”
Lipson (album co-producer and bassist) and Stagner (percussion) assembled Lane’s backing band, The Disheveled Monkeybiters, which included the late “convulsive blues” guitarist Davey Williams, pedal steel guitarist Susan Alcorn, saxophonist Jeff Crompton, and guitarist Jimmy Dormire (disclosure: this writer is a baritone Disheveled Monkeybiter), and last week, Feeding Tube Records released the album.
To celebrate, Lane/Reed’s first publicized performance since 1976 is scheduled for January 31, 2020 at Saturn in Birmingham, Alabama, joining a screening of Cyzyk’s documentary, also titled Icepick to the Moon, which premiered at the Chattanooga Film Festival last year.
The album is full of bait-and-switch tunes that lure listeners with popular mid-century song forms before they realize that the songs are wild slices of Dada-ist lunacy or devious and outrageous satire.
“Cinderblock Man” is a “cartoon-puppet tune that hybrids children’s songs and Godzilla films,” Reed explained, and “Fried Yellow Women” came from “a 1970s-era nightmare...combined with Madame Zenobia, a cheesy X-rated film of the time.”
“’Twist, Leathernecks, Twist’ is a takeoff of Elvis G.I. movie songs circa 1958-63 in their quaint frivolity,” said Reed, about the song involving a Marine dance party that degenerates into war crimes.
“’I’m Gonna Go to Hell (When I Die)’ is a glowingly glorious snappy evocative message I received from Pentecostal evangelicals in my childhood,” said Reed. “Did I make a mistake?”
“’Icepick to the Moon’ dates from the late 1970s. It’s sort of a film noir psychotic comeuppance thrilling murder song with a dynamic up-tempo teen beat you can dance to,” said Reed. “You got to take the good as well as the shattered clock radio and fractured skull.”
With Icepick to the Moon finally out after a three-decade wait, what’s next?
“There is a collection of songs that were mostly written between 1986-1991 and earlier entitled Muzak Under The Stairs which I had roughly recorded and documented vocally earlier this year,” said Reed. “We will record that five minutes before my imminent demise next Tuesday.”