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All Music Guide:
New York's Bush Tetras had a no wave link, via guitarist Pat Place's association with James Chance, but the band's sound was neither frantic nor disjointed enough to be properly categorized with those bands. They played scrappy post-punk, with fellow Americans Pylon and Konk and Brits Delta 5 and Au Pairs as close contemporaries. If there's any one song the Bush Tetras are known for, it's 1980's "Too Many Creeps" -- the band's most representative song and also the catchiest, made by the kind of jagged rhythms, slicing guitars, and sniping vocals that were used throughout their short lifespan. Perhaps the song wasn't quite insistent or hypnotic enough to become a smash single of the new wave era (released on the small 99 label, its reach was limited), but it could be argued that Romeo Void wouldn't have become popular without knowing about it. That band's "Never Say Never," a genius single in its own right, seemed to take a couple cues from the Bush Tetras; during a 2003 episode of VH1's Bands Reunited series, Romeo Void guitarist Peter Woods matter-of-factly confessed to being inspired by the sound of Place's guitar.
After Place, bassist Laura Kennedy, drummer Dee Pop, and singer Cynthia Sley made their debut with an EP centered around "Too Many Creeps," signed with the U.K.'s Stiff label, and recorded another EP, Rituals, produced by the Clash's Topper Headon. The live cassette Wild Things, which included a cover of John Lennon's "Cold Turkey," was released by ROIR in 1983. By this stage, the Bush Tetras -- along with Konk, fellow New Yorkers Talking Heads, and Manchester's A Certain Ratio -- went outside the realm of Western music for inspiration. African and Caribbean influences played a significant role in their sound. This same year involved the exits of Kennedy and Pop and an eventual split.
Post-breakup, most of the members went on to short-lived groups. Pop, his Tom Verlaine/John Cale-associate wife Deerfrance, and former 8-Eyed Spy member Michael Paumgardhen formed Floor Kiss; Sley and ex-Voidoid Ivan Julian had the Lovelies; Place helped out spoken word artist Maggie Estep. A while after these less significant projects dissolved, ROIR compiled all of the Bush Tetras' studio recordings and threw in some demos for Better Late Than Never. ROIR being ROIR, it too was a cassette-only release.
The original lineup got back together in 1995. Boom in the Night, another retrospective on the by-then-evolved ROIR, functioned as a CD version of Better Late Than Never, with all but one track from the earlier release included. It came out just before 1996's Beauty Lies, an album of new material that came and went without much notice. It had the bad fortune of predating the rocketing interest in post-punk that took hold during the early 2000s. In 1997, the Bush Tetras recorded the album Happy for Mercury. Before it was released, Mercury was sold, its A&R staff laid off, and the album shelved. ROIR issued the album for the first time in 2012.
Wikipedia:
Bush Tetras are an American post-punk band from New York City that was popular in the Manhattan club scene and college radio in the early 1980s but never achieved much mainstream success. Their music combined funk rhythms and dissonant guitar riffs.
History [edit]
Lead guitarist Pat Place and vocalist Cynthia Sley produced the most distinctive aspects of the Tetras sound. Place's guitar lines were rhythmic and distortion-filled. She had been the original guitarist and one of the founding members of the No Wave band The Contortions. With Bush Tetras, Pat continued to pursue some of the musical ideas she had explored in that band, although her distinctive slide guitar is absent from many of the Tetras songs. Sley's vocals were half-spoken, half-sung. In songs like "Too Many Creeps" and "Can't Be Funky," she repeated simple phrases over and over again, creating a hypnotic monotony similar to Place's guitar rhythms.
Place appeared in some of Vivienne Dick's movies, co-starring with Lydia Lunch and other musicians from New York's thriving late-1970s and early-1980s music community, an off-shoot of No Wave. These appearances contributed to the band's prominent position in downtown New York in the early 1980s. New York's post-punk revival of the 2000s was accompanied by a resurgence of interest in this period, with the Tetras' influence heard in many of that scene's bands.
The group scored two dance hits in the U.S. in the early 1980s – "Too Many Creeps" peaked at No. 57 Dance in 1981, and "Can't Be Funky/Cowboys in Africa" peaked at No. 32 in 1982 – before their initial split.
Cynthia Sley later joined up with Ivan Julian of Richard Hell and the Voidoids to form the Lovelies. They put out one percussive post-punk album, Mad Orphan (109 Records), in 1988. In 2008 she formed Command V with Pat Irwin of the Raybeats and B-52s, and Rachel Dengiz. They released a self-titled album in 2012 on Mush Records.
Dee Pop also currently performs with improvisational jazz groups Radio I-Ching and Freedomland. Pop has also performed or recorded with rock-oriented bands and artists including Floor Kiss, Immaculate Hearts, The Shams, Black Flies, John Sinclair, Jayne County, The Amazing Cherubs, Fur, Michael Karoli (Can), Richard Lloyd, James Chance, The Slits, Odetta, Gary Lucas, Bobby Radcliff, Patti Palladin, Darlene Love, Andy Shernoff, The Walsos, Nona Hendryx, Band of Outsiders, Lenny Kaye, Jahn Xavier and the Gun Club. He also performed with jazz musicians Eddie Gale, Roy Campbell, Marc Ribot, Mark Helias, Dick Griffin, Billy Bang, Borah Bergman and Hanuman Sextet.
Bush Tetras briefly reformed in the mid-1990s and released the album Beauty Lies in 1997. In 1998 they recorded an album titled "Happy" with producer Don Fleming (it was not released until 2012). In 2005, they resumed performing in New York City, and toured Europe in summer 2006.
Laura Kennedy, the band's original bassist, died on November 14, 2011, after a long battle with liver disease.
