Robert Thomas - Sunburned Hand Of The Man Interview
Are you originally from Boston, Massachusetts? What was your childhood like? When did you first begin to fall in love with music and what was it that initially fascinated you about it? Was music something that was relevant around your household growing up?
I was raised in Quincy, Massachusetts which borders Boston to the south. It was at the time (70’s & 80’s) a very traditional working class town and not typically tolerant, or welcoming of people who strayed outside the edges of conformity. I was always a bit of an outcast so there was a lot of struggle to get by & fit in during my youth. I was very fortunately turned on to underground music and culture (punk, hardcore, skateboarding etc) at 12 years old and that opened many doors for me and really expanded the horizon. I lived just minutes from the subway which would take me into Boston & Cambridge and I’d spend all my spare time and money there buying records and going to as many shows as possible. I fell in love with music in my infancy. I have two much older sisters and they both played records constantly, so I was hearing the things they loved like the Stones, Aerosmith, Kiss and Cheap Trick while still a toddler. When I was in 5th grade (1985), I was pretty enthusiastic for whatever I was seeing on MTV at the time, things like Duran Duran, Cyndi Lauper and The Ghostbusters soundtrack for instance. Then I befriended a 10 year old marijuana enthusiast who shamed me for enjoying contemporary pop music and sort of peer pressured me into listening to Jimi Hendrix, The Beatles, Zeppelin, etc.
I got my first primitive stereo system for Xmas that year and a copy of “Are You Experienced?” on LP which I would listen to repeatedly on headphones in the dark. I knew Hendrix had died 15 years earlier and he looked a bit like a ghost to me in that fisheye photo on the cover. There was something really spooky and visual about that music and i felt connected to the anguish that lurked beneath the “grooviness”. I similarly spent a lot of time in the dark listening to my cassettes of “The White Album”, particularly “Helter Skelter” & “Revolution 9” which used to really creep me out (and was certainly my window into the industrial, avant garde & musique concrete recordings that would mean so much to me later). The following year, my sister’s husband showed me his record collection and played me things like the Sex Pistols, Ramones, The Stooges and the Velvets and I was off to the races. By ‘87 I was into Bad Brains, Minor Threat, Negative Approach and pretty much any raging, agonized hardcore record I could get my hands on.
I heard “Locust Abortion Technician" by the Butthole Surfers as a new release and that was a total game changer for me as it connected the darker side of Hendrix and the White Album that I had adored to the punk aesthetic that had recently transformed my reality. When I was 15 my dear friend Don Harney exposed me to another realm of music from acts like Psychic TV, Throbbing Gristle, Coil, Current 93 and especially Nurse With Wound that would radically transform my trajectory/agenda again and lead to, so many more discoveries in all kinds of genres. Interestingly, it was this scene (along with things like Chrome and the Buttholes) that would guide me toward the (for me) magically transformative and redemptive world of psychedelics which certainly helped me to shed a great deal of the nihilism and anger that i had accumulated over the years. I can’t overstate how important magazines were back in the pre-internet age (particularly Forced Exposure and later Bannanafish) in making discoveries and connecting dots. By age 19 I was experiencing the deluge from all fronts - Can, Faust, The Incredible String Band, Van Dyke Parks, Love, Fred Neil, Tim Buckley as well as Stockhausen, Luc Ferrari, Hijokaidan, The Dead C, Hirsche Nicht Auf Sofa, The Art Ensemble of Chicago, Sun Ra & on & on. A genuine magical torrent of music and ideas from all directions that I’m very happy to report continues gushing forth to this very day, 30 years later.
When and where did you see your first concert and what kind of impact did that leave on you? Did you participate in any outfits/projects prior to SSB and SBHOTM? When did you make your live performance debut and what was that experience like for you?
My first proper concert was in ‘84 when my sisters took me to see Adam Ant, The Romantics were the opener. It was fun at the time, but didn’t leave too much of an impact (other than my sisters dressing me up like a new wave dork with a skinny tie). Much more exciting was my first proper “show” in ‘87 where I saw Suicidal Tendencies at the Channel club in Boston, it was a true whirlwind of hyperkinetic macro aggression, haha! That was my first time seeing an actual pit and I’m convinced that the species of purely unhinged psychos who used to populate that scene have gone extinct. It was terrifying and exhilarating. Anyway, prior to Sunburned & the Shit Spangled Banner, I had been in hardcore groups. My first time on stage was probably at age 14 and it was exciting at the time as there were hoards of sweaty teenagers stage diving & kicking each other in the face in a kind of macho, hormonal hurricane.
Prior to SBHOTM, the group was originally called Shit Spangled Banner. When and where did you guys initially meet and what was the chemistry like between everyone? The group released two records on the great Ecstatic Peace/Yod label in ‘94 and ‘95. Can you tell me about writing and recording those early projects?
Shit Spangled Banner was started in ‘93 by Rich Pontius and myself. Rich and I were very tight in those days and we spent a lot of time listening to records and going to shows together. We were both excited to get something going musically and we shared a passion for The Dead C which, in retrospect, was probably the biggest inspiration for the SSB. Like Sunburned, the SSB music was entirely “spontaneous”, we didn’t write songs together (except in our live sets where we occasionally played a cover of The Dead C’s “Mighty’’ and one actual composition of our own called “Sandy" which was heavily indebted to their style). Rich and I invited John Moloney (who was my co-worker at the time) to join us on drums and we embraced a 2 guitar “power trio” format that really clicked for us. We recorded absolutely everything to tape on a Sony walkman pro with a stereo condenser mic. We released a cassette of these recordings in ‘94 that made its way to Thurston Moore which led to Byron Coley kindly offering to release it as an LP as part of the ‘“ASS RUN” series on his Ecstatic Yod label (also home to the debut LP of the No-Neck Blues Band as well as albums from Alan Licht, Fuzzhead and more). There was actually only one SSB Lp but there were 2 Variations of it due to some malfeasance on my behalf in which I snuck in some extra “unapproved” material that resulted in a repress... lucky Byron. The band folded in early ‘96, but Moloney & I continued playing together and began slowly inviting members to what would become Sunburned (including Pontius). The 1st Sunburned shows occurred in 1997.
As much as I’d love to run through the group's whole entire discography, it may actually be impossible! So I’ll ask a few questions regarding your favorites releases and songs that you guys have written and recorded over the near 30 year span of the band's career.
The Sunburned catalog is too vast & dense for anyone to get a handle on, not much light escapes from it, haha! My personal favorite titles &/or recommended starting points for anyone who may consider dipping their toe into the discography would be: Jaybird & Wild Animal (two cd-r’s which were the 1st releases many people heard from us, both from 2001); Headdress (our debut LP from 2002, recently re-released & beautifully remastered & repackaged by Three Lobed); No Magic Man (a personal fave, cd released by the Bastet label which was operated by Arthur Magazine); A Taste Of Never (an LP of studio recordings made for Dutch VPRO radio, 2007); Fire Escape & A (our 2 studio collaborations with Kieran Hebdan, from 2007 & 2010); Headless (engineered & mixed by Jason Meagher of Black Dirt Studios, released by Cardinal Fuzz in 2020); Pick A Day To Die (studio recordings stitched together from across the years, released on Three Lobed in 2021); Meadowglen Malloy (a bizarre cd-r release put together by Gary War & myself in 2019, notable for us having possibly invoked an entity).
You’ve played with numerous artists and friends over the years, what keeps you creative and still interested in making music and art? What are some of the most fascinating and engaging elements of exploring music, tone and texture the way you have over your career with the band?
I don’t give too much thought to where the urge to create comes from, i generally sit back and let it flow of its own accord. I certainly wish i had more time & space to create, but I’m trying to focus more on quality than quantity these days and I’m personally very happy with what has been emerging. With Sunburned, the music is almost always created spontaneously. Terms like “freestyle”, or “open music” probably describe it better than improv which, for me at least, evokes the arch languages developed by Anglo & Euro music scenes documented on labels like Matchless, Incus, Hat Hut etc. Our approach & language is cruder by an order of magnitude & totally divorced from any theory whatsoever, haha! What fascinates me about our approach is how the process can occasionally lead us to a point where all the participants are finally able to lock into a unified whole in which all the parts are moving together as one “thing”. I’m also exhilarated when this sometimes occurs live in front of a receptive audience and it feels as though the band has brought the audience inside the music, or “along for the ride”.
Are you guys currently working on anything new? Any plans for 2023? Is there anything else you would like to further share with the readers?
We have a new cd called “Hypnotape” which is our debut for the longstanding VHF label & will be released in April 2023. It’s a collection of studio recordings from 2021 & 2022 that run a full gamut of atmospheres. Some of it gets pretty intense & hectic & seems well suited to the current state of global affairs. We’re also excited about a forthcoming studio album for Three Lobed which similarly features a wide variety of approaches and focuses rather heavily on deep poetry. I believe this will be out by the end of the year as well. There will be some touring of the U.S. in May and doubtless many other live appearances throughout the year. I recommend that all of your readers keep listening, looking, reading, watching, thinking, remembering, building, loving & moving!
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