Mayo Thompson & the Red Krayola - by Bill Perrine (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

In Mayo Thompson & The Red Krayola: Listen to This, filmmaker and writer
Bill Perrine traces the six-decade, ever-mutating career of the Red Krayola --
the Houston art-noise group that emerged from the 1967 Summer of Love playing
"Free Form Freak-Outs" alongside John Fahey, splitting the difference
between garage rock and outright sonic destruction on their debut, The
Parable of Arable Land. From there Perrine follows Thompson and his
revolving cast of collaborators through five decades of reinvention: the
Familiar Ugly's audience-as-instrument chaos of the late '60s, an underground
UK art-punk phase alongside Art & Language in the '70s, disillusioned
detours through the disco era, and a 1990s and 2000s run through Chicago's
post-rock scene with members of Tortoise, Gastr del Sol, and Stereolab passing
through the band's ranks.

Built from new interviews and drawing on the band's own extensive
self-documented archive -- the book's appendices include a full discography,
bibliography, and videography compiled by the Red Krayola themselves -- Listen
to This treats the band less as a rock group than as a six-decade art
project that happened to use guitars, tracing its through-lines from free jazz
and musique concrète to conceptual art and Marxist politics. Thompson emerges
across the book's thirteen chapters not as a rock star but as an idea in
motion: a singer who has said outright that he hates music, and who has spent
sixty years making some of the strangest and most influential of it anyway.

For readers of Michael Azerrad's Our Band Could Be Your Life
and fans of Pere Ubu, Sonic Youth, and Stereolab -- bands the Red Krayola
directly shaped or ran alongside -- Listen to This is the first full
account of one of American music's longest-running and least-classifiable
experiments.