Red Crayola
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The Red Crayola was a psychedelic, avant-garde rock band from Houston, Texas, formed by art students at the University of St. Thomas (Texas) in 1966. The band was led by singer/guitarist and visual artist Mayo Thompson, along with drummer Rick Barthelme. Their work predated punk and the no wave scene in 1980s New York City.
Thompson has continued using the name, in its legally-required permutation The Red Krayola, for his musical projects since.
They make noise rock, psychedelia and occasionally folk/country songs and instrumentals in a DIY-punk fashion, an approach that presaged the lo-fi aesthetic of many 1990s US indie rock groups. Negative reviews have come often during The Red Krayola's history. A critic once wrote, "It's a band that has no idea how to play its instruments. In fact, they don't even know what instruments are, or if the guitarist has the ability to remain conscious long enough to play whatever it is a 'note' might be." [1] He added, "This is a band that was paid ten dollars to stop a performance in Berkeley. If Berkeley's not having it, you know you're in for rough sledding."
In 1967, the Red Crayola created a psychedelic album, Parable of Arable Land, featuring Thompson alongside Frederick Barthelme and Steve Cunningham, as well as an anonymous band of followers known as The Familiar Ugly, who appear on a number of noise tracks called Free-Form Freak-Outs. The next album, 1968's God Bless The Red Crayola And All Who Sail On Her changed the approach completely. Instead of the cacophonous psychedelic approach of their first album, the band took a more basic, constructive approach simply using electric guitar, bass guitar and drums to achieve some surprisingly melodic results and even more surprisingly off-kilter lyrics.
Thompson's collaborations in the 1970s and 1980s read like a roll call of the avant-garde and experimental. The Red Krayola teamed up with the Conceptual Art collective Art & Language for three LPs, 1976's Corrected Slogans, 1981's Kangaroo? (also featuring Swell Maps' Epic Soundtracks) and 1983's Black Snakes. Thompson joined Pere Ubu for a period in the early 1980s, performing on several releases, and provided soundtrack music for Derek Jarman. Throughout this time he was prolific as a producer for many other seminal experimental and alternative rock acts, including The Fall (1980's Grotesque (After the Gramme)), The Raincoats, Scritti Politti, Blue Orchids, Cabaret Voltaire, Stiff Little Fingers, Kleenex, The Chills and Primal Scream.
The 1990s found The Red Krayola with a new audience, who came to the group via musicians associated with Chicago's Post Rock scene and in particular the Drag City label, who had joined the band's ever-shifting line-up for a number of releases including the LPs Hazel (1996) and Fingerpainting (1999). These were, amongst others, Jim O'Rourke and David Grubbs of Gastr del Sol, the post-Conceptual visual artist Stephen Prina, George Hurley (formerly of The Minutemen and fIREHOSE), Tom Watson of Slovenly, and John McEntire of Tortoise. In 1995, Drag City released the LP Coconut Hotel, which was originally recorded as the group's second LP in 1967, but was at the time rejected by International Artists. A live album from that year, The Red Crayola Live 1967, was released by Drag City in 1998. Recorded at the Angry Arts Festival and at the Berkeley Folk Music Festival in California, the record features a live collaboration on the latter occasion with guitarist John Fahey. Rumour has it that Thompson recorded a full album with John Fahey some time in the 1970s. According to folklore the album has been missing ever since due to a series of unfortunate events.
Many psychedelic music fans will be familiar with a rather faithful cover by British Space Rock group Spacemen 3 of the Parable of Arable Land track, Transparent Radiation. Meanwhile Scottish act Future Pilot AKA recorded a rendition of Hurricane Fighter Plane, also from Parable, released by Domino Records in 1996.
Thompson is active as an art critic and currently lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, and in California, where he teaches at the Pasadena Art Center College of Design.