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Clownhole

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It’s midnight, 1988, in the heart of Appalachia and a table of drunks are screaming “Play the Dead – Play the Dead” as they were frequenting a small eclectic music venue on the outskirts of town. When the singer shouts back “we don’t play the Dead they are Dead, Dead, Dead!” the band replies to the drunks by unleashing a musical napalm of a song that can best be described as a Sex Pistols-fueled rendition of the Banana Splits Theme song….Tral-la-la. As the band kicks into the song, a wall of sound fills the room – clowns start appearing out of nowhere, people storm the stage to sing or dance and massive amounts of fog suddenly erupts from a giant clown’s arse. It is clear this band is the original “No F%*CKs Given” band and leaves the table of drunks to wonder what they hell they have stumbled into. Welcome to a Clownhole show. Welcome to the short, but crazy world of music that still can’t be defined coming out the hills of Appalachia in the late 1980s. Clownhole was only a band for a short time - years before Nirvana’s Nevermind would create a new genre, in a land where Long John Silvers, small movie theaters and VHS Rental Shops pepper two-lane highways. A trio of friends in small Charleston, West Virginia went on a musical journey that still has people talking about their shows decades later. Having played in local punk bands, the trio wanted to explore a music that intertwined aggressive music, art, comedy and audience engagement. Their home-away-from-home was the Charleston Playhouse – a magical Oasis in the middle of a Mountain State where artists, actors, musicians and like-minded free-spirits would test levels of creativity and performance. While the band lasted slightly more than one year, their musical impact and performances are still talked about 35 years later. The trio consisted of Sham Voodoo on guitar, Randy B on Drums and Flair on Bass, pumping out a sound that pre-cursed “Grunge” and fueled by Mind-erasers with insane friends who would often jump on stage to sing with the band. Their performances became legendary for never knowing what might happen at the Playhouse. Were they on mushrooms, were they drunk or were they fucking with the crowd and making them part of the show? When a lost video tape of one of their performances was found, the band was encouraged to record some of their originals which crossed boundaries of punk, rock, new wave and humor. In the Spring of 2024, the reckless energy and music madness of 1988 will be brought back to life on an album featuring five of their most popular originals. This is the Clownhole story. This is their music.