Dave Bell Memorial

A memorial for Dave Bell is being held Tuesday, October 29, 2024 at 4:30 p.m. at Loutzenhiser-Jordan Funeral Home, 366-368 S. Main Street, Greenville, Pennsylvania USA.  Dave died this week from cancer.  An obituary and more information on the service is at https://www.loutzenhiserfuneralhomes.com/obituaries/david-bell.  A good buddy of mine, Dave is missed.  I first met him in 1990 if I remember correctly.  My mom was set up at a flea market and made Dave's acquaintance.  Dave was helping his grandmother who was also set up there.  He liked cool music and was a cool kid, so we soon struck up a friendship.  We played in many fun bands together including Yeast?, Angry Housewives, Anal Spikemobile, The Lenin Spoonful, Rage Against Dabney Coleman, Ungoat, and probably a few others whose names I forget now.  We also saw many great concerts together including Nirvana, The Boredoms, Slayer, Pavement with Gary, The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Guided By Voices, and many, many others.  

In addition to punk/alternative/indie/whatever you want to call it, Dave also played hip-hop, electronica, noise music, and even drummed in a polka band once.  After playing in the Pennsylvania/Ohio scene (Youngstown, Warren, Pittsburgh, and so forth), he was active in the Kent, Ohio USA music scene of the 1990s.  Some of the acts included Black Squirrel And Freaky and The Sacred Hearts Auto Club.  After that, he moved to Columbus, Ohio, where he caught the tail end of the 1990s garage rock scene that produced The New Bomb Turks and Gaunt.  Upon moving back to Western Pennsylvania, he made a variety of music on his own and played with various acts.  At one point, he was involved with the Cleveland noise music scene.  Even while undergoing cancer treatment, he was still making music.  I remember him showing me some cool beats he was making on a drum machine.  With luck, maybe we'll all get to hear some of the unreleased music down the road (I particularly loved one silly song called "I Like To Ride My Helicopter Around Town"), but, unfortunately, that's still no substitute for Dave.  He was like no one else.

If you want to hear some Dave music, then you can hear The Angry Housewives and Anal Spikemobile.  That's Dave singing on "Duster" by Yeast? as well.

New Yeast? Soundcloud Page!

I have to clear up some space on my SoundCloud page, so I will be deleting "Happy Tears" by Yeast?, so if you want to download it from there and have not done so yet, now would be the time.  I should also note that I heartily recommend downloading.  As cool as streaming services are, files can disappear at any time.  Yeast?, for example, probably was one of the earliest bands to have music online.  We started at the Internet Underground Music Archive or IUMA for short.  Here's a little article on what happened to them:  https://www.zzounds.com/edu--internetunderground.  I don't remember what year the Yeast? files disappeared from IUMA, but they were up until a few years after the band itself was defunct.  Then I think I put up at least one Yeast? file on MySpace.  It disappeared along with the rest of MySpace, although this site claims to have some of the lost MySpace files:  http://lostmyspace.com/?q=.  I assume SoundCloud's files will disappear in some corporate merger or RAID failure, so enjoy it while it's there.  Ditto for any Yeast? stuff on YouTube or whatnot.  The same goes for any music you like.  Download it and back it up if you want to up the odds on enjoying listening to it in the future.  

Since I will be moving "Happy Tears" shortly, I set up a Yeast? page on SoundCloud, so you can find the track there, along with a few others.  As mentioned earlier, I recommend downloading the tracks if you like them.  I'll probably be featuring the tracks here in subsequent weeks.  Here's one to start:

Yeast? · 23 Skidoo

While uploading these, I enjoyed listening to all the many other bands named Yeast on there.  That appears to remain a popular band name.  We might have been the second ones to use it.  There was a band on C/Z Records that appears to have been the first to use that name.  When we learned of them, it was too late to change the name, and they appeared to be defunct, so we just added a question mark to the name like Therapy? (we liked Therapy?; otherwise, we would probably have gone with an exclamation point or maybe even an interrobang).  After we called it a day, the floodgates broke open.  Some of them unfortunately are dreadful.  I remember some bonehead in the 1990s claiming we stole his band's name, which was hilarious because his Yeast formed after ours had broken up (apparently, he was too dumb to look up things on the then-current Ultimate Band List, but not dumb enough not to send a whiny email).  Over the years, there's been a screamo band, a weepy piano band, an electronic artist, and some indescribable (apparently, in Asia, people like to listen to just the audio of anime or something ?????).  It continues today.  Just plunk Yeast in at Soundcloud.  Of the new Yeasts, I like these guys the best, but it looks like they broke up in 2003.

If you want more Yeast?, then listen to our classic 1994 7" (not on the new SoundCloud page)!

"Big Daddy Pane (Take 2)" by Yeast?

This is the second take of "Big Daddy Pane" from the Slippery Rock University tv show in 1994 that Yeast? played.  They get fancy with the camerawork in this one, and the take is a bit better in that we start together and I don't pull off the microphone too many times while singing.  This was one of the four tracks from the Dick Bennett 7".  We recorded the record right after our other guitarist Chris quit--he was actually supposed to be at the recording session, but he never showed up--and before our new guitarist Drew joined, and we were still in power trio mode at the time of the tv taping.  The song was inspired by Dave and I meeting a guy named Kevin at Mama Joe's in Kent, Ohio USA.  Mama Joe's was a pizza place that used to let the local hardcore bands play in the basement.  They stopped soon after one of the bands wrecked the basement.  I was there for that show, and that band--I don't remember the name now, something Youth?--started punching the crowd and then wrecking their own equipment.  After they wrecked their own equipment, they proceeded to destroy the basement of the venue.  Most of the crowd fled.  Dave and I would peep our heads around the corner of the staircase only to have to duck when a projectile flew past us.  Finally, one of the pizza workers came downstairs and discovered the chaos and called the police and that was the end of the show, and of shows in general there if I remember correctly.

It remains the most nihilistic performance that I have ever seen.  I don't know what the band thought they were doing.  Out G.G. Allining G.G. Allin?  In any case, in the midst of all that insanity, this guy named Kevin entertained Dave and us with a story of how he just got out of jail.  From what I recall, the song basically does recount Kevin's story.  He stabbed a hippie.  He drove the hippie to the hospital.  He went to jail.  His mom sent him cigarettes.  He was afraid of being anally raped.  He also was quite generous and did just keep offering us cigarettes and beer.  I don't know whatever became of Kevin, but I hope he stayed out of jail.  I hope the same for all of us.

Yeast? TV Interview

This is the interview segment from The Hart Rock Cafe show that Yeast? appeared on in early 1994.  I don't recall why I end up being the only one interviewed.  It could have been that Damon and Dave just didn't want to, or that the show's producer only wanted one of us to talk, or that there simply weren't enough seats.  In any case, I got to do the talking.  I am happy that I was reasonably articulate and answered the host's questions.

"Generic Smokes" by Yeast? Live

Yeast? played this tv show in 1994 right before the Dick Bennett 7" was released, so we did two songs from it.  "Generic Smokes" probably was the most popular song on the ep, so we did it, of course.  This version is pretty rocking.  Damon's bass line keeps the song grooving.  I always liked that Madman shirt as well.  We read a lot of comic books in that band.  Dave's drums are stripped down, so he could focus on the core of the beat.  The guitar sounds really good as well.  This song has evolved over the years as I have continued to play it, but this is a pretty good early version of it.

"Big Daddy Pane (Take 1)" by Yeast?

There isn't much video of Yeast? in comparison with many of my other bands.  In fact, this footage from a Slippery Rock University tv show may be all that exists.  It's certainly all I have.  The band does two songs including two takes of "Big Daddy Pane".  This one is the first take.  I don't recall why we did two takes.  Most likely someone screwed up either in the band or the tv crew and we rerecorded it.  The tv show was some sort of music talk show by a guy named Richard Hart.  He was not a member of professional wrestling's Hart Foundation as far as I know, but that would have been cool if he were.  He was probably just a college student in Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania USA majoring in tv production or something.  His show might not have lasted much longer than the band did, but both were fun.

Yeast? Warehouse Find!

An old buddy of mine recently surprised me by sending me ten copies of Yeast?'s Dick Bennett ep, a 7" record from back in 1994.  Long out of print, he had the copies leftover presumably from putting them on consignment at various Washington D.C. record stores.  I haven't had this record in stock since 2003 when the last copies were given away as part of the final issue of The Pornographic Flabbergasted Emus zine.  Recorded when Yeast? first became a power trio (our other guitarist at the time simply didn't show up for the recording session and subsequently disappeared from the band entirely), this clear vinyl 7" has four songs on it:  "Johnson Wants To Rant", "Generic Smokes", "Big Daddy Pane", and "Warm Fuzz".  Our buddy Ryan poses on the cover as a parody/tribute to P.J. Harvey's 4-Track Demos cover.  It is for sale for $5 postpaid.

This item is sold out.

The Great? Lost? Yeast? Song?

While going through the old cassettes, I found a few Yeast? ones.  Yeast? was one of my old bands and released a couple of 7" singles in the 1990s (one of which apparently made it to Northern Ireland, where it's now for sale on eBay).  The band started as just a solo project called Yeast (the question mark was added after we discovered there was already a band called Yeast on C/Z Records; we had already been using the name and no one else in our area seemed to have ever heard of the other band anyway--apparently it was a popular name for a band).  Dave from The Angry Housewives helped me record a few songs on his four-track, and the project later evolved into a band when Dave and our Lenin Spoonful buddy Damon joined in on the music.  We also picked up another guitar player named Chris since I was still getting the hang of the whole play guitar and sing thing and Chris could cover me if I flubbed anything.  Mainly, the band performed songs I wrote, but the others occasionally brought in a song, and we even jammed up something together once in a while.  We played around Ohio and Pennsylvania USA in the early 1990s for a few years, but, by the end, the four members of the band were all living in different cities (Chris had left before the first 7" and we forged ahead as a power-trio for awhile, then added our pal Drew from Pogeybait for the tail end of the band) and the logistics just got too hard to manage, so we called it a day by playing a last show in Akron in 1995.  A few years later, I made a cd-r retrospective of the band and fit our best stuff on it.  I left out "Happy Tears" though, much to Damon's dismay, who always liked the song.  We only recorded it once, for a demo tape we used to get gigs at local bars.  It was one of the earliest songs we played as a band, but as we got better songs, some of the early ones dropped out of the repertoire.  "Happy Tears" was one of them.  It was written about a comment that Michael Jackson made about how he cried "happy tears" (Jackson seems to have used the phrase in the song "Heal The World" as well).  This version of the song features the original quartet of Yeast?  It might not have made the cd, but, hey, it's on the Internet now.  That's not bad considering that the rest of the cassette's tracks are going to the landfill.  Don't cry though.  Everything ultimately does.  At least it was fun though, so if you must cry, please cry happy tears.