CLASS NOTES: FEEL THE NOISE

A significant—and magnificent—piece of Bard music history is being brought back into the light for your dancing and listening pleasure. Thanks to Nelson Bragg ’84, recordings of the incomparable band Big Noise are finally widely available. Falling Underground—The Lost Album, consisting of 11 songs on vinyl, gatefold art with neverbefore-published photos, two 18-by-24-inch posters, and liner notes by Bragg and honorary Bardian Mark Kirby, was released December 9 on Bragg’s Steel Derrick Music label (steelderrickmusic.com). That will be followed in early 2023 by a 52-track, double-CD set with the songs from the LP plus all the band’s demos—including the earliest Bard College recordings (made in the Manor basement)—and the best live performances captured on tape.

“I came to Bard on IDP weekend in 1981, and I got in! I was so happy,” Bragg recalled recently. “That weekend I saw the band Swollen Monkeys. I had never seen or heard anything like that! I was so inspired by their music. I met John and Andrea that weekend and they said, ‘We need a drummer, maybe you should try to play this music.’ My first week at Bard I was in a band! Our first gig was October 3, 1981, in Sottery Hall.”

The band that became Big Noise debuted as Orange Crush. The name was soon changed to Live Short and Suffer, but as the band’s popularity grew, and commercial viability became a possibility, a more user-friendly moniker seemed appropriate. In addition to Bragg on drums, the players were Brian “Buford” O’Sullivan ’84 on trombone and vocals, Andrea Cairone ’84 on guitar and vocals, John Jacobs ’84 on bass, Peter Buettner on alto sax, and Dave Casey ’78 on tenor sax. They recorded their first single, “College Student,” on Paul Antonell’s Red Hook, New York–based indie label Black Sheep Records (Antonell now owns the renowned Clubhouse recording studio in Rhinebeck), played in New York City clubs such as CBGB and the Cat Club, Maxwell’s in Hoboken, and opened for the B-52s on Long Island and X, Gang of Four, and Quarterflash at The Chance in Poughkeepsie.

Despite the enthusiasm of the band’s fans and excellence of the music, the big break didn’t come for Big Noise before other projects began to exert their pull. By 1988, the musicians had all gone their separate ways. “It’s an amazing story,” says Bragg. “It’s also a sad story. We left dejected, we went back to our lives, some of us left the Hudson Valley. It was depressing when it was all over.”

The positive always outweighed the negative, though, and so he held on to the music even while he carved out a successful career as a maker of music. Bragg has recorded three solo albums, toured and recorded with Stew and the Negro Problem, Anny Celsi, and many others, and was Brian Wilson’s vocalist and percussionist for 14 years. Meanwhile, the Big Noise treasure trove accompanied him wherever he went. “I’ve been lovingly saving all those tapes, all those cassettes. I saved everything: posters, newspaper clippings,” says Bragg. “I’ve got the whole history, and now is the time to prove it was a good idea to move all this stuff from apartment to apartment.”

Falling Underground— The Lost Album

SIDE 1

1. Virgin’s Delight

2. Tarzan on the Tube

3. I Love My Job

4. High School

5. Murderers and Thieves

6. Jumbotown

SIDE 2

1. College Student

2. (Do The) El Coyote Dip

3. 21 (Glad to Be Alive)

4. Reminiscing Girls

5. Dark Ages

A Big Noise celebration will take place on Friday of Reunion Weekend (May 26, 2023), with a Falling Underground listening party, screening of a 1980s student-produced Big Noise music video, and Q&A with band members—moderated by Art Carlson ’79 and Mark Kirby.