Ed Volker hits REWIND for a look back at the release of Law Of The Fish by the Radiators on Epic Records in 1987 which introduced “fishhead music” to a national audience.
“I put it on a couple of days ago and was impressed with what a wonderfully complete production it was, seamless in a lot of ways.
We rehearsed for about a week and a half with the producer Rodney Mills before going into the studio. We had stars in our eyes. The larger issue was that, against all odds, we somehow got a major label record deal, something we wanted but didn’t imagine we’d really get, and it was like going to school.
The producer was great as far as helping us fine tune the songs so they would fit into a four minute format, but… as I listen back I don’t get much feeling from some of my vocals. Now, somebody else might get a lot of feeling from them, but I hear myself boxed in.
On “Suck The Heads,” the producer didn’t know what to do with that song, on a number of different levels. Rodney famously said ‘The cowbell has no place in rock music.’ He didn’t realize that everybody in New Orleans is born with a cowbell in their crib.
We recorded in early summer. It was Friday, we’d been recording since morning and it was noonish. We ate on Veterans Blvd., heavy fried food or something. When we came back, on “Love Is a Tangle” I’d echoed what Reg was playing with my left hand, doing octaves with my right, basically playing the percussion part on piano.
After eating all that greasy, hot food in the hot weather I came up with a really cool organ part. A Booker T-ish come Jimmy Smith kinda organ part that fit and was a lot more soulful than the tiddly winks thing I had been doing. I had problems with my singing. I was kind of pitchy, I couldn’t hear it, and once I heard it… I totally was a cowardly, craven dog. It shriveled my singing. It sort of broke something in me—that experience.
It took a while for me to get back to the place where, ‘why give a crap about that? So you got to make a ‘Hollywood movie’ and got to realize how really freaking ugly you are compared to the icons. But when you’re living your life, when you’re back in the street—just be yourself, man.’ The other point of that was… it gave me a much deeper appreciation of how to craft music.
Before, I used to believe in holy inspiration, and whatever lyrics I wrote, I would never touch ‘em, you know, ‘that was the word from God’ that I was given. So the experience kind of broke a lot of pieces of me but it showed me how to put things together. That was very instructive. I got over the cringing over my vocal thing and went on to craft my own music.”
