Zeke Fishhead (a.k.a. Ed Volker) has a treasure trove of home demos that surpasses even the prolific Pete Townshend. Since the 1970s, Volker has assembled these songs in a bare-bones home studio, using electric pianos with various effects and a series of analog tape recorders.
Volker painstakingly layers his overdubs with rhythm tracks, vocals and various percussion instruments to produce stark, often otherworldly and always hypnagogic soundscapes for his dream poetry. Many of these songs, often with guitar arrangements crafted by Dave Malone, have gone on to become Radiators staples, but there are literally thousands more that Volker has carefully annotated in his archives. Dating back to his Radiators days he would sometimes release album-length collections of this material. He even released the “official” solo album Lost Radio Hour. Other collections were sent to friends for private listening.
The velocity and sound quality of these releases began to increase as Volker seriously considered retirement from the road after the 2005 diaspora.
“I spent from October 2013 to April 2015 playing a good bit of gigs,” Zeke writes in the notes, “with Mollusc, the Rads, the Suspects, and with the Iguanas (as Los Reyes de Lagardo) when my gear was getting some upgrades. …After Jazz Fest, in May, with all the recording gear working well, I returned to writing and recording.”
Volker’s solo projects have the feeling of epic poetry, a story told in symbols and allegory filled with metaphysical observations about love, spirituality, and a search for identity set to stark melodic and rhythmic landscapes that at points approach trance music. All of it is marinated in a miasma of pop culture references and Louisiana folklore. Some of the references are easy to get; others are encrypted. When Volker shouts “Hang the ham!” in “No Fun,” not many will get the connection to the wild days of Storyville when “Hang the Ham” meant a barroom romp in which drawer-less women would try to kick a ham suspended from the ceiling, providing prurient sport for the drunken onlookers.
Dancing beats set the tone for the message “no fun—unless it hurts.” Volker takes the listener through a kaleidoscope of emotions. There are stately intimations of love contained in “When All the World Was Blue,” “Cinnamon Smile” and “Come Back, Little Pigeon”; then something more visceral in “Song Without a Shotgun.” After all, “Even Iron Man has a melting point.”
There’s a fever dreamwith a carrion crow joining the conversation, in “Blood from the Stone.” There are several twisted observations on the world around us, as in “The Time Is Now,” in which Zeke warns the oblivious “the sky ain’t gonna fall without you fallin’ too”; or the further delusions of “50 Million Miles From Earth,” with its radio squawkers talkin’ politics and the studs “prayin’ market correction gonna help them with their next erection” while the planet around them is dying. Not even Kirk and Spock can help this scenario, leading Zeke to conclude “Scotty beam us down.” Things get so bad Zeke wants out on “Take Me to the Sweeter Place.”
What to do? Throw a party at “The House That Rocket Girl Built,” a toe-tapping mindblower where Spock finds the Romulan wine, K-Doe is in the house, the gators are poppin’ and even the Klingons hit the dance floor.
Volker knows how to end a story and the finale here is a good one: “An Untamed Twist of Grace.” Zeke/Ed concludes he was lucky to get a fleeting glimpse at elusive treasure: “the music that made me/ never betrayed me/ kept me standing/ in the harshest storm.”
