The Sound of Future Past

A bit about my favorite band of all time. Read to the end to learn how to make your guitar sound like a ballistic missile.

May 06, 2024

I will cop to having bad taste in music. I know, I know, it’s subjective, but my taste is uniquely…difficult. I think that unlike most music listeners, I worked backward from the weirdest stuff I could find. At age 14, I started wandering into Schoolkids’ Records (RIP) and bothering the clerks to recommend me music. I feel like almost as a goof they started recommending music like Caroliner and Merzbow (if you’re wearing headphones and want to listen to either of these please turn them down). Music that barely hewed in any traditional sense to musical form. Maybe they thought it would scare me off. Instead, what it taught me was that anyone can make music, and that music isn’t bound to meter and tempo. It can be almost anything.

Whether it was this specific aspect of my early musical education or it’s just some unique quirk of brain chemistry, my enjoyment of music has always been less about lyrics and more about teasing apart the sounds and how they’re made. One of my favorite music listening experiences is sitting down to check something out and going how the hell did they make that sound? In a world that feels pretty mapped, hearing something that sounds impossible and new is thrilling, like I’ve made it to the bottom of the Mariana Trench and discovered some new sound species.

It’s rare to remember where you were the first time you ever heard a band, and that is true with Chrome, my favorite band. What I do know is that I asked my friend Michael Troutman to make a cassette of one of their albums, tossed it in my care unlabeled, and promptly forgot it existed. So imagine my surprise when I was rifling through my tapes and popped that one in, and heard this:

I was sitting in the parking lot of my community college, about to go to class. But I just stopped and sat. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. A better produced rendition of this song could be mistaken for a punk or even a classic rock tune. There’s definitely DNA of both The Ramones and ZZ Top in this song. But this is something different entirely. The drums are blown out, the the vocals are all at once cool and silly (the high pitched double tracking in the background, the lyric “meet me at the backdoor of my mind”), and then in the last 40 seconds, the song devolves into…sounds. sweeps of noise, recordings of radio and TV, sounds played backwards, menacing synthesizer. The whole thing felt like it was made out of time. It could have been produced in the 1960s or 6 months before I found the tape floating in my car.

The truth of it is all at once more mundane and more interesting. Chrome started as the project of a bug eyed DIY punker named Tom Wisse, who went by the much more menacing nom-de-plume Damon Edge. Their first album, 1975’s The Visitation is somewhere between punk and psychedelic rock, bears all the lyrical trademarks of Chrome — aliens, occult symbols, sci fi imagery, pyramids and biblical references, anything and everything new-agey, mystical and menacing — but it sounds like it was recorded by a bunch of eager kids who may not have totally known how to play their instruments. It’s weird and atmospheric, but feels pretty amateur, and is not an album I return to a ton.

Between their first and second albums, Damon jettisoned the original lineup and brought on another certified weirdo named Barry, but from the start, he was going by the much more spaced-out moniker Helios Creed. A much more competent guitarist than Edge, Creed brought otherworldly guitar sounds that were, according to him, the product of a "listening to Black Sabbath on LSD on headphones when I was a teenager," which, even if it’s a joke or a fabrication is still a decent in for their music.

Their second and third albums, Half Machine Lip Moves and Alien Soundtracks exist as these monuments to a kind of strange alchemy between two obsessive music fans and cultural weirdos basically tossing out all the rules. They recorded the album in their studio on reel to reel tape, and in addition to actually recording songs, added a ton of tape loops, odd sounds, and synthesizers. There are all kinds of tricks peppered through these albums I have gone on to steal, like recording guitars at half speed, so when it’s played back they’re blisteringly fast, added bits of interesting sounds to your music, and liberal, almost reckless sampling.

The songs themselves almost never have traditional structures. They almost sound like snatching bits of transmissions from either an ancient, or deeply futuristic race. Lyrics are almost an afterthought, growled into distorted microphones. If there are any discernible lyrics, they are usually just odd phrases that penetrate the haze of noise that the band is making, like “I saw you in the zoo, in the monkey cage” or “Slip it to the android!” The overall effect of these records is very much a piece with the emerging cyberpunk literature of the time. To borrow a phrase, the albums felt “half machine,” and deeply ahead of their time.

But in 1977, people didn’t get it. They had next to no audience in the United States, owing at least in part to the fact that they had become such a studio band they didn’t perform live. Over in Europe, however, contemporary reviews of their albums call them pretentious, retrogressive heavy metal with dopey lyrics, said they had “no hint of passion or emotional depth.”

When I first heard their music, I thought they must have been impossibly cool and intimidating weirdos. But as time has gone on, I think they might actually be more like me: eager dorks with a love for sound and a natural distrust of things that sound too polished, tooling away in their bedrooms or basements trying to create atmosphere more than anything else. They’re just silly pioneers out here making as much noise as they possibly can, and I love them for it.

After Half Machine and Alien Soundtracks, Chrome started pushing toward a more refined sound, if you ignore their 1979 sound collage EP Read Only Memory. It moved away from psychedlia, got rid of most of the samples and tape loops and started to sound more industrial. It also became less silly and more sinister. And to be honest, pretty much everything they made through 1982 was a banger. Blood on the Moon is a perfect record, especially the songs “Static Gravity” and “Isolation.” They also had what are absolutely some of their best tracks released as singles and compilation tracks. But by ‘82, Creed was tired of Edge’s refusal to perform live (save for two shows at a festival in Italy), and quit the group. Edge (until his death in 1995), and later Creed have gone on to produce around 20 albums as Chrome in the intervening 40 years, and their songs have been packaged and repackaged into compilations as a cheap cash grab. Helios Creed still tours as Chrome to this day. But nothing really managed to recapture the chaos of those first few years.

Chrome lives on as one of those “your favorite band’s favorite band” kinda outfits. They were big influences to the Touch & Go roster of the late 80’s/early 90’s — Steve Albini, The Jesus Lizard, The Butthole Surfers. Creed even played some guitar on The Surfers’ Independent Worm Saloon. But every couple years I try to make some public re-declaration of love for these guys. They were loose and weird and innovative and on my best days I like to think I’m still carrying their weirdo torch.

If end up listening to any of this band’s music, and want your guitar to sound like theirs (as I definitely did) you should pick up any ol’ distortion pedal (like a ProCo Rat for example) and a phaser pedal. I have an Electro-Harmonix Bad Stone, but they mostly all function the same. Just turn the phase rate way down and the depth/feedback way up. Boom, you’re Helios Creed now.

For this week’s JamBox, I’m naturally putting together a playlist of my favorite Chrome tunes. Apologies if this music is unlistenable to you. I truly think I lost a friend when in 1999 I went on a 13-hour road trip with a friend and only brought Chrome and the second Devo album to accompany us.