Bobb Trimble

What, I ask you, can be said about Bobb Trimble that hasn't been said before? Gentlepersons, don't start your search engines…just mumble along in unison: "Umm…everything?"

Aye, verily; here's a chip off'n a rock tale too seldom told, although I'm hard-pressed to find anyone to blame for that. In fact, if a few hollow-eyed collectors hadn't honed in on his small-press cry from the DIY wilderness, these notes might still be swimming in my head instead of on the gramophone documentation now before you.

Besides, it's not like anyone else in the original Wormtown (Worcester, MA c.1977-1984) punk/weirdo scene ever made a truly national splash. The Unattached and The Odds (JJ Rassler's post-DMZ combo) came closest; besides, Bobb himself wasn't even really accepted in said scene-at-large until he'd hit the local club/warehouse/fairground circuit in '82 with the largely junior high-school Crippled Dog Band (context: Bobb was 24 at the time; loony tambourinist/howler Capt. PJ was thirty-something).

Before that, nuances of the odd onionskin layers of studio acid-folk heartbroken sound-dreams from his two self-released albums had fallen mostly upon punk-and-garage-rock-deafened ears…a real shame to be sure, but I can't even necessarily blame the newly punk-attuned, since they'd fought long and hard to cast off the yoke of 70s/80s arena/schmaltz oppression. To those for whom the urgency of punk and new/no-wave was a refreshing fix, Bobb's solo stuff may have been dismissed too readily as symbolic of the discarded "old guard".

Some of this original solo style is showcased here on Side One: Bobb solo recordings never released in their own time. Two of them, "Blood Of The Lamb" and "Home In Heaven" are rewrites of other as-yet unreleased tunes ("Break Of My Horizon" and "Wandering In A Daydream", respectively) that he undertook during a brief foray across the border into Jesus-freakdom. While spirituality often had colored the musical impressions in Bobb's music, there was a time of such loneliness and despair for him that he'd taken solace in the calm soul of the hippy-Man-of-Nazareth – while also taking to recasting some of his work in such wistful stain-glasséd tones. He never proselytized openly about his beliefs, though; in fact, the other members of The Prefab Messiahs and I originally took to calling him "St. Bobb" just because of his otherworldly aura of enlightened naïvete. In any event, Orpheus is planning a series of Bobb-related discs, so eventually you'll be able to hear these songs in their original text-settings too. Despite the dissimilarities between Bobb's music and that of Wormtown-at-large, he was a big fan of the local scene, and became at least as caught up in its excitement as any other active participant. So, even as he proceeded to record a second solo album largely in his established style, he'd also convened a gaggle of Northborough, MA grade-schoolers (average age: 12) as "Bobb & The Kidds". Why? On one hand, it may have been his own interpretation of the "youth voice empowerment" flaunted by the newest breed of rock rebels. Then again, like many a beautiful dreamer (& even Whitney Houston), Bobb believed that "the children are the future" – and since he felt a sense of betrayal in suburban society's overt message that innocence and imagination weren't acceptable in its adult populace, forming The Kidds could have been his way of ducking a punch of that unfortunate reality.

At some point, though, parents of one of The Kidds became paranoid about this 23-year old "artistic type" (with no girlfriend) leading a rock band of young boys. The paranoia spread far enough that The Kidds soon were disbanded by a force more insidious than that of any record company – their parents! (The one surviving document of the group actually made it onto Bobb's second LP (Harvest Of Dreams; no label); "Oh Baby" sounds much like what The Shaggs might have if they'd been boys weaned on Kiss' Love Gun)

Determined not to be foiled, Bobb sought out a few slightly older (junior high) guys, and -- with "permission to rock" secured -- thus the Power Puff Boys…er, umm…the Crippled Dog Band – was formed! The band breathed some youth-slackened rock fire into some of Bobb's songs, wrote some new ones of their own (featured here on Side Two), and slipped in the occasional odd choice in Beatles covers. The name was inspired by drummer Steve Fouracre's three-legged dog "Boopsie" (shown on the LP art; Bobb claims that Boopsie somewhat mauled him during the photos you see here, but he claims so with just enough hint of a smirk and a would-be poker face that it's hard to take him seriously). Many Wormtonians may recall what was perhaps their greatest day in the sun -- their appearance at a WCUW event at E.M. Loew's Theater (now The Palladium) with The Nebulas, Performers, and Foamin Agents in February 1983. For the occasion, Bobb wore a top hat with bunny ears and a green satin coat, complete with bunny-tail.

So, gentle reader, stay tuned for further Orpheus archeology of the elusive aural bread-crumb trail of this man perpetually ahead of his time, outside of any time, and oft-seemingly (yet endearingly) out of his mind!
~ Kris Thompson, May 2002

Sometimes when a "lost" cult artist is suddenly exhumed from the dust of pop music's past, whatever hipster mystique had been built up by the obscurity (and inflated collectors' prices) of the original records is somehow lost in the transition. Listen to most tracks on those CD compilations of all but unknown garage rock, Northern soul, and freakbeat singles and it's quickly apparent that many of these songs had never broken through in their time simply because they're not really that good. What makes Bobb Trimble special is that although the neo-psychedelic singer/songwriter has generated a tremendous level of collector mania in the quarter century since his two albums were self-released in editions of 300 copies each -- near-mint copies of 1981's Iron Curtain Innocence have changed hands for over $1,000 -- his music is actually quite good, with intrinsic merits beyond the rarity of his albums or the back-story of his somewhat troubled artistic career. As a singer, Trimble has a high, tremulous voice that's garnered comparisons to T. Rex's Marc Bolan, Sparks' Russell Mael, and even Joni Mitchell. As a songwriter, his lo-fi psychedelia is tinged with an emotional intensity not often seen in the work of better-known '80s neo-psych contemporaries like R. Stevie Moore, Robyn Hitchcock, and the Bevis Frond. Trimble's two albums may allude to the late '60s in sound and songwriting, but he's actually closer in spirit to modern-day artists like Neutral Milk Hotel, Smog, and the "freak folk" revival spearheaded by Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom.

Born in the small central Massachusetts town of Marlborough in 1958, Trimble grew up listening to the usual classic rock staples, particularly the Beatles. ("Dear John, Paul, George and Ringo: If I'm a good boy and work real hard, may I please be the 5th Beatle some day?" read the liner notes of Iron Curtain Innocence.) Gravitating westward to the blue-collar city of Worcester, Trimble began performing on the local punk scene in his early twenties, while writing and recording the unquestionably non-punk songs that would be released in 1981 as Iron Curtain Innocence. Following that album, Trimble formed a garage rock backing band called the Kidds, who also performed on his far more experimental second album, 1982's Harvest of Dreams. The Kidds were not fancifully named: Trimble's collaborators averaged between 12 and 13 years old. Besides making club gigs difficult, the Kidds supposedly broke up due to the qualms of bandmembers' parents worried about their children spending so much time with the adult Trimble.

Trimble never released any further albums after the breakup of the Kidds, although he gigged around Worcester with a new, slightly older backing group called the Crippled Dog Band from 1983 to 1990 and continued to make sporadic unreleased recordings. In a November 2007 interview with the Boston Globe, Trimble claimed not to have written a single song since 1993. However, interest in Trimble's career continued to develop through the psychedelic underground, as tapes of the two albums circulated and the prices collectors paid for originals climbed. In 1995, the reissue label Parallel World released a CD called Jupiter Transmission that collected 13 songs from the two albums, further increasing the buzz. Meanwhile, Kris Thompson, a mainstay of the Massachusetts psych rock scene whose early-'80s band the Prefab Messiahs had played around the same Worcester punk scene as Trimble, became a vocal proponent of Trimble's music. His band Abunai!'s 2000 album Round-Wound features Trimble playing guitar on one track, and Thompson did the liner notes for an archival vinyl release called Life Beyond the Doghouse in 2002, featuring one side of previously unheard studio recordings made after Harvest of Dreams and one side of live tracks by the Crippled Dog Band. After the gray-market U.K. reissue label Radioactive Records released an unauthorized CD of Harvest of Dreams in 2005, Thompson urged Secretly Canadian Records (whose act the Impossible Shapes had been compared to Trimble in a review) to properly issue both albums, with full-color covers, extra tracks, and superior sound. ~ Stewart Mason, All Music Guide