A Brief History Of The Big Mess Cabaret Orchestra
by Andy Bresnan
The first version of what was to become the Big Mess Orchestra played music for a production of The Bogus Bride in 1987, and consisted of Karen Schmidt, John Razler, and myself. By 1991, when we produced the first cabaret Three on a Meathook, One on the Floor, we were joined by Wendy Buckwalter, Rob Winfelder, and Joe Quigley. We only played four or five songs in between the performance art that weekend, but a few cabaret trademarks were already established: the hostessing of the show by mistress of ceremonies Carlota Ttendant, the "Off Our Backs and Onto Yours Cabaret Strip Show Auction," and the practice of chewing up any genre of music that crosses our path and spitting it out more or (sometimes) less altered.
The next cabaret took us to the Penguin Place, where we stayed for a couple of years during which the cabarets grew into four-hour events with an ever widening circle of singers and performers. By the time we left, the orchestra also included Thomas Razler, Myk-Syd, Randy "Cookie" Rudolph, Dean Sabatino, Chris Unrath, and Alan Hewitt.
Since then our home has been the Trocadero where the band (with Topher in place of Alan on bass), the show, and the audience all had a bit more room to grow. The number of people who have crossed our stage in the years since then is huge. There is a bit of a revolving door of guest musicians, singers, and performers. So much so that there literally isn't room to list everyone who has worked with us. With the production crew, each show involves forty or fifty people. As the shows went on, with all those people and all those hours of performance, it began to seem too bad not to have a record of some of it. So, a brisk three years later, here it is.
About the recordings on "A Little Trash Goes A Long Way"
We made this album as a souvenir, to document what the orchestra has been doing the last few years. Obviously it is impossible to duplicate such an unusually "live" event -- aside from the poetry, dance, vaudeville schtick, and other purely visual elements, even the songs are difficult to transmit. We rehearse them without amplification, and until we came to the Troc, we performed them acoustically as well. With the large, boisterous, cocktail-fueled crowd -- and then of course there's the audience -- anyway, it was in light of this difficulty that we recorded our Grossten Schlager (biggest hits) show live. To do this, Gary Ferenchak and Frank Sylva built a temporary studio in one of the upstairs dressing rooms of the Troc. Then Frank, never having seen our shows, recorded two nights of cabaret entirely unable to see the stage, guessing what was going on on stage by ear only, and by seeing dazed, winded performers darting by in the passageway. It may as well be pointed out once more that the cold light of morning does nothing for last night's excesses, but even so, a few of these tracks do convey something of the spirit of the Big Mess shows. Several other live tracks were usable, but lost out to the studio versions for the sake of clarity and sound quality.
In the fifteen months since the Grossten Schlager show, we have been recording at Cycle Sound in Manayunk with Gary. It has been refreshingly eye-opening to hear the music played with such relatively sober care. I found mistakes in arrangements we had been playing for years. And now that they are finished, I can safely say this is pretty much the way we wanted you to hear them all along. For this I must thank the nearly inexhaustible patience of the musicians, who for ten years have worked day jobs and home lives around the sometimes ridiculous schedule demanded by such unwieldy, unfunded shows (it's true, no one gets paid for this -- it's all we can do to get the next show up!) The same is true of the singers, who have almost always been game for any idea, no matter how outlandish: "You want me to sing a song by who? -- dressed as a what??" The most heartening thing about this is that the feeling of being free to experiment has been consistently reinforced by the most diverse, enthusiastic, and open-minded audience I have ever played for. It isn't much of a triumph when we get an audience to respond to seltzer-bottle / banana peel humor, or to some beautiful creature dancing out of their clothes to a raucous accompaniment, but in a town as conservative as Philadelphia generally is, to have a packed house stomping and hooting while the Big Mess Dancers caper and swirl unsteadily to the sound of Bartok is an accomplishment indeed. Everyone in Big Mess would like to thank all of the people who have been willing to come along on what has often been a lurching, unpredictable ride.
This album would also never have been made without the commitment of Gary Ferenchak, first as the sound man at the Troc who took the time to make Big Mess sound just like Big Mess, only louder, and then as the studio engineer who remained unwaveringly cheerful through fourteen-hour days that would have anyone white-knuckled. This has been a project unlike any Gary or I have ever worked on, and it was painfully laborious at times, but entirely worthwhile.
The singers are:
Jacqui Ambrosini, Wendy Bell, Michael Byrne, Lee Charleston,
Michael Dura, Joe Genaro, Greg Giovanni, Grace Gonglewski, Jack Gorry, H Kolenda, and Jimi Mooney.