WHENCE MR. H. From the rubble of three bands came the nucleus of Mr. Happy. Jerome Deupree had been the drummer for the Decoders, Ted Pine was the keyboardist and main songwriter for the Sex Execs, and Dave Bone and I had been in the Bones together. Jerry had kept busy and was already playing with the 11 piece Either Orchestra jazz band; not long after Mr. Happy dissolved he would be Morphine's first drummer. Sebastian was a bass gunslinger, playing jazz, rock and everything in between with a number of bands. We got together in 1986 and spent a good chunk of the year working in the studio- this tape was one of the projects that I used to get my 8 track engineering chops together in the newly built Fort Apache South (the other was a twelve song Lifeboat demo). Mr. Happy played our inaugural gig at a show put together by Bob Lawton's newly formed Labor Board booking agency.

Back in California, Jerome Deupree had been the drummer for the Humans, with whom he released a 45 RPM single and toured in 1980. He was also the drummer on the first John Cougar LP, recorded as a demo and later released when Cougar's success made the LP a viable product. Moving to Boston, Jerry joined the Harvard University new wave act the Decoders, and followed the sax player from that band- Russ Gershon -into the Sex Execs in the early '80's, replacing the band's original drummer Danny. The Execs were a wonderful band, a sort of amalgam of the sound of the Suburbs and the style of Kid Creole and the Coconuts. Ted Pine was one of the two principal songwriters for the Execs (along with Sean Slade), although as the group developed his material began to dominate their sets. They released two excellent 33 RPM 12" singles and a 12" EP that included a number of strong tunes, including the highly popular local hits "My Ex" and "Sex Train". The band opened for large acts like the Motels (at the Orpheum) on a number of occassions, and made a strong 'run for the roses' that saw them make it to the finals of the Rock and Roll Rumble (they lost to ex-punk chanteuse Ammie Mann's atmospheric dance-pop band 'Til Tuesday). When the Execs broke up Jerry and Ted both hooked up with Mr. Happy.

Ted and I had a ball playing around in the studio. We got carried away. There are songs on this tape with fourteen tracks or more, with six guitar tracks overdubbed and bounced to stereo, just the worst sort of overindulgence. In many ways we learned when not to stack tracks as well as how to bounce things together by doing this record. While I still had overdub fever for some time to come it never again reached this near-terminal level! But it's all part of the learning process. These days I like to have several different guitar parts but not all smashing into each other at once! Still and all this is a pretty cool tape, especially Ted's songs which are great and the surf instrumental arrangement of "Oh Sussana" called Surf Susanna.

There were several gigs that stand out in my memory of Mr. Happy. We were able to play in front of a number of bands I'd worked with in the studio such as the Connells, the Celibate Rifles, Lifeboat, Dumptruck and Slow Children. One in particular was a show we did at the Rat on the night of the supposed Harmonic Convergence. I had asked Syd Straw to come in from New York and when she agreed I bought her a train ticket and picked her up that day at South Station. We practiced for an hour or so and then she got up to sing on the ode to the Convergence from "Hair":Aquarius: Let the Sun Shine. Syd can sing her ass off and I seldom had as much fun at a show. For our encore we played Led Zeppelin's Four Sticks, the sort of weird meter tune that showed off Jerry and Bash's rhythmic prowess and the kind of middle eastern riff Ted and I thrived on. Again Syd was fantastic. That night was the start of a friendship between Bash and Syd that would later lead to his moving to NYC and playing gigs with her, and eventually to hooking up with Soul Coughing.

Another cool show was one we played opening for Lifeboat in Newport, Rhode Island. It was on Halloween, 1986, and Mr. Happy went as the 4 Beatles and a Beatnik. Here's how that happened:
A few months prior I had driven down to New Jersey to meet with Ted's friend trumpeter Lee Z, who'd done some work with one of the road casts of the Beatlemania show. Lee had told me they had a Mellotron stashed in a storage locker in Northern N.J. and I was going down to look at it. When we got there the Mellotron was in a road case at the bottom of a stack of other cases that weighed a ton apiece. Lee and I almost bought the farm trying to get the cases down (they were stacked four high) but it was worth it when we did. There was not one but two Mellotrons- one was used for a spare as they were always breaking down. We started to open other cases and there was just all sorts of shit in them. When I left my Chevy Luv pickup was packed to the brim- I literally couldn't fit another thing in the bed. I had bought six guitars and a bass, several dummy Vox cabinets and some odds and ends. When I was just about out of cash we found a wardrobe trunk and Lee let me have it for fifty bucks. It had a half dozen pairs of real Beatle boots, several complete outfits from the Abbey Road period, wigs, the works. When we took the stage at the Blue Parrot that Halloween night we WERE the Beatles! Ted was left high and dry as the fifth man, but there was a beatnik wig and beard and some sort of tye-die shirt so he was our white Billy Preston. The next day I got a tattoo at world famous Buddy Mott's Tattoo Parlor. It's a musical staff with a heart shaped note on it, a tribute to our new record Love and Music: Play! Play! Play!, which we'd recently completed. The title came from those ridiculous and oh-so histrionically delivered lyrics from Boston's Rock and Roll Band. Ted and I were in a period where we'd latch onto some little snatch of lyrics or a passage from a book and we'd utter it over and over like some sort of mantra. Spending countless hours in a windowless studio will provoke such behavior. One of Ted's favorites at that time was "What am I, an octopus?", which I think is from "Naked Lunch", but you get the picture.

When Mr. Happy dissolved Bash and I stayed together and started 500 TV with Clark Dark. Jerry went on to Morphine and the Joe Morris Trio. Ted and I drifted apart after he moved to Vermont to work for New England Digital- the manufacturers of the Synclavier. Dave Bone focused more and more on country, started the Jolly Ranchers and then went on to play in one of John Felice's later versions of the Real Kids. Dave moved to Texas in 1990 or so but we stay in touch. He plays down there with a band of his own. Oh yeah, Mr. Happy WAS NOT named after Robyn Williams private parts. I'd never heard that term used that way. I used the name Mr. Happy for Ted during a period when he was anything but happy, so there was a sardonic humor in the nickname. We both got a kick out of this and when we started playing together I said "why don't we name the band after you?" and we did. Ted was a fucking genius at songwriting, a beautiful cat wound real, real tight in those days. I miss hanging out with him

Lineup, Mr. Happy