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“Dear John, Paul, George, and Ringo, I am a good guy and work hard, maybe one day I can be the fifth Beatle. Your friend, Bobb”.
In the twilight of the '70s, Bobb is a young man from Marlborough, Massachusetts.
He lives and goes to school in Massachusetts.
And he has a band, there in his Massachusetts school.
They're called “Bond” and they will last just a little more than a moment.
But Bobb does not give up, he wants to play, become famous, be an established musician, have a band and leave Marlborough, Massachusetts, forever.
So he locks himself in his room with his guitar, a small synth, and little else. He rearranges the songs of the “Bond” and writes something else during those days.
Songs that prophesy disasters and feed on morbid adolescent visions beyond adolescence, speaking of the “Iron Curtain Innocence” (splendid title). They float in a haunting and vaguely unhealthy atmosphere, led by a strange ambiguously androgynous voice, submerged by reverberations, feedback, and mysterious noises. Where there is everything but innocence. A Molly Bloom monologue with open eyes. But it's a Molly afflicted by pathological regression.
A cry for help: “please, let me be the fifth Beatle, take me with you….”.
Bobb manages to print just a few hundred copies (300 or 500), practically paying for them out of his own pocket, and he inserts them into an amazing cover: him, a sea of blonde curls, the face of a kid, strange staring eyes, an indecipherable and distressing expression, sitting on a stool, nothing behind, his guitar on his lap, and a machine gun (a machine gun!) in his hand.
On the back, that message to the Beatles.
Just weeks after the release of “Iron Curtain Innocence” Mark David Chapman will sound five bells of death knell on the illusions of a generation and make the dreams of all Bobb Trimbles impossible: the Beatles can never be five again.
And that dedication and that cover now take on a sinister value.
Okay, Bobb won't be a Beatle but he doesn't give up on his dream of having a band.
The new band will be called “Kidds”, and it's not a name chosen by chance.
The “Kidds” are really kids. Kids of twelve and thirteen years whom Bobb teaches to play and tries to take around to perform concerts, because “purity is in childhood” – Bobb thinks.
But he makes two mistakes.
The first is not imagining the reaction of the parents of his “Kidds” who, in fact, soon intervene to keep their children away from that strange guy who shows up in concert with rabbit ears. So Bobb tries again with “The Crippled Dog Band” whose members –this time– are fifteen years old.
Needless to say how it will end.
The second, much more serious mistake is confusing childhood with adolescence and pre-adolescence.
Childhood is the serious and demanding time of play. Adolescence is the Land of Monsters and Nameless Desires. There is no purity in adolescence.
But Bobb still manages to record the material for a second album, “Harvest of Dreams”, which will be released in '83, also in a “private press” of a few hundred copies. Again with a strange and unsettling cover where Bobb stares at a goat with a mysterious horn on its head. But again, practically no one notices him.
And Bobb gets lost
Yet “Harvest of Dreams” is even more beautiful and stranger than “Iron Curtain Innocence”.
Songs that live on an impossible normality. Bobb has them clear in his head, they are precise, defined, correct there; but when they come out of the instruments they deform, they enrich themselves with noises, effects, screams, groans, children's voices, glimpses from elsewhere. Even two minutes and thirteen seconds of silence, placed at the center of the first side under the title “The World I Left Behind”.
The same impossibility of being normal and the same desperate need to be normal that I feel in Syd or Sly, in Skip or Julian.
It's like, you know, have you ever woken up in a hotel room, in an unknown city. Alone, in that moment when you don't remember why you're there. That subtle anguish, the deformity of normal and habitual but unknown contours, that moment when you wonder where you are and what you're doing there?
Then you wake up.
That's how Bobb Trimble's albums sound.
But only a few knew, and very few will know for almost twenty years. Then his records start circulating among the right people, ending up in the hands of – among others – Ariel Pink and Thurston Moore, word of mouth begins, the copies of “Iron Curtain Innocence” reach evaluations of over 1500 dollars.
Meanwhile, in 1995, Parallel World publishes “Jupiter Transmission”, a compilation with tracks from the two albums. In 2002, “Life Beyond The Doghouse” appears via Orpheus Rec., a collection of various unreleased materials: demos, discards, and more, dating back to the period after “Harvest Of Dreams”.
The time now seems ripe for the world to notice Bobb. Secretly Canadian, in 2007, reissues the two LPs with added extra material (three demo versions – quite useless - of songs present in the album for “Iron Curtain Innocence” and a demo and some unreleased tracks of the Crippled Dog Band – these indeed interesting – for “Harvest Of Dreams”), polishes the recordings, takes care of the packaging, and distributes worldwide.
But, again, only a few take notice. A few lucky ones.
In 2009, a 45 rpm appears with two tracks from Bobb's two albums. In 2011, Yoga Rec. finds and prints more material of Bobb with the Crippled Dog Band and titles it “Crippled Dog Band”, indeed.
And, in the meantime, what happened to Mr. Trimble?
Until a couple of years ago he was playing around with a group, the “Flying Spiders”. Not anymore, it seems, but I am not sure.
In fact, I have no idea where he is and what he does, today, Mr. Trimble.
But I know where Bobb is.
Bobb is lost, he's in Wonderland. Trying to find the exit of a labyrinth. But he's not alone, there are Syd, Skip, Sly, Julian, and other ghosts.
Because not everyone was as lucky as Alice.
Not everyone found the way home.
-Hello Caterpillar, if you pass by here, know that I still have with me the four thalers I owe you.-
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