New Times Los Angeles May 6-12, 1999

DOOM'S DAY

After disolving the Obsessed and nearly losing himself, guitarist Wino returns with a new band to a burgeoning scene he helped inspire

BY JON FINE

It has been three years since R. Scott Weinrich left Southern California, but from the sound of it, you'd never know. For the first time in the twenty-plus years he has been in bands, there's a hard-rock scene he'd fit right into. Weinrich, known to one and all as Wino, has spent the past two decades grinding out a very specific form of heavy rock, first in the Obsessed, then in St. Vitus, then the Obsessed again, and now Spirit Caravan. Shorthand descriptions generally tag the guitarist/singer as a fearsome musical savage, half-Ozzy and half-Lemmy, which is mostly inaccurate. Wino's work and story are as American as they come, and he has staunchly resisted adopting a clowning persona. (It's also a safe bet that his bank account doesn't much resemble theirs either.) The bands he has led - all of the above except Vitus, though most of the following descriptions apply to that group as well - have been trios plying a unique, psychedelically tinged hard rock. Though it's clear that Wino's heard the progenitors of the form, he has shaped something rather different - stripped-down, direct, sonically thick, melodically oblique. If Sabbath and Grand Funk reached out to arenas via anthemic melodic gestures and epic size, Wino's bands are rooted in the more intimate environments of smaller clubs and lone at-home listeners; they focus on interior space. Their best work sounds deceptively simple but is laden with odd voicings and rhythmic twists. Spirit Caravan and the Obsessed make superficial listeners think 70's, but try to find a 70's band as organically heavy and direct. "What I hear in Wino is a natural who's not like other musicians," says Joe Carducci, the author of ROCK AND THE POP NARCOTIC, former co-owner of SST Records, and co-producer of several Vitus records that Wino appears on. "He always has a trailing shimmer on all of his playing, and when he is just doing down strokes to mark the rhythm, he's shaping that as well - dragging the rhythm from the guitar." Onstage his sheer physical presence is such that he appears a good foot taller than his 5-foot-9 inch (or there-abouts) stature. Put it this way: Wino's one of the few rock musicians around who can deliver Eric Burden's jailbird howl of isolation, "Inside Looking Out," so convincingly that it's alternately astonishing and discomfiting to hear. His years in rock began on the fringes of the Dischord-dominated D.C. scene of the early and mid-80's. In the middle of that decade, he came to Southern California, splitting time between the radically different music camps in the South Bay (centered around SST, of course) and Hollywood. He had disbanded the Obsessed and joined Vitus; he'd eventually quit the latter soon after the former reconvened. He recorded an Obsessed album with a pre-Kyuss Scott Reeder on bass. Later came the ill-advised major-label signing, then came the inevitable major-label dropping. And then things got crazy, in no small part due to drinking and drugs. That ended in '96, with a cross-country Greyhound bound for his home state of Maryland, armed with little more than the shirt on his back, the shorts on his ass, and a small blue-and-black bag. All that was left from his decade in L.A.: "A couple of wahwah circuits, a few bandages, and some fucking trinkets," Wino says. Now, though, he's back. Spirit Caravan, formed a couple years back as Shine, just released it's first full-length, JUG FULLA SUN. The L.A. label Southern Lord released an odds-and-ends Obsessed CD, INCARNATE, this week. More importantly, Wino's sober. And the music world at large now has a few names for the style he helped pioneer - "doom" and the vastly more insulting "stoner rock" - and scenes that seem ready-made for Spirit Caravan. "I see all those other bands," says Pinhas, former Obsessed bandmate who now plays bass in Goatsnake, "and I think, 'Impress me.' I'm sorry. I played with the guy who invented it".

Wino, an airforce brat, was born in 1960 in San Bernardino. His dad went to work for IBM, and when Wino was nine, the family settled in Maryland. Guitar lessons followed; a D.C.-area free-form radio station introduced him to the likes of Zappa, the Mahivishnu Orchestra, and Roky Erikson. But the big event came on the cusp of his adolescence. "I saw Sabbath in 1972, on my 12th birthday," says Wino, who, in stark contrast to his onstage persona, is approachable and even effusive in conversation. "That was pretty much the turning point of my life." The Obsessed formed in the late '70s. Originally called the Leather Nuns, they played a mix of originals and punk covers - a strange blend, but one that quickly made a mark on a nascent D.C. scene. "They were opening for the Dead Boys in 1980," says Joe Lally, Fugazi's bassist whose label, Tolotta, released the Spirit Caravan CD. "They did all these covers, and they had long hair, and they were made up, kind of New York Dolls-ish...You know: How do these guys fit in? It didn't make any sense, except that they were just burning to play and rocking so hard, they were undeniable." (Stiv Bators' look in his post-Dead Boys band the Lords of the New Church, according to Lally, bore a strong resemblance to that of the Obsessed's singer at the time, Vance Bockis.) Wino remembers the odd mix of people who turned out for that show. "The crowd was visibly divided, man," he says. "Imagine a normal club, packed," save for a makeshift aisle seperating the crowd. "It's like the freaks [were on one side], and the fucking skinheads were on this side." Other times, he says, "I'd go to shows and watch Faith, Void and Minor Threat. I'd be standing there in the crowd in my long hair, my fucking eyeliner on, platform shoes or whatever I was wearing, and I would get a lot of shit, you know?" But since he was used to frquenting biker parties dressed that way, the threats of skinny suburban hardcore kids were child's play. And despite the look, the Obsessed won over those punks. In the mid-'80s, at a show at D.C.'s George Washington University, "all these punks were singing along to the Obsessed," says Lally, "and I was going, 'When did this exactly turn?" But even though Minor Threat singer/Fugazi guitarist Ian MacKaye adored the band, his label Dischord wasn't calling. In a promotional video released with the Obsessed's major label effort in 1994, MacKaye describes an '80s conversation with Meatmen mastermind Tesco Vee during a roadtrip to Detroit about how someone had to manage the Obsessed or help get them signed. But, MacKaye said, he knew he'd never get involved with the Obsessed on a business level because he thought they were "major fuckups." "They were just a bunch of rednecks from Maryland. What do you want me to tell you?" shrugs Pinhas. That may not be quite true, but there's no question that the Obsessed was a far cry from the cropped-hair, largely well-meaning bands (one major exception being Void) then on Dischord. "I lived with Wino in 1984 I guess," Lally says. "It was pretty insane. They would shoot guns in to telephone books in the basement." Wino confirms this, adding that if you shoot guns in a room where a drumkit is set up, soundwaves vibrate the cymbals until, eventually, they ring at full volume. As for MacKaye's comment, "I think he was just a little jaded toward the hippie," says Wino, who's now close enough to MacKaye to attend his birthday party. "He probably got wind that we lived a bit differently - drugs and drinking." But that wouldn't become a problem for some time.

A band like the Obsessed - as odd a fit among metal bands as it was among punk bands - had few options in the mid-'80s. A 1983 single (included on Southern Lord's INCARNATE) rapidly went out of print. A 1984 compilation appearence on Metal Blade's METAL MASSACRE VI held the promise of a deal, but in those days, the metal scene was geared more to speedsters like Slayer than to slower grooves, and nothing came of it. Wino dissolved the Obsessed and saw a subsequent idea (a glam band) go nowhere. And then one of the few groups with a clear aesthetic kinship to the Obsessed came calling. Saint Vitus singer Scott Reagers was planning to quit following a tour that brought them to D.C., and the band wanted Wino to try out. In fact Reagers thought he might split before the end of the tour and, counting on this contingecy, had already approached Wino about finishing out the tour - "unbeknownst to me at the time," says Vitus guitarist and leader Dave Chandler. "At the time I was ready to get out of town," Wino says. "But because I had dyed hair and a strange look going on, David wasn't just going to give me the OK. He was like, 'I don't know...Wino looks like a glam rocker.'" "Wino looked like someone out of Motley Crue," Chandler says. "I was like, 'No way.' He had dyed hair and makeup on." He didn't make the tour, but he got the gig; a less dolled-up Wino flew to L.A. and dove into rehearsals for 1986's BORN TOO LATE. The THIRSTY AND MISERABLE EP and MOURNFUL CRIES LP followed, both on SST. Vitus then split for Germany's Hellhound label and released V and 1990's SAINT VITUS LIVE. But tensions were building, especially after Hellhound put out an unreleased Obsessed album and pressed Wino to tour. "The Obsessed thing was tension from the start, because I told him not to do it," Chandler says. (Wino disputes this, saying Chandler initially consented.) "From the very start, I said, 'No way, because you're going to split on us.' 'Oh no man, that's bullshit, I won't do that, you're fucked for saying that.'" "Oh well," concludes a chuckling Chandler. 'I guess I'm fucked,huh?" Wino lasted one Vitus rehearsal after the Obsessed's first European tour. "I know he thinks I fucked him," Wino says, "but the bottom line is I just got tired of the music...I didn't feel like I was born too late, you know what I'm saying?" The result wasn't a shock to those who knew the band. Wino was "quickly bored with the South Bay and living up in Hollywood and commuting," Carducci recalls. "You could kind of read that as things aren't going to last forever."

A reformed Obsessed released Lunar Womb in '91, some time after Wino played bass for one show with Junkyard. Bassist Scott Reeder split for Kyuss and was replaced by Pinhas. The Obsessed hooked on with high-powered legal representation and management and signed on with Sony/Columbia. "It was a weird situation," Pinhas says. "We got signed at the wrong period by the wrong label. We were a rock band, and it was grunge time, when people were looking at their shoes and going, "Oh my god, I had a college education, oh, oh, life is so miserable.' People didn't know what to do with us, and we didn't know what to do with ourselves." The record, 1994's THE CHURCH WITHIN, sold poorly. Columbia paid off the band to release them from their contract. Easy street? No. "When all was said and done, we ended up getting like 17 grand," Wino says. And after band expenses, "I think I ended up getting like two or three grand." A few years later the IRS tracked Wino down in Maryland and socked him with a five-figure past-due tax bill stemming from the Obsessed's Columbia advances- a bill, Wino says, he convinced the IRS to reduce, though not eliminate. "Basically, I got from Columbia Records an album I'm pretty happy with and a major fucking bill." The band soldiered on, recording a new batch of excellent material (including "Inside Looking Out") that ended up on a Bongload single and on Southern Lord's upcoming INCARNATE. But things deteriorated, and the group broke up around the end of that year. Then things fell apart. "After the band broke up, I ran wild," says Wino. I spent several years where I didn't do anything...working, but not in the conventional sense. "I was living real hard. I became homeless," he continues. "I was doing a lot of amphetamines. I really got into crystal. And pretty soon, that was all I was into. Fucking crystal. "Finally, I lost everything. Lost it all." Pinhas says, "L.A., like it does to a lot of people, picked him up and dropped him." And so in 1996, Wino, limping from a staph infection on his foot, made his way onto a bus heading back east. Back home to Maryland. Without a guitar. Or an amplifier. Or a speaker cabinet. Just a couple of wahwah cicuits and some fresh bandages stuffed in a little blue-and-black bag.

"When I moved back here from L.A.," says Wino, on the phone at the rural Maryland home he shares with his dog, a boxer named Woody, "it took me a long time to fucking slow down, a long time before I could concentrate enough to read a book. "But then Gary and Sherman came along [Gary Isom and David Sherman, formerly of Wretched and Unorthodox and now Spirit Caravan's drummer and bassist]. They literally dragged me out of the house. They kept calling me up - 'You wanna jam? You wanna jam? You wanna jam?' Finally, I said, 'Let's jam.'" By '97, they were playing regularly in the D.C/Maryland and New York ares and released a single, under the name Shine, on Tolotta. A legal tussle over the band name prevented the album, originally slated for a '98 release, from coming out until last month. JUG FULLA SUN shows Wino can still mine new gold from the musical form he's long explored, especially when he's abetted by another powerhouse rhythm section. Though the Obsessed was, by shunning the genre's grandstanding moves, always an unusually subdued heavy band, JUG may be Wino's most subdued effort to date- and not just because there's acoustic guitar audible in the mix. The mood's more contemplative, the imagery is more overtly psychedelic, and the lyrics are noticeably lighter than the Obsessed's darker tone. "Some doomheads might say it's not heavy anymore," Wino muses. But they'd be wrong, even if Spirit Caravan hasn't yet eclipsed all of the Obsessed's best moments. As always, there's outstanding rhythm guitar work (check out the riffs on "Cosmic Artifact" and "Lost Sundance"), one of heavy rock's best lead guitar voices, and palpably solid ensemble playing; when Sherman and Wino ride riffs in unison, you really feel it. And for perhaps the first time in Wino's career, there's a critical mass of bands that sound like his musical kin, even if none of them sound like they're aping Wino or each other. Though the likes of Nebula, Goatsnake, Fu Manchu, and Queens of the Stone Age haven't gone gold yet, they also don't have to slog it out as musical anomalies such as, say Vitus or the Melvins did last decade, or wither in geographic isolation like the D.C. lineups of the Obsessed. Coming later this year from Spirit Caravan: a tour, which may bring Wino back to L.A., a five-song EP for the Meteor City label, a split single with the Baltimore band Sixty Watt Shaman, and an appearance on a compilation on Rise Above - a U.K.-based label run by Lee Dorrian, late of Cathedral and a big Wino fan. Indeed, most of the labels Spirit Caravan and Wino now work with are run by musicians who cite the singer/guitarist's past and present work as major inspirations. "I've been a fan of Wino's since I was 16," says Southern Lord's Greg Anderson, who plays in Goatsnake with Pinhas and who first saw Wino in Vitus in 1986. "You could tell he wasn't fucking around with what he was saying and what he was playing. I respect any musician or band who gives you that feeling and not many do." Lally, just before joing Fugazi, remembers thinking, "'I'm gonna keep letting my hair grow, and maybe someday, I'll be the bass player for the Obsessed. I'm just gonna be ready for when Wino reforms the Obsessed.'" When Fugazi formed, Lally says, "Ian and I really did sit down and say, 'Let's fucking try to write some Obsessed riffs.' Obviously our early songs don't sound like the Obsessed. "But we were trying."