WIDR DJ Bizarro Jerry spoke at length with musician Bobb Trimble this afternoon about his new group, the Flying Spiders, and his move from Worcester, Mass. to an area closer to his band’s location in Boston. However, due to ‘technomological differences,’ much of the recording was lost. We’ve salvaged what we can, and it’s available as a podcast at the bottom of this post. Also, Jerry wrote a brief summary of the remaining 20 minutes which weren’t recorded and a brief bio of Bobb:

Bobb self-released two LP’s in the early 80’s that combined the harmonic chops of the Beatles with the eccentricity of Syd Barrett. Thanks in part to the internet (and partially to Secretly Canadian for re-releasing these albums and promoting the hell out of them) more people were exposed to Bobb’s music than the initial pressing of his albums did (both were only made in copies of about 500). His songs range from beautiful to terrifying, and the whole scenario is made all the more strange by Bobb’s decision to perform and record with bands of young teenagers (the Kidds and the Crippled Dog Band). Now 51, Bobb’s music is decently well known to ‘college radio types’ like myself, and he’s glad to be playing again.

Surely he’s tired of answering questions about 2 albums he wrote in the 80’s, so I tried to keep the questions a mix of past and present (as well as future).

One of the most interesting anecdotes I heard from Bobb was regarding this album cover:

from Bobb’s 1982 release “Harvest of Dreams.” Apparently, the unicorn in the photo was encountered at a renaissance fair, and went on to be a big star in the Ringling Bros/Barnum and Bailey circus. He said upon returning to the renaissance fair more recently, they had tigers instead. We both agreed that tigers aren’t very renaissance-type animals.

I also asked him about the leap in production quality between his first album, “Iron Curtain Innocence,” and the aforementioned “Harvest of Dreams.” He told me about half of the first album (all played and engineered by Bobb, except the drums which he had 2 different friends play) was recorded on a 4-track, and the rest on an 8-track machine. When the 2nd album was recorded, an 8-track was used, but it had a bounce function and allowed them to do about 14 tracks per song.

Returning to the Kidds and the Crippled Dog band, I asked Bobb if he’d ever seen the movie “School of Rock,” because the story kind of paralleled his own. He said he hadn’t seen it, but that he’d heard of it and agreed with the ‘older rocker’ showing some kids how to rock notion–although the Crippled Dog Band actually asked him to join, and he was so impressed with their musicianship that he agreed.

Also, he appeared in a cartoon not too long ago, which can be found here.?He told me the cartoon wasn’t actually far from the truth, and that he did spend a while as the driver for legendary Mass. band the Prefab Messiahs (who share musicians with Bobb’s current backing band). The cartoon was created by Xerox, the vocalist for the group, and Bobb says he’s been attempting to get them to do some more live sets.

That’s about it. Click here for the recorded portion of the interview, and click here to find out more info about Bobb’s albums.

Thanks again to Bobb for taking the time to speak with us, and thanks to Kris from the Prefabs for hooking this thing up. I feel bad for missing a large portion of the interview, but technology, eh?