Talk Late in the Dark

“We can walk to my house right on the corner/ We can talk late in the dark in my front yard” - Vulgar Boatmen, “You and Your Sister”

When I was the music director at WOBC, Oberlin College and Community Radio, we received a package of cassette tapes from the Safe House label. Even though cassettes are great, they are absolutely useless for DJ’ing. They are hard to cue, you can’t really do anything cool with them without ensuring their future destruction, and with the compression on radio, it sounds like listening to music being played through a tin can. In short, radio stations never use them.

As a result of this, any tapes that came into the station were free game. Real finders keepers shit. Anyway, I looked through this package of tapes and came across a tape from a band called The Vulgar Boatmen. The album was You and Your Sister. Nothing about this tape made it really stand out from the others. The album cover isn’t particularly remarkable. It’s purple and there’s a split photo in the center. On top is a young woman looking down at a letter while leaning against a white car. On the bottom is a waist-down VHS screen grab of a band playing in what looks like a library.

Interested by the name, I put the tape on in the office and let it run. I finished the tape, and I listened to it again all the way through. I didn’t have any work to do the second time around; I just listened to it. This was in 2004. It is 2025. I still have this tape in my house. It is one of the few things that if I loaned it to someone, I ensured that I got it back. I’m aware that most of you have never heard of either the band or the album, so a little story is in order.

The Vulgar Boatmen is now one band based in Indianapolis, IN. At the time of recording You and Your Sister, the Vulgar Boatmen was two bands, one located in Gainesville, FL, and the other in Indianapolis, IN. The first form of the band started in Gainesville with Ray, Walter Salas-Humara and John Eder. They released a couple of tapes that had no impact. Eder left the band first, and Salas-Humara left later to form the Silos, an proto-alt-country band. Ray held onto the band name, and started communication with Dale Lawrence, his former student at Indiana University.

The two of them had bonded over music, and they decided to start writing music together. Ray and Lawrence would mail each other cassettes, composing songs through correspondence. They both would play the songs out live as the Vulgar Boatmen. Ray led the Florida branch, and Lawrence ran the Indianapolis branch. In 1989, Lawrence and Ray decided to commit their songs to tape, and the result was You and Your Sister.

If you have been paying attention to this newsletter and the types of things that I write about or show an interest in, this album might confuse you. There are no guitar dramatics or walls of noise. The guitars jangle, but only in the most polite of ways. The drums are punchy and not heavily manipulated. The vocals are clear, and their singer is reasonably articulate. The reason that this album has always worked for me is because it is weirder than its rather plain facade would make it seem.

The album starts with “Mary Jane,” a rollicking roots song. The song starts with strumming guitars as the drummer lays down an insistent rhythm. When the verses begin, Ray sings in this rather tense style, sounding extremely on edge. He is accompanied by staccato guitars, adding further to that tension. In the choruses, the song blows wide open. Guitars are played with energy, and the rhythm section comes crashing in. It’s an immediate, catchy open that makes you sort of sit up and pay attention. If I was in a bar for someone else and they opened, this song would grab me.

The second track, the title track, starts with the singer accompanied by only an acoustic guitar. The drums kick in at the first chorus, and there are vocal harmonies in the second verse. As the song moves along, an electric guitar comes in and fills some of the empty space. It plays this repetitive, slightly droning line, adding extra texture to the song. It’s a gently beautiful song about our protagonist and his unrequited love for a young woman. After the punchy introduction, this song brings everything back down a little, but does not slow the pace in the slightest.

In “Margaret Says,” the band plays a smooth song that is heavily indebted to 50s rock and roll. It has this naivete in the lyrics and presentation. Ray’s voice is clear and somewhat wistful. He is just telling a story and being slightly self-effacing. The instrumentation on the song is very simple with the guitars and drums until there becomes this weird droning viola in the back of the song. It adds to the very hazy nature of this song, one made up of fragments of ideas and unclear relationships.

The fourth track, “Katie,” has the sound of a 70s Neil Young song: plaintively strummed guitars with exhausted vocals from Ray about Katie, whose relationship to him is unclear. It is a slowdown from the previous track, but the rationale for it becomes clear when you hear the last track on the first side, “Drive Somewhere.”

A six-minute almost-krautrock-style roots jam, “Drive Somewhere” is a masterstroke. The drummer, with metronomic timing, holds the foundation while the guitars chime, jangle, and change rhythms over the runtime. The song’s elliptical lyrics about driving in Morristown and the protagonist’s relationship with a woman weave in and out of the instrumentation skillfully. I think that this song has always resonated with me is because it has an almost shoegaze quality to it. It is droning and hypnotic. The vibe is dreamy and transports the listener. You can just lock into it. It’s a legitimately beautiful song.

Next is “Decision By The Airport,” which is not on the original LP but the CD release. This is an acoustic-guitar-driven song that is trickier than it needs to be with its more exotic instrumental fills. It runs at a solid midtempo, and the lyrics, as always, are about girls and relationships. It’s frankly shocking at this point a car isn’t involved, but that’s OK. This is followed with “Change The World All Around,” another midtempo track that shows some light in an album that, if you aren’t paying attention, could come across as excessively gloomy or just weird lyrically. It is on this track and the previous one that you can really here the influence of artists like Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers on what they are doing. The protagonists of their songs might be in flux, but they aren’t jaded; they are just reflecting upon what is sitting in front of them. The music is very heart on the sleeve even if the words create a maze.

The tempo kicks back up for a second with “Fallen Down,” a real rocker for this album. The guitars are jangling hard, and the band is really aiming to get people out onto the dancefloor with this track. I could hear this song killing at a house party if you time it just right. Everyone is just at that level when they need to dance. If you started playing this at that time, this would go over super well, and I’m sure that the band had this same thought when they put it at this point on the album.

After any party song, you need the waltz to let everything cool off and to stare in the eyes of the one you brought to the dance. That’s the purpose of “Hold Me Tight.” The lyrics to the song are not quite as romantic as that previous sentiment might suggest, but you can always flip it and have the two of you be in the same place. The 50s rockers come back again on “Cry Real Tears.” The guitars are strummed hard, and some of the fill lines are intricate. The drums are punchy, and the vocal harmonies are great. There are also some fantastic vocal runs that play well with the guitar runs. The sentiment of this song is kind of mean, but it really rocks. An absolute blast of a track.

On “Drink More Coffee,” the band switches into a more country sound. This is probably due to the fact that this song was written by Carey Crane and Silas-Humara rather than Lawrence and Ray, like the other songs were. It fits within the milieu of the album, but its twanging guitars and shuffling drums do make it something of an outlier. While it doesn’t quite fit with the other tracks, it still is a very good song.

The album ends with the chiming “The Street Where You Live.” It goes by at a leisurely pace. In a fitting metaphor for this album, this song is like taking a long cruise in your car. The rhythm sets, and your body settles into it as one minute turns into one hour. It isn’t too high energy, but it isn’t sleepy either. It’s a perfect track to end an album on, as it provides a very soft exit from the world that they have created on this LP.

Every time I get to the end of this album, I never really understood why this album never got off of the ground. I’ve heard a bunch of other albums from this time that weren’t nearly as accomplished, yet this one got nothing. In the end, they can be considered another band lost to the grist mill that is the recording industry, and that’s unfortunate. This album is a true gem, and more importantly, they proved it wasn’t a one off with their subsequent albums, Please Panic and Opposite Sex. If anything, this band's failure is just a constant reminder of how unfair things can be in our world.

The video below is a live performance of “Drive Somewhere.” This will be give you a good idea of what this band sounds like. The album can be found on all streaming services, or if you're in Duluth, I'll loan you my tape, but I will want it back.

This ends this week's dispatch. In a couple weeks time, I'm going on an international sojourn and will not be writing anything. But, I have a plan for the time before that.

The long post next week will be on The Wake's Here Comes Everybody, an album that bridges the gap between post-punk and indie pop. The week after that will be about A.R. Kane, a duo from the late 1980s and early 1990s whose influence cannot be overstated. If you like doing homework, you can familiarize yourself with those albums ahead of time if you so desire. The Spins will occur at its normal time.

Until Wednesday, I'm out.