Musical Interlude 2: A Less Than Short, Melancholic History of the Band LESSER ANGLOS & Its Many Haunted Successors

You know of Lesser Anglos II
more for their infamy than musical diatribes.
Oh sure, there was that Noise cover article circa 1989
(or was it 1990?)
telling how the 2nd bass player got "inspired"...
"A dream", he says
(or was it a fortune cookie?).
"To keep it going", he says,
"To keep T. Constantine's memory alive for the next generation
of disaffected, dissatisfied, disenchanted"
(although that might be authorial flourish).
You know how these things go...
one well-placed cassette copy of "National Anathema"
in the Harvard Square Newbury Comics
and suddenly the kids can't get enough!
Or Stonehill College plays "Mastiff..." one Saturday at 11:12PM
and everyone in the radio station's 2 mile transmission radius
takes notice.
It's usually that simple, right?
All that success after you're dead.

So there was this sequel band,
and as sequel bands go they weren't bad...
a bunch of Berklee kids this time out,
the 2nd bass player casting his net well.
And they got to play this houseparty & that gig in the BC cafeteria
& dang it all...if they didn't get better...
and garner actual returning fans.
This was all before the internet, right?
So word-of-mouth leading to butts-in-seat
was all that more powerful.
It meant something had to inspire beyond a mere E-M reminder,
or hodge-podge band website.
And they covered the basics well,
at T. Constantine's "passing" there were all of 14 songs in the Lesser Anglos canon
some little more than sketches
or extended drum rolls
("Bun in the Oven" was merely 3 mins of cymbals ticking off an impending
afterbirth of feedback squeals).

So they wrote new songs--
faster songs
gloomier songs
crooning songs
garbled songs
bloody songs
spectral songs
And were ready to record a proper album's worth--

Only what happened?
Well, you read the headlines...
those awful awful tragedies...

The entire band went mad apparently.

The rapes at the nursing home,
the ham-fisted lobotimies at the day care,
the racial disfigurations.
The 2nd bassist was the worse.
His name was Chad Henry Rosenberg, by the way
(although everyone called him MARQUIS, oooh).
Well Chad...I mean MARQUIS
took it upon himself to kill his baby sister
feeding her bottle after bottle of sour milk,
drowning her really.
And then after that, he went to the Goth club...
and set it on fire with all the patrons inside.
And then after that...
he scooped out his own eyes
and jumped in front of a train at South Station.
No rhyme or reason it seems,
altough he was thoughtful enough to write it all down
and explain...

Ahem. This is very confidential stuff. Not a lot of
people have seen this. So if you traipsed upon this
blog by chance, lucky you.
I give you, in MARQUIS' own writing, found stuffed
in an envelope with the band's practice space rent check...

THE RULES TO BEING IN A LESSER ANGLOS
SEQUEL BAND!

1) You cannot be in Lesser Anglos longer than a year-
and-a-half OR
2) You cannot be in Lesser Anglos in a shorter span of
time if your success increases incremently beyond
your musical predecessor
3) You can never record new material or re-record older
material
4) You can never be happy once you are in the band

Well, that seems simple enough, huh?
But what does it all mean?
What's with all these stipulations
which unfortunately
Lesser Anglos III thru IX paid no attention to...
(although their ruin was petty & perfunctory...
no grand Lesser Anglos II mayhem & murder,
just your usual arrests & home invasion misunderstandings)

Can a band really be haunted,
their members on steady rotation
like some gothic Menudo?
Hit a certain longevity or level of success
and your credibility and lifeline literally dies?
Yet your body of work goes on and on?

Planet Records, right before the fire in Fenway,
had a live bootleg of Lesser Anglos VII playing Middle East upstairs
in the mid 90's
and although the vocals are submerged in distortion as thick as seafog,
there are moments of brilliant mimicry--
one can almost envision T. Constantine himself on-stage at that moment,
hardly coddling the masses
yet desperately connecting.
A ghost hand reaching into the front row.
A boom mic in the grave.
Brrr. Gives me the willies just thinking about it,
especially as that was the show the poor girl in the wheelchair
got trampled.
But you know how it goes...
one man's tragedy is another's inspiration.

So I hope this was all informative. Maybe I'll have an update
from SXSW next year.
I hear Lesser Anglos XX may be on the bill.
That should be good timing,
they just re-formed earlier this month.
They might just make it.

If they're not that good-- yet.