Transcript
Speaker: All right, here we go.
Speaker: Greetings, audio friends.
Speaker: Audio friends.
Speaker: That's stupid.
Speaker: Greetings, audio fans.
Speaker: Audio fans, audio files, audio files and audio fans.
Speaker: All right, okay, ignore that first part.
Speaker: I'll just edit that out.
Speaker: Fix it in post.
Speaker: Greetings, audio files and audio fans.
Speaker: That's right, I'm back.
Speaker: Better than ever.
Speaker: And I'm here to bestow upon you the greatest story ever told about the greatest band that ever rocked.
Speaker: The automatics.
Speaker: You're about to hear archival audio that will blow your mind.
Speaker: So I suggest, no, no, I demand that you listen with the best possible headphones you can find.
Speaker: I'm talking closed-backed, noise-canceling behemoths that allow you to hear the lo-fi tape in all its glory.
Speaker: Like nothing that costs less than $150.
Speaker: And I sure as shit don't mean to listen with that one crappy earbud while you're riding the subway to work.
Speaker: But how?
Speaker: Why do I need expensive headphones to listen to a recording of a jacked up recording?
Speaker: Well, I'll tell you why.
Speaker: Because you want to place yourself into the 1970s.
Speaker: And that means absorbing all the analog goodness and deliciousness directly into your brain through decent goddamn headphones.
Speaker: Is that too much to ask?
Speaker: By the way, if you're an executive at a high-end audio accessory company and you need a live read, I will narrate the shit out of a commercial voiceover for you right about now.
Speaker: But I digress.
Speaker: Listen, I've led you to the curtain and now you can peek behind it for yourself.
Speaker: You wanted to know about a band that changed lives?
Speaker: Well, this band is the greatest of all time.
Speaker: Colloquially known, colloquially, colloquially known.
Speaker: I'll fix this too.
Speaker: All right, fix it.
Speaker: Try again.
Speaker: Colloquially known as the goat.
Speaker: You like what I did there?
Speaker: Ladies and gentlemen, the automatics.
Speaker: They were the band who pioneered goth art dance rock.
Speaker: Until they got lost in their own medium.
Speaker: But behind their tireless work ethic, there was a dark secret.
Speaker: You want to go to the beach?
Speaker: It's 10 o'clock at night.
Speaker: I got to get something from my grandparents' house.
Speaker: I thought your grandparents' house burned down.
Speaker: I'm Max Ingalls, and this is Legends of New Wave.
Speaker: Phoebe Jeebies in the early 1970s was a cradle of opportunity for bands like Blondie, Television, and The Ramones.
Speaker: and Private Stock Records produced some of the biggest selling hits of the 1970s.
Speaker: For bands like Blondie, the leap from CBGB's to Private Stock Records was the first step in a glorious career.
Speaker: But not every band made it out of the Bowery alive.
Speaker: Thanks to some newly discovered audio, we can now reveal how one band in particular nearly ended up at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.
Speaker: For this special edition of Legends of New Wave, we'll show you the rise and fall of a mysterious one-hit wonder.
Speaker: Ladies and gentlemen, the automatics.
Speaker: The automatics' mysterious front man, Mr. Noyes, wasn't always as mysterious as he claimed.
Speaker: Born to investment banker Edwin Farnham Noyes III and nightclub singer Margarita Alfaro, Oliver lived the American dream of the 1950s.
Speaker: My parents were head over heels in love, and they loved me.
Speaker: Tragedy struck today when a Lockheed Jetstar crashed off the coast of Newport, Rhode Island.
Speaker: Coast Guard sources say that the search for survivors continues, yet has little hope due to the nor'easter barreling up the coast.
Speaker: My grandfather always said that when he wrote his memoirs, he wishes he had a dictaphone when he was younger because then he wouldn't have to try to remember all the things that happened.
Speaker: I have a really hard time remembering my parents, so, you know, I gotta record everything.
Speaker: Providence, Rhode Island, September 1971.
Speaker: The Rhode Island School of Design produces masters of their craft who reinvent their medium by breaking the rules.
Speaker: When Jared Crespi and Callan McLean showed up at their dorm room on move-in day.
Speaker: My dad took one look at him, and you gotta understand, my dad is a boomer from Louisiana.
Speaker: He looks at this kid who's gonna be my new roommate, who's trying to grow facial hair for the first time in his life, but the middle of his mustache hadn't filled in yet, so he sorta got these patches at the corners of his mouth.
Speaker: So my dad says, son, I'm gonna call you Catfish.
Speaker: And the name stuck.
Speaker: Jared wasn't my roommate.
Speaker: A few minutes later, they found out that Jared's dyslexia had got the better of him.
Speaker: What are you doing in my room?
Speaker: Who are you?
Speaker: I'm supposed to have a single.
Speaker: Ah, shucks.
Speaker: Nobody in a freshman dorm is a single, pal.
Speaker: Can you read this for me?
Speaker: Well, my grandfather called the school.
Speaker: Right, look, my room assignment says I'm supposed to be in 423.
Speaker: What does yours say?
Speaker: Is that a tape recorder?
Speaker: Oh, bloody hell.
Speaker: Your room's done the whole, pal.
Speaker: Excuse me, this is my room, and I'm supposed to have a single.
Speaker: Why are you recording this?
Speaker: This is for my memoirs.
Speaker: Oliver Noyes really did record everything.
Speaker: I mean, everything.
Speaker: If I hadn't been coming to his room every night to get catfished to go to the dining hall, I think he might have jammed that tape recorder down his throat.
Speaker: My grandfather said that your first week of college is when you make all the friends that will always help you out and be there for you the rest of your life.
Speaker: So here we are.
Speaker: Oliver Noyes would sit in the stairwell with his guitar.
Speaker: It was a brand new Martin something or other.
Speaker: The guy's family was loaded.
Speaker: And, I mean, he could kind of play.
Speaker: So he would sit in the stairwell and he said he was writing songs.
Speaker: But, I mean, obviously he was already trying to do the Lonely Genius thing.
Speaker: Maybe he was trying to meet girls.
Speaker: Hey guys.
Speaker: Hey Oliver.
Speaker: Hey, Noyes.
Speaker: Where are you headed?
Speaker: Where do you think we're headed?
Speaker: Dining hall.
Speaker: Do you want to eat with us?
Speaker: I didn't want to hurt his feelings.
Speaker: Catfish was loud, but he didn't want to hurt his feelings either.
Speaker: I'd been slaving away in my dad's Muddy Waters cover band since I was tall enough to see over the kick drum.
Speaker: I didn't come all the way here to spend every weekend hauling a drum kit around.
Speaker: What kind of idiot gets into school and the first week says, hey, want to start a band?
Speaker: And then Cindy came along.
Speaker: You're probably not going to be able to get an interview with her.
Speaker: She probably put all this in the rear view long ago.
Speaker: That dormitory was not the best experience.
Speaker: Cindy lived a few floors up in the girls dorm, and she wasn't real happy.
Speaker: I chose apparel design for my major because when you grow up an hour north of Fort Wayne, Indiana, winter clothes that look nice that are affordable are a big deal.
Speaker: And most people don't see apparel design the same way I did.
Speaker: A lot of people think it's a way to kill time getting an MRS degree until you find a sugar daddy.
Speaker: I just wanted to keep warm.
Speaker: Cindy started to go to dinner with me in catfish, which was fine until... Hey guys.
Speaker: Oh, the noise.
Speaker: What a surprise.
Speaker: Where you guys have- Dining hall as always.
Speaker: Do you want to eat with us?
Speaker: Come on.
Speaker: Girlfriend, Jared.
Speaker: Oh.
Speaker: Hi.
Speaker: Oliver, this is not my girlfriend.
Speaker: This is Cindy.
Speaker: I am my own person.
Speaker: And a very hungry person, might I add.
Speaker: So if you'll excuse me.
Speaker: Oh, yeah, I've seen you around.
Speaker: You said your name's Cindy?
Speaker: Are you coming?
Speaker: Are you going to keep flapping your jaw like a- Please pull your jets and behave like a rational human being instead of bellowing like a- I'll cool my bloody jets once I've gotten a slice of pizza down me.
Speaker: We gotta go.
Speaker: Cindy had no trouble speaking her mind.
Speaker: I mean, she's not a monster.
Speaker: She put up with him or ignored him just like everybody else.
Speaker: But then, I think it was the second half of the term?
Speaker: November 30th, 1971, 5.27pm, practice session.
Speaker: I guess people were kind of tense.
Speaker: Maybe their midterms hadn't gone so well, finals were coming up, people were really tired, and, you know, tempers flare up.
Speaker: For no reason.
Speaker: Hey guys, where are you headed?
Speaker: I will give you three guesses.
Speaker: We are on our way to the dining hall to get some nourishment so we can continue to study and complete our assignments.
Speaker: Do you want to come with us?
Speaker: Nah, I went earlier.
Speaker: Tacos are pretty good.
Speaker: What exactly is it you're doing, Oliver?
Speaker: Nothing much.
Speaker: Just a little bit of wood shedding on my axe here.
Speaker: Yeah, practice makes perfect.
Speaker: Yeah, hey, listen.
Speaker: You guys ever think about that band idea?
Speaker: That is not how you play an F7 chord!
Speaker: Ow, my hand!
Speaker: This is how you play an F7 chord.
Speaker: This finger goes here, this finger goes here, and this finger goes here.
Speaker: Now press down.
Speaker: Ow!
Speaker: Yeah, it hurts because you don't have the calluses, because you're not doing it right.
Speaker: And don't ever say you're woodshedding again, because if you were really woodshedding, A, you would have built up some actual calluses by now, and B,
Speaker: B, you wouldn't sound like garbage, and C, we wouldn't be able to hear you torturing a ridiculously expensive guitar all the way up on the eighth floor because the point of woodshedding is to go somewhere where nobody can hear you and make mistakes and learn from them.
Speaker: But instead, you're sitting here trying to get attention.
Speaker: I'm pretty sure everyone in that stairwell fell head over heels in love with Cindy Holzer at that moment.
Speaker: I didn't even know she'd played music.
Speaker: My parents started me on guitar when I was two years old.
Speaker: Oliver Noyes didn't play guitar in the stairwell after that.
Speaker: In fact, we all started seeing a lot less of him around campus.
Speaker: He and Kat were still roommates, but we just didn't see a lot of him.
Speaker: Jesus!
Speaker: Oliver, what are you doing?
Speaker: Watching you sleep.
Speaker: What the hell is going on?
Speaker: You look so comfortable, I was trying to figure out how you do it.
Speaker: Ah, it's not hard.
Speaker: Lie down, close your eyes, take deep breaths.
Speaker: You should try it.
Speaker: None of this bothers you, does it?
Speaker: You're bothering me right now.
Speaker: Go to sleep.
Speaker: Why won't you guys start a band with me?
Speaker: Why won't...
Speaker: What?
Speaker: You heard me.
Speaker: Why won't you and Jared start a band with me?
Speaker: My drum set's at home.
Speaker: Is that the real reason?
Speaker: I think that's a pretty good one since getting to be a long swim.
Speaker: Go to bed, Oliver.
Speaker: Finals are coming up.
Speaker: We've all got projects and shit.
Speaker: It's because I'm no good, isn't it?
Speaker: You're not making a very good impression right now, that's for sure.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Sleep well.
Speaker: After winter break, Oliver Noyes just didn't come back.
Speaker: None of us expected to see him ever again.
Speaker: In the spring of 1975, Oliver Noyes resurfaced.
Speaker: Cindy did the costumes for some theater thing.
Speaker: And then there was this after party.
Speaker: She said we could come.
Speaker: So Catfish and I are hanging out with Cindy.
Speaker: She's trying to introduce us to the girls in the cast.
Speaker: And then she looks over my shoulder and says, what the hell am I seeing right now?
Speaker: So I look around and there's this guy sitting on an ottoman playing a guitar.
Speaker: And he's not bad.
Speaker: He's got a whole bunch of people around him.
Speaker: He's having a good time.
Speaker: And then I realize it's Oliver.
Speaker: It was him and it wasn't him.
Speaker: He dressed different.
Speaker: He looked different.
Speaker: He was taller almost.
Speaker: I guess it was his posture or something.
Speaker: He wasn't
Speaker: I mean, yeah, nobody's the same person when they're 22 or 23 compared to who they were when they're fresh out of high school.
Speaker: And I'm not saying he was great, but he definitely figured out that F7 chord.
Speaker: He was a very different guy.
Speaker: And I fell for it.
Speaker: We all fell for it.
Speaker: I don't remember agreeing to anything.
Speaker: After the after party, Oliver got them all to come back to his loft.
Speaker: Lofts were like a pretty new thing then.
Speaker: At least in Providence they were.
Speaker: Usually you'd have a bunch of people living there to make rent, or at least hanging out there, but he had the whole place to himself.
Speaker: This place was huge and it was plush.
Speaker: No milk crates, actual furniture.
Speaker: First time I ever saw a person our age who owned a leather sofa that didn't have like stains or a stab wound with the stuffing coming out of it.
Speaker: Great view of the river.
Speaker: I didn't even want to sit down.
Speaker: Curiosity dragged me in the door, but at the same time, I could not get comfortable.
Speaker: I remember he says he's going to make tea.
Speaker: I thought he was kidding, or like it was a euphemism or something.
Speaker: Then he says he'd been traveling around, he'd been to Egypt, met some people there, and he brought back this really amazing tea.
Speaker: I'm thinking, tea, all right.
Speaker: What's he really putting in it?
Speaker: And if he really wanted to smoke hash or something, why didn't he just say so?
Speaker: He's got this amazing stereo system, like all kinds of music equipment and stuff.
Speaker: What gets me is, there's a drum kit.
Speaker: I'd heard him kind of play guitar, but you're not telling me this guy suddenly developed the skills to justify that kind of drum kit.
Speaker: You don't just buy that kind of kit unless you're planning to do something with it.
Speaker: I could see Cindy was getting uncomfortable.
Speaker: So, um, you know, doing like I always do.
Speaker: Being, uh, making small talk, being the nice one, again.
Speaker: And, uh, you know.
Speaker: So I asked, what's he been up to?
Speaker: And...
Speaker: The fire insurance settlement came through okay.
Speaker: It turns out his grandparents, he'd been living with them in Newport.
Speaker: They were dead.
Speaker: Big fire just ripped right through.
Speaker: Now that the funeral's over, I'm gonna get a change of scene.
Speaker: I'm looking around to see where he's got microphones hidden.
Speaker: Guy recorded everything before.
Speaker: You can't tell me he's not recording this now.
Speaker: Finally, I just, I don't know what got a hold of me, but I blurted it out.
Speaker: I felt bad, because the last time I saw him, I treated him like, I grabbed his hand and I jammed his fingers into the strings because he didn't know how to play an F7, and then my knee hit the stupid guitar, and I could have broken it.
Speaker: Then I hollered at him, and that's not how you show somebody how to play a guitar, and maybe he needed to grow a thicker skin or something, but I didn't feel like I could sit in his big fancy apartment and drink tea with him after I'd been, you know, like that bitch who shamed that lousy guitar playing in public.
Speaker: I don't know why it all came out of me at once like that.
Speaker: Then he says, come here, I want to show you something.
Speaker: And he gets out this carved wooden box.
Speaker: Now I'm thinking, ah, okay, great.
Speaker: Now he's going to show us he's a drug dealer or he's got a gun or a human finger or something.
Speaker: We found the village.
Speaker: But the black stone in the town square was completely destroyed.
Speaker: Stalin must have run his tanks right over it.
Speaker: They said the stone never existed.
Speaker: They didn't know what we were talking about, so I asked some of the old people.
Speaker: There were shards of the stone still charged, and one of the old women had one.
Speaker: So I made her give it to me.
Speaker: He tells us this crazy story about how he's hiking in the mountains of Hungary, a stone these people worshipped, or something.
Speaker: And he opens up the box, and there's this shard of this black, not metal, it was stone.
Speaker: There had to have been a battery in the bottom or something, because it was, like, it was vibrating.
Speaker: It was black, but almost like an emerald, like it had depth.
Speaker: and he tells us to touch it.
Speaker: If he hadn't said anything, I probably would have touched it anyway.
Speaker: But because he said it, things got weird.
Speaker: All of a sudden, I knew don't touch that stone.
Speaker: Bad idea.
Speaker: You know what?
Speaker: I'm not afraid of this clown.
Speaker: So I touched it.
Speaker: And it was, um... I can't tell you.
Speaker: I'm not going to talk about it.
Speaker: Yeah, of course I touched it.
Speaker: Cindy did it.
Speaker: It felt... Um... Like a magnet.
Speaker: But for my blood.
Speaker: Like it was pulling something inside my veins.
Speaker: And I thought, this is bullshit, some kind of prank.
Speaker: So I fucking grabbed it.
Speaker: Cat did not have a good experience.
Speaker: You ever touch an electric fence and get that shock all the way up your arm?
Speaker: Then the tea kettle.
Speaker: The only thing I remember about it was he said, careful catfish, you're going to need that hand.
Speaker: Another thing that really stuck out.
Speaker: I remember he said we can't call him Oliver anymore.
Speaker: He said we had to call him Mr. Noise.
Speaker: That's Mr. Noise.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Within days, the band was practicing every night at the loft of Mr. Noise.
Speaker: I hadn't played guitar in years, but for some reason, things come back to you.
Speaker: When we weren't there, I couldn't stop thinking about it.
Speaker: And this was not the time.
Speaker: We were in our last semester of school.
Speaker: We had to graduate.
Speaker: But somehow things fell out of the way.
Speaker: I had a professor who absolutely hated me and I needed the class to graduate and I had to fabricate seven packable winter coats for my final project.
Speaker: I was a dishwasher at a restaurant in Provincetown.
Speaker: And I couldn't exactly quit, but one day I came to work and they were closed.
Speaker: Health code violation.
Speaker: Suddenly my schedule opened up.
Speaker: And one day I come to class and there's a note on the door.
Speaker: The professor had a heart attack.
Speaker: Go figure.
Speaker: He had gear, the most expensive stuff.
Speaker: I mean, nobody buys this shit when they're just starting out.
Speaker: Some of it I didn't even recognize.
Speaker: He said he was working for a company that designed amplifiers and microphones and stuff, all of it brand new.
Speaker: I find it very hard to believe that we're letting him have free samples.
Speaker: We all had plans after graduation, but somehow none of that seemed very important anymore.
Speaker: I do know I overstayed my visa.
Speaker: That was bad.
Speaker: I mean, I didn't know how much trouble I'd be in.
Speaker: Within a matter of weeks, the band had a set of 17 songs, performance dates set up at local venues, and a name.
Speaker: It was just like we were fueled.
Speaker: He had these lyrics.
Speaker: He said he'd gotten them through automatic writing.
Speaker: Like, he'd meditate and the songs would just come to him, fully formed.
Speaker: When we were practicing, I was only thinking about playing.
Speaker: I didn't think about what any of it meant or what people would think.
Speaker: But looking back, the whole thing was, um... The whole thing was fucked up, that's for sure.
Speaker: Before this, I'd had a crush on Cindy, ever since I'd met her.
Speaker: And now, all of a sudden, I didn't care.
Speaker: Playing music was all I could think about.
Speaker: He gave us the name because, yeah, it was like we were on autopilot.
Speaker: We were the automatics.
Speaker: We graduated, all of us, except noise, obviously.
Speaker: He dropped out.
Speaker: My dad was there telling me, oh, your mom would be so proud, Catfish.
Speaker: You finally grew that mustache.
Speaker: His dad was the nicest guy, but I swear to fucking God.
Speaker: But the minute we were done taking pictures, it's like, okay, love you, dad, gotta go.
Speaker: I told my parents I had a job and it was serious.
Speaker: Kissed my mom, kissed my dad, ran straight to band practice.
Speaker: We all ran straight to noise like good little automatons.
Speaker: And then this arrogant fuck wants to go on tour.
Speaker: Despite Mr. Noyes' panache and the band's unstoppable work ethic, the tour didn't go as well as they hoped.
Speaker: Suddenly he's got a van for all the performing gear we had to drag around.
Speaker: Every night we're playing another town, up and down the coast of New England.
Speaker: We're thinking, okay...
Speaker: It's gonna be summer crowds, tourists, right?
Speaker: This guy's loaded.
Speaker: Maybe he's got an inn with some of these blue-blooded yacht clubs or something.
Speaker: He got us booked in at the shittiest dive bars, places that reeked of fish and piss and cheap beer.
Speaker: And these people did not like us.
Speaker: At least the few people that were there were like so drunk and exhausted they just hunched over their beer.
Speaker: They didn't even throw things at us.
Speaker: These people had to be like, they had nowhere else to go.
Speaker: Maybe they were working on fishing boats, I don't even know.
Speaker: The whole time, all I could think about was playing the music, and he had me playing bass.
Speaker: Bass is now my strong suit.
Speaker: I think when you're in a cult, you don't know you're in a cult.
Speaker: One time I said, come on guys, let's play Mustang Sally.
Speaker: Just to liven things up, the noise turned around and shot me this loop like fireballs.
Speaker: Maybe that was how he burned his grandparents' house down.
Speaker: I'm kidding, I'm kidding, he didn't burn his grandparents' house down.
Speaker: It was an accident, right?
Speaker: Another thing which really used to bug me, we'd drive all day, get there, and the three of us would load in while he'd go talk to the bar owner.
Speaker: Or he had to make some phone calls or something.
Speaker: He'd just disappear, he'd come back in time for soundcheck, play the set, then afterwards we'd start getting ready to load out and he'd say, I gotta go get us paid.
Speaker: Don't get me wrong, getting paid's important, but you could, like, at least roll a cable or pick up a freaking cymbal or something.
Speaker: He'd go off and talk with the bartender or whoever was in charge for a while, and once we'd load it out, he'd come back to the van, and each of us got a hundred bucks.
Speaker: And the bills are like clean, crisp twenties.
Speaker: You can't tell me any of those winos were paying for their beer with anything other than sweaty, wrinkled ones and fives.
Speaker: He always drove.
Speaker: We'd be exhausted and hungry, and he always controlled the route.
Speaker: We always had to stop by the beach or walk out by the sand and look at the moon.
Speaker: I'd never been within 500 miles of an ocean until I went to college, so that was nice.
Speaker: I loved playing music, and the beach at night was amazing.
Speaker: When you're young, you're supposed to take chances, make mistakes, end up on a beach at night watching the stars and the waves.
Speaker: I mean, we weren't screw-ups, right?
Speaker: Recently recovered audio of one of the automatic's practice sessions shows that it was starting to look like the end of the road for the band.
Speaker: Guys, what did I tell you?
Speaker: You can't do that.
Speaker: If one of you screws up, you have to keep going.
Speaker: You'll recover.
Speaker: Don't stop.
Speaker: Whatever, we'll start over.
Speaker: You can't just start over when you're on stage.
Speaker: It's unprofessional.
Speaker: Unprofessional?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: You're getting paid, but nobody's listening, guys.
Speaker: Come on.
Speaker: What are you talking about nobody's listening?
Speaker: They've all got their heads in their beer.
Speaker: They're practically nodding off their corpses.
Speaker: Come on, don't fight.
Speaker: I want to play.
Speaker: I want to play, too, but I want to play proper music that makes people feel good.
Speaker: Why can't we write a song like a proper band?
Speaker: Knock it off, Cindy.
Speaker: You really want to play some boring run-of-the-mill American bandstand music?
Speaker: No record company is going to take us seriously unless we play originals.
Speaker: And when I say that, I mean stuff that's going to blow their minds!
Speaker: Don't.
Speaker: Don't dangle that record contract thing in front of us.
Speaker: It's not even true.
Speaker: Oh, it isn't.
Speaker: I've been trying.
Speaker: How?
Speaker: How could you get anyone from a record company to come see us play?
Speaker: They've got a point noise.
Speaker: What'd you call me?
Speaker: Sorry, Mr. Noise.
Speaker: We need to put in something familiar that wakes people up.
Speaker: Get some- You're not taking this seriously.
Speaker: You call me Mr. Noise so that everybody knows we are not human.
Speaker: We are more than human.
Speaker: We are conduits for vibrations that are greater than any puny human beings mind can understand.
Speaker: Understand?
Speaker: We're putting them to sleep.
Speaker: We've got- We've- I have to get back to the source.
Speaker: What source are you talking about?
Speaker: You want to go to the beach?
Speaker: It's 10 o'clock at night.
Speaker: I gotta get something from my grandparents house.
Speaker: I thought your grandparents house burnt down.
Speaker: Not all of it.
Speaker: Some of it is still... Can't we just play?
Speaker: Come on guys.
Speaker: From the top.
Speaker: You're not listening to me.
Speaker: You're not paying attention.
Speaker: You're unruly and you're a mess.
Speaker: I got... Look, I got a music teacher and he's got something for me.
Speaker: Cindy, you're coming with me.
Speaker: We're taking the van.
Speaker: I'm not going anywhere with him.
Speaker: Are you kidding?
Speaker: You have to.
Speaker: Guys, watch it.
Speaker: He records everything.
Speaker: You're the only one who can find out where the dealer is.
Speaker: What do you mean, I'm the only one?
Speaker: Come on.
Speaker: You know he wants a piece of you.
Speaker: Cat, knock it off.
Speaker: That's gross.
Speaker: Yeah, haha, real funny.
Speaker: How do we know he's not going to stab me with a syringe full of smack or toilet bowl cleaner or something?
Speaker: Take it.
Speaker: Cindy, are you coming or what?
Speaker: I want you to meet my music teacher.
Speaker: Jared, take my keys.
Speaker: I made those guys swear they would follow me in my car, no matter what.
Speaker: I always kept it gassed up, but the tires had seen better days.
Speaker: And of course it starts raining.
Speaker: It wasn't raining.
Speaker: And it's not a good night to be out in Newport County with strong winds coming right up the coast.
Speaker: There's an unusually low barometric pressure in this weather system and a high-pressure ridge over Greenland causing a negative North Atlantic oscillation, so this storm isn't going out to sea anytime soon.
Speaker: It wasn't raining that hard.
Speaker: I'd never been to Newport.
Speaker: Jared and Catfish said if his grandparents had a house there, then they must have been loaded.
Speaker: Mansions are all over the place, apparently.
Speaker: Noise didn't say one word to me, not a sound the whole drive from Providence.
Speaker: So we turn onto Narragansett Avenue, and I'm thinking it's going to be some nice little wooden beach house.
Speaker: But I wasn't expecting.
Speaker: Like, it had a gate.
Speaker: Like a Bruce Wayne gate.
Speaker: The driveway was long enough that getting to the house took a while.
Speaker: And then he cut the headlights before we got to the house.
Speaker: And there were statues standing on tiptoe in the bushes.
Speaker: And he turns the van around.
Speaker: And I can smell it.
Speaker: wet charcoal.
Speaker: I don't know how long it had been since the fire, but the smell of burnt timbers was still there and wet dirt, mildewed leaves, and on top of that, I can smell the ocean.
Speaker: And he shuts off the engine and he says, It's the first time I ever brought a girl from the family.
Speaker: I asked him if somebody was living there, like a caretaker or a property manager, and he said, There's someone who takes care of things, yeah.
Speaker: The front of the house is a wall of flat stone going straight up.
Speaker: and he unlocks this massive door.
Speaker: Like the whole thing is like Downton Abbey, Richie Rich comics and Edward Gorey, but it's pitch dark.
Speaker: I can't see anything.
Speaker: And he walks right in like it's broad daylight.
Speaker: After a couple seconds, I can see light.
Speaker: Straight back, there's an opening.
Speaker: Half the house was burnt to the ground.
Speaker: Through the back though, it was open.
Speaker: And the wind was coming through.
Speaker: And of all the stupid things, I asked, Is there a bathroom or something I can use?
Speaker: I don't know if the plumbing works in this part of the house.
Speaker: Stay here.
Speaker: I've got to do something.
Speaker: And he just took off, headed back towards the burnt smell and the wind.
Speaker: It's pitch black, and my bladder was screaming at me at this point.
Speaker: So I reached my hands out to the side, trying to find a wall or something.
Speaker: Hey, you dragged me out here.
Speaker: You can't just...
Speaker: I found the wall and the chest of drawers or something.
Speaker: I felt around trying to find a phone, anything.
Speaker: I opened a drawer, hoping for a flashlight and matches.
Speaker: This crazy, obsessive, compulsive nutjob doesn't have any lights or plumbing, but he's got a tape recorder.
Speaker: So I figured... Who can play this game, Captain Kirk?
Speaker: If anybody finds this...
Speaker: My name is Cindy Holzer.
Speaker: I'm from Fremont, Indiana, and I'm not supposed to be here.
Speaker: Oliver Noyes, aka Mr. Noyes, is a fringing narcissistic nut job, and he made me come here.
Speaker: And I'm gonna find out what's what.
Speaker: I can see a light.
Speaker: There's a space at the back where the walls have burnt down, like a half-burnt room with a lean tube where the roof's partially caved in.
Speaker: And there's like a candle or something.
Speaker: And it looks like there's a person sitting in a chair covered with a red blanket or something.
Speaker: I'm gonna try to get closer.
Speaker: No, Lord Nealathachep, I haven't failed you.
Speaker: I only need more time.
Speaker: And I've done your work, sir.
Speaker: I've built the amplifiers you showed me.
Speaker: I've spread your music all along the coast.
Speaker: I've done everything you asked.
Speaker: The stone's power wears thin.
Speaker: And you're probably nothing.
Speaker: Didn't the people who heard the music walk into the ocean?
Speaker: Lord Neal Arthotep, I'm begging you, give me one more time to amplify your sounds and I can bring you many young humans.
Speaker: There will be more!
Speaker: If you can wait and let us amplify your sound, Lord!
Speaker: Cindy, Cindy, there's someone I want you to meet.
Speaker: Come to find out, Narragansett, the town, and Narragansett Avenue are nowhere near each other.
Speaker: That's why when Catfish grabs the map and starts giving directions, you don't pay attention.
Speaker: You don't want to follow too closely, otherwise he's gonna know something's up.
Speaker: Cindy!
Speaker: Did I ever tell you how I finally learned how to play that F7 chord?
Speaker: Uh, no you didn't.
Speaker: But you can show me when we get back home.
Speaker: It was just like you said.
Speaker: You have to have everything in the right place at the right time and... And yeah, yeah, it hurts at first, but... If you press hard and you practice, the pain goes away.
Speaker: Let's go down to the ocean and I'll show you.
Speaker: Bindi, come on, this isn't fun anymore, noise.
Speaker: Don't ruin everything I've built for you!
Speaker: Give me the respect I deserve!
Speaker: Not a chance, pal.
Speaker: Oh, Jesus, Cindy, are you okay?
Speaker: Go, go!
Speaker: Get in the car!
Speaker: What the hell is that smell?
Speaker: Never mind now!
Speaker: Go, go, go!
Speaker: Who the hell has stopped using the vicinity?
Speaker: What happened?
Speaker: Jabbit, look out!
Speaker: When I woke up, it was pitch black.
Speaker: Every joint and muscle in my body ached, and my head was at like a weird angle, leaning on something hard and bumpy, and my knees were curled up into my chest.
Speaker: I was lying on my side, and all around me were hard, flat surfaces.
Speaker: I was in a box, so I put my hand forward and pushed, and the door opened.
Speaker: The last thing I remember was rain pouring down and those white marbled naked girls straining their arms out to claw the windshield.
Speaker: Never mind, go, go, go!
Speaker: What the hell are this?
Speaker: Stop it, you wouldn't.
Speaker: No, damn it, we go!
Speaker: I must have had that nightmare on repeat.
Speaker: And now I find myself crawling out from underneath a shelf in a closet on the floor of a white hotel room with snowy white linens all tossed and piled around and gold scrollwork everywhere.
Speaker: So I stretched myself out as quietly as I could, and I had no idea how I'd gotten there.
Speaker: And then I see in the bed, it's noise.
Speaker: And I didn't scream.
Speaker: He was sleeping, sleeping hard too.
Speaker: So I managed to lift myself up a bit and it felt like I had the flu, like I was so drained.
Speaker: And I see in the other bed, Jared and Kat were there similarly sleeping hard.
Speaker: And they must have fallen into bed and they were both fully dressed.
Speaker: If memory serves, when I woke up I still had my boots on.
Speaker: On the table, there was a big bottle of champagne in a bucket of water and a few sticky glasses around.
Speaker: And next to it, there were these pieces of pink paper.
Speaker: Do you know that cheap thing that they used to have when you had to sign a form and make carbon copies, like multiple copies, and then you keep one of the pages?
Speaker: Right, so there were copies of contracts.
Speaker: And the date showed since the car crash, it had been a month.
Speaker: Cindy woke me up, really quietly, and motioned for us to quietly go into the bathroom with her and shut the door.
Speaker: Everything hurt, worse than a hangover, like the flu.
Speaker: None of us remembered anything since trying to turn the car around in the rain.
Speaker: Except for nightmares of those freaky stone gorgon girls leaping out at me and the screaming.
Speaker: Like albino tentacles.
Speaker: A month.
Speaker: A month.
Speaker: Noise had somehow incapacitated us and puppeteered us around for a month.
Speaker: Who knows what the hell he could have done to us.
Speaker: The contract was... Apparently, much to our surprise, we had recorded an EP with private stock records.
Speaker: Which is bad because, like I said earlier, I'd overstayed my student visa if I got caught working.
Speaker: The whole time we were in the bathroom trying to piece together what happened, Cindy was hugging this cheap black nylon duffel bag to her chest.
Speaker: I asked her, what's in that?
Speaker: I said, I don't know.
Speaker: And then I unzipped it.
Speaker: And inside we found a cocktail napkin with a red lipstick kiss on it and a phone number.
Speaker: And it said, Cindy, great talking with you.
Speaker: Call me if you need help.
Speaker: Love, Debbie H. I kept that.
Speaker: Got it framed.
Speaker: $3,000 wrapped sequential serial numbers.
Speaker: All hundreds.
Speaker: So it looks as though private stock paid us in cash.
Speaker: And handfuls of cassette tapes.
Speaker: We'd signed away all the rights to any future royalties, licensing or publishing.
Speaker: So that noise had all the rights to any music we'd recorded for private stock records.
Speaker: And fortunately, somehow, I'd had the presence of mind to sign myself, Catfish McLean.
Speaker: And I had had the presence of mind to make sure I slept alone, if crawling into the bottom of a closet is a good idea.
Speaker: We did a quick sweep, made sure we hadn't left anything in the room, took our hard-earned money, and got out of there.
Speaker: The last thing I did was grab the keys to the van, because enough's enough.
Speaker: I got a last look at him before we went out to make sure Noyes was really, definitely asleep.
Speaker: He was.
Speaker: He must have been exhausted because whether this happened on purpose or by accident, Noyes was missing a hand.
Speaker: Aye, gone.
Speaker: His hand was gone.
Speaker: Big red scab over the stump.
Speaker: Like it had been severed weeks prior.
Speaker: Maybe he had to give something up to keep control over us, or maybe he got mad at it.
Speaker: When we got into the elevator, we found out we were at the Plaza Hotel.
Speaker: Oliver wanted the whole myth of being a rock star.
Speaker: The champagne, the signed contracts, the hotel room, the pressuring people into sleeping arrangements they can't consent to.
Speaker: And he wanted to skip over the hard part.
Speaker: We had to split up as fast as possible.
Speaker: Cindy and Jared put me in a cab and sent me straight to the airport.
Speaker: That frickin' idiot noise had parked the van on East 59th Street with all the gear in it.
Speaker: If we were together, he'd find us.
Speaker: I landed in Edinburgh the next morning.
Speaker: So I unlocked the doors, rolled down the windows, and threw the keys in the Central Park Reservoir.
Speaker: If he found one of us, the others could at least have a chance of getting away.
Speaker: It was a great throw, too.
Speaker: A nice, long overhead arc.
Speaker: And it landed.
Speaker: Bloop!
Speaker: Disappeared into the blue with barely a splash.
Speaker: And we couldn't know where the others were, or he'd use that to make us... Look.
Speaker: I just... When I turned around, Cindy was gone.
Speaker: It's over.
Speaker: Take the tapes.
Speaker: All of them.
Speaker: I've tried to listen to them and catalog them, but I just can't.
Speaker: Take them.
Speaker: And please, don't.
Speaker: If you talk to Jared or Kat, don't tell them where I am.
Speaker: I don't want to know where they are either.
Speaker: It's a damn shame.
Speaker: We could have been really good together.
Speaker: But we're safer apart.
Speaker: Today, Jared Crespi runs a guitar store and rehearsal studio outside of Philadelphia.
Speaker: Catfish MacLean is a sculptor who lives on a private island in the Outer Hebrides.
Speaker: Cindy Holzer agreed to this interview on the condition that we not disclose her location.
Speaker: Private Stock Records closed in 1978.
Speaker: Owner Larry Uthall died in 1993.
Speaker: His son Jay Uthall inherit the rights to the master tapes, but has said that he has no idea where they might be.
Speaker: Private stock only pressed the minimum number of copies of the Automatics EP.
Speaker: You might have a chance of finding a copy in a dollar bin.
Speaker: If you do find one, let us know.
Speaker: But I don't recommend you listen to them unsupervised.
Speaker: According to a 2019 police report, one man who played a copy of the album was motivated to self-mutilation.
Speaker: Details are available at the link in the show notes if you have a strong stomach.
Speaker: His grandparents' mansion on Narragansett Avenue in Newport was sold at auction after the property taxes went unpaid for too long.
Speaker: Rumors and speculations abound as to the whereabouts of Mr. Noise, but not among many undying fans.
Speaker: For now, here's an exclusive clip of what Noise hoped would be the band's hit single, Nylar Hotep.
Speaker: And at the last, from an eregient came A strange dark place to whom the fellows bowed Silent and lean, cryptically proud And wrapped in fabrics, where does some such plain
Speaker: All his commands The leaving could not tell what they had heard All through the nations read the awestruck word The wild beasts found him and laid his hands
Speaker: Weed as fires of gold The ground was cleft and mad at Aurora's Road Down on the quaking citadel of man Then crushing while he chastened wolden clay
Speaker: Chaos blue is just away.
Speaker: Behavior chaos blue is just away.
Speaker: Behavior chaos blue is just away.
Speaker: The comings pressed around, frantic for his commands The leaving could not tell what they had heard But through the nations spread the awe-struck word The wild beasts followed him and lit his hands
Speaker: Follow him and lick his hat.
Speaker: From the sea of the ship's birth to death.
Speaker: Ladies and gentlemen, The Automatics was performed by Vincent Friel as Max Engels.
Speaker: Jeffrey Wilkerson as Mr. Noise.
Speaker: Brian Lincoln as Jared Crespi.
Speaker: Robert Cudmore as Catfish McLean.
Speaker: Jill Knapp as Cindy Holzer.
Speaker: Ted Harris as Nelora Hotep.
Speaker: Additional voices provided by Lindsay Harris Friel and Vincent Friel.
Speaker: Music and sound design by Vincent Friel.
Speaker: Written by Lindsay Harris Friel, based on the stories and poetry of H.P.
Speaker: Lovecraft.
Speaker: For more information, visit our website at 6630productions.com.
Speaker: Copyright 2023 and 2024.
Speaker: 6630 Productions.
Speaker: 6630 Productions.
