Now The Truth Can Be Told...
We didn't even have a band name when we first went into a 24-track recording studio in Central Florida to record Gout. It's the result of a live, six-hour, totally improvised session that, when it was all said and done, sounded something like a directionless gang of misfits on a jazz/rock bender, circa 1974. So, with that thought in mind, we created a band name and a story line that reflected the music, and Art Jackson's Atrocity was born. It wasn't meant to be some grand hoax, and the back story myth - about a bunch of junkie ex-Black Panthers bankrolled by Miles Davis and signed to Columbia Records - seemed jokingly transparent enough on the surface. At least to us. But, none of it mattered much, since our MySpace page, where this music was first posted in 2006, was roundly ignored. Our only "friend" was that corporate tool, Tom, who befriended all the lonely newbies on MySpace. Just prior to shutting the site down (for lack of interest) we were contacted by Willard at Never Get Out Of The Boat (now known as Willard's Wormholes), who said he liked what he heard and wanted to re-post the material on his music sharing blog. Without telling him any additional info about us, he paraphrased our MySpace profile, which we thought would be seen as an obvious ruse...
"This is the tale of one of the great lost experimental jazz/rock albums. According to legend, Gout was bankrolled by Miles Davis in 1974, delivered to Columbia Records and pressed for promotion… then summarily abandoned by the label. Reasons, besides its lack of commercial potential, are unclear. Though theories range from guitarist Art Jackson’s already developed heroin addiction to Columbia’s desire to distance themselves from a band that may have included a few radical Black Panthers. Reportedly, when Miles (with his own drug problems) began withdrawing into seclusion, so did the desire to release Gout. Specializing in free form, live-in-the-studio, jazz/rock experimentation, The Atrocity was a chaotic, 8 to 11 piece collective fronted by the 20 year old Jackson – whose guitar explorations were prone to both violent outbursts and spacey sonic excursions. No charts, no songs, no rhyme or reason. Driven by extra heavy propulsion drumming, the musical interplay between the players suggests a drug fueled free for all."
- Willard @ NEVER GET OUT OF THE BOAT / WILLARD'S WORMHOLES
Then something funny happened... Reviewer Joe Kenney picked up the story and wrote a review at Julian Cope's Head Heritage, focusing in on the "fucked-up, psychedelic distortion which goes raging and chaotic one moment to spaced-out drones the next." Others began debating its origins, including a thread called "Art Jackson's Atrocity A Hoax?" also at Head Heritage. An Italian jazz band, Catasto Elettrico, were, at one point, named as Gout's perpetrators, but they had a reputation of their own to protect and quickly denied any involvement. Commenters on WFMU's Beware Of The Blog began suggesting that an artist named The Exotic Prince was actually Art Jackson, a suggestion that has also appeared at Discogs, where a bootleg LP was posted. Many pointed to the obvious reasons this music couldn't have been recorded in 1974, from modern studio characteristics to a dialog sample from the 1987 movie, Full Metal Jacket. When physical LP & CD bootlegs of our online MP3s began to appear on foreign websites, featuring what our MySpace page called "the only known photo of Art Jackson" (in reality, a pic of a cool looking dude we cut out of a magazine), it became apparent that our joke was starting to get out of hand. So... for the 10th Anniversary of our original posting of Gout - first heard with fake vinyl scratches and a Photoshopped "promo" cover created from an old Miles Davis album - it's time we fessed up.
Yes, Art Jackson's Atrocity is actually We're Late For Class.
#71 ART JACKSON'S ATROCITY Gout (Remastered & Expanded) by Art Jackson's Atrocity
: We've revisited our original tapes to create a long overdue "Remastered & Expanded" version of Gout, which now includes a previously unreleased bonus track from the original studio sessions, "Chimps Do Five." We've removed the fake vinyl "scratches" and took out the movie dialog, and are now making it officially available to the public for the first time.
Because we've always given our music away for free, you can still download the original MySpace MP3s of Gout, the 5-track version that has been floating around the web for 10 years (at the bottom of this post). For our "special" fans who want to catch up with all 75 of our We're Late For Class releases, our USB Flash Drive release, 4 Gigs In Kingston - The Complete We're Late For Class, has been updated to include both old and new versions of Gout (for the same low price). And, to maximize all of our marketing potential, we've pressed up our first official CD release, a professionally reproduced, Limited Edition "Promo" CD of Gout (Remastered & Expanded) - complete with a retro cut-out hole on the sleeve - and now available direct from us for $10.99 (+ postage) How's that for cross-platform marketing? Don't forget to download Gout's free .pdf Press Pack below, featuring reproductions of the original 2006 MySpace pages, real and fake reviews, and newspaper articles with myth-making interviews with non-existent members Art Jackson's Atrocity.
So... now the truth is out, and we've been exposed for the liars and charlatans that any of our regular visitors here have known us to be all along. We hope you enjoy Gout (Remastered & Expanded), and we hope you are curious enough to check out our other 75 posts. They're all downloadable for free (320 MP3s), but those who require higher quality files can pay a buck for full album FLACS, AIFFS, WAVS and more from Bandcamp. We appreciate the beer money. As Paul Harvey used to say... "Now you know the rest of the story."
Telling The Entire Story, From The First Pages On MySpace To Now
Click each page to read or DOWNLOAD THE ENTIRE PREE KIT
