What is a Vaganza and Should You Care?
The Vaganza logo. We adored this font and 20-odd years later have yet to see it used anywhere else. I'd guess that its utter illegibility is a factor.
A long-ass time ago I spent the better part of a decade doing this.
First, some links for the especially curious…
A periodically vandalized, but also intermittently, more-or-less, accurate Wikipedia entry can be found here:
I can be seen here, on the left, and on the right is David Longworth Wallingford. These photos were snapped in front of CBGB, during the summer of 1993 (photo credit: Andrew Miksys).
Vaganza's 1998, self-titled debut album can be heard at links provided below (and on most other major streaming platforms).
As I type this bit here (September of 2023), I have just heard the album for the first time in years and was not taken with the sound of it. My inclination would be to first direct the uninitiated to what I’ve facetiously dubbed the “bonus disc.” It’s a SoundCloud playlist containing our 1993 first official demo/E.P., ‘Are You Willing to Die for Rock n’ Roll?,’ some unreleased mixes of our album tracks, done in 1996 by the album’s co-producer, Greg Frey, and various outtakes, basement demos, and tunes from a crucial adjacent project (elaborated on below).
Click Here (Warning: The music will start playing immediately)
But the album also does exist and some of the tracks do sound pretty a-okay to my ears, and it can be heard at these links:
When considering that we worked on this project for years, hundreds of thousands of dollars were sunk into it, and that it involved a considerable aesthetic element, there is a worryingly limited amount of visual media available documenting that the thing happened at all. There is more, in our possessions, than is included here, but not much.
Scattered throughout the big bad world, I am certain, a vast many more, and far better, photos sit on undeveloped rolls of film, in file cabinets, shoe boxes, and on decades out-of-date hard drives. David and I abruptly sprinted away from the project, in the wake of its unceremonious decline, as though we were fleeing the scene of a crime. For differing reasons, neither of us regarded posterity as any kind of priority in that moment.
By the time we cared to gather and preserve it, the evidence was scant.
David Longworth Wallingford in the wild - 1993
A strange and spectral, black and white photo of me, drunk (as I am in all of these pictures) at a friend's wedding during spring of 1993.
Improbably grainy Polaroid, 1993 (this image has been digitally manipulated to attempt to make it comprehensible, but this is as good as it’s getting).
My passport, issued in May 1994.
Beacon Theatre, New York City, November 1994 - Quigley w/ Bryan Fucking Ferry.
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Digression
David and I can be seen above flanking Abraham Green. Not a protégé, per se, but a close collaborator, and one-time co-Vaganzan. Abe played drums, piano, and he had a far better singing voice than either David or I (I believe all these things are still true, however he's professionally a writer for, and senior editor of, a venerable political journal).
We had very high hopes of establishing a family of acts who shared our sensibilities—a "movement" of a sort, I suppose—but upon playing the demos we produced for Abe to various industry sorts the response was repeatedly the same; "We're going to have a hard enough time selling one Vaganza, the last thing we need to worry about is two."
Abe's gloriously, often deceptively minimalist compositions to our ears were quite different from what we were doing. Our ears, in hindsight, were likely insane.
The best of our collaborative efforts can be heard on the above-referenced “bonus disc” playlist that you’ll find here.
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Our black and white press photo for Geffen subsidiary, Outpost Recordings. Photo credit: Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock. Taken December 1997.
This is the photo on the back of the CD booklet, intended as pay-off gag to the front cover. Taken on its own, I find the above photo amusing, although on the whole I hate the album artwork.
At the time this photo was taken we were, as portrayed, broke as shit. All of our advances were spent, and a publishing deal that was forthcoming had yet to be finalized. Owning the artifice was always part of the gag. It was always meant to be taken for granted that we in no way believed ourselves fabulous.
Album notes (I’m noticing now that we thanked David’s sisters, but neglected to thank my brothers, which is pretty shitty; especially as my brothers were definitely owed a thanks).
Also, this image is altered. In the actual CD booklet, my late mother’s middle-name, Dolores, was misspelled as Delores. I grabbed this image off of Discogs and should probably upload a more clear one, but on the other hand, who cares?
Pics from the insert of our CD cover, I need to get a better scan at some point, but these convey the gist. I adore the picture of David and I dancing together. That should have been used not quite as is, but as the centerpiece for the album cover incorporated into a greater design. I suggested as much to our art director, but we'd already spent thousands on photoshoots and pro makeup and stylists, and renting a mansion in the Hamptons, and hiring professional models and all this very fancy business we didn't need.
Color ad for the album. The shoot's photographer, Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock, instructed the models to shoot a selfie in 1997. This, many years before the sight of such behavior was commonplace. The ad's "Larger Than Life Itself" tagline was most certainly the work of the label, and is not the sort of thing we'd have signed off on. It was very much off the mark.
This image is of such poor resolution, as I grabbed it years ago from someone selling it on eBay, as a poster or some other nonsense. It’s a full-page ad from a trade mag (probably not Billboard). I do not have the ad in my possession.
This is the back of the pre-release promo CD serviced to press and radio. The blurb seen here was authored by the label and was part of a greater, longer, needlessly confusing, poorly written, and immensely frustrating press release. Over the course of a month the label continually sent this document to us for revisions (this being the 90s, it was all done via fax or Fed Ex). We made a huge number of changes, repeatedly, and nearly all were ignored. The small assortment of our revisions that they did incorporate were used in a way that entirely missed our intended facetiousness (such as “creative dark crucible”).
As of this typing, nearly a quarter-century has passed, and I still wince at phrases like “This wickedly potent potion is the alchemy of…” That’s just plain bad and although I don’t recall, I’m certain we felt this way at the time.
This album took nowhere near two years to record. It took six months, plus two passes at mixing the album, each of which lasted about a month. So eight months, if you insist.
It was released a little over two years after we first started recording it, but most of that time was not spent in the studio. In fall of 1996, not long after the album was completed, the late and legendary Terry Tolkin, our A&R guy at Elektra, was shitcanned. That same week, upon learning we were available, our pal Andy Gershon—president of a brand-new Geffen imprint called Outpost Recordings—offered us a deal immediately. Even at the time we recognized the ridiculous degree to which we were blessed, being dropped by one major label immediately into the hands of another. That said, it still took a full year for Geffen and Elektra to come to an agreement (we used that time to focus on Abe, and get up to whatever we each did in our respective lives).
We felt strongly that if we had spent two years in the studio—as Outpost insisted on saying, thinking it was somehow an impressive claim—the album would have been far better. We also suspected that anyone reading that—whether they liked the album or hated it—would only be underwhelmed if they believed the album was the fruit of two full years of labor.
Another thing of which I’m reminded while reading this—We begged them to remove the phrase “New Jersey-bred multi-instrumentalists,” and thought that they had. It remained intact, obviously, and subsequently (and as we predicted) nearly every review or piece of press we received included that descriptor somewhere in the first paragraph.
A pair of additional photos from Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock's December 1997 photoshoot that were used on our CD single for the song 'Everyday' (my least favorite song on the album, by far, but essential to getting us signed).
David and I onstage, not sure of the venue but somewhere in NYC, during the summer of 1998
John Kimbrough (formerly of the almighty Walt Mink), Scuba McCampbell, and me; somewhere in NYC, summer ‘98.
L-R: Wallingford, Quigley. Summer 1998.
L-R: Me and David, without our faces on and in casual dress. Summer 1998.
On one unlikely occasion, Wallingford and I found ourselves being introduced to David Lee Roth. While neither of us were decked out in our fullest regalia, we were still dressed in sufficiently striking variations on our basic individual vibes.
On this March 1994 evening, immediately upon entering a venue where friends of ours were throwing a party, we were quickly and enthusiastically waved over by our friend Clay. As we approached, we realized that he and a couple of others from our circle were in the midst of a conversation with Mr. Lee Roth. Upon being introduced to us, DLR sized us up and, without skipping a beat, quipped, “Oh I get it, you guys are doing a whole ‘good and evil’ thing.”
Amazed by how many didn’t get that (with me favoring the reds and blacks and Wallingford the whites and blues), it was something of a triumph to have our rather simplistic collective personae acknowledged by the man who was very possibly the last proper rock star.
Anyway, I’m struck by how well Wallingford and I inadvertently maintained our theming even when just hanging out in “street clothes.”
Our excesses, both in sound and presentation, would seem fairly tame by contemporary standards. In the incredibly boring and wildly narrow-minded world of 1990s rock, fixated as it was on fictitious notions of authenticity, and ill-defined standards of integrity, some of our detractors found us far more irritating than was actually reasonable. This here — from what Google tells me was a free music weekly in Philadelphia during the era — isn’t really all that bad, in the grand scheme. I’m sticking it here, though, because a) I have a scan of it in my possession, so might as well, and b) the casual homophobia (pretty mild for the era, all in all) is slightly jarring when viewed through 2023 eyes.
On the left are Skunk (L-R: Matt Sweeney, me, Claude “Matt” Coleman) and on the right are Astronaut (L-R: Kyle Bennett, David Longworth Wallingford, Tim Smith), the bands each of us were in before embarking upon the whole Vaganza thing.
Astronaut never released anything, but there was a fair amount of buzz surrounding them before David and I broke up our respective bands and combined forces to snatch failure from the jaws of victory,
While we’re all more or less the same age in these pics (I’d guess that Kyle, from Astronaut, is 17 or 18, and the other two are 19, and I know that I’m 19, Claude is 21, and Matt Sweeney is 20 in our picture), we had been a band for a few years already when Astronaut emerged in, I think, late-’89. This seniority likely accounts for our haggard, weary, weathered appearance in contrast to their fresh-faced youthfulness.