R. Stevie Moore's Inside Joke


While an effortless knack for pop hooks, loopy humor and self-revelation should have made him a star, DIY pioneer R. Stevie Moore never translated his 265 homemade albums, fanatic cult following and music press raves into mainstream success. Doug O'Donnell examines the unfulfilled promise of a permanently stalled career.

"The American record industry's failure to recognize and promote the unique gifts of this giant talent is a case of criminal neglect," concludes The Trouser Press Guide to '90s Rock entry on R. Stevie Moore. As the underground's longest running inside joke, "the boy who couldn't stop taping" has spent decades recording a chaotically meticulous avalanche of music on home studio gear for a potential audience that never materialized.

Although Moore's music has yet to see mainstream commercial release (some uninspired '70s session work excluded), dozens of indie albums and self-distributed cassettes earned extravagant praise from music-press intelligentsia over the years. A young Kurt Loder wrote, "I can only urge some latently adventurous major label to bestow a few of those hot dogs in the satin baseball jackets up off their A & R asses and out to Verona, New Jersey, for a reminder of what actual talent sounds like." Underground UK suggested Moore "should be sponsored by the American people as one of the few realistic pieces of rock 'n' roll history they have left." Ira Robbins informed Trouser Press readers of "a national treasure unrecognized in his homeland," while Musician praised "tunes that many richer, more famous musicians would be proud to have written." Though he's gained minor notoriety as an elder statesman of the home recording revolution and all-around oddball, the versatile songwriting, production and performing skills that captivated those critics remain almost totally unknown.

Moore's father Bob was an in-demand Nashville session musician, and his uncle Harry a record exec, but family connections never helped to build on his modest success. "It seems like I've done everything there is for me to do, but still I'm right where I started," Moore says. "I mean, I'm not even on the level of an Alex Chilton or a Camper Van Beethoven. I don't need gobs and gobs of money, but it would be nice to get on a slightly higher plane than the one I'm at now. And I've got this huge backlog of dandy tunes, which is more than a lot of other people can say."

He had already adopted an outsider's stance by the time heady vibrations from the '60s pop renaissance and '70s art rock inspired Moore to plug in two stereo reel-to-reel decks and begin compulsively recording himself. Despite a privileged childhood in the belly of Nashville's music scene, Moore was unable to endure country music without cringing. Cultish oddities like Roy Wood, Roxy Music, the Residents and the Bonzo Dog Band became favorites, joining an embedded infatuation with the Beatles and Beach Boys. "For years I was trapped in an early-'70s Nashville scene that had nothing to do with the kind of things I was listening to and influenced by in my tapes," Moore recalls. "Dad was doing country sessions and everybody my age was caught in a southern rock, blues-riff mold that I couldn't relate to at all." Although Moore's enormous catalogue does include some country and riff-rock, they are only minor elements in a tapestry incorporating every conceivable genre. With skills honed by overdubbing all the instruments, voices and noises himself, Moore's output grew from teenage folk-pop and stoned tape collage experiments into a staggering abundance of crafty rockers, brittle new wave, aching ballads and demented audio diary entries. Taken as a whole, his 265 master reels (the earliest was recorded in 1968 at age 16) record the development of a strange but likeable personality with a gift for tunefulness, humor and candor.

Aside from the "criminal neglect" of the music industry, however, Moore's defiant refusal to censor or edit himself has been partially responsible for his ongoing obscurity. Making no effort to please critics, managers or a buying public, he filled hundreds of hours of tape with an equal measure of self-indulgent dementia and seductive, polished hooks. He dared listeners to endure his excesses and refused to leave anything unreleased -- a habit he has called both "the ultimate creative drive" and "a kind of artistic suicide." New Jersey producer and radio personality Irwin Chusid, a longtime friend and supporter, believes Moore's failure to break commercially is partially due to "stubbornness, an unwillingness to cooperate, a too-easily triggered negative attitude, and self-destructive habits." Chusid, who produced Moore's Hundreds of Hiding Places (2002) and The Future is Worse than the Past (1999), adds, "At some distant future date, I imagine [Moore] will be recognized as a landmark artist. I'm trying to hasten that before it occurs posthumously. It's still possible on some level for him to achieve enough of a worldwide following to allow him to subsist on income from his music, something he's never been able to do."

In the mid-70s, a supportive uncle of Moore's (Harry Palmer, an record industry honcho who released two seldom-heard albums of his own with a band called Ford Theater) issued a quartet of vinyl releases on his self-created "HP Music" label. Moore's debut was 1976's Phonography, culled from an already massive backlog of home tapes. Recently remastered and reissued, Moore's debut effort was primitive and lo-fi, but sophisticated in its songwriting and arranging. Radio-ready pop like "I Wish I Could Sing" and "She Don't Know What To Do With Herself" sat comfortably alongside a surreal talk show pastiche, the lunatic "Goodbye Piano" (a song strange enough to inspire one of the Residents to write a fan letter) and a recording of the artist reciting the circumstances of his own birth while splashing in the tub. His next two efforts, a 12" single called Stance and the full-length Delicate Tension (1978) were similarly diverse.

Although the label's four releases (almost entirely recorded on home studio equipment) made no commercial impact (most were given away), they brought R. Stevie's homespun vision its first raves in the rock press and planted the seeds of his continued cult following. This attention eventually resulted in a series of smartly packaged, listener-friendly albums on New Rose, a French label headed by Patrick Mathe, a fervent admirer. Mathe bankrolled professional studio time and a French tour for the previously homebound artist. Their first release was a glossy double LP set (1984's Everything You Always Wanted to Know About R. Stevie Moore But Were Afraid To Ask), anthologizing his most striking home-recorded work. New Rose then released three albums of mostly new material recorded in professional studios (Glad Music, Teenage Spectacular and Warning: R. Stevie Moore), each brimming with ambitious songwriting and bizarre humor while ignoring Moore's more tedious excursions. Although the albums were relatively high profile for an unknown artist, his idiosyncratic songcraft and anything-goes ethos were ill-equipped to join Huey Lewis on the charts.

While unsold copies of his records languished in the import bins, Moore worked a series of music store clerk jobs throughout the '80s and '90s, inhabiting a modest third-floor apartment in suburban New Jersey. In 1981, with cassettes emerging as an increasingly cheap and popular medium, he decided to assign catalog numbers to each of his reels and begin a self-contained mail order business. "I would just get a check with a little letter, dupe the tapes and send them," he remembers. "I was never really conscious of copyrighting things or making a big impression with 'the latest release.' None of it had to make sense or be accessible on any level, but at the same time I was just pouring myself into these tapes."

Although no royalty checks were forthcoming from his vinyl releases, eager customers of his "unreleased" catalog boosted Moore's income and ego. While the majority ordered one or two tapes, never to be heard from again, a few developed a taste for his total disclosure and began collecting every release. During peak periods, he would sometimes issue the equivalent of two double LPs each month. Those who sent for his brightly-colored catalog encountered dozens of oddly-named cassettes peppered with song titles like "Man Without A Gland," "Funeral (Rap)," and "Pardon My Lifestyle." Tongue-in-cheek reviews accompanied each selection ("for completists only," "another very entertaining hour," "[a] dawning of a new growth," "a further turn for the worse," "avoid"), and the tapes were numerically rated for listenablility. Relatively accessible or popular items like R. Stevie Moore is Worth It (1985) or Games and Groceries (1978) received a "10," while obscure projects like 1985‚s Theater of Skips (described by Stevie as "nonstop gathering of selected phonograph record defects defects; somehow connected repetition of torturous ear mayhem mayhem mayhem") scored somewhat lower. Customers intrepid enough to take the bait received a package with their tapes (duplicated by hand, with the titles scribbled in magic marker) and, frequently, a cryptic handwritten note urging further purchases. Though his self-released cassette output delighted a small following, it also cemented his status as an industry exile and scared off casual listeners with its size and strangeness.

Today, as copies of the new-wave music rags that hyped his "bottomless well of talent" become brittle and faded with age, Moore has yet to mold his fractured career into perspective. Too many years as a self-contained songwriter, performer, producer and record label eventually warped Moore's career to the point "where I record now and I feel like I'm in competition with my earlier self, instead of other artists," he says. Although copies of his original vinyl releases now fetch high bids on eBay auctions, not a single review of his latest CD has surfaced anywhere. Hundreds of Hiding Places, released on Germany's Pink Lemon label, showcases quintessential R. Stevie Moore obsessions without relying on much-anthologized (if unknown) cassette club classics like "Don't Let Me Go to the Dogs" and "Part of the Problem." It retains the feel of Moore's innumerable homemade reels, with the relentless creativity and unapologetic self-indulgence intact. Unlike previous career-spanning compilations, over half of the tracks were recorded after 1994, and only two represent his pre-1978 "Nashville period." Furthermore, the album largely eschews Moore's usual homemade sound in favor of crisp production and professional mastering. Despite these departures, his broad range of musical settings and wallowing in life's everyday ups and downs are characteristic. "Puttin' Up the Groceries" celebrates a return from the supermarket, "I Wish I Had a Cigarette" immortalizes an after-hours nicotine jones, "Good Job at Home" is a joyous ode to his dual career as a record-shop clerk and cult hero, while the stark acoustic lament "Steve" revels in self-mocking pathos.

After compiling and producing two discs, Chusid still sees untapped potential. "If someone would step forth and handle the finances, marketing and distribution, I'd like to put together a 10-CD [R. Stevie Moore] series," he says. "Each would be eminently listenable and demonstrate the extraordinary magnitude of the man's catalogue. There are artists off the mainstream radar who do quite well because they are intelligently and creatively packaged and marketed. He has never experienced either, in my estimation." Moore himself admits, "I'm clueless when compiling for maximum listenability effect, or more importantly, for maximum profits. Any and all sequencing of my thousands of sound pieces works. I simply can't be objective about it."

Nor is he objective about his struggles on the fringe of the pop music scene and the rotten state of a hit parade he never managed to join. The big success that was always just around the corner for a promising young renegade has become a sour joke to the graying New Jersey recluse. "I had the weirdest dream," Moore recently posted on his website. "I'd written this long essay called 'Music: What Went Wrong?' which became a runaway sensation in numerous magazines. It was an amazing diatribe about today's lack of melody or substance, how it's all but vanished, nothing created, everything recycled. No sour grapes, just perfect literary reportage -- and the overall opinion was 'Y‚know? He‚s right!' The dream was mainly the celebration that my manuscript just shot to the top, and the parties and reviews and sudden financial success . . . I really wish I could do it."

When he's not asleep, or updating [rsteviemoore.com], Moore still oversees the sprawling archive of his life's work. He still copies his 265 albums (now burned on CD-R) for a handful of dedicated customers, noting each purchase on the same index cards he's used since his cassette club first "went public" in 1981. He's still recording at home, recently participating in long-distance collaborations with XTC's Dave Gregory, Jad Fair of Half Japanese and two high school buddies from Nashville. He still plays sporadic live gigs around New Jersey and New York. And, after thirty years as an inside joke, he's still waiting for the punchline.