Doing Everything Wrong: Mission of Burma's Signals, Calls and Marches

Song-by-song with the band's guitarist Roger C. Miller

    This is a piece I did ca. 2008 for the late, great and short-lived music site Paper Thin Walls.  The editor, the brilliant Christopher Weingarten, asked me to write a piece about Mission of Burma’s classic 1981 Signals, Calls and Marches EP for a regular feature they did called "Listening Party," which interviewed musicians about every song on one of their key records.

Mission Of Burma — Signals, Calls And Marches
(original label: Ace of Hearts, latest reissue: Matador)
Release date: July 4, 1981
Recording location: Boston, Massachusetts

    "We were a pain in the ass," says Mission of Burma's singer-guitarist Roger Miller, "because everyone knew we were good, yet we were irritating as fuck."  But Burma's essential Signals, Calls and Marches EP hardly sounds irritating now — instead, it sounds like the exhilarating blueprint for over two decades of forward-looking rock music.
    By the time Signals, Calls and Marches was released on July 4th, 1981, punk's initial salvo had been spent and Mission of Burma, from Boston, Massachusetts, was one of the first American bands to define the wide-open field of something called post-punk.  But was the anthemic bombast of "That's When I Reach for My Revolver" post-punk?  Or maybe the discordant skronk-stomp of "Outlaw"?  Or the textured grandeur of "All World Cowboy Romance"?  In those heady times, it was all up for grabs.
    "Mission of Burma touches on a lot of different types of stuff, so, for us, an EP made sense," says Miller. "It was kind of a thick calling card, a real taste of the band."  To save money, producer/Ace of Hearts label chief Rick Harte recorded the band in the wee hours at a local soundtrack studio called, funnily enough, Soundtrack Studios.  After their heavily overdubbed "Academy Fight Song"/"Max Ernst" 1980 debut single, they simplified things.  "People would see the band live and think we were just this sprawling mess compared to the thick, lush orchestration of the single," says Miller. "So we wanted to strip it down, be more like we are."
    What they were was a roiling, gnarly mass with an ineffable propulsion, with Miller, singer-bassist Clint Conley, drummer Peter Prescott and tape loop manipulator Martin Swope all equally essential parts of the band's brainy yet brawny sound.  "We assimilated a certain thing in punk, which was that there were no stars — the bass player is as important as the drummer is as important as the guitarist," says Miller.  "It has to do with the kind of quasi-anarchistic democracy that makes up a really good punk rock band where, really, it's a community.  That's how we've always functioned.  There's no leader in our band."
    It's never easy being a visionary band, but that was especially so years before the term "alternative rock" was even coined.  "We were definitely one of the more problematic groups around," Miller says. "We didn't give them a chorus after the verse every single time and then repeat the chorus three times and everyone's happy.  It would take people three times seeing Mission of Burma to even understand it.  Somehow, by the third time their cells got jarred into alignment by the volume and they understood it, like riding a bicycle or something."
    "A lot of people thought we were being deliberately weird," Miller continues. "But never once, in the entire Burma history, was I being deliberately weird.  It was like, this is what I was feeling at the time, and I can't help it if it's odd.  It's just fuckin' who I am.  If you don't like it, you don't have to buy the record."
    Luckily for Burma, Boston rock radio powerhouse WBCN championed the best local bands, broadcasting them throughout New England, and Signals, Calls and Marches debuted at #6 on the station's playlist.  "Some people were walking around Cape Cod and hearing 'Revolver' that summer," Miller says, still marveling.  "It was pretty insane."  The EP sold 10,000 copies within the year, "But still, we would play and not that many people would show up," Miller says, "and the ones did show up would be completely baffled by us."
    Miller recalls an early Burma gig when his girlfriend (whom he later married) overheard two Berklee College of Music students making fun of what they felt was the band's primitivism.  Of course, 27 years later, those two losers are probably selling double-tall lattes at the Starbucks in Kenmore Square while Mission of Burma tours the world, long having passed into legend.  "Ah, that's the irony," Miller says, with a contented chuckle.
    The following are Miller's recollections about the six songs on Signals, Calls and Marches.

"THAT'S WHEN I REACH FOR MY REVOLVER"
    "I remember very distinctly the rehearsal when Clint brought that in.  He played the verse and then a chorus and then he stopped and Pete and I just looked at each other and said, 'That's a complete hit!'  It was comparatively straightforward for us, with a rousing chorus that repeats at the end, but for us to do that, it was almost radical.  The very first time we played it, at the Rat, people totally locked into it.  Right away, it was the thing.
    We do these about two-bar fills that lead from the verse to the chorus, and it was as if there were two bars of free improvisation — Pete would do a drum solo, Clint would do a couple of chords and I'd continue with a squall of feedback, and then we'd slam into the chorus.  But even with 'Revolver,' the recording was comparatively tame to what we were playing live at the time.
    Maybe the quiet verse, loud chorus thing in the song was just Rick Harte coaxing us to make everything more extreme.  It wasn't anything we thought about.  But even in the Beatles, the choruses were like that.  I don't see it as being that radical, personally, but if people say it is, fine.  People say, 'You influenced all these bands,' and we just don't hear it.  But it must be true because people keep saying it."

"OUTLAW"
    "We all loved the No New York compilation [featuring New York "no wave" bands the Contortions, DNA, Mars, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks].  That's über-stripped-down art-aggression shit. You can hear a little of that in "Outlaw."  It certainly doesn't sound like James Chance or anything, but there's a little bit of funk in there.  A lot of New York bands were doing that offbeat hi-hat.  It was a beat that was in the air.  And you can hear Gang of Four in that song all you want, but their record didn't come out for another six months.  We were influenced by Wire — if you hear Wire, there is that vibe here and there.
    The guitar solo, instead of sounding like Keith Richards, it's harmonies from Bartok, twisted through the most outside of Hendrix's stuff, and then it's just… weird. I could see how, to a normal person, that could just be completely alienating.
    My vocal is pretty bad — it's atonal, the singing's almost in a different key — but that's deliberate. The lyrics are Surrealist as hell: 'I won't be there when the monster flips/ I'll have it buried with an axe and a pick.'  I love that line but it's not something people want to go around singing, like, 'Oh baby, I love you.'  Although there are erotic overtones in that song, for the record."

"FAME AND FORTUNE"
    "I was like, wow, Clint did that catchy hook thing with 'Revolver,' so I was like, maybe I'll try to write something that's a little more straightforward too.  In some ways 'Fame and Fortune' failed, but in other ways it didn't — it was covered by the Spinanes and it's kind of a rabble-rouser.  It's almost like a sonata: the allegro and then the quiet middle section and then it ramps back up into the presto.  Clearly, my concept of making a pop tune failed miserably.
    It was just a take on the futility of trying to get famous.  We wanted to do what we wanted to do, but we'd still love to play to 500 seats and make $10,000 a night.  On the other hand, if that's your goal, it's "see-through people, see-through monuments, see-through empire."  It's all just a façade.  It's stupid, I know, but if you're going to be in a rock band, part of you has to do that.  It's a problem you can't avoid.
    It integrated thoughts about Syd Barrett, who was brilliant and just burned out — 'smash a face into the wall, grind a face into the ground.'  When Syd Barrett died a couple of years ago, we played 'Fame and Fortune' and I dedicated it to him, and that made it very emotional.
    That song also touched on my own experience: when I left Ann Arbor, my brothers were on the ascent with Destroy All Monsters, but now I was in Burma and Destroy All Monsters was kind of collapsing.  So the middle section is 'the beginning at the ending, one goes up, one goes down,'  It was kind of an emotional thing for me to have left Ann Arbor in kind of almost disgrace and then to come Boston and go hey, this is working out… I guess."

“RED”
    "It's a nice chord progression, kinda poppy in its own way.  There's an expansive improv section — our style of improv, where Clint holds it down and me and Pete are making an unholy racket.  But before it goes into that, I sing a little vocal melody, so it's the quiet before the storm.  That's just the dynamics of music — the songs that start at 10 and end at 10 are fine, but after three or four of those, I want something more.
    Toward the end of the improv section at the end, Martin takes my vocal melody and loop it at high speed and gradually fades it up, then once we hit those last chords, he hits the speed change button on his tape recorder and it just kind of glissandos down, slowly, until it's just kind of sitting down there, an octave lower.  That's a pretty brilliant Martin Swope moment."

“THIS IS NOT A PHOTOGRAPH”
    "That's one of our blitzkrieg tunes.  Basically, it's punk, but it's art-punk. I usually start writing with the music, but this one started with the phrase 'this is not a photograph.'  Clint and I were watching Unnatural Axe one night — they were a really great band, one of our favorites.  And maybe we were a little bit blitzed in some fashion or another, and about two-thirds of the way through the set we realized they had stripped down to their skivvies and we hadn't even noticed.  So we were really pretty impressed.  And somehow during the course of that night the phrase 'this is not a photograph' came up.  I knew that was going to be the hook for a song.
    The riff is super simple — there's no chords in it, there's just unisons on the guitar, something that Burma kind of liked.  At the end guitar slide thing where I kind of do a downward gliss is definitely related to the concept of a shutter on a camera.  And Martin had a nice loop to go along with it, to make it more extreme.
    Because of my obvious interest in Surrealism, some people think it's a reference to Magritte's famous painting of a pipe that says, 'This is not a pipe.'  But this was kind of the opposite, because this is not a photograph, this is the real thing!  So in a way, it's taking that idea and twisting it.
    'This Is Not a Photograph' was like, the world's gritty, so fuck you.  That's closer to the truth of what I felt at the time.  There's a lot of 'fuck you' in our music — we really felt like that all the time.  We had to fight to be ourselves.  I mean, we'd play shows and people wouldn't care and we'd just come back and do it again.  Take that!"

"ALL WORLD COWBOY ROMANCE"
    "When Clint and I were starting the band I don't believe he'd ever written a song in his life.  He and I would just go to the basement of where we lived, and we'd just drink and play guitar for hours, many nights in a row.  One night Clint came up with the main riff and it had that open feeling that helped define the Burma sound.  And I came up with the counter-part, which helped it feel like a piece, rather than just a jam.  It was basically a song entirely about texture.
    By the end, there is this glorious layering of multiple harmonics.  One of Burma's trademarks is to use as many open strings as possible because they give you the most harmonic content.  "Cowboy" is all about harmonic content.  Martin's tape loop is really nice in there, too.  He records the guitars and fades ‘em in at high speeds, and it's kind of a dramatic moment when he hits the speed change.  These high guitar chords just kind of slide across the stereo field and settle into a lower range… it's kind of trippy.  It could have been a miserable failure, but it wasn't.
    It's not an obvious way to end a record, with those chords just dribbling off.  We're not doing some big finish and going thank you, goodnight!  We're dribbling off.  You're not supposed to do that in a rock band — you're not supposed to fade out.  That's how we play it live, too.  It's just another example of us doing everything wrong.