Counting Eucrows

In 1996, two bands from Northern California got signed to two different major labels by the same A&R person. Davis band Chance the Gardener was the final signing by Roberta Peterson to her longtime employer, Warner Bros./Reprise Records, where she’d brought in such acts as Nick Cave and Flaming Lips. Then Peterson segued into a new job at Geffen/DGC Records, where Chico/Davis group Harvester was her first signing.

Someone got the idea to celebrate the release of both bands’ records—Chance the Gardener’s The Day the Dogs Took Over and Harvester’s Me Climb Mountain. The gala evening began with cocktails at the Hyatt, moved to a brutally spicy dinner at a nearby Indian restaurant, and culminated in a show featuring the two bands at Old Ironsides.

The bands, if memory serves, were as fired up as the chicken vindaloo. Chance the Gardener’s guitarist Steve Bryant can still taste the evening’s particular irony. “That was when [Harvester’s] Sean Harrasser was rolling around the floor with a mike in his mouth, saying ‘Nothing’s gonna stop the flow of keepin’ it indie.’ And that was just one of the funniest things; I just thought that was hysterical—Roberta standing there, watching.”

Later, Peterson, standing outside the club with the smokers, was chatting about a possible future of life in the foothills running an aromatherapy shop, and it was apparent that she wasn’t long for the music business.

When you’re a non-superstar act just signed to a major label, and the point person at your label disappears, your record contract usually evaporates rather quickly, too. Which happened to both bands. In Harvester’s case, part of the band relocated to Portland; it released its most recent album, Annoying the Waitress, last summer on its own independent label, Lather.

As for Chance the Gardener, the band was invited to tour with Better Than Ezra, but broke up after singer Stu Blakey killed himself. According to Bryant, Blakey had been behaving strangely beforehand. “I don’t know how exactly he would have been diagnosed,” Bryant says of his former bandmate, “but I think probably what it was, was paranoid schizophrenia. The way he just kinda melted down and left town, and didn’t leave any numbers—he literally just took off in the dead of night.”

By 1997, Bryant and bassist Greg Hain, who eventually switched to guitar, had reformed as the Toadmortons with bassist/pianist Jack Payne and drummer Jimmy Brasier—who’d played in the lower Solano County band Sweet Children, later known as Green Day. Chance’s skin pounder, Paul Takushi, eventually became the drummer for the Looky-Loos.

The Toadmortons took their name from a Nick Cave novel about inbred Southerners, And the Ass Saw the Angel. They cut a debut on the cheap with Thin White Rope/Acme Rocket Quartet guitarist Roger Kunkel, and Beware Mortons Murder Mile became the first release from a then-new independent label based in San Francisco, Future Farmer. (The label has since released records by two other bands from this area, Jackpot and the Mother Hips, along with such acts as For Stars and Kevin Salem.) A follow-up album, Shaking the Ghosts, was finished with engineer Greg Freeman, but the band declined to sign a contract that Future Farmer had drawn up, so that album never came out.

It is now 2002, and the Toadmortons are still standing. Bryant lives in the Southport area of West Sacramento, where he bought a house with a garage he’s turned into a studio/practice space. Payne left the band to move to Santa Rosa, and was replaced by Stephanie Smith.

“I’m super happy with what’s going on,” Bryant says. “I don’t think I’ve been, musically, more content.”

That happiness is reflected in not one but two CD projects—one an electric rock record, the other a more rootsy acoustic one. Some of those songs will turn up this Saturday, when the Toadmortons play the True Love Coffeehouse with Elena Powell and Jackie Greene.