Jumbo's Killcrane

At their very first live appearance in 1998, a Lawrence, KS, television show called Fusion arrived to film local band Jumbo's Killcrane after a neighbor at the band's practice space recommended them. Nothing has been normal for the group since, who could be considered the rock equivalent of electronic music composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. Like Stockhausen, who spliced electromagnetic tape together to create nonuniform musical passages, Jumbo's Killcrane has a penchant for taking their previously recorded material and chopping it up and rearranging it so that beginnings are at ends, and ends are at beginnings during live performances. Guitarist/vocalist Erik Jarvis (aka Ervis Jug) and drummer Adrian Proctor (aka P-Rock) were friends from Lawrence, KS. When they began, they had a rotating lineup of bassists, which led to Jarvis laying down the bass tracks to get exactly the right sound they wanted for their first album, Scratch, released on the Tarlick record label in 1999. Since the band had their first release on various store shelves across the United States, they decided to schedule a tour in order to promote it. Little did Jarvis and Proctor know that they would meet the man who would become their full-time bassist on the journey. At a show at the Kansas City bar Davey's Uptown on May 25, they met Aaron Mersmann (aka Merz). At that time, Mersmann was performing with a band called Panel Donor. While on the second leg of their tour for Scratch in March of 2000, the band made a stop at New York's CBGB with Belvedere and the Workhorse Movement. One of the audience members happened to be producer/engineer Paul Kneevers, whose Kneever-Kneeverland studio was situated on the street in Milwaukee where serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer would cruise for victims. Kneevers liked what...