4/11/2024 0 Comments Fireside bowl documentary![]() ![]() The band began to rock harder, the songs became more wiry and complicated, full of nervous tension. The lyrics became more oblique and imagist as main songwriter Danny Pound seemingly took some kind of inspiration from his distant relative, the poet Ezra Pound. Once Brooks, Dan, Danny, and Brad linked up both the sound of the band as well as the themes explored began to shift - songs of high school romance began to fade in favor of something much more cryptic and original. The scene Brooks was coming out of in Kansas City to Lawrence was noisier, and more post-hardcore than the one in Topeka, with Rites of Spring influenced bands like Germbox, Giants Chair, and Boys Life being the order of the day. They met Brooks Rice at Hashinger Hall, the “fine arts” college dorm at KU where the art scene kids congregated, and which had a space on the ground floor to host the occasional show. But post high school and a move to Lawrence in 1993 precipitated a major shift in the band the gigs became more frequent at clubs like the Hideaway in Lawrence, and the legendary all ages venue the Rhumba Box in Kansas City. Vitreous Humor were almost preternaturally great even in high school, writing songs way beyond their years with a knack for melody born of their love for the likes of Big Star, the Beatles, and Teenage Fanclub. It begins to dawn on you that a local band at a college house party -whether it was Lawrence’s Zoom, or Manhattan’s Truck Stop Love –could absolutely be as good as anything you hear on the radio or in the new arrival bins at the record stores. You go to Lawrence to pick up an Unrest album at Love Garden Sounds, or the Groove Farm in Kansas City (where future Vitreous Humor bassist Brooks Rice worked) to buy the Superchunk “Slack Motherfucker” single and a Caspar Brötzmann t-shirt. at the KU student union, or drive to Manhattan on a weeknight in a blizzard and back to see the Flaming Lips at a warehouse space, when they were still obscenely loud and acid damaged and not yet rolling around on stage in giant plastic hamster balls like absolute cornballs. You would pile into the Vitreous Humor band van to go to Lawrence and catch Dinosaur Jr. If you were really lucky, you maybe had a friend with an older brother already in college that could dub you a Slint cassette. ![]() Pre-internet, high school days in Topeka you had few options if you wanted to find out about bands, and they mostly entailed driving to the nearby college towns of Lawrence and Manhattan, or heading further east to Kansas City & its smattering of record stores and all ages clubs. ![]() If I’m talking a lot about Topeka, it’s because the story of Vitreous Humor is also one of geography. Seems like a story as old as time really, but in the span of just a few short years they managed to blaze incandescently, leaving a handful of singles and one “nearly” full-length recorded testament to their brilliance that will forever put them down as one of the best rock bands to ever come out of the midwest (and most certainly Topeka, for sure). But in the late 1980s, three Topeka kids with a deep and abiding love of the Beatles who’d known each other since they were pre-teens started making music together in one of their parent’s basements. (In fact it could probably be argued they actively contributed to the aforementioned cultural wasteland). Apart from that constant staple of classic rock radio, the band Kansas, of “Carry On Wayward Son” fame, you really can’t. A deep record collecting friend has occasionally challenged me to name an album, single, or band circa the 1960s-1980s to have come out of Topeka. Not gonna lie, Topeka, Ks, where I’m from, and where three-fourths (Danny Pound, Dan Benson, and Brad Allen) of Vitreous Humor were born and raised, has always been a bit of a cultural wasteland. ![]()
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