The unofficial John Bender homepage

John Bender
I don't remember now

In 1982 I got an album by a guy called John Bender. The album's title was "I don't remember now / I don't want to talk about it" and it was released on a label called Record Sluts, based in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA. [Track listings on the releases page]
The album came in a numbered and rubber stamped sleeve. Mine was #271.

Two of the stamps on the cover.
The dead rodent reads: "Don't die in the house"

It looked very home made, and the music on the album sounded very home made too. It contained electronic music with vocals. Not your ordinary smooth electronic music, but very urgent and dark rhythms with distorted lyrics. I started looking in every recordshop for more Bender, and about two years later I found a brand new copy of:

Plaster Falling

In a plain white sleeve, with a handwriting on the back stating this was Record Sluts 003, Plaster Falling by John Bender.

Some of the writing on the back cover

The album sleeve was covered in plaster and you had to cut the sleeve open to get the record out. Again, it was brilliant music. The same feel as I Don't Remember, perhaps a little more experimental. By that time I had already written to Record Sluts three times for more info, but I never got a reply. Because Plaster Falling was numbered Record Sluts 003, I assumed John Bender had made at least three albums.
It took me another 10 (!) years, the alt.music.alternative newsgroup, and a netizen from Chicago USA, to get that third album. I popped dollars in the mail, waited for a week or two, and there it was:

Pop Surgery

A change in style (more experimental), better sound quality as well, but still very Bender and a brilliant album. In its professionaly printed fold out sleeve, it looks almost like a release by a major, but on the back it reads: Record Sluts 004.

Pop Surgery inner sleeve photo

004 ?! Right. Just what I needed. Three albums by John Bender but four releases on Record Sluts.
I contacted QCA, the company that pressed the Bender albums, for more information about release dates and quantities but unfortunately they don't answer their (e)mail. It took me years to learn that this missing fourth album wasn't a John Bender release, but a Velvet Underground bootleg (see email page).
And this April '98, 16 years after getting my first Bender album I finally got my own (signed!) CCG/CAGE album, thanks to Peter at Volatile. Thank you thank you thank you.

Cassettes

And it just goes on: a while ago I finally got my hands on a few of the "Bender cassettes". You know the kind: every now and again stories about (extremely limited) cassette releases get out, and we all look high and low for them. And IF you ever find one you usually have to pay through the nose for it. Nevertheless I got 5 cassettes from Jorg (thank you thank you thank you too) and I've put the liners on the releases page. I'm not quite sure if these cassettes are original releases or some sort of bootlegs. The liners I got with them are xeroxed and some of them contain a little "JB95" signature which must have been on the original liner. I guess. This seems to prove John released them himself, but I'm not sure. The "95" is puzzling. Re-release ?

Cassette spines

Most cassettes contain familiar tracks from the albums (usually in the original, longer, versions) and other material from the same period (1982 to 1985). Some tracks appear a few times on different cassettes, or two times on one cassette. Unfortunately the sound quality is sometimes poor, probably because of the constant copying that's going on among Bender fans. But the music soon makes you forget the low-fi. Some tracks are extremely beautiful, others make you wonder why John decided to cut them short on the album release.

For example: "I want to be loved for it" from the Plaster Prototypes cassette is the same as "Something" from the Plaster Falling album, only longer. On the album the track fades out after some 4 minutes, but the cassette reveals it originally ran on for another brilliant 3. The same goes for the title track "Plaster". On the album it is cut after the "Do what you got to do" line, but on the cassette there are 2 more minutes after this. The same happens on the 'At the 4th St CAGE' and 'Do the CAGE' cassettes with some tracks from the Pop Surgery album.
The cassettes obviously include a lot of new tracks as well.
Most cassettes contain material in the Pop Surgery "style", but the 'Packing List' cassette is an exception. In my opinion it's beyond Pop Surgery. It contains some very long tracks (10 to 19 minutes) with a lot of looped and pitched speech samples. Slogans like "Let's be friends" or "This is for sale" get repeated over and over again, accompanied by jumping beats and sharp electronic sounds. Basically it's as far away from 'I don't remember now' as you can possibly get. It takes a while to get used to it, but eventually it grows on you and you keep playing it. At least, I do.

If you've got ANY info about Bender or his music, please send email to [no longer supported], and I'll get back to you. I'm trying to put a John Bender FAQ together and I need all the info I can get. And if you "just" happen to be a Bender fan, tell me about that too.

I can assure you one thing though: JB is far from dead. There have been some rumours, but let's not do a Paul McCartney on the man. ;-)

Rien Post (MTL1)

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(c) Rien Post [MTL1]

Updated:

23 II 2001

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