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Creeper Lagoon - Shasta Complex (1994) [Shrimper, SHR52, Cassette]

From the J-card:

Thank you: Ah-Club, Shrimper, SLAB, Sukpatch
CREEPER LAGOON: 550 Ashbury St. S.F. CA. 94117
Shrimper Box 1837 Upland, CA 98175 

NO NOISE REDUCTION (DOLBY DBX ETC)
PHOTO BY MARGARITA ART BY STEVEN
RECORDED IN MY ROOM © 1994

Tracklist:

A1. Over The Rainbow
A2. Upland Fiesta
A3. Back Down
A4. Atom Smasher
A5. Treason
A6. Blue Sunrise
A7. Distress Traffic

B1. Colorado
B2. You Let Me Down
B3. Secrecy of Communication
B4. Half as Strong
B5. That's Your Decision

I don't know much about this Creeper Lagoon outfit off the top of my head. The shout-outs to the Ah Club and Sukpatch, who also put out Shrimper tapes (the latter as Patch) got me digging. There's a John Brengelman listed as personnel via some online searching, possibly some relation to Aubrey Brengelman of the Ah Club? Patch/Sukpatch and Creeper Lagoon both had releases on Slabco/Slabco Records. 

I found a website for Creeper Lagoon, which in July 2023 offers a Creeper Lagoon Songbook pdf and 2017 tour dates. Some highlights from digging back through http://www.creeperlagoon.com/ on the Wayback Machine:

• The main page operated with a Flash page in 2005, which I took a screengrab of; click here to see that. ("Drama" goes to a forum;  "News" goes to news posts signed "Sharky", for Sharky Laguana; "Contact" is an embedded mailto type link; "Music" goes to http://www.creeperlagoon.com/music.html) 
• http://www.creeperlagoon.com/records.html : lists their 1998 LP, a "Wonderful Love" maxi single, a Shifty Disco Singles Club release in 1998, and a Sub Pop Singles Club release in 1998. Around 2001 the captures stop showing up for this page. No captures I could find mention the tape.
• http://www.creeperlagoon.com/music.html : lists Long Dry Cold, some MP3s to buy, and news of a tribute album (!) made by regular posters on their forums (!!). Following more links takes you to a Geocities page which was run by someone named Robin (/"Apoptosis"). 
  • http://geocities.com/deadmansaloon/index.html : please, I implore you, take a look at the homepage as captured in October 2009. Peak web design. 
    • Following the little turntable picture takes you to http://geocities.com/deadmansaloon/discography.html ; from there, clicking "Albums and Singles" gets you to http://geocities.com/deadmansaloon/discography1.html, where sections are labeled.
      • Here, Robin's site lists, under the "Sharky Solo" section, SHR52 Shasta Complex, which you can see a screengrab of here. 
    • http://geocities.com/deadmansaloon/Bio.html, the Biography section, confirms that Creeper Lagoon's earliest releases were solo Sharky Laguana work. 
  • Following links on http://www.creeperlagoon.com/music.htm as captured in February 2005, clicking "Early Creeper tapes", you can get to http://www.nillywilly.net/CL/ for lists of mp3s from the early tapes. Files now inaccessible via Wayback, of course. 
    • Digging around for http://www.nillywilly.net/ itself on the Wayback turns up a lot of boilerplate domain registration pages. 

From available information, it would seem that Sharky Laguana is the only confirmed personnel on the Shasta Complex tape. I offer my heartfelt thanks to people like Robin who did this sort of thing long before me, and whose cataloging and dedication allow me to do this kind of practical research. Thanks also to the Wayback Machine and Internet Archive for their work.

One additional note here, to give context to the name of the tape. My fellow horticulturists may think of the Shasta daisy at first sight, but even that common name for the Leucanthemum x superbum traces back to the volcano. Yes, the volcano! For those curious about California geography, Mt. Shasta is a volcano in northern California, which you may know if you've taken Interstate 5 ("the 5" to Californians) between California and Oregon and seen the thing. You may also have seen exit signs for the nearby town of Weed. According to the USGS, Mt. Shasta is potentially active, in the "high-threat" classification, due to its proximity to people and level of activity, and you can read all about that.

But what of the "Complex"? Here, I tip my hat again to the Internet Archive for this paper from the California Bureau of Land Management, "ARCHAEOLOGICAL EXPLORATIONS IN SHASTA VALLEY, CALIFORNIA", authors Blossom Hamusek, Eric W. Ritter, and Julie Burcell. Their reference to the Shasta Complex is as follows, bolding mine: 

Meighan grouped all late period materials from northwest and north-central California into the Shasta Complex estimated to span post A.D. 1600 to historic contact (cf. Basgall and Hildebrandt 1989). Attributes considered associated with this complex included hopper mortars and pestles, bipointed chert bifaces, Gunther Barbed projectile points, and an overall emphasis on hunting and gathering. Village sites appeared to have favored streamside locations, often producing "mounds" up to five meters in depth that contained a variety of house depressions.

The "Meighan" cited here is C.W. Meighan, and the text is given as Archaeology of the North Coast Ranges, California. University of California Archaeological Survey Report 30:1-39. Berkeley. That's Clement Woodward Meighan who, from some more looking around, appears to have been the kind of guy who thinks repatriation of archeological material to indigenous people is bad for the field of archaeology. After all this digging and linking and dutiful following of threads, academically and all, I offer this brief editorial note: fuck that guy.

Anyway. "Shasta Complex" is an archeology/anthropology term, for the curious. This whole page has been your web admin's unabridged perversion of the day, thank you.

Click any thumbnail below to view a full size scan:

any images, lyrics, song titles, etc are property of the original artists, where at all possible images are pulled from my own scanned copies and any found/submitted images are noted and credited. this is a fan site without ads, trackers, or even so much as one of those site counters from the late 90's. if you see your intellectual property here and want it removed, email away. thanks