FUCKFACE
Tornado Watch [tape] (Two Tates) 1988
TORNADO WATCH
Stripper Logic [tape] (Two Tates) 1988
Widening Gyre (Harder Times) 1989
Separate Bedsheets (Harder Times) 1990
Fuckytown EP (Harder Times) 1990
Encyclopedia of Brown (Matador) 1992
McPunk’s (Matador) 1994
Prion Eyes (Matador) 1996
Widening Gyre/Stripper Logic (Matador) 1997
Separate Bedsheets/Fuckytown (Matador) 1997
Sadisterotica (Matador) 1998
Night Shift (Matador) 2001
Tornado Watch: Live in Chicago (Ergot) 2009
The Bondage Reclamation Project (Ergot) 2012
Sleeping Gods (Ergot) 2014
Tornado Warning (Ergot) 2017
SARAH ANDERSON
Sarah Anderson (Ignatz) 2003
TOM TATE
Ice-9 (Siberia) 2002
Ice-9 + (Siberia) 2015
         Formed in 1987, the group eventually known as Tornado Watch cycled through a number of monikers at the beginning, including Chewface, Fuckface, Fuck Brothers, Mole People and Your Mom. The brainchild of Robert Tate (impresario, vocals and guitar), best friend Louis Romero (bass, mostly) and drummer Sean Zabel (later of Babalon; replaced by Billy Yale before the first Fuckface tape), they were soon joined by Robert’s younger brother Carl (Tom) Tate on rhythm guitar and eerie backing vocals. Early reviews used the terms noise, fuzz, and Midwest power pop, which all seem about right, if a little too precise.
         Self-produced, the first two tapes (confusingly, Tornado Watch as Fuckface and Stripper Logic as Tornado Watch) are sludgy and only semi-melodic, like Husker Dü slowed down from 45 to 33rpm. Moving on up to Harder Times, Widening Gyre does seem to widen the sound a bit, stretching from the Devo-meets-Fugazi “Mechanical Men” to a respectable cover of the Cramps’ “Can Your Pussy Do the Dog?” that even Lux Interior seemed to like.
         The next LP Separate Bedsheets and its immediate follow-up EP Fuckytown finally see the band delivering on some of their earlier promise, with multi-part jams like “Doctor Phibes” and “R’lyeh Got a Hold on Me” suggesting a possible prog (!) or jazz-fusion (!!) direction. The non-charting single “Vinegar Wine” would become a live staple.
         Improbably signed to Matador after a brief Doctor Phibes fad on Radio K, the band seemed confused about their direction, with Bob Tate suggesting a harder sound in an interview with Spin (“We’ll leave Superchunk in the dust”) and his brother Tom striking a more equivocal note (“[s]omewhere between Pavement and Comus”). In the event, the three Matador albums (Encyclopedia of Brown, McPunk’s, Prion Eyes) didn’t move the needle much, although a number of tracks such as “Eggs,” “Wednesday 1pm,” and the vertiginous “Washington Avenue” do catch fire.
         Romero briefly quit after Brown, and the bass on the latter albums was supplied variously by Bob, Tom, Tim Commerford, Kristen Pfaff (in one of her last recordings) and an uncredited Flea. A North American tour was damaged by inter-band conflicts and erratic performances.
         After that, Matador reissued two CDs rounding up the early stuff and then the band, with Romero now back on bass duty, shifted direction by adding new vocalist and jazz savant Sarah Anderson (then performing under the name Urethra Franklin) to Sadisterotica, a pseudo-concept album based around the films and music of Spanish horror movie weirdo Jess Franco. Two singles (the swingy “Red Lips” and the proggy-boppy “Kiss Me Jesus”) cracked the Billboard Top 100, but internal pressures between the two brothers made the band go up in smoke. Matador swept the ashes out the door with Night Shift, a double-disc of outtakes, magickal babblings and curiosities.
         Tom Tate released a solo album on his own Siberia label shortly after the band’s dissolution, but it made no impression (nor did its expanded edition, released over a decade later). By contrast, Sarah Anderson’s solo debut on Ignatz, which featured all the former members of Tornado Watch except Tom (even Zabel: maybe a calculated insult) charted respectably, even crossing over to the jazz charts. Despite its brevity, her later career is still too complex to outline here.
         A series of well-received 2007-2008 nostalgia shows kicked off the Tornado Watch revival, followed the next year by the release of a terrific 1999 concert on the Milwaukee-based Ergot label, featuring Anderson at the beautiful pinnacle of her rock/jazz uncertainty. This led to a full reformation of the band, including Romero but sans Anderson and Tom Tate. The Bondage Reclamation Project and Sleeping Gods both evoke a sort of fantasy middle-period Tornado Watch that never actually existed, layering jazzy improv over lurching punk rhythms. The lyrics are still occult-scented (“Darkly Shining World,” “Fifty Names”), suggesting that Tom Tate wasn’t the only member to be influenced by the Simon Necronomicon. Quality stuff, but there’s a slight wheel-spinning feeling here.
         By contrast, the band’s final album, Tornado Warning, is truly excellent, and presents any number of exciting musical directions that the band might have taken if not for the tragedy, including several avant-garde innovations brought in by Anderson on her three guest tracks. It deserves to be evaluated as a serious musical statement in its own right and not some kind of requiem mass or morbid curiosity. Since Tom Tate is the only member/former member who is still among the living—and recording facilities are likely pretty scarce in federal Supermax prison—the era of Tornado Watch is definitively over, alas.
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