People occasionally ask me about how Nuclear Gopher happened.  There is sometimes a sort of wonder that even though Rhett and I were two nice Jehovah’s Witness kids from the neighborhood we started this crazy experimental band and then an underground record label.  The assumption seems to be that we must have been rebels or trying to stir things up or “be worldly”, in Witness lingo.  Honestly, though, this couldn’t be further from the truth.

Nuclear Gopher has deep roots that go back to before I was even born and one thing led to another and another until that seemed like a natural outcome.  I usually tell people that music is the family business.  Here’s a bit about that, with some multimedia accompaniment.

I can trace the family business back at least as far as our maternal grandparents, Joseph and Ethelwynn (Hineline) Brunette.

That’s them in the pic, below is the two of them singing a beautiful rendition of the song “Drifting and Dreaming”.  Give it a listen.  It’s gorgeous.

The Brunette clan was a big, boisterous, musically gifted, Catholic family with thirteen children, of whom my mom was the tenth in line.  Grandpa Brunette played guitar and sang, Grandma played the banjo and sang, and all the kids were taught to sing at an early age, often into a microphone connected to a reel-to-reel tape recorder and sometimes they even sang on local radio programs.  It was one of the main family past times and that’s how our mom spent her childhood.

Here’s a 1956 radio appearance by The Brunette Children singing “Gonna Get Along Without You” and “Ringo Rango”:

Mom experienced two major tragedies when she was young.  First, she lost her father when she was only nine years old.  Then, when she was eighteen, she lost her then fifteen year old brother Jerry in a car accident.  Those two loses made a major mark on her.

Mom was a shy girl, very pretty, and a helluva singer.  In another life she could have been Cher.  But she told me many times that she had always felt lost, like she was adrift in life, never given a chance to properly grow up.  She got married almost immediately out of high school and became a mother to my brother Rhett not long after.  When I was born fourteen months later my mom had just had her twentieth birthday.  That’s a lot for a young person to live through.  I think about how she must have felt, only twenty years old and already a mother of two, married to a man she hadn’t known for long, still mourning her brother and father… It makes sense to me that the message of the Jehovah’s Witnesses appealed to her at that time.  I can understand why she listened when her neighbor told her about the last days and an interpretation of the Bible that was entirely new to her Catholic trained mind.  I can likewise understand why she clung to music.  That was her lifeline, her connection to her past.  To quote my dear friend Cindy Elvendahl, music was her savior.

She and her brother Rick had formed a band called Special Export.  It was a cover band, they played at supper clubs and parties and wedding receptions.  Over the years the band went through various iterations, name changes, and phases, but it was always there when Rhett and I were growing up.  Even as Rhett and I (and later Reed and Robbie) were being taken to meetings at the Kingdom Hall and raised as Witnesses, we also attended band practices and gigs.  Mom was always the star of the show.  She didn’t play any instruments but she was this glamorous lead singer and people were always so impressed by her voice and, man, it was like living with a celebrity.  Of COURSE we wanted to do it too.

Here is mom with her gold microphone singing “Girl From Ipanema” in the late 80’s.

It’s hard to remember a time in my life, even as early as four years old, where Rhett and I weren’t trying to make music.  We had a record player and a bunch of hand me down albums and we sang along to The Beatles and Barry Manilow and Grand Funk Railroad until we were sent to bed.  We pretended to be rock stars, we drummed with pencils on the furniture, we planned gigs and put on little shows for any audience we could find, neighbors, our parents, or the other kids in the home daycare that mom ran for extra money.  I have a sign hanging in the Nuclear Gopher studio from a “concert” we put on as The Rockboys when I was six years old.

Rhett started sitting in on drums with mom’s band at paid gigs when he was 7.  I bought my first electric guitar at 12.  Like I said, the roots run deep.  And a little “derp”.

Rhett was so good at drums at such an early age that he attracted the attention of a group of young adults from a nearby congregation who, like my mom, were forming a cover band to play weddings and the like.  The others in the band were all in their 20’s but they brought the little 12 year old drummer into the group because he was really really really really good and he could also sing.

It was a 50’s band called Hubcaps and Hearts and when Rhett joined, they decided to use the Sutter home as their practice space.  This was great because we had a room in the basement that we had been using as our “music room” ever since The Rockboys.  There had been a drum set in there for five years but suddenly there was more.  Guitars, amps, microphones, keyboards, speakers, it was real gear, gear we could never have afforded, and it was just sitting there most of the time.  Of COURSE we recorded music with it.  That had been one of our primary hobbies for years and now we could try to do it on another level.

Rhett, Reed, and I were calling ourselves ROW at the time.  We always had a penchant for picking band names that were people pronounced wrong and in this case ROW was supposed to be like the British word for a fight not like something you do with an oar in a boat but I digress.  The sudden access to equipment caused the three of us to record our first album as ROW which we called “Terror Again” and it was a blast but Rhett and I struggled a bit with Reed.

“Waldo Koterman” by ROW

It wasn’t Reed’s fault, he is a brilliant and amazing person, an awesome kid brother, and he later became a spectacular musical recording artist but at the time I was 12, Rhett was 13, but Reed was only 9 and he didn’t know how to play any instruments.  Rather than wait for him to catch up, Rhett and I chose to start a new band with just the two of us.  We called ourselves The Lavone (another pronunciation problem for most people, it’s meant to be pronounced like “love own” but people usually pronounce it “love on”, whatever…) and that was the fateful moment.  The Lavone started in 1986 and was never officially “broken up” although our last recording session was in 2003 and Rhett died in 2005, ending it for good.

How it started:

“My Adventure Flowerland” – 1986

…  and how it ended up:

“Blues Around My Soul” – 2000

Nuclear Gopher exists because The Lavone existed.  The Lavone existed because of mom, and grandpa, and ROW, and The Rockboys, and Hubcaps and Hearts, and me and Rhett sharing a bedroom and a brain, and all of that stuff that came before.

For the first three years of The Lavone we made albums and in early 1989 I recorded a song called The Gay Laughter of Nuclear Gophers, a title I found written on a slip of paper while cleaning my bedroom one day.  I vaguely remember waking up from a dream and scribbling it down in the middle of the night but I don’t remember the dream.  It randomly happened to be the most recent song I had recorded before Rhett and I bought our first 4-track recorder so the words “Nuclear Gopher” were fresh in our minds when we christened our studio and the label just stuck after that.

It’s not a particularly great song.  It was just this sort of  guitar experiment that I recorded.  The idea was to use a brass slide in a sort of bowing technique to create an ambient soundscape and various forms of tapping to make something synthesizer-esque using only a guitar.  In case you want to here it, here it is, “The Gay Laughter of Nuclear Gophers” by The Lavone from January of 1989, the accidental namesake of the whole kit and kaboodle.

So, there you go.  Nuclear Gopher was born not as an act of rebellion but as a fairly innocent outgrowth of an innate passion for making music that we got from our mother, who got it from her parents.  We recorded our music because we made it.  We labelled it because it was fun to do so.  It wasn’t until we grew up that it ever occurred to us that it might be unusual to do this inside of our religion but even then, so what?  Unusual doesn’t mean wrong.  When I think of Nuclear Gopher I think of something born out of sharing something I love with people I love.  That was the origin and that’s still the point.