"A guy who said he was a Portuguese rapper started jamming with us. And we're like, 'Wait, man. We gotta practice. We can't do this.' But it was no use."
In fact, making eclectic music is old hat for Sharky and Ian: they've been noodling on 4-tracks since their days as high school classmates in Cincinnati, Ohio, where they played in punk rock bands and teethed themselves on Negativland, the Butthole Surfers, Jimi Hendrix, and anything that smacked of "weird production." When Sharky moved to San Francisco in 1990, he began using his 4-track and a cheap sampler to create magnetic tape loops culled from his extensive vinyl record collection. He launched Creeper Lagoon as a collaborative project with a rotating lineup of Bay Area musicians (the evocative name, by the way, was one Sharky used to describe a skid-row hotel where he worked graveyard shift).
After releasing several cassettes and a four-song 7-inch single called Creeper Lagoon V. the Dead C, the band's shifting lineup began to solidify two years ago when Ian arrived from Cincinnati, guitar in tow, and settled into a burned out Haight Street squat. "It was missing the back wall, and there was dirt and ash everywhere," he laughs. "I guess I was looking for that whole Charles Bukowski thing." Bassist Geoffrey Chisholm joined in January,1997 after answering a newspaper ad seeking musicians into Guided By Voices, the Fall, Hank Williams, My Dad is Dead, and sampling. "It was the samples part that got me," he says. David Kostiner arrived a year later and used his background as a classically trained jazz drummer to help broaden Creeper's already expansive sonic palette.
In 1997, Creeper's eponymous EP on indie rap label Dogday Records won critical accolades and radio play, and remained on CMJ's Top 200 for five weeks. For their first full-length they teamed up with Ideal Records, the label run by production pioneers -- and longtime Creeper fans -- the Dust Brothers, who also share production credits on a few of the songs on I Become Small and Go.
