Show Vehicle Flips Some Love!

Maybe you’ve seen the name Frank B. on this site. Back in early 2008, Frank Boscoe invited me to become a contributor to Salt in Wound. Twenty years earlier, he was my music director at WRCT, the radio station of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Frank had a strong influence on my developing musical tastes as well as my interest in Holden Caulfield’s cap. Then Frank led a terrific band called Wimp Factor 14 with my buddy Tom Hoffman on the drums, Rob on guitar (who years later I learned was a mutual friend of Jerry Fuchs), and also Gary the future loyal blog commenter on bass. Their 7″ single “Train Song” had a real flattened penny on the packaging. That was cool. I saw WFXIV play in CMU’s Wherrett Room. After graduation Tom sent me a postcard asking me to join the band which was very tempting, except I was really hoping to find a job in New York and also, I had no musical ability whatsoever.

By the time I moved to Hoboken a few years later, Frank was leading Vehicle Flips. (Who maybe I saw at the Khyber Pass in Philadelphia, when I was living in central Jersey? Or was that still WFXIV?) They put out three albums, a batch of singles, and appeared on several compilations. In the post-collegiate pre-Internet years, those comps were a crucial way to learn about new bands. Compilations that Frank’s bands appeared on introduced me to future favorites such as the Magnetic Fields and the Mountain Goats. My friendship with my former co-worker Stephen really took off when I figured out that his band #Poundsign# had appeared on the same record as Vehicle Flips.

On October 6, 2000, I saw what I believe was Vehicle Flips’ farewell show at Great Lakes in Brooklyn. (In March 2004 I missed the Wimp Factor 14 reunion show at New York’s Lit Lounge because a zine-editing very recent ex assumed I knew about it. I did not.) Frank moved from Pittsburgh to Albany, forming the Gazetteers. At a party thrown by my friend Leital, I finally met Frank’s fellow Gazetteer Rob Christiansen (Leital’s WNYC co-worker), who’d collaborated with Frank since the WFXIV days. The Gazetteers’ album Landlocked! is, to my knowledge, the sole release to date on the fledgling Salt in Wound record label.

The most recent Gazetteers album appeared on the significantly more prolific Jigsaw Records label out of Seattle. And now Frank returns to Jigsaw for an upcoming anthology of Vehicle Flips’ singles, compilation tracks, and unreleased songs, most of which have never been available digitally. If you’ve read this far, I like to think you’ll kick in a few bucks via the Kickstarter campaign to help make this compilation a reality. For the price of downloading such an album ($10), you can significantly defray the costs of transferring the aging, multi-formatted original tapes into pristine homogeneous digital files. And you’ll receive your choice of a free digital copy or CD of the album, so it’s win-win! Want to contribute less? Or more? That’s cool too. Oh, and if you’re new to Vehicle Flips, as an added bonus, you’ll certainly learn the difference between a Boscoe and a Bruno. Thanks very much from all of us here at SiW HQ.