ABOUT K.T.S.

Kitty Tooth Salad would never have happened if Roger Maris had not hit the 61st home run that broke Babe Ruth's record. The Billy Crystal movie "61*" was filmed at Tiger Stadium in Detroit in the summer of 2000 and Bill and I were both production assistants on the set. I was from a little northern Michigan town called Manistee and Bill lived in metro-Detroit. We became buddies and decided to abandon the struggling film industry of Detroit and move into a summer apartment in a tiny hamlet called Beulah, near my hometown. We were there to develop a film script together that would top anything David Lynch or any other surrealist film-maker had produced. That project would eventually fall through, probably due to too much drinking and pot-smoking.

Kitty Tooth Salad was initially a subject line I had typed in an email to Bill. I often wrote bizarre things in the subject line of emails, like Pelican Loaf Torpedo or Bologna Shaving Crocodiles. Bill wrote me back and said, "We gotta put Kitty Tooth Salad on a T-shirt!” KTS the "band" started with this line from Bill: "Let's make the most f#%*ed up album ever." One of the first "songs" Bill and I recorded was a track called "Bar Fight Stories" which became the title track for the album. It was a badly recorded rant from Bill that is one of the most difficult of our songs to endure. But that, we believed, was what gave the song its appeal. Neither one of us knew anything about recording music but I had an acoustic guitar I could barely play and some recording software, both given to me by my friend Tony Bottrell. Bill and I figured: Maybe sounding “bad” will be our strength. With a degree in Graphic Art and Broadcasting & Cinematic Arts, I knew a little about audio editing and had worked around tape reels and had done some sound-work before, but I knew nothing about the software Tony gave me so we were going into this project blind.

Bill and I were diehard fans of early alternative and experimental music; everything from Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart to early art-punk bands like Wire and Sonic Youth. I was a big fan of a little known but long lived avant-garde rock band, Red Krayola. We both loved eccentric musical characters who dared to be strange, like Tom Waits and Robyn Hitchcock. Most of these guys were very atonal, weird, and challenging. So we figured if we could be as unique and strange as these guys, some of whom were music novices themselves when they started out, then we could create something interesting. All these influences went into the KTS mix. When it came to producing the tracks this quote from Frank Zappa had a strong impression on me (and I paraphrase): "To be a composer all you need is something to make noise with and something to record it on.” Zappa’s words were the motivating influence I needed to get my creative juices flowing with the post-production end of things.

In the fall of 2001 Bill and I moved to Mt. Pleasant, Michigan, where I had went to college and where we planned to continue work on the film. I had made a couple of movies in college and still had access to some resources, connections, and acting talent. The project was officially dead the day a drunken misunderstanding led to me throwing a metal folding chair at Bill's head, and him kicking the shit out of my dehumidifier. I moved out to live with my girlfriend Sarah and our friendship was on the ropes. Bill went on to attend college in Mt. Pleasant and I moved to Chicago to pursue God knows what. I didn't seem to know anymore and felt like I had lost my way and things got worse with my drinking. Somewhere between me moving back to Michigan to work as a photojournalist at a news station and then me getting fired - probably because I was becoming a drunken asshole - Bill and I mended our friendship. Bill moved to Alabama after college and we kept in touch. He would record tracks and send them to me to produce. By this time I was back in my hometown working as a newspaper writer and trying to maintain a marriage, kids, and my sobriety. I had no success there. Thanks again booze!

I still live in Manistee today and Bill lives in Denver, Colorado but we still keep KTS going and I work daily on my sobriety. If there's one thing I want KTS to represent, is that it’s a warning to the dangers of mental collapse due to drugs and alcohol. Some of our tracks can be dark, and some funny, but there's an element of foreboding danger that haunt these tracks. If you're ever thinking f#$*ed up, but aren't sure if you should, listen to some KTS instead. I think it will take you to that place you wanna go, but without the hangovers.

In early 2012, Bill contacted me and said he would like to produce a KTS music video and build a website. I loved the idea. We had a presence on MySpace for years, but that didn’t take us anywhere. I recorded an album of my friend Ron Riekki's poetry, using some KTS experiments called "Leave Me Alone, I'm Bleeding." It had minimal sales, but cool reviews, and that's been enough to keep my interest in KTS going. So when Bill said he wanted to create a website I suggested we make it as unique as the band. We had always brought in friends to help out with instruments, noises and rants, so why not invite the rest of the world to join in and contribute to the salad? I had been a member of a site called IndabaMusic which had an interesting way of letting artists all over the globe collaborate and that’s what we want to do with the website; use it as a platform to collaborate with other artists. And there you have it: Kitty Tooth Salad.

-Dan Wrzesinski (October 2012)

WANT TO CONTRIBUTE?

To add ingredients to the salad, send your sound samples to kittytoothsalad@gmail.com (wav or mp3)

Cross us with Ween, The Residents, early-They Might Be Giants, Brian Eno, and especially The Red Krayola, and give it the absurdist humor of early work by Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart, and you pretty much get the idea of what we're going for.

For any other matters related to KTS please contact us