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HOW IT ALL BEGAN
Remy Zero was born Remy Boligee in Chelsea, Alabama about 1950.
At around 16 he left home for Birmingham and found a job unloading
trains outside the city. By 1969 he was living in a shack in a
railroad worker's shantytown and had begun writing the first of
hundreds of highly idiosyncratic songs. Around this time, he be-
friended Sam Bruno, a second-generation immigrant whose family
would create a supermarket empire throughout the south.
Bruno had acquired an
early model reel-to-reel tape recorder and
decided to use it to record the songs of Remy Zero. Together they
methodically filled almost thirty hours of tape with music, conver-
sation, ramblings, and long periods of relative silence (in which
trains, dogs, and distant voices populate an eerily vivid sound
picture of his world).
By 1970, Bruno having
since lost count of Remy Zero gave his recorder
and two large boxes of tapes to the 12 year old Shelby Tate, whose
parents were close friends with the Brunos.
Shelby was entranced
by the strange recordings and having no other
tapes, played them constantly. By 1988, he and his brother Cinjun
had started a band with their friends Cedric LeMoyne, Jeffrey Cain,
and Greg Slay. They eventually found themselves playing exclusively
the songs from the Remy Zero tapes and decided that while free to re-
arrange, reinterpret, or recreate the songs in varying ways, they
would always preserve the essence of the originals.
When they had a chance
to make a record they adhered to this idea and
even included snippets from the original recordings. Their bewilder-
ing music is sometimes highly expressionistic, sometimes bare and
fractured and overall impossible to categorize.
The band and record
company made numerous attempts to locate Remy Zero
and his relatives but have so far been unsuccessful. It is hoped by
using his name, Zero will come to hear of the band and perhaps estab-
lish contact.
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