Revisiting Fortune’s Flesh (post-Starvations, pre-Jail Weddings)
The Starvations ended their blurry 12 year “career” in December 2005 at The El Cid in Los Angeles in front of a sold-out audience of drunks, sluts, and dumb angels. There was so much damage done to the club that the promoter threatened to withhold their pay unless they at least cleaned up all the broken glass - 20-30 members of the crowd had began smashing their own bottles to mimick the percussion on “Not Me This Time,” the hour-long set’s closer. In true tainted glamour of L.A. showbiz, Gabriel Hart, Ian Harrower, Dave Clifford, Leon Catfish, and Vanessa Gonzalez ended the otherwise celebratory night pushing brooms.
But what the crowd didn’t know that night, was that the suicide of The Starvations was to be in name only. Already the same group had a whole new set ready to go that following Spring under the name Fortune’s Flesh - a way to fulfill a sorely needed psychic reset after crumbling under various preconceived trappings of the previous group.
Admittedly, with no more than a couple instrument swaps (Dave Clifford moving from bass to drums, Ian Harrower moving from drums to bass) and some slight experimentation with harmonies, Fortune’s Flesh is most likely what the next Starvations album would have sounded like anyway…Trading the Pogues and Gun Club influences for a somehow more These Immortal Souls/Scientists vibe. But to outwit the underlying doom of The Starvations legacy might have been too much of a tall order, as FF wouldn’t make it through another year and a half from their debut show at the Scene Bar in 2006, opening for Demolition Doll Rods….Jail Weddings obviously ending up being the true predecessor, after Hart chose to wipe the slate truly clean of the slimy past.
To make matters specifically more unceremonial for the whispered demise of Fortune’s Flesh - a whole album was actually recorded that the own band has never actually even heard, much less will ever see the light of day - due to some questionable negligence/alleged sabotage by a spiteful ex-Jail Weddings member who engineered the sessions.
What we CAN hear and enjoy are three songs the band recorded at Infrasonic in January of 2006 to be used as preliminary demos for that phantom record - one of which ended up as one of the more popular Jail Weddings tunes, “Mutual Fools.” Later this week we will post “I’m Only Like This With You”, followed by the flamenco-tinged “Ambition.”
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