As first mentioned in this post, there’s currently a 15-year-old kid in Finland named Peeter who has become something of a super-fan of Cop Shoot Cop. While that sounds strenuously unlikely, Peeter has been hard at work exhuming C$C rarities from the nether regions of the internet, and those proud, few die-hards like me could not possibly be more pleased about it.
In the wake of digging up super-rare tracks like the studio rendition of “Honey Why” and a track I’d genuinely never even heard of before called “What Have You Teached,” Peeter struck oil, this week, with a full, live recording of the one and only show by The Red Expendables
I’ve mentioned this chapter before, but for those unfamiliar, commanding officer/songwriter Tod [A] (above, center) acrimoniously split from the ranks of Cop Shoot Cop about a year earlier to concentrate on the band that would become Firewater. Undeterred, the remaining, newly-former members of Cop Shoot Cop – now including new guitarist Mike Kaminsky (above, far right), who had been recruited to replace Steve McMillen, who’d jumped ship to change vocational trajectory and go study law -- salvaged the fruits from their final recording sessions with their estranged leader for what would have been Cop Shoot Cop’s fifth proper studio LP. Songs were then largely stripped of Tod’s contributions, re-worked and re-rendered with low-end bassist Jack Natz (above, second from right) taking over all vocal duties. The finished product was brought to the bigwigs at Interscope Records, the major label who’d released Cop Shoot Cop’s last couple of albums, but Interscope showed zero interest in a band now without its former lead singer/songwriter and dropped them on the spot. That’s life in the music biz, baby.
My chronology gets a bit fuzzy, at this point, but the record ended up on a tiny indie label named GrimmWerks, and was available to be prized off the internet circa … 1997, maybe? By this point, the quartet had re-christened themselves the Red Expendables (or RedEx, for short), the name a self-deprecating allusion to their diminished status. Sci-fi nerds might already get the joke, but the name refers to the lower-ranking crew members of the Starship Enterprise who invariably die first -- and die horribly -- on episodes of “Star Trek.”
If I’m right, that record was not yet available to the general public when the Red Expendables made their live debut opening for Foetus at Irving Plaza one chilly March evening in 1996. Without Tod, the band eschewed any/all Cop Shoot Cop tracks and played exclusively new material … which no one in the crowd was even remotely familiar with. I was there, that evening, and remember being struck by the fact that drummer Phil Puleo -- until then renowned for playing standing up in a sort of cage – was playing sitting down in a more conventional way. While I’m dead certain the boys were happy for the opportunity to play out, I don’t remember the mood being entirely festive. Oddly enough, MTV News … where I’d go onto work ten years later .. even did a story about the show.
Discouraged by their prospects, the Red Expendables disbanded. In the following years, Jack Natz briefly played in few bands with Stu Spasm, including CrimeWave, Mercy Killers and, I believe, Crux before joining Lubricated Goat for a spell. These days, he’s a painter and a mixed-media collage artist, but he briefly reformed with Phil and Jim as ExCop for a Martin Bisi tribute. He has a new a project called EXP. Jim and Phil, meanwhile, briefly formed a project called Audio Dyslexia before pursuing other things. Jim has never stopped making music, doing solo work and soundtrack work before reuniting with Phil for ExCop and then Human Impact. Phil largely continues to play drums for SWANS, these days, despite serving in the ranks of the original line-up of Human Impact. He’s back with SWANS, at the moment.
Michael Kaminksy, meanwhile, had a sensationalized fall from grace when a botched robbery attempt backfired horribly. I’ve no idea what happened to him after that.
In any case, here they were in 1996. And while the Red Expendables' era is long over, you can still find their album on Spotify.
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