A Souvenir From Planet Ten is a remembrance by Jack Rusher, published here Monday, October 14, 2002. It is part of Memories.
The diary of a former rock star.
There was a band called Planet Ten from Gainesville, Florida, formed in 1993 and disolved in 1995. I was one of the founding members of that band. We played around the Southeastern United States, our music received limited air play and we were interviewed by radio and television stations in our little college town.
We made numerous recordings, some of which I’ve archived here. This was the first time I had listened to any of this material in years. There were many surprises awaiting me. Shakey is much better than I remembered and this live version of Been Here Too Long isn’t nearly as good. The Beatles-pop of Welcome has weathered the years better than the faux-metal of Vamp or the Parliament funk of Red Sun.
The happiest surprise of the lot was this creepy live performance of the jazz inflected version of the Reason, which later became a part of the Pop Canon repertoire.
The greatest single disappointment was this live version of Adrian Belew’s The Momur. There are positives, like Ned’s frantic bass line, the energy of the vocals and the hilarious guitar solo, but there are heinous timing issues — we couldn’t hear each other at all — and the whole idea was probably ill advised.
I found several versions of an early song called Stick in the Eye. The original version, a metallic affair, was an obvious nod to Peter Gabriel’s the Intruder. The later swinging, slide guitar version is mostly superior, but the vocals are neither as smooth nor as serpentine.
Trapped was one of the songs that came forward from a project that immediately preceded Planet Ten and contained most of the same personnel. It’s an homage to the prevailing music of the time: Alice in Chains, Nirvana, and the rest of the Seattle scene, though filtered through our own harmonic indulgences and vocal extravagance.
I also found an early version of the Reason that features a jazz-metal treatment and an amazingly strident vocal from Charlie McWhorter. This arrangement originated the arpeggiated major seventh walk down that survived in the Pop Canon arrangement.
One of our best covers was the stripped down blues of Randy Newman’s God’s Song. The song is a scathing critique of organized religion and we used it as a showcase for Jen Doody’s deep appreciation of Etta James. Sadly, this poor recording of a lesser performance is the only extant version.
The experience of cataloguing this material has conjured many memories, and some mixed emotions, about a time that I had largely forgotten. This band was my primary artistic outlet for two very strange years. We played many, many shows, made some recordings, received ambiguous major label interest and finally learned that we didn’t want to be in a band together.
Planet Ten was Ned Davis, Jen Doody, Blue Lang, Charlie McWhorter and Jack Rusher. Our horn players, the Hong Kong Cavaliers, were Alyson Carrel, Lind Erickson and Don Undeen. Requiesat In Pacem Eternam.