Post? Boast! Pt. 1

The bands that came after Nihilistics. This week: Missing Foundation.

After I moved to New Jersey in the summer of 1986 I had little to no contact with the other members of Nihilistics. Mike would occasionally call when he was drunk, then leave a rambling answering machine message I’d ignore. That life was firmly behind me (until 1989, when the redux happened) and I had no interest in returning to Long Island or the drama of the Nihilistics.

But I still had my guitar and amp and I missed playing.

I ended up in my first post-Nihilistics band through Kaz, who was co-hosting WFMU’s The Nightmare Lounge with me and relayed a message from his brother Vince, on bass in…

Missing Foundation was an infamous NYC-based industrial band led by professional provocateur Pete Missing (above, on megaphone). The lineup shifted but Vince and I were on bass and guitar through the first three albums, along with Chris and Mark (RIP) on percussion, augmented by any number of “bang on that shit and see what sort of sound it makes” dilettantes (here we are playing live on air at WFMU on Oct. 12, 1986).

(Oddly enough, I was a Tenafly housemate (it was his place, I just rented a room) of Jeff Nagle (RIP), who’d been the guitarist in Pete’s previous band, Drunk Driving.)

Missing Foundation gigs were notorious for being thrown-together highly-illegal edge-of-disaster audience-menacing affairs. We’d take over a space, find the electric outlets, plug in, put on a show and get the hell out of there before the cops showed up. After I left the band they ended up in the laughable 3-part Cult of Rage series Mike Taibbi did for CBS-NY News, based purely on the ubiquity of the band’s brilliant “The Party’s Over” symbol, which was all over Manhattan in the 1980s:

Missing Foundation didn’t have “songs” per se. Someone would show up to rehearsal with a drum pattern or a riff and we’d build from there. Pete would often make up lyrics on the spot. Burn Trees – based on a riff of mine – is a prime example. On the rehearsal tape you can hear it coalescing as we’re playing. Then I lose the riff. Then I find it again. Then it ends up on an album, 1933, for which I get absolutely nothing.

Missing Foundation is the other band whose legacy lives on far longer than I thought, its continued relevance leading to a recent re-release of the first three albums (for which I wrangled roughly $87 out of the reissue record company) and my one-and-only album signing last December.

I don’t know if any Missing Foundation music made it into a film, like the Nihilistics did back in 2021, but somehow it feels inevitable. PAY DAY HERE I COME!

Kids, if you end up in a band be sure to codify your contribution through any legal channels necessary. Who knows, someone may still be talking about your band fifty years from now.

NEXT WEEK: The Jungle Creeps