In The Beginning….
Eccentric musical magician? A nomadic descendant of The Luddites? Or a lost alien explorer, left behind when the mothership took off without him? There are many rumors, legends, exaggerations and bits of truth involved in the story of Wizard Boots, but to get to know the facts is to get to know the man, and that man is none other than Mr. Christopher Elsken. Born and raised in northwest Arkansas, he developed a fascination with music very early on and became a full on disciple of rock n’ roll when he saw his very first concert at the ripe old age of 15….it happened to be Joan Jett & The Blackhearts and from the opening assault of “Bad Reputation”, he was hooked and knew exactly what he wanted to do when he grew up (25 years later and that still hasn’t happened…). He quickly acquired a guitar, favoring an unschooled primitive approach to the instrument….playing along with records and picking up tips from other musicians when wanting to know how something was done. Bedroom 4-track recordings with friends were the beginnings of incorporating his personality and already strange world view into composing original music. Having a lifelong obsession with the pure physical vibration of sound led to Chris finding his way around on the bass guitar, eventually joining country-western cover band Redeye & The Rippers as bassist with more friends who were already accomplished musicians. The Rippers folded before playing any gigs however and the core of the band went on to form the genre jumping pop punk quartet, Groove Bucket. In 1990, Christopher made his onstage debut with that band….”I was sitting there in the bar after we played, drinking a beer….my head still spinning and filled with adrenaline, when I was approached by a young lady who I thought to be completely out of my league. She whispered in my ear…”I think we should have sex..”. Yep….I had found my calling.” 
Groove Bucket also didn’t last long, but provided Chris with enough confidence on his instrument to not only form another new band, but to attempt something completely different stylistically. Voodoo Moon hit the local Fort Smith, Arkansas scene in November of 1992 like a pack of rabid badgers on acid with a heavy psychedelic sound and freakout light show. “We were pretty full of ourselves, putting on these insane shows in a pretty conservative part of the country…..there was no middle ground…the ones who loved it came to every show….the ones who hated it wanted us to die.” One night at rehearsal it was determined to be the perfect time for a group ingestion of a particularly strong hallucinogenic substance. Later as the walls of reality came down, guitarist Robert Wofford put on The Butthole Surfers’ “Rembrandt Pussyhorse” and “Locust Abortion Technician” albums back at Chris’ apartment. He remembers it vividly as a life changing moment. “Those two records are so visceral and scary when you’re NOT on drugs, and it was my first time hearing both of them, so I wouldn’t recommend it as a first trip for everyone, but it did make me re-evaluate everything and consider that every single thing I knew up to that point might indeed be wrong. It was what some people must feel like when they find religion….such a heavy experience….I’ll never forget that night.” SEE PHOTO ABOVE……(”The very last photo of me just before my psychedelic innocence ended and the acid kicked in. M y sister’s asshole boyfriend punched a hole in the wall from the next room and his fist came through right above me and my girlfriend’s heads later as we were peaking. The show on the poster below was our first show in Fayetteville. Our drummer got arrested for changing clothes in his car and barely got out of jail in time to do the show. We covered “Interstellar Overdrive” off the first Pink Floyd album. The Faith Healers were infinitely more important to me than Nirvana.”) Voodoo Moon continued to play locally and out of town with their heroes to the north, Fayetteville’s Faith Healers, 
another seminal early influence. “We used to rip them off so blatantly….and they even called us out on it once….it was hilarious!” By 1994 the band was feeling like it had gone as far as it could locally and their drummer initiated a move south to Dallas, Texas. The whole band agreed and made the move, where the above mentioned drummer promptly got a case of cold feet and went back home. Chris however is not bitter years later, “Why should I be? I plowed ahead through all that shit and had some of the best years of my life in Texas, AND I’ve gotten much better at keeping liars and hypocrites and cowards out of my life since then.” Voodoo Moon struggled for as long as it could in Texas through two very difficult years that left the last version of the band with Christopher as the only original member. “It was tough there for awhile…my wife left me…I was horribly depressed while we were still doing some very heavy mind altering drugs and pushing the limits of everything ….and to top it all off, I had a terrible falling out with Bart ( Lucas, Voodoo Moon guitarist), one of my best friends ever.” In the weeks following an absolutely shambolic performance at The Rock in Dallas, Voodoo Moon finally called it quits in 1996.
But I’ve Got Texas….
In the meantime…as his day job in Texas, Chris had starting working in record stores, surfing the last huge wave of the music biz until it got too fat and choked on it’s own tongue. At least as he was trying to put some kind of new life together, there was tons of new and old music to listen to that he’d otherwise never have been exposed to. The new sounds and inspirations were a motivation to get out and play again. The next three years were spent playing bass in a revolving door of female fronted groups….morose alt-rockers Psalm 69 
(”The only band I think I’ve ever been kicked out of…..for acting too much like MYSELF onstage……they wanted to keep up this facade of being depressed and pissed off and ummmm… SERIOUS……AND they even Pearl Harbor’d me a week before a show in New York at CBGB’s!!! Fuckers. The two guys in that band were the most uptight assholes I think I’ve ever played with.”), hard popsters Generika (”So many fond memories of this one….I miss every single other person from Generika…..I once ran onstage and did a “Soy Bomb” impression while the band we’d opened for was playing and a woman ran up and threw her drink on me. Another time we opened for Days Of The New and after the show a very lovely lady wanted to have sex with me even though I was obviously fashion challenged at the time……SEE PHOTO ABOVE, (”but look at those legs, freshly tanned in the Bahamas, from which islands I had indeed just returned from with my smoking hot flight attendant girlfriend…..sometimes my life sounds like a James Bond movie, I know…..ANYWAY….my point is that the alternative to dressing like Eddie Vedder in the 90’s was to try actually being in fashion, which meant adopting the boy band look that was just around the corner……and yes, I am exposing my chest at the direction of a photographer in the Generika promo photo below……I felt like Demi Moore in Indecent Proposal”).… and a very brief stint with Cosmic Slut (”A really great and very original band, although we
split up before I got to do any gigs with them”). There were other low key gigs as a bassist and one very memorable one when Chris played onstage foil to the late great surrealist comedian Mitch Hedburg for a sold out show at The Improv Comedy Club in Dallas. (”Another unforgettable night….he was tripping on mushrooms and doing his show while I sat behind him in a beret and shades like some damn beatnik, just keeping this mellow vibe going on the bass. He payed me $100 and was just the coolest guy. I really miss Mitch.”) He was burned out on playing bass in other people’s bands though, and started thinking about creating a vehicle for his own artistic expression. Sometime in 1998 two key things happened: One was that in the enormous stream of new music he’d been absorbing through work, Chris discovered psych rock visionaries The Brian Jonestown Massacre. As he tells it, “It was a blow to my psyche I hadn’t felt since I was much younger and first discovering The Cure or The Cramps.” The second was his renewed interest in four-track home recording ….he began to experiment in strange and sometimes chaotic sonic collages that over time began to resemble songs.
EL KABONG!!!
Rumors and speculation suggest that El Kabong was one of the many bastard children of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, born of a three legged armadillo ….raised by coyotes in the Texas wild….subsiding on nothing but roadkill and cactus, until the fateful day that a guitar fell from a passing van full of hippies, knocking him out cold and face down into a ditch. When he woke up….that sound was still ringing in his head as he screamed, “Goddamn!!! It’s ROCK N’ ROLL!!!” Truth be told, Christopher dubbed himself El Kabong in the summer of 2000, made the guitar his primary instrument and self produced the cassette only “Hit On Head Lessons” EP, handing them out to anyone who’d listen. By this time he’d set up a nice little home studio and figuring out ways that his musical heroes of the past had used the studio as an instrument was part of the way forward. He was on his way and the next logical step was a return to the live stage, so a search for like minded musicians began. Along came the enigmatic Gangster Rob, 
brilliant guitarist and fellow music obsessive. The two spent a couple of months recording and rearranging Christopher’s twisted tales of sex, booze, guns, drugs, murder, grave robbing and all other things synonymous with the creepy underbelly of Texas. Rob’s twang of rockabilly & surf-inspired guitar complimented Chris’ unorthodox singing/writing style and the duo set off down a dark path. The music of Royal Trux, Pussy Galore and The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion along with Kabong’s slant on what would become known as Improper Music became the template for their trashy garage rock clatter. “When my fuzzed out rhythm guitar meshed with Rob’s garage-tastic leads….it was pure evil sleaze….Rhythm & Blooze, I used to call it.” All that was missing was a suitable drummer and it didn’t take too long to convince metal head rock goddess, June to join the fold. The trio bonded (allegedly with a satanic contract on a bar’s cocktail napkin) and began rehearsing a live set, which they debuted with a gloriously sloppy noise at The Liquid Lounge in the Deep Ellum district of Dallas on July 18th 2002. “I was pretty wound up that night. Not only was I playing guitar onstage for the first time, but now I was the lead singer too….thankfully there was booze.” The next year saw them take on a steady stream of gigs spreading the gospel according to Kabong all over the DFW Metroplex…The Cavern, Club Dada, The Galaxy Club, Club Clearview and Chris’ personal favorite, Fort Worth’s Wreck Room… it seemed their momentum was building. SEE PHOTO ABOVE…..(”El Kabong and Lou Reed’s twin Gangster Rob laying down some devil blooze at Club Dada……the poor hairless man at the front is hypnotized into having a seizure…..and below…El Kabong tells ‘em where to shove it with June back there bangin’ ze drums…… a certain shitty beer company’s North Texas New Music Festival.”) A six song demo CD produced by Kabong and recorded at their groovy new rehearsal studio in Irving was used mainly as a promotional tool for booking, but a few were sent out for review. FortWorthMusic.com Editor, Grady Smith described the El Kabong sound as, “Crazy, weird, sick, humorous, insane, funny, great.” To paraphrase his review, “El Kabong is something else! It’s like they pulled a guy out of an insane asylum and put him in front of a microphone with a band behind him…this shit is crazy! 3 out of 4 stars!” On January 16th 2003 Chris performed his very first solo acoustic gig (also at The Liquid Lounge) and this most likely became the point where
El Kabong began to unwind as a band. He elaborates, “Everyone there that night says it was the best show I’d ever done and all of that encouragement on top of finding out I could really do it by myself gave me a sort of unnecessary ego boost that I didn’t really need. I was already pretty difficult to deal with sometimes. And when you have to blow yourself up to epic proportions in order to put out the performance you want to project, you can get a little lost in it.” A proposed deal by indie label Neat Damn Noise included featuring El Kabong’s “HOV Lane” (”I wrote this little surf tune that was about digging up corpses and putting them in your car, so you could drive in the carpool lane. Everyone seemed to like that one.”) on a compilation record alongside such luminaries as The Damned and unfortunately… it fell through. “I’ve always seemed to have a problem with capitalizing on momentum and missing opportunities on the business side….I need a good manager.” The band regrouped for a new round of shows including a stellar Valentine’s Day performance at The Cavern, and soon entered the Arlington studio of producer, Scotty B. to lay down songs for a proper album. Well…things proper and correct hardly ever worked out in the world of El Kabong. The CD project never came together and was scrapped. “I still have those masters and one of the best things about them is all the dialog between Scotty in the control room and us out in the main room. He kept yelling “ALIENS LIVE IN MY BUTTHOLE” when he was ready for us to start playing and we’d crack up every time. We should have just released that as a record.” They continued to play as many gigs as possible, but the forward progress of the previous year was gone and some inevitable tensions began to arise. A fallout later in the year between Chris and Rob led to a split he now says was silly and unfortunate. “These things happen in bands. People move in different directions. It’s not worth losing your mind over. I haven’t seen or spoken to him since, and he’s definitely a great guitar player, BUT he’s also a damn thief. Rob, if you’re reading this, I still want my goddamn PA back, motherfucker!” Chris and June quickly regrouped and revamped/rearranged the live set and the live sound. “I was playing through a guitar amp and a bass amp with a subwoofer. Lots of that good old low end gravy.” Despite an explosive debut of the two piece line up at The Curtain Club, the band
was quickly moving closer to it’s end. Some sporadic gigging over the next two months seemed promising, but June had a desire to move on to something less minimal. A final show in late 2003 at The Bar Of Soap in Dallas ended quite appropriately with Kabong passing out dead drunk on a pool table. Chris and June had a long discussion and decided that it was the right time to pull the plug on El Kabong. The decision was amicable and the two are still friends to this day. I believe it was F. Scott Fitzgerald who said “American lives don’t have second acts.”, but here was Mr. Elsken who not only seemed to be at the end of his second, but just about to begin The Third Act.
Continued on the History Part 2 page….