On this day just six years ago Matty Luv left the earth forever. He was my best friend, my partner in crime, the Huey to my Bobby, the Hall to my Oates. I played music with Matty for a period of almost twenty years, and I can honestly say, without bias, that he was one of the great songwriters of our time. As great as Dylan, D. Boon, Darby Crash or that guy that stabbed himself, can't recall his name. Matty's amazing gift for lyrics and sweet pop hooks was uncanny, perhaps the byproduct of his very restless and tortured inner psyche, perhaps not. In honor of his memory I have decided to share the Yogurt tapes. These are extremely special, when he was alive Matty only gave these to those he deemed worthy of listening to them. I guess that's a little elitist and fucked up, because these songs are so fucking great, it'd be a shame to die without ever hearing them. And people do die, believe me, motherfucker, they really do. I guess a little history of Yogurt is due. Yogurt wasn't really a band. It was the name given to Matty's home 4 track recordings which started around 1993 and continued until his death in 2002. There are countless hours of weird lo-fi little songs, skits, sound collages, trippy layers of loops floating around on oddly labeled cassette tapes, but these songs were the ones that made it on to the home-dubbed editions Matty gave away. Matty always labored to make the package of the tape he was giving away very personal, painting the box and hand writing the song titles (which often changed.) Yogurt features alot of guest performances by whoever would drop by our 24th street flat at the time. Wherever you hear live drums that's me, and Matty had me sing here and there (that's me on "Small Town Boy".) After Hickey broke up in 1997, we formed a live line-up for Yogurt with him singing and playing guitar, me singing and playing drums, and Chubby (Hickey's original bassist) on second guitar. We translated some of our favorite songs from the tapes into live rocking numbers and played them, high as fuck. It was kind of a shambles, the live Yogurt thing though, we were all at our worst in the chemical way, and I felt the more we played live like this, the more we tarnished our already spotty legacy. We did manage to eke out a pretty good 15 minute studio recording with this incarnation, and if anyone is interested I can post that too some time. Anyhoo, I quit, and Yogurt was relegated back to the chord/wire/tape miasma of Matty's closet. Matty made recordings under the banner of Yogurt until his death on October 5th 2002. October 5th, this day will always break my heart.
