Q&A: The Liechtensteiner Dullest Man Ever?

I'm beginning to believe Memphis Mafioso Lamar Fike's maxim: There are no coincidences. I'm at a party the other night, and my friend Margo Mathis is regaling us all with stories about teaching at a certain prep school in the Ohio hinterlands. She's going through her English department colleagues offering bon mots about each one's eccentricities (eccentricities uniquely Englishy) when her non-stop hilarity hits a pregnant pause as she comes to a guy named Roy. Suddenly she seems to channel a character from a long-lost Nathanael West novel and says, "A duller man, you'll never meet." In the context of her monologue and the spirits flowing at the party, the statement is the funniest sentence I've heard in months. When we all revive ourselves from our respective laughing fits, somebody asks, "How dull?" "That's just it," Margo explodes like Minnie Pearl on laughing gas, "there's nothing more to say about him." And then, as if fate and Fike were guiding me, I had to ask, "What's the guy's last name?" And Margo replies innocently, "Roy Whittier, only he spells it with a 'y,' W-h-y-t-t-i-e-r. That's the only thing not dull about him. His last name that begins with 'why!'" Another fit of laughter from everybody except me. Could it be, I thought.

Roy Whyttier, AKA The Liechtensteiner, bass player for the sub rosa, sui generis early 70s rock band from Dayton, Ohio, United Notions. If you've heard of United Notions at all, you're either obviously a music obsessive like I am, or you had your ears fine-tuned to an AM station in April of 1973 when the band's one and only "hit"--"Pacify Me"--briefly bruised the pop charts for a week or two. You might even recall that United Notions was (in)famous for its members' official names: The Tongan on guitar and vocals; The Albanian on lead guitar; The Sri Lankan on drums; and The Liechtensteiner on bass.

Like much of my musical knowledge, I learned about United Notions second-hand, from my crazy freshman college roommate Alex Hoke, who disdained studying in favor of writing and distributing his amazing fanzine, Hoke's Plunderer Fortnightly, a horribly scrawled and photocopied rag he'd distribute outside of the most boring mainstream rock concerts of the era (we're talking Toto, Foreigner, Styx, et al.) in hopes of converting one or two mullet-sporting mall-rockers every two weeks. "If loving music isn't about evangelizing like the Jehovah's Witnesses, you're doing it a grave disservice," he liked to say. United Notions was just one of the many artists Alex turned me onto in those days. He hated the band's one and only album, Assembly, on which "Pacify Me" is found, calling the album "a crock of crap" and the single "mere pablum." But he could and did wax ecstatic about the early single, "I'm Your Shadow" b/w "Lazy Tune." "The b-side's just that, a lazy instrumental," he told me upon first showing me the 45, which was signed "Lovingly, The Tongan," "but my God, the a-side is sheer noisy manna. One of the half-dozen uber-great lost 45s of the era."

In the nearly thirty years since first hearing "I'm Your Shadow" in a musty dorm room, I've never been able to argue with Hoke's assessment. When I listen to it now it sounds simultaneously before and after its time, as if The Byrds had had Nine Inch Nails play on an outtake from The Notorious Byrd Brothers. The trippy, stalker-like lyrics, the primal drumming, the shimmering yet somehow stuttering guitars, and the highlight for me, always, the bass runs that sound to my ears now like the product of Mike Watt after a ten-day crystal-meth jag. All of this in 1972 on a 45 on the obscurely legendary Earsaatzz label. Absolutely stunning.

"How could a band make one record so astounding, and then never even come close to scaling such heights again?" That was Alex Hoke's last sentence in his 3700-word treatise on the song/group. In the pre-Internet era yet, Alex had somehow tracked down a blurb in a Dayton weekly about United Notions, which "unmasked" the band. The Tongan was Tommy Corvello, The Albanian was known only as Clark, The Sri Lankan was Louis Pettigrew, and The Liechtensteiner was one Roy Whyttier. Who knows, when I can't remember where I've put my wallet half the time, why I can still recall with absolutely no prompting the full line-up, stage names and real names, of United Notions? Alex made me a dozen or so cassette tapes from the year we roomed together, tapes I mostly still have and play infrequently. Over the years I've dubbed songs from those tapes onto tapes I made for friends, and I'm pretty sure "I'm Your Shadow" was the song I dubbed the most. Imagine my delight, then, when about eight months ago I received an e-mail from Alex Hoke. I hadn't heard from him since probably 1987, but he tracked me down on the web, just to say hello. He's a corporate lawyer now, unnaturally. Anyway, he asked for my address, and a week later I received a package with a long screed about his musical obsessive past and his new pride and joy: a turntable that enables him to digitalize all of his old wax. He included three CDs of what he thought might have been some favorites of mine from way back when. Track 3 on disc 1: "I'm Your Shadow." So I've been listening anew to the song for months now, and then Margo Mathis mentions she works with a guy named Roy Whyttier. Too much. I had to pursue. After the party I cornered Margo, who thought I was nuts to claim that her Roy Whyttier could have ever been in a rock band. Nevertheless, she e-mailed me the guy's phone number, and last Saturday afternoon I called. Paydirt! What follows is a rough transcription of my conversation with Roy Whyttier, bass player on one of the craziest psych-out songs of all time, and, truth be told, "a duller man, you'll never meet."

SPITOUTYOURGUM: So how did you hook up with the guys in United Notions?
Roy Whyttier: I knew Lou Pettigrew, the drummer, through shop class in high school. He called me a couple years later and said his band needed a bass player.

SOYG: When did you pick up the bass?
RW: At my audition for the band. I was, well, still am, a sousaphone player. Marching band and all. But I was pretty handy with any instrument back in those days. I told Lou I never had played the bass, but he said something like, 'It's only the bass. You can do it.' Well, I was working my way through night school at the time and my mother always said I needed a diversion, so what the heck, right?

SOYG: What can you tell me about "I'm Your Shadow"?
RW: It was the first song we recorded. About two days after they accepted me in the band. Tommy Corvello wrote the lyrics, which I never really liked. Or understood, to be honest. They kind of offended my sensibilities. But I was a hired hand, I figured. I had been playing the bass for all of three days, so I didn't really know what I was doing. We did it in three takes.

SOYG: How did you get that sound, though? It's really mind-blowing.
RW: I don't know about mind-blowing. Like I say, I didn't really know what I was doing, and I think I had turned the knobs all wrong. Plus, the engineer, some guy named Dayton Dickie or something, was quite inebriated, and just after that third take started I guess he passed out on the soundboard and did something to the bass. I hated it when I heard it, but Tommy thought it sounded frisky or freaky or something. Plus, we couldn't really record anymore because Dayton Dickie was incapcitated. I always liked the other side of that record, "Lazy Tune." That was my composition.

SOYG: Where did your names come from?
RW: That was all Tommy. When I joined the band they had their names already. After meeting me for five minutes and hearing me play, Tommy just said, "Right, you're in. You'll be The Andorran, no, you'll be The Liechtensteiner." That's it.

SOYG: What can you tell me about the whole "sex and drugs and rock'n'roll" thing? Any good stories from the road?
RW: Oh, we played here and there. Never tried any drugs myself. I've seen them and seen the havoc they wreak, though.

SYOG: Any groupies? Everybody always says they joined a band for the girls.
RW: Well, I was betrothed at the time. To Muriel, my wife of thirty-four years now.

SYOG: What about the album and your one hit single, "Pacify Me"?
RW: They cut the whole thing in two nights. I wasn't there, though. When I joined the band I made it clear that I had my priorities. There was a stamp collectors convention in Moline that I had made plans to attend months before, so I went. Always have clear priorities, that's what I always tell my students.

SYOG: Stamps?
RW: I'm a lifelong philatelist. Been moderationg the philately club here at school for twenty-three years. Still keep in touch with the twenty-nine former members.

SYOG: So you didn't even play on the album, or the hit single?
RW: No, I think the Tongan did all the bass. Always sounded pretty good to me. In fact, I never played with the guys again. After they cut the album and I returned from Moline, they told me I was out. I think that's when Clark started taking over, which ultimately proved to be the band's demise.

SYOG: What was Clark's last name?
RW: I thought it was Clark. He was kind of a guarded guy back then. Well, he still is, I guess (slight laughter). He's in prison for burning his house down. Unfortunately a wind kicked up, I guess, and burned two neighbors' houses down too.

SYOG: Wow. Have you kept in touch with any of the other guys over the years?
RW: No, I moved on. Tommy is a born-again Muslim I heard. And Lou tragically died in an elevator accident just a few years ago.

SYOG: So you teach English. What's your favorite book to teach?
RW: The Elements of Style. Strunk and White.

SYOG: Well, I mean literature.
RW: E.B. White is literature.

SYOG: How might one of your students describe your classroom demeanor?
RW: Hmmm. Exacting.

SYOG: Ever tell your students stories from your rock'n'roll past?
RW: To be honest, I haven't thought about United Notions in decades. When you called I thought you were asking about the limited edition of United Nations stamps that were issued ten years ago.

SYOG: Well, I just have to say, "I'm Your Shadow" has given me hours and hours of listening pleasure over the years, and I want to thank you for your contribution to such a wonderful song.
RW: I hear my wieners boiling. I have to go now. Nice chatting with you.

Margo don't lie. But neither does thirty-seven-year old digitalized wax.

United Notions-I'm Your Shadow