Press

Nerd Rock [8-track] (Cool Beans) 1982
Friendly Park Survivors [tape] (Nerd Rock) 1983
Monster (Fart Blossom) 1986
Wafer of Darkness (Nerd Rock) 1991
Festival of the Wedding of the Sea goat (Nerd Rock) 1993
The Figshta Diaries! (Nerd Rock) 2000

On a long-term mission to confront, confuse and ultimately comfort its battle-scarred audience, Three Day Stubble combines the most eccentric extremes of Houston (the band's birthplace) and San Francisco (its adopted home). Dressed in garish clashing polyester plaids, the group's self-actualization campaign has sometimes been hindered by the false impression that its music is a joke. In the long run, Stubble's aggressive lack of ego is more radically unsettling than all the razor blades and spiked dog collars in punkdom.
Issued as an honest-to-god 8-track tape, Nerd Rock compiles eight tracks, most of which resemble a stoned hybrid of Texas blues and the Master Musicians of Jajouka. After a successful West Coast tour in 1983, Stubble relocated to California, where it became a hit on the experimental underground. The group at this time was a tilt-a-whirl of outside collaborators, notably Brad Laner, who later founded Medicine.
The Friendly Park Survivors cassette is one of Stubble's more prescient moments. Contained on a small scale, the bustling psychedelia and exotic inclinations are cohesively integrated on "Beli & Bali," "Boogin' Around" and "Hurly Whurly Mama." Stream-of-consciousness vocalist Donald the Nut, Brently Pusser and Wilma combine the best of '70s wigout and '80s no wave with fiercely expressive self-invented guitar and home sounds. Dazzling and way ahead of its time — in every way (except self-importance) the equal of Stereolab and Tortoise.
Monster is a tuneless, rambling epoch of self-justification, meaning it fits right in with the prevalent DIY punk records of the day. Like a spaced-out Half Japanese, the band vamps through "Turbulance of Motion," the anti-hardcore spoof "Nick the Dick" and nine other ventures in search of the almighty positive mental attitude. Pusser shines as a wigged-out guitar hero; his reassuring riffs anchor the rhythmic and vocal flakiness. Still, hanging through linear jams for the full hour can be psychically exhausting.
The late '80s saw a great deal of personal turmoil for Three Day Stubble, with periods of inactivity that left co-founder Wilma back in Houston. A 1987 Texas jaunt produced a permanent second guitarist, and Wafer of Darkness put Stubble back on track. Newcomer Mr. Hungry joins Pusser for an awesome discombobulating dual guitar attack, enabling the bouncy polynote riffing of "Mind Over Matter." Deeply affecting revelations from maturing man-child-prophet Donald find him at odds with an alienating modern world in "Look Experience" and "Teckaknowlegy." The title track is a nerdy white-soul take (complete with catchy falsetto refrain) on James Brown.
Festival of the Wedding of the Sea Goat follows the band's hit-or-experiment quality, with convoluted boogie numbers like "Stone Lizard Angina" mixing it up amongst a cappella improv from Donald (fresh from performing his personal art form avi for Mr. T on The Gong Show). New bassist Murder'r Bob (ex-Tragic Mulatto) replaced ten-year stalwart Capt. Dan Man mid-recording. Comparisons to Captain Beefheart persist, though Stubble still does not seem at its core to be a rock band. If there's a Residents influence to be noted, it seems to hail from Eskimo, not Duck Stab. Frenetic as the band can be, there are no sharp edges — Stubble proves enthusiastically that music can soothe shattered nerves without sounding like aural anesthesia.
Three Day Stubble tightened up its musical act in 1993 with the addition of drummer Don Bolles (ex-Germs/45 Grave), replacing Dave "Spumoni" Cameron, a former Roky Erickson associate who commuted to Stubble rehearsals from Austin. Pusser concurrently joined Barbara Manning's SF Seals.
[Ian Christe]

Ungainly, incomprehensible, disturbing, and charming all at once, the music might be an elaborate aesthetic joke, or it might be a kind of radical schlock therapy (rumor has it that the band members met in addiction therapy). Whatever it is, there are swift undercurrents of fear, joy, confusion, and desperate besieged innocence: Far beyond nerd rock, Three Day Stubble is the sound of nice boys snapping under the strain· - The Oregonian

Since its inception in 1980, Three Day Stubble has been rubbing and wiggling its way around the US, Canada, all the way over to Japan and even as far as the prestigious Fringe Festival in Edinburgh, Scotland. The group has played with a diverse range of acts such as Beck, the Boredoms, Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, Faith No More, Jad Fair, and Sun City Girls.

Befuddled attempts to label the band bring comparisons to Frank Zappa, Pere Ubu, and Captain Beefheart, but they somehow fall short of the carnival of sights, smells and sounds that is Three Day Stubble. Brut cologne, pyroflatulance, dijiridoos, trombone, platform shoes, trumpet, drool, bizarre keyboards, and teeny tiny drumkit swirl in a thick stew of guitars peppered with Donald's inimitable vocal stylings.

Three Day Stubble shows the glory and horror of white American culture turned inward upon itself, and the incestual expulsive ramifications of our democratic free society. Three Day Stubble's hobby is showing the struggle of backward egos from a relatively tame society, that would rather turn away from looking at their problems and delude themselves while acting out the eccentric behavior brought about by such ignorance. Stubble exposes this "bubble life," never acknowledged by society, through music, dancing, and other entertainment. These guys are making way to allow and encourage the acceptance of individual expression and creativity, no matter how secret or personal.

The band refers to its music as 'nerd rock,' but that fails to capture the depth and scope of Three Day Stubble's strangeness. The impression begins with the band's attire, such as it is: eye -bendingly bad combinations of thrift store relics from the 70's that make David Lindley look like a GQ model. The nerd reference might strike closer with the musicians' earnestly goofy expressions. Still these guys make Bill Murray's ultimate "Saturday Night Live" nerd, Todd de la Muca, seem socially adept.

Musically Three Day Stubble is similarly unique. Try to imagine a hybrid of Captain Beefheart's advanced rythmic/harmonic weaves, the naivete and inadvertant dadaisms of the Shaggs, and the ingratiating enthusiasm of, say, Kukla, Fran and Ollie. Still not close.

On a long-term mission to confront, confuse and ultimately comfort its battle-scarred audience, Three Day Stubble combines the most eccentric extremes of Houston (the band's birthplace) and San Francisco (its adopted home). Dressed in garish, clashing polyester plaids, the group's self-actualization campaign has sometimes been hindered by the false impression that its music is a joke. In the long run, Stubble's aggressive lack of ego is more radically unsettling than all the razor blades and spiked dog collars in punkdom. - The Trouser Press Guide to '90s Rock

From suburban Houston it came, sporting more pomade than the entire cast of Grease; glasses that made Woody Allen look hip; and more polyester than a dozen lame 70's revival acts (only this stuff was never cool). It sang psychotically mindless ditties like "Be Nice" in which we are reminded to "Be nice to the people who want you to touch their heads," and "Figshta," the story of a girl who fell in with the wrong crowd, joined a cult and changed her name to Figshta. Musically akin to a lobotomized Captain Beefheart, this was high surrealism in nerd-rock clothing, and it grinned an idiotic grin as it giggled aloud its infernal name: Three Day Stubble. - LA Weekly

I recall closing my eyes to focus solely on the music and I jolted out of the darkness to look at them thinking, "What are you crazy? This isn't something you can close out!" It was a marvelous spectacle. What mugging; we laughed and hollered and hooted at Donald the singer and his henchmen - two guitar players squawking twangy abstraction from their amplifiers, nyurking and mrrowling about the stage like overstimulated monkeys in slow motion, contorting faces into comic grimaces of vexation, prowling footsteps exaggerated like goofy long jumpers; and drummer thumping bass drum small as a basketball, no hi-hat, no ride cymbal, just bapping snare and toms with Texan's madman rhythm, wearing cowboy hat and dark t-shirt and horn-rimmed glasses and detached drummer smile. Brently wore red wool hunting cap, flaps down over the ears, yellow polyester pants, and glasses, of course. Mr. Hungry's shorts were high riding, showed off long legs, platform shoes with red plastic flowers bow tie and glasses, or course. Donald is undeniably the frontman of this vision of chaotic geek solidarity and pride. He cavorts, he clowns, he talks between every song, he farts into the microphone, his nasally snake-like voice is the little boy who gave Mrs. Brigh, my second grade teacher, an apple every morning. The portrayal of his nerd vision is so dead on (Bozo the clown hair with question mark curl squiggled on forehead, orange socks dotted with black spiders, bow tie, high water polyester stretch pants, soft alligator skin shoes, and glasses, of course) his performance so energetically good-humored (our response seemed to elicit almost tearful gratitude) that I could only admire such evocative devotion to this depiction of pencil-necked geekdom. In fact it jogged my memory, put me back in the second grade, there I was, and I realized it's never changed, it's never been any different, we are still in the second grade in terms of the rawness of our emotions, how perilously close to the surface some people are, a breakdown could happen at any time. So I laughed, not out of superiority, no, out of recognition, and dug the angular jolt of the music, primal, loopy, like Beefheart of Pere Ubu, with great theatre no less. - Snipehunt

Discography
1982 - eight-track Nerd Rock 1983 - Cassette Friendly Park Survivors 1987 - LP Monster  991 - CD Wafer of Darkness  192 - 7" Welcome to the World  193 - CD Festival of the Wedding of the Sea Goat  199 - 7" Bing Bong 2000 - CD The Figshta Diaries  2002- CD Let Your Morsel Find its Way