Waiting For The Axe To Fall

The Zoo Crew has got a short, sharp one on the turntable, and the Zoo Freaks are going to want the whole story before the needle lifts. "Waiting For The Axe To Fall" by the Andy Van Dyke Band runs two minutes and fifty-seven seconds, and it sits at track ten on Tales From The Edge Volume One: Attacked By A Giant Boa, the 1991 compilation Dallas station KDGE put out through Reel George Productions, with Dragon Street Records and Mercury also on the spine. The disc was compiled, produced, and arranged by George Gimarc, and the sleeve still carries the Allison Broadcast Group and PolyGram copyright lines. Discovery Systems pressed it, matrix number P230200B. If you ever held one, the barcode reads 727371094529. It is not a lost national single. It is a North Texas radio souvenir that happened to catch a songwriter on the way from the folk rooms to a harder band, and then to something quieter still.

The title of that first volume is pure pulp, and that was the point. Gimarc told the Dallas Observer years later that the cover art came out of Men's Life magazine, the same lurid source Frank Zappa mined for Weasels Ripped My Flesh. Volume One wears a giant boa on the front and a bill of local bands on the back. The Andy Van Dyke Band is parked between Fever In The Funkhouse doing "Deep Ellum Blues" and Stranger Than Fiction doing "So Many Days." Reverend Horton Heat is on there with "Party Mad." Course Of Empire has "Coming Of The Century." Ten Hands close the disc with "World With No Money." Three On A Hill, Lesson Seven, Psychic Surgery, The Bat Mastersons, Safety In Numbers, T42, A Deux Voix, Shoulders, Picket Line Coyotes, and Johnny Reno fill the rest. That is the company this little axe song kept in 1991, and it is why collectors still hunt the thing.

Gimarc had been cooking this idea since his Sunday night Rock and Roll Alternative shift on KZEW 98 The Zoo, the station this crew is still trying to keep alive over at THE ZOO. He used to cut touring bands at Planet Dallas on off-hours, a deal he called the Planet Dallas Sessions, and he already had a master tape of local music sitting around in 1983 that he could never afford to press. Cheap CDs and a music-director job at The Edge finally let him do it. He paid for the first Tales From The Edge disc out of his own pocket. Bill's Records and Sound Warehouse stocked the series without a wholesale fight, because the airplay sent people through the door. Profits from one volume paid for the next, with a little left for charity. Across eleven volumes and about 199 tracks in five or six years, the series moved something like 100,000 copies. Gimarc has said the discs are about 95 percent unique material. Jeffrey Liles, who heard those Sunday shows as a teenager and later ran rooms of his own, put it simply: George took a shot on local artists, and the CDs were an extension of that shot.

Nobody has turned up a sit-down interview where Andy Van Dyke walks through "Waiting For The Axe To Fall" line by line. The published record is thinner than the song deserves, which is how a lot of these Edge tracks survived, as a listing on a jewel case rather than a press bio. What the paper trail does say is where the man was headed. Discogs and the later band histories agree on the outline. After the University of North Texas he moved to Austin in the late 1980s, played solo in the folk rooms, and cut two solo cassettes, Spark and Politics & Allergies. The Andy Van Dyke Band came next. That group hardened into Drop The Gun, which also left an independent cassette behind. In 1994 he and Drop The Gun guitarist David Ducharme-Jones turned the thing toward alt-country and four-part harmony and called it Rainravens. Herb Belofsky on drums and Dave Evertson on bass filled out the early quartet. Van Dyke sang, played guitar, piano, and harmonica, and wrote the lovelorn ones.

The debut Rainravens album was cut and mixed in 1995 at the Woodshed in Austin, co-produced with Gary Hickinbotham, and it came out on Dejadisc in the States and Demon in Britain. The pitch at the time was lyrical invention in the Steve Earle and Jackson Browne lane, with a melody sense closer to the Eagles. "What Are You Doing Tonight" was the Austin Friday-night song, pick up the girl, drive around, no particular destination. Blue Rose in Germany kept the records coming: Diamond Blur, Rose Of Jericho, One Last Saturday Night, a best-of, then Garden Rocket in 2007 after a layoff. Ken Lieck, writing in the Austin Chronicle in 2001, called the band electric singer-songwriter music that rocked without stepping on the words, and he singled out the world-weariness on One Last Saturday Night, including a Kennedy song called "Zapruder Blues" and the line about the last lonely one set in motion by the sunset gun. Gurf Morlix and Mark Hallman turned up as guests. In October 2007 the band played the Crossroads Festival in Bonn for Rockpalast, Van Dyke on vocals, rhythm guitar, and harmonica, Ducharme-Jones on lead, Evertson on bass, Rob Lee on drums. A comment under that broadcast still says Andy was a friend from high school days and had grown tremendously. That is about as close as the public record gets to a personal note.

So the axe song is the early chapter. North Texas college years, a move south to the folk circuit, a band named after the singer, a turn toward hard rock, then the harmonies that got them to Germany. The track itself never became the calling card. The calling card was the KDGE disc with the boa on the cover, pressed so a Dallas alternative station could prove the local rooms had songs worth keeping. DFW Legacy Series has since pressed a vinyl sampler from the Tales series, oceanic coke-bottle clear, three hundred copies, a reminder that people still care about that run of CDs. The first volume, and track ten on it, is the one the Crew is spinning.

There is no verified official Andy Van Dyke Band website, and no confirmed official Facebook, Instagram, or X account for the band or for Rainravens that a modern browser can open and that actually documents this song. Old MySpace listings have gone cold. What does load, and what does name the track, is the artist catalog at Andy Van Dyke on Discogs, right beside the compilation page for Tales From The Edge Volume One: Attacked By A Giant Boa. Gimarc's own recollection of the series lives in the Dallas Observer, and Lieck's later take on the songwriter is still up at the Austin Chronicle. That is the paper trail. The rest is two minutes and fifty-seven seconds, and then the next record.