About The Crispy Critters

In June 1988, we were about to graduate. Was the old gang going to break up? I was heading to Stanford in the fall, but everyone else was going to go to UT-Austin. After a senior class dinner party one night, the four of us convened at Dave's parents' house, where Dave (a budding songwriter and musician) had a lot of recording equipment lying around. We turned on the mics and started making up stuff. Anthony and I found a rhythm together, with Dave remaining basically shy except for the occasional aside. We did this again a week or so later, and again as the summer rolled on.

Something new clicked when I got home for winter break that December. I made the unfortunate decision to tell my fellow critters that my girlfriend at college had told me I looked like a birch tree, which naturally they found hilarious. They started calling me "Birch Tree," and out of that we started improvising characters whom we eventually named the Wilbury brothers, four Texas boys with a crazy slant on the world. Less flattering names than "Birch Tree" got tagged onto the others: Anthony became "Runt," Dave somehow became "Clam," and Steve (and he's still sensitive about it) became "Snake." We started making recordings as if these brothers had their own radio show, and found those made-up identities (and outrageous Texas accents) to be a fertile source for improvisation. I still like some of the twisty logic that seemed to come naturally from these brothers, things like "Birch Tree is the oldest, although Runt was born first."

We only did a couple of Wilbury brothers recordings, but we did continue to do random recording sessions off and on as I completed my college career and moved back to Austin permanently. The last major recording we did was our own version of "The War of the Worlds," performed live with a great deal of silly sound effects, sometime in 1998, I think.

Up until September 2003, all four of us were still in Austin, but arranging our schedules to get the whole gang of critters together was harder every time, and the zeal for making recordings dissipated. Anthony and Dave have been married for a while, and Dave has a son. Anthony finally moved to Colorado, making a reunion unlikely for the indefinite future. One thing I promised the guys the last time we got together was that I would make an effort to transfer our legacy of recordings to CD from the cassette masters, and to assemble some sort of Best-Of collection. I didn't tell them I'd be doing this website, but I didn't know I was going to do it until just tonight.

It may be a while before I manage to get any of this material available on this website, and I'm not sure it'll really amuse anyone besides ourselves. It's mainly about four old friends entertaining each other, with the running pretense that it was a radio show with a loyal audience tuning in each week. However, this stuff looms so large in my own personal legend that I can't help but put some of it up. I hope you can glean some amusement from it.

---jrw 09-25-03