Newly reunited, the musicians in Nice Strong Arm continue to destroy themselves, listeners

Jason Asnes always appreciated performing live with Nice Strong Arm, describing the Austin, Texas noise-rock band as one that always left everything on the stage anytime it played. “I move and flail and jump around and just get every emotion out,” the singer and bassist said by phone in early September from his home in New York. “You destroy yourself, is the only way I can put it.”

Of course, these self-destructive tendencies were easier to bounce back from in Nice Strong Arm’s earlier days – a lesson Asnes learned the hard way last month when the band played its first shows in 30 years on back-to-back nights in Dallas and Austin. 

“After that Austin show, I woke up and sounded like I’d smoked for 40 years, and I never smoked,” Asnes said, briefly adopting a faux-rasp. “Then I was sore for a few days. And now we’re getting ready to do eight nights in a row, so it’s going to be a fun week.”

Prior to last year, the reunion, sparked by a promoter’s invite to join the likes of Moviola and Scrawl in the Catskills for this past weekend’s Dromfest, wasn’t on the radar of the trio, which billed a 1990 Austin concert as its last-ever show and for decades held to this promise. Looking back, Asnes said the split was amicable, the musicians content in the knowledge the band had then run its course and they were being pulled by life in different geographical directions. Following that final show, drummer Jeffrey Kent Hoskins remained in Austin, while singer/guitarist Kevin R. Thompson and Asnes split for the coasts, with Thompson eventually settling in San Francisco and Asnes in New York. 

In the years since, Asnes said he only listened to Nice Strong Arm’s music on rare occasions, which left him open to being surprised with the reunion requiring a deeper immersion in songs he hadn’t dived into, in most cases, since the late 1980s.

“And it’s interesting seeing the musical choices you made, like, why did we do this here? Why did we change this part? … Why did we play everything so damned fast?” said Asnes, who will join his bandmates in concert at Cafe Bourbon Street on Thursday, Sept. 10, supported by Ron House and Scrawl, with whom Nice Strong Arm performed routinely in its heyday. “And Jeff, our drummer, he didn’t play like other drummers, and his parts were really complicated and busy. And he’s 62 now and he was asking himself out loud, ‘Why the hell did I write such hard drum parts when I was 20?’ And playing them now is like doing calisthenics.”

Asnes experienced a similar, if slight, discomfort in revisiting some of the lyrics he penned for the band’s 1987 debut, Reality Bath, saying that most of the songs for the record were written when the bandmates were 18 and 19 years old “and a lot of them I just can’t relate to anymore.”

“With the earliest stuff, it’s hard to get in the mindset of being a 19 year old dealing with the world at that age, you know what I mean?” said the musician, who described his teenage self as “very idealistic and very passionate.” “We lived in a warehouse for a while in East Austin, and the only window was a garage door that went up. … And we practiced, we played, we did mushrooms and acid, and that was it. You’re young and you’re experimenting and you’re learning about the world. And that was your life back then.”

At the time Nice Strong Arm came into existence, Austin felt in a way like the center of the weird-rock universe, with the pioneering punk band Big Boys attracting the likes of Minor Threat, Black Flag, the Minutemen, and Bad Brains to Texas, where Asnes, then in high school, saw them play in venues that held fewer than 200 people. “And that creative energy was so inspiring, and Big Boys’ motto back then was, ‘Go start your own band,’ and that’s what a lot of people did,” the bassist said. “So, you could go to one club or another and see Butthole Surfers or Scratch Acid or any number of interesting, weird bands. And no one was worried about assimilating, no one was worried about sounding like someone else or fitting in.”

Once Nice Strong Arm progressed from engaging noisy jams to writing songs with at least a degree of structure, the band booked a show at the Austin venue Beach Cabaret, where Asnes and his friends had on occasion watched Daniel Johnston perform, sometimes still in uniform directly off his shift at McDonald’s. More shows followed, including a slot opening for Circle Jerks and a series of early morning, guerilla-style gigs that saw the musicians set up and play on top of a downtown Austin parking garage, inside a laundromat, and outside of a federal building where they had happened upon an outlet into which they could plug their gear. 

“It was 3 a.m. … and we went up to the security guard and said, ‘Hey, we’re filming something for MTV for the next hour or so,’ and he was like, ‘Okay, no problem,’” said Asnes, whose friend, the director Richard Linklater (“Slacker,” “Before Sunrise”), filmed the performance. 

Eventually, a tape of one of these earliest concerts – Asnes thinks it might have been a set opening for Sonic Youth – found its way into the hands of Gerard Cosloy of Homestead Records, who invited the group to play in New Jersey alongside Volcano Suns and Phantom Tollbooth. “And us being young and dumb, it was like, ‘Oh, okay!’ And we loaded up in a Honda with a trailer, drove straight from Austin to New Jersey, played a show, and drove back,” Asnes said, and laughed. “And then Gerard called and said, ‘Do you want a record deal?’”

With a little money in its pocket from the label, the band set out to find a spot to record, happening upon a nearby R&B/soul studio where neither band nor producer had a clear idea how to approach sessions. “We set up and Kevin started playing guitar, doing all this crazy feedback, and the producer ran into the room like, ‘Oh, my God! What happened? Is it broken?’” Asnes said. “And it was like, ‘No, no. That’s what I meant to do.’ ‘You want that sound on your record? What the hell’s wrong with you?’”

Asnes anticipates significantly less studio drama when the musicians gather following this upcoming run of shows to lay down new tracks, having written four songs together over this last year that have already become part of its current set. “We’ll probably … record an EP to start with and then see what happens,” Asnes said. “We always had a good time playing in this band, and it’s different now only in that our livelihoods don’t depend on it. I’m married, we have homes and houses, and everyone has lives besides that. This is more like a vacation or a getaway now.”