Song of the Day # 433 Come On

'Mike's mother, looks like the Mona Lisa...'

One of the constant joys of writing this is the constant joy of stumbling over bands that slipped through the cracks, that I or it seems the most of humanity never knew existed. There seems to be no end of them.Here's one from the late '70s New York Punk scene. Talking Heads fingerprints all over it of course but that's hardly a bad thing. First song Mona Lisa sounds to me pretty much like a lost classic. Here's our old friend Robert Christgau writing about them.

'New York City 1976-80 [Heliocentric, 1999]
Who are these guys? There were five of them, including a female guitarist--neatniks all, favoring white shirts, black pants, and short hair. Half of this belated testament was recorded CBGB 1978, a final track Hurrah 1980. But I'd never heard of them, and when I checked with New York Rocker's Andy Schwartz, he remembered only the name. On the evidence of these 16 homages to first-growth Talking Heads, from long before it was determined that the world moved on a woman's hips, we were missing something: the halting yet propulsive, arty yet catchy ejaculations of the uptight nerd as subversive geek. A five-year-old sex fiend joins suburban tennis players exposing their underthings join two straight songs about kitchens join the incendiary "Old People": "Get out in the streets/Turn over cars/Elbow young people/Set garbage on fire." Not important, obviously. Funny, though. B+'

An here's a biography from Richie Unterberger:

One of the most forgotten bands of the late-'70s New York punk and new wave scene, Come On recorded the self-released single "A Kitchen in the Clouds"/"Don't Walk on the Kitchen Floor,," and showed up on the ROIR compilation Singles: The Great New York City Singles Scene with "Disneyland." With their jagged funk-rock rhythms, spiky amelodic guitar figures, and the yelping, half-hysterical vocals of lead singer Jamie Kaufman, Come On were probably more similar to the Talking Heads than they were to any other major New York band of the time. There was also a lyrical minimalism that was in some respects similar to that of some Talking Heads material. The fragmented, almost non sequitur narratives of housewives playing tennis, five-year-olds and their sexual fantasies, and "Businessmen in Space" suggested, as David Byrne sometimes did, a not entirely charming half-lunatic. That similarity with the Talking Heads doesn't go terribly far, however. Come On weren't nearly as good, and certainly lacked any of the pop hooks that the Talking Heads boasted at least occasionally from the very beginning.

David Byrne, appropriately enough, was a supporter of the band and took David Bowie and Brian Eno to see them at CBGB's. There was a meeting with Eno in which the possibility of collaboration was mooted, although apparently nothing came of that. Jamie Kaufman has said that other admirers of the band included Thurston Moore, Klaus Nomi, artist Jeff Koons, actor Willem Dafoe, and performance artist Ann Magnuson, none of whom were nearly as famous in the late 1970s as they would become, and hence probably not in a position to help Come On become more famous. (Two of Come On's members did go on to work with Nomi.) The "A Kitchen in the Clouds"/"Don't Walk on the Kitchen Floor" single, together with demos and tracks done live at CBGB's and a live version of "Disneyland," were assembled for a retrospective CD compilation, New York City 1976-80, released on Heliocentric in 1999.