by Tim McMahan, Lazy-i.com

Fell into a rabbit hole of my own making last night as I researched (via this website) Vitreous Humor, a Lawrence band from the early half of the ’90s who I really dug, but never came to Omaha. Well, that’s about to change.

Vitreous Humor has been added as an opener for the Feb. 4 Cursive concert at The Waiting Room that also features Criteria. Is this the same Vitreous Humor who sang “Why Are you So Mean to Me”? Yes, says Matt Maginn of Cursive.

“We are thrilled and shocked they can do it!!!!  Blew our minds.”

I could go into the background, but it would be just as easy to reprint my Dec. 6, 2006, interview, wherein I interviewed Danny Pound, frontman of Vitreous Humor. Pound was headed to Omaha back then for a gig with his solo band at the old Saddle Creek Bar, which gave me a chance to ask him about Vitreous Humor. The story follows.

By the way, Vitreous Humor rereleased their 1996 LP Posthumous this past May. Here’s an interview with the band on Bandcamp that accompanied the release. And here’s my favorite Vitreous Humor track. Better get your tickets while you can…

Now let’s go back in time…

Less Humor Per Pound
Danny Pound’s brief glance at Vitreous Humor.

You can’t blame Danny Pound for not being eager to talk about his old band, Vitreous Humor.

After all, they haven’t been around for over a decade, and his new band, aptly called The Danny Pound Band, sounds nothing like them. Still, there’s more than a few followers of Omaha’s mid-’90s punk-rock golden age that remembers Vitreous Humor and their grungy, post-punk sound heard on the classic 1993 7-inch, Harbor. The three-song single featured a teen-aged Pound warbling the words to “Bu-Dah,” the single’s catchy B-side that went “In the shithole where we live / Something’s living in the cellar / Keeps us all awake at night / Smells like cooking blood.” Remember it now? Probably not. Still, the song managed to make it onto a lot of mix tapes from that era.

Pound appreciates the memory, but said few people recall his former band around his hometown of Lawrence, Kansas. “Some younger kids look up to Vitreous Humor as one of the old-timey, classic Lawrence rock bands,” he said, “but no one ever comes up and asks about it.”

The story of Vitreous Humor is a rather short one. The Harbor single was followed two years later by a 7-song self-titled EP. Posthumous, a collection of unreleased tracks, outtakes and live cuts, was released on Crank! Records in ’98, well after the band already had called it quits and moved onto Pound’s next project, The Regrets.

A decade later and Pound has left Vitreous Humor’s jangle-grunge behind in favor of a more grown-up, sophisticated sound born out of his fondness for mid-20th century folk and blues.

“After The Regrets broke up, I discovered Harry Smith’s Smithsonian Folkways recordings, began listening a lot of blues and pulled out The Basement Tapes,” Pound said.

The result was The Danny Pound Band’s 2005 debut on Lawrence label Remedy Records, Surer Days, a collection of tuneful alt-country rockers that sounded like a cross between Centro-Matic and The Silos.

But even that style was short-lived. Since its release, Pound and his band — bassist Jeremy Sidener (ex-Zoom — another classic ’90s Lawrence band), guitarist David Swenson, and drummer Ken Pingleton (who replaced former drummer Dan Benson, who also was in Vitreous Humor) — have moved in a whole different direction, creating music that recalls ’70s-era So Cal groove rock. The band’s as-yet-unnamed follow-up to Surer Days was recorded at Black Lodge Studios in Eudora, Kansas, and is slated for release on Remedy Records sometime in the near future.

“You couldn’t call our new record rootsy. It’s more of an electric rock record,” Pound said. “I get bored quickly. I’m always trying to find new things to do.”

As for Vitreous Humor, Pound said he doesn’t understand why the memory of that band continues to live on in places like Omaha and Milwaukee — another city with more than its share of that band’s fans. “It must be a Midwest thing,” he said. “We never toured very much. I don’t think we even played in Omaha as Vitreous Humor.”

While he acknowledges that the band could have influenced someone, Pound is hardly proud of those early recordings. “I’m not offended by that era, but it doesn’t give me great pleasure to listen to that music,” he said before immediately correcting himself. “I take that back. Some of it was interesting, if a bit too earnest. I know there are those who liked it, and there’s nothing wrong with that.”

First published in The Reader, Dec. 6, 2006. Copyright © 2006 Tim McMahan. All rights reserved.

* * *

Read Tim McMahan’s blog daily at Lazy-i.com — an online music magazine that includes feature interviews, reviews and news. The focus is on the national indie music scene with a special emphasis on the best original bands in the Omaha area. Copyright © 2021 Tim McMahan. All rights reserved.