A belated RIP to Merrill Womach, and a Nardwuar the Human Serviette excerpt

I interacted once with Merrill Womach, who - I noticed the other day - died back in 2014. I had missed it.

Womach was kind of a strange story in the world of music: a burn victim and subject of reconstructive facial surgery who wrote inspirational (Christian) songs for other burn victims, assuring them that they were happy before, and would be happy again - as he does in his video for "Happy Again." It's bizarre enough a scene that the mind reels a bit when trying to take it in, but even the hardened ironist, I presume, will register that it's kind of a great thing that he did this, even while chuckling at the weirdness of it all - because in a world where 90% of what passes for "Christian" is repugnant - from hate speech against gays to hoarding wealth as a sign that you are among the elect to traumatizing children with one form of sexual damage or another to voting for vicious bastards like Donald Trump - with all of these things somehow associated with Christianity, trying to cheer up and give hope to the disfigured, using your own disfigurements as an example, is a shiningly moral and laudable calling.  Having my own sorta-disfigurements lately, I've been thinking about Womach a bit and the example he set and wanted to repeat this story, which all took place due to Nardwuar the Human Serviette.... and a box of 8 track tapes.    

Nardwuar - in an interview that initially ran on this blog, then ended up in Mongrel Zine - was telling the story about how he and the Evaporators released an album on 8-track tape, due to his ambitions to release in every format possible: "How we got 8-tracks going was, simply, we bought some 8-tracks, we bought an 8-track recorder, because you know, a lot of them are out there at Value Villages, and we simply went from cassette to 8-track! And Scott, the drummer of the Evaporators, drew some covers, got a shrinkwrapper, sealed it up, and bang! It looked like new. He's a bit of an artist himself, so he really made it totally store-ready. And we've probably sold about 1,000 8-tracks over the past, like, 15 years. At one gig, in the mid-90's, in Penticton, British Columbia, Canada, we sold 23 8-tracks. It was amazing. They were flying off the shelf like pet rocks."

The "hardest part of making 8-tracks," Nardwuar explained, is getting clean ones to record on.  "There's lots of 8-tracks that are out there, but lots of times when you buy them, they're all dirty - y'know, like, trucker scum is on them. Or they're very old. So we were lucky that we actually happened upon a huge cache of 8-tracks, and those were found in Spokane, Washington. A guy we know called Cappy got the entire 8-track output from Merrill Womach, after he passed away."

At the time I had no idea who Womach was, so Nardwuar rounded out the story: "He's one of those guys profiled in that Incredibly Strange Music book that Re:Search put out. You've probably seen a couple of volumes of those. He was sort of a preacher fellow, and unfortunately he had an airplane crash and became terribly disfigured. But the great thing is, he kept on with his life, and he always put his disfigured face on the cover of his records. Eventually when he did die, he had a whole bunch of 8-tracks in his garage. Cappy phoned up Scott from The Evaporators; Scott drove down there in his 1967 Volkswagen bus, completely filled it up with 8-tracks, and then drove back to Vancouver. And that's probably why we don't make any more 8-tracks: Scott is tired of making them, and also, we've run out of 8-tracks! We can still buy them from Value Village, but it really sucks having to buy them for $3 or $4, for something that's totally dirty and may not work. These were 8-tracks that we taped over, but they had never been used, they had all been sealed up. So that was kind of our 8-track foray."

But here's the thing - you interview someone in a case like that, you have to fact-check them, even when it's Nardwuar (ESPECIALLY when it is Nardwuar; you don't want to associate a person of his stature with incorrect information, which I did at one point when passing him on an incorrect Eugene Chadbourne story that I hadn't checked, back when he interviewed Eugene). I looked up Merrill Womach, read the Wikipedia page - and there was no mention of him dying.

Did someone just not update Wikipedia? I did a search for "Merrill Womach obituary" and found nothing - or at least not anything about him dying; I did seem to find what seemed to all appearances to be an email address. I had to think carefully about how I worded my message. 

Mr. Womach -

Sorry to bother you; I am a music journalist currently writing an article on another music journalist, Nardwuar the Human Serviette. Nardwuar relates that he believes you are dead, but I can find no evidence of this online, and assume there would be an obituary somewhere, since you are a public figure. Since I can find none, I am basically writing to ask, um, are you still alive? (If so, are you still musically active?).

A.

I still have his reply: "Actually Allan, I died two years ago but I frequently check my email accounts. Actually, I’m alive and well. I’m 82 years of age. I’m not singing any more."

That was on June 29th, 2009 - he had another six years left to him. I have no idea if he had cause to think back on that interaction.  He didn't really want to be in the article, perhaps after discovering the bulk of the story was about recording over his music (I felt a bit sheepish about explaining that). I recounted about the other burn victims I have known in my life, and how brave they seemed to me. Not much else came of it, but that line about how he died two years ago but still frequently checks his email was utterly delightful, so he scored big points from me (not big enough that I picked up the next Merrill Womach album I saw at a thrift store, I confess). 

That's it - my Merrill Womach story. Rest in peace, Mr. Womach. 

Maybe I should record another version of "If I Was a Bat" with my new Frankentongue, to inspire fellow tongue cancer patients?