{"id":1777,"date":"2012-01-09T13:00:06","date_gmt":"2012-01-09T19:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/murileemartin.com\/wordpress\/?p=1777"},"modified":"2013-05-06T19:48:04","modified_gmt":"2013-05-07T01:48:04","slug":"how-does-a-hairy-sweaty-dude-end-up-with-a-name-like-murilee-anyway","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/murileemartin.com\/wordpress\/?p=1777","title":{"rendered":"How Does a Hairy Sweaty Dude End Up With a Name Like Murilee<\/em>, Anyway?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nAfter doing so much work updating the MurileeMartin.com homepage<\/a> so that it includes links to my writing, there’s another bit of housekeeping that needs doing: it’s about time I explained how and why I use a pseudonym that sounds like a girl’s name<\/em>. I’ve talked about it before<\/a>, but never really told the whole story in one place. Fasten your seat belts, because this Leyland P76<\/a> will be heading into weird territory. 
 
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\nBy now, just about everyone who reads my stuff knows that my real name is Phil Greden, aka Judge Phil of the LeMons Supreme Court, so why eschew my proud Luxembourgian-American<\/a> surname for such a confusing pen name? It all goes back to 1986, when my personal train jumped the tracks leading to a career in mechanical engineering and veered off into a bunch of art and writing nonsense; this trainwreck gets described in some detail in Part 1 of the Impala Hell Project story.<\/a> At age 20, I got into writing one-act plays, and\u2014 just as marihuana leads directly to the white horse\u2014 that led to writing and doing performance art<\/a> and (what would today be called) multimedia installations. Since I wanted to create my own sounds for these pieces, I learned how to use an early Tascam Portastudio<\/a> four-track tape recorder from my friend and artistic collaborator, Dan Goodsell (who has since gone on to become quite famous as the creator of Mr. Toast and friends<\/a>) and hooked up a bunch of cheap analog effects pedals to a shortwave radio and police scanner. Then I rounded up some friends who could play actual musical instruments, and\u2014 in early 1987\u2014 my new band was born. 
 
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\nAs Yunnies (Y<\/strong>oung U<\/strong>rban N<\/strong>ihilists), our big musical influences were Throbbing Gristle<\/a>, Psychic TV<\/a>, and Boyd Rice<\/a>, with heavy Laurie Anderson<\/a> and Butthole Surfers<\/a> overtones. 
 
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\nAt first, we called ourselves Bad Ronald, after the terrible 1974 TV movie<\/a>. Then we were The Sniffdogs (inspired by the drug-sniffing dogs that appeared all over the place during the Just Say No<\/a> madness of the mid-1980s), and then just Peehole. The band “played” as part of my performance art\/installation pieces<\/a>, and every so often we did “music” gigs to completely befuddled audiences. 
 
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\nBut still, we needed a better name for the band. We tried consulting the spirit of Randy Rhoads<\/a>, via Ouija board, figuring that the man who played such hair-raising guitar on “Over the Mountain”<\/a> would have some good ideas about band names. And he did, advising us to call our band Umber Stump or Submud Rubgun. The idea of making umber<\/a>-colored shirts reading “I’m Stumped!” had great appeal, and Submud Rubgun rolls off the tongue nicely, but those names just didn’t stick.  
 
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\nAt that time, my fiction writing was getting more and more difficult and unreadable, as my brain was plunged into a boiling vat of Finnegans Wake<\/em><\/a> and The Last Words of Dutch Schultz<\/em><\/a>. Burroughs and Gysin led me to Cut-Up Technique<\/a>, and my trailer<\/a> filled up with thousands of scraps of paper bearing words and sentence fragments. 
 
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