Home & Garden

Home & Garden were a Cleveland-based post-punk band, formed after the breakup of Pere Ubu in 1982.

Founding Ubu drummer Scott Krauss and a more recent addition, bassist Tony Maimone, decided to retreat to the recording studio after the band dissolved. Joined by friends Doug & Pat Morgan on guitar, the musicians, freed from the regular expectations of a band, made odd, free-form instrumental rock songs. They released the resultant experiments as an EP titled How I Spent My Vacation.

The musicians, satisfied with the EP, decided to actually form a group and recruited former Ubu guitarist Jim Jones and local poet Jeff Morrison to be their singer. The band developed an album’s worth of material and played live several times before Maimone left to pursue other bands during the sessions for their first and only album, History and Geography. The remaining members finished up the sessions and released it to some critical acclaim and a bit of success on college radio.

Faced with some commercial promise, the band tried to get back together, replacing Maimone with Michele Temple and adding a synth player, Robert Wheeler. They became a regular live outfit, gaining a regular audience in Cleveland and recording some scattered songs here and there, an EP in 1985, some compilation tracks. Jones left in 1986 and within a year, he, Maimone and Krauss were playing for the re-constituted Pere Ubu. Home & Garden was placed on the backburner until Maimone & Krauss left Ubu in the early ‘90s, unhappy with the band’s new direction.

The time had come once again for Home & Garden, and the group reconvened in the studio to exorcise some ideas Krauss couldn’t use with Pere Ubu. They recorded a full album which has yet to see the light of day. The group continued to tour well into the present day, though they seem to have kept rather quiet since 2014.