the near-mythical punk-funk outfit Stick Against Stone. Starting with the 2010 release of The Index of Directions, the long-untold story of an early ’80s basement band of post-hippie Pittsburgh renegades, led by the charismatic singer John Creighton Jr., began to take shape. Some excellent material salvaged from the band’s live archives soon followed (put out in chronological order), including the critically lauded 1985 set The Oregon Bootleg Tapes, which upon its release in 2014, Pitchfork also heralded as a surprise gem that “…not only deserves to be listened to, but nearly demands it.”

In fact, taken as a whole, the narrative arc described by the eclectic music of Stick Against Stone is rife with treasures aplenty, in spite of—or maybe because of—the band’s brief, turbulent existence. Between 1983 and 1990, the band lost its spiritual leader (Creighton, departing due to health reasons; later succumbing to a heart attack in April 1985 at the age of 30), relocated to three different cities (Brooklyn; Eugene, Oregon; and eventually landing in San Francisco), and endured several personnel changes (including a brief stint / abandoned recording session with Bad Brains frontman HR) before finally calling it quits after years of toiling in harsh obscurity. But from 1985 on, the band left a compelling body of work—spearheaded by founding drummer Richard Vitale (who died in 2010), guitarist Daniel Ramirez, bassist David Soule, horn player Robert ‘Xeres’ Shepard, and lead singer Sari Morninghawk—that to this day reaches new fans even as it redefines what it meant to be “underground” and “ahead of the curve” all at once.

With this legacy in mind, Instant (MediaGroove, 2015) vaults the SAS story firmly into the here and now. In a sense, it picks up where Get It All Out, the reunion effort by the Stick Against Stone Orchestra (an SAS offshoot featuring several original band members), left off in 2012. As MediaGroove label founder and producer Will Kreth tells it, Instant is the studio album that the band “could have made if they’d had the opportunity. It’s basically 30 years in the making, but a lot of the songs here sound as though they were written yesterday.”

True to the implied irony of its title, Instant started to materialize back in in the fall of 2007, when Kreth assembled Ramirez and SF-based Soule at Underground Sound in Greensboro, North Carolina (where Ramirez still resides) to record basic tracks based on new arrangements of key songs from the later SAS catalog.  Knowing that the cliché of “getting the band back together” is always harder than the rallying cry itself – and with original SAS drummer Vitale incommunicado at the time, enter Will Ridenour. Responding to a local Craigslist ad – in Ridenour (who’s globetrotting bio included studying and performing Afro-Cuban, West African and Brazilian percussion; kora in Mali, Senegal, and Sweden, plus US and European tours with the punk rock band Zegota) they knew they’d found their man.   A few years passed before Vitale resurfaced; he had intended to lay down additional drum tracks in New York City before he was found dead of a brain seizure in a friend’s Brooklyn apartment. Undeterred, Kreth kept up communications with former band members and recruited additional musicians, eventually bringing the tracks to the point where they were ready for some lead vocals.

Sari Morninghawk answered the call. She hadn’t been in a recording studio, let alone behind a microphone, for more than just a few years, but she threw herself into tracking new versions of songs that she’d helped define as the band’s lead singer through much of the ’80s.

“It was so much fun making this album,” she says. “Every time I was in the studio, in the back of my mind I was thinking, ‘How can I do this and keep paying my mortgage?’ I’ll admit it took me a while to get back into shape. I felt a lot of pressure. I was a little nervous, and I could hear it when we listened to the first tracks that I did. Eventually I got into the right frame of mind where I just felt comfortable. You walk in the door and you just feel a little more pumped-up and excited, and all the nervousness is gone.”

The diversity of material on Instant reflects the omnivorous nature of the band since its inception, but with a particular organic flavor that came out of relative isolation in Eugene, Oregon from 1984 to 1985, where most of these songs were written. Funk, rock, disco, dub reggae, samba, West African highlife, Afrobeat, even a little country/western twang – all of it coming out the other end of the blender as inimitably their own. Maybe it’s no accident that a few of the band members worked at a local natural raw juice cooperative (they even wrote a song about it).

With Morninghawk, the immediacy of her husky voice (at times androgynous, at times unmistakably female) – and perhaps because of the life she’s lived, lends believability to the tunes that can’t be faked. A post-punk/pre-Riot Grrrl vocalist and single mother who stayed political all her life, Morninghawk knows the value of connecting. “That was my whole thing [back in the day]. That was my shtick. That’s why anybody that became a fan liked me, because it was all from the heart and passionate, and just going into that character and being all the way there,” she says. “That was the one thing I could do to make people become fans of the band when we were performing live. It wasn’t necessarily about having a beautiful voice. We had a lot of fans in Eugene, and at that time I looked around, wondering ‘who are the people that like us?’ It was a very diverse crowd, and then I started looking for my fans—like, who looks at me like, “Oh, isn’t she great?” And it was all these young girls.  It was like, oh my God. We should have stayed in Eugene longer, obviously. We had such a fanbase there. The press maybe would have come to us, even though we were in Eugene, if we had really worked it.”

Not having a true album to share with the fans didn’t help, either – so once the band did break up, there was very little evidence they had ever existed.  Changing that fact has been a goal of guitarist Dan Ramirez – well before the 2007 sessions in his adopted home of Greensboro, but especially since. More recently, in 2014 – Ramirez was diagnosed with renal cell carcinoma (kidney cancer) and it had already spread to his shoulder. After losing one kidney to surgery, Ramirez takes it day by day – fighting it with chemo and radiation. “Stick Against Stone is a great story and a part of my legacy,” he says. “To see these songs hit the streets and get into people’s ears, that will be just fantastic.”

With both Instant set to come out and rehearsals starting this fall for a new version of the group to play live, it seems that another chapter in the long-lost dream of Stick Against Stone is perhaps a tiny step closer to reality.

-Bill Murphy