ABOUT ME:
Ida Prescott saw The Get Quick in concert at the dawn of the 80s when she was eleven and impressionable, with orthodontic hardware that could tune in Radio Luxembourg on a clear night. Her older brother snuck her past security by claiming she was an emotional support dog. Just kidding, the world didn’t have them back then. Security, that is.
Suffice to say, that night changed her life.
If you’re one of the lucky few who can remember ever having seen The Get Quick live, then you know where Ida’s coming from.
She has spent the ensuing decades as a dilettante archivist, compulsive scrapbooker, and unreliable narrator, currently operating The Get Quick Dossier from an apartment above a Psychic Dentists Network among the pines and fire escapes of Vermont. Her hobbies include decoding liner notes, haggling with bootleg dealers, dressing absolutely fabulous for no reason, and mailing sternly-worded letters to the BBC regarding their “lost” tapes policies.
Ida is a normal person, she swears. But she has come to believe time is a Möbius loop, pop music is a form of telepathy, and The Get Quick are either the best-kept secret of the 21st century or a mass mind-bender shared by those sensitive to disturbances in the space-time continuum. Possibly all of the above and more.
She is not entirely sure whether she is documenting history or inventing it — but she’s terribly committed to the shoes either way.
HELLO AGAIN
Hello again, it is I, Ida, the (half-accidental) heroine of the ultimate underground mystery.
Like all things in my life, including my life, this site is a WORK IN PROGRESS.
Here I’ve conjured up a little summary of pieces I hope to soon share on The Dossier:
“Things I Own That May or May Not Be Real (A Partial List)”
Like a bootleg 8-track labeled “TGQ: Live at the Mindshaft, 1969” found in a vintage cigar box at an estate sale in Schenectady. A handmade replica of Mitch’s signature silk scarf embroidered with his motto “The Beat Knows Where You’ve Been,” found tied to the railing of a Quaker meeting house near Adamstown. A fanzine dedicated to TGQ, “The Quickening” Issue #8, found in a sealed manila envelope on a bus stop bench in Athens. A postcard from Rio de Janeiro dated 1971, addressed to “Sibyline,” detailing a series of TGQ dates, and signed simply “C.LB.” (Coco LeBree?) And a lingering suspicion that this antique mirror I bought at a Poughkeepsie flea market is showing me the band’s old Bottom Line dressing room whenever viewed from an angle with the light hitting it just so...
“Zak Don’t Remember, ‘No No Nope’”
An interview with my otherwise awesome older brother.
I’ve asked him a dozen times over the years. Every time he gives me this same baffled look like I’ve just asked him if he was once the McMayor of Flavortown. It’s not denial, exactly. It’s something weirder. He truly believes there was no such night, no such band. And the thing is — Zak remembers everything. He remembers the name of his 6th grade teacher’s hamster. So what does it mean when he forgets this?
“On the Subject of Coco LeBree and Other Women Who Seem to Appear in My Dreams.”
A reverent but irreverent yet conspiratorial entry about The Get Quick’s mercurial frontman/frontwoman/frontperson. You know what I mean. Or maybe you don’t?
“What I’ve Dug Up from Dead Forums”
A reflection on the rabbit holes of the early internet — where half the surviving information about The Get Quick once lived. Like, back in 2003, there was a GeoCities site that claimed the band’s 1975-79 albums were encoded with coordinates. To what... we never got there. I emailed the webmaster, but it bounced right back. The site’s long gone now, but I did manage to print out one page. I carry it in my wallet, like a weirdo. It smells faintly of toner and heliotrope. I’ve always had the uneasy feeling that it might be the most important thing I own.
“What I’ve Dug Up from Dead Forums”
Well, here we go. The essential companion to the tentative first steps of my digital pilgrimage. Picture me late at night (fully clothed, you...), hunched over a humming monitor with 23 open tabs, scrolling through forgotten threads where usernames like “NeonHaunt69” and “Vi0letEntropy” speak in riddles and half-memories. Can you taste the decaf? And an array of snacks that need not be named?
The first thing you learn about chasing The Get Quick online is that most of the roads are closed, overgrown, or on fire. The second thing is that people remember things — vividly, passionately, weirdly — but rarely in the same way.
I started trawling the old music message boards sometime in the late ‘90s, back when everything still reeked of dial-up ozone. I’d search The Get Quick and get mostly Get Rich Quick schemes, but maybe three or four legit hits: a link to a GeoCities shrine full of broken pixelated images; a thread arguing that “Mammothgon” was in fact an actual physical tour, but also metaphysical hoax; someone named “StarCalypso” swearing they saw Coco LeBree solo in ’88 struck by lightening and vaporize into a lighting rig mid-show; and a cryptic one-liner at the end of a heavily redacted government document that concluded: “The band should be considered a breach and a threat.”
Which, you know, helpful.
Since then, I’ve lurked on:
Obsolete fan forums for obscure prog bands (shoutout to “EldritchEther” where someone claimed their uncle had worked as Vanderwolf’s handler in the early 90s)... Paranormal subreddits archived to static HTML... A truly cursed BBS devoted to “discontinuities in recorded music history,” where someone posted a spectral spectrogram of “Hex Tape 48” and was promptly banned... And one lovingly maintained LiveJournal that mostly posted dreamy poetry yawns until — out of nowhere — a 2004 post titled “The Get Quick Were Real. Irrefutable Proof To Follow.” Well, well, well. Nope. There were no follow-ups. The user vanished.
What I’ve managed to learn is this:
Everyone remembers a different version of the band. Some say they weren’t vaunted Classic Rock gods so much as left-of-center psychedelic garage weirdos. Others cast them as post-punk pioneers who singlehandedly invented 90s alt-rock. Some recall their peak as a glossy 80s New Romantic outfit. A passionate few insist they were literally working for the Ministry of Defense.
The principal band members and their secondary associates assemble in the histories like a team of superheroes. Or mutant aliens. And everyone I’ve spoken with configures them slightly differently, their roles, skills and attributes becoming jumbled.
There are multiple versions of things floating around. I’ve seen three different versions of the band’s oft-cited MERRY HELL LP, none of which contain the same songs.
The deeper you dig, the stranger the stories get. People talk about frequencies that made dogs speak Portuguese, subliminal chants hidden beneath drum solos that loosen teeth, tactile memories of venues that never existed.
Also:
Someone out there calling themselves Sibyline_333 seems to know a lot. Maybe way too much... The key phrase “Tune Up, Black Out” shows up in multiple places, often spray-painted behind stage doors or scribbled in liner notes... And I’ve personally seen photos of shows I know I didn’t attend but swear I can spot myself in the crowd...
So, no — none of this is what you’d call evidence. But it’s enough to keep me up nights, headphones on, scanning through cassette hiss like it’s calling my name.
If you’ve found anything — anything at all — please write. The old forums are dead.
But I’m not.
— Ida