Eugene Robinson, co-founding vocalist and leader of the long-running San Francisco noise rock band Oxbow, has left the band. On his Substack, he writes:
…after 36 years of creative work I can’t think of anything more horrible than to have to face the fact that I am now like Dr Dre. Not in the I Am a Billionaire part, but in the part where he left Death Row records. I remember him famously being called on to explain why he left and since he was dealing with Suge Knight, a man who if he wasn’t already in prison for killing someone might have actually killed some other one, he was…circumspect.
Circumspect, though he did say some version of this: you ever go to a party, and you start to get uncomfortable, and then you get so uncomfortable that you have to leave? That’s why I left Death Row.
While I don’t feel that my life is being threatened, my physical life, I do feel, under the weight of irreconcilable differences, none of them aesthetic or musical, that I now must leave OXBOW. Recent circumstances have caused me several dark nights of the soul and while it feels/seems crazy to kill my involvement in that which I started, I think it necessary so that maybe a kind of healing can take place that will make OXBOW a comfortable place for me to be again. If not, then not.
So the last five shows of the tour were scrapped and I’m sitting in a cheap hotel in Fuengirola, Spain, thinking of how the band began, and how the last video we just released from Love’s Holiday was so aptly named. “All Gone” it was and perhaps seems to be.
So that’s where we are, and this is where I am. For the first time in just about forever I don’t have any idea of what to do. I’ve always envisioned that by bringing OXBOW to the masses I was engaged in what might crazily be considered G-d’s work. Bring me your lonely, downtrodden and so on…a tribe for people who have no tribes. Sure I’ve punched people in the face at our shows before but this was usually a course correction for people who thought punching me in the testicles was sexy.
However, the very real prospect that we might have contributed to the misery of the world makes me sick to my stomach.
He also talks about originally intending Oxbow’s 1989 debut album Fuckfest to be a suicide note, his own personal future plans, and more. Read the whole thing here. So far, no statement has been issued on the band’s website or social media.
Oxbow last released Love’s Holiday on Ipecac in 2023.
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Top photo: Oxbow at Brooklyn Bazaar in 2017 by Greg Cristman. More here.