“We just booked ourselves as our own solo acts and then booked our friends. On the first night, Jeff Jensen did a puppet show called Mr. Manchild and Spoons, a weird performance thing about the punk band The Germs. Jeff Jensen and I had been booking and performing our various acts together for the past year. He’s a good sport. Outside of the people in Sweet Thunder, he was willing to do Starbucks before anyone else would. Another one of the acts was Warren Fischer and Casey Spooner who collaborated together for the first time that night. Casey was an actor before he started singing, so he had this monologue about an indian cab driver who tried to have sex with him in a cab. Warren and Casey put it together with music that Warren had composed on the computer and they made it into a song. But that’s how Fischerspooner was born. Then Casey did another act as Monotrona. Jodie McCann was the drummer for Sweet Thunder and she also has a solo act as Monotrona. She was originally going to perform at Starbucks, but then had to go out of town on a business trip. We couldn’t find anyone else to do the gig last minute, so Casey dressed up in her costume and performed her songs. And then Sweet Thunder headlined the show that night, and that was that. Sweet Thunder consisted of: Jodie McCann, Lizzy Yoder, Alexander Eiserloh, Casey Spooner, Gavin Russom, Peter Redgrave, Heather Romney, and me. It was a band that started off with 8 people, then 6, and then 5. A bunch of us were friends that had met in the early 1990's in Chicago at art school or from just living in the same Chicago/Wicker Park neighborhood. Lizzy’s lived in NYC since 1990. I knew Lizzy from when I was still a teenager in Denver, Colorado. I met Gavin in NYC. He was familiar with me from when I was in a band called The Scissor Girls. But basically, we were just a bunch of stray performers who had gone solo until I got us all to join forces. After talking to everyone about various concepts for a new band, I came up with this concept of trying to make music about Niagara Falls. They all loved the idea and then the ball started rolling.” - Kelly Kuvo, from a phone conversation with Aleksandra Mir, November 12, 2000.
"Double hard chew", 2006, Davide Balula