eben grace: every guitar known to man, including legendary specially modded mini toy rock, country, and rockabilly guitars, bass, drums, vocals
wil masisak: guitars, toy table saw, balloons, drill, drums, bass, toy keyboard, mellotron, vocals
don yaffe: guitars, a very fine leslie cab, drums like no one else in the whole world, bass, vocals
jason mannell: guitars, bass, cellophane tape wardrobe (don't t try this at home without covering your nipples first!), drums, vocals
special guests include...
jamey warren: trombone, drums
matthew taylor: poetry slam and chick singing department
patrick: hand drums, bass, & vocals
deborah greene: vocals
rick demey: saxophone
matt 'planet' planer: trumpet
virgil and kenny castro: handclaps
Influences
frank zappa, noise as art, the weird part of the white album, mental illness is okay to make fun of when it's yours, the tapes I made when I was 11 years old, captain beefheart, the ramones, sex pistols, they might be giants, the residents (!)
Sounds Like
the frogs, captain beefheart, frank zappa & the mothers of invention, the residents, sex pistols, the ramones, an alleycat attempting sex with a wolverine
you bastard: the band, the myth, the legend. april fools.
in 1995, I had this brilliant vision: create the world's worst band. pretty much everyone in the world had no freaking idea what I was talking about... except my good friend Eben Grace, who not only understood, he actually thought it was a _good_ idea. he's weird.
anyway, we decided that, at the heart of any sucky band, you'd have to have some truly horrendous songs. so, we set out to write what became a playlist of weird, stupid, dumb, bad, unusual, stream-of-consciousness-ish, ultimately catchy songs about domestic arguments, songs with only one chord, how both ballet and rodeo can get you aroused, car accidents, pop icons and how we were like them/wanted to be like them/what would happen if they were still alive, not doing herion and a bunch of other rich material which surprisingly had not yet been tapped by the songwriting population at large.
despite eben's friends making an intervention-like trip up from colorado springs because they interpreted this career move as a cry for help, you bastard was met with some enthusiasm by those strange/brave enough to hear about what we were doing, or who at least liked the t-shirts. (we sold a _lot_ of shirts) we therefore decided to play some shows. what was once a joke became an actual case of life imitates art or something like that.
we found an odd and kindred spirit in the person of don yaffe, who also brought us songs, including one which rhymed weiner with cleaner. we couldn't decide who would play drums, mostly because eben & I each wanted to be the drummer. we were going to split the drumming duties between just the two of us, but once we saw how incredibly funny don was when trying to play the drums, we knew we'd have to have kind of a musical chairs in a science lab vibe to the shows... which is what we did.
that's when the local indie rock station got wind of us and they decided to do do a live simulcast of our first show. we thought that was about the coolest thing ever and that it would, at the very least, lead to local stardom spearheaded by the people at the radio station who were huge fans and vowed to play and promote us every day.
which they did... for about a week until they went belly up and were bought out by a huge radio conglomerate named clear channel. uh, that would be about it for that.
however, the one thing we hadn't expected happened: people loved us. I mean 'you are my favorite band ever!' kind of love. I'd never seen anything like it.
you try your whole life to to something good and it's crickets... try to suck on purpose and they adore you. what a country!
anyway, eventually, we finished a cd and had our huge april fools' day release event at the largest theater in town: the 1000-capacity boulder theater. it was a bit ambitious but, we figured with some hard work on publicity and promotion, plus closing off the balcony, the 250 or so people we could draw on a wednesday nght would look okay in there and the talent booker told us he would be pleased with that kind of a turnout.
fortuntely, we got some rave press and we worked the phones and the streets hard. spring had sprung in boulder, wth a ton of people walking by the theater every night and in the days leading up to the show, we felt like we were on top of the world. we rehearsed (!) with special guests before the show and set up an enticing rafffle with door prizes including two horribly unattractive lamps and a kitschy yellow table.
about noon the day of the show, the skies became overcast and, as it will do from time to time in boulder's unpredictable spring climate, it got cold and a light drizzle began to turn to snow. by 3 in the afternoon, it had started to snow as heavily as I've ever seen it come down. by 6pm, driving was treacherous and we were convinced that our big night was a bust. personally, I figured we'd have almost no one there... I'd already heard that our prize hostess wasn't going to make the trip up from denver (although she had a good excuse, since she was going into labor).
at about 7, I walked outside into a winter wonderland. I might have seen one car moving slowly down the street. that's that, I thought, with less than an hour until showtime.
then a funny thing happened: slowly, erratically, bizarrely, people began to show up at the theater. for an hour or more, there was a steady stream of the bundled up, the four-wheel-driven, the crazy, and the drunk arriving at our show.
somehow we drew around 350 people in a town know for its easily distracted and unmotivated showgoers...on a wednesday night in a snowstorm. it must have been the raffle (although the person who won the table didn't take it home at the end of the night, so I still have it.)
the show was a rousing success, with guest appearances from jon stubbs (hamster theater, fraga) on trombone, todd ayers (sic em fifi, twice wilted) on sax and guitar, libby kirkpatrick singing delta dawn, 76 pinto's chris depinto on guitar, shark on bass, and jason mannell playing the part of 3rd you bastard guy to perfection, since by that point even don had decided the whole thing was too weird for him.
at the end of the night, I drunkenly invited everyone to come up on stage to join us in the singing of our massive encore rendition of hey, jude. seeing a stage filled with happy, drunk revelers, circled around me at the grand piano, arms around eben and jason, looking like something between the end of saturday night live and the finale of live aid was a memory I will not soon forget. long live you bastard.
