I hear band names, and some of them don’t even know they’re bands. Prefork, The Govs, Podium California – those are just the three most recent. The names just jump out from unsuspecting places and in some quantum sense, a band forms. And I’m not the only one.
And the problem with fake band names is that once you start looking for them, you see them everywhere. You start assigning genres, idiosyncrasies, member names, album art. If you know your music history – this is exactly how Def Leppard started.
Sometime over the past year, I started tweeting the band names I’d find in CAPTCHA codes at Mixx.com. And I wasn’t alone. The volume of CAPTCHA bands started to increase with new discoveries found daily. At Twitter events, I’d end up talking about CAPTCHA bands with other users – Brad Carr, Dean Browell, and Carrie Fleck being the three other local CAPTCHA band spotters.
Yesterday morning I received a DM and Facebook message from, good guy and friend of the blog, Dean Browell. He was taking the CAPTCHA band mini-meme to the next level – a Facebook Fan Page.
The idea is just as simple as the Twitter action we’d been doing for the better part of a year now, albeit in a bit longer form and benefiting from multimedia. I quickly roped Justin into the group, swallowed my rather strong dislike for Facebook, and jumped in.
So far, we’ve managed to get six CAPTCHA bands up, and I’ll include one of them below. If you’re into that whole Facebook thing, and you’d like to Fan the page, here’s a link. It’s still early, but there’s some quality stuff up there.
The Govs
Prison State
Orange County in the late seventies was known more for it’s love of disco and The Eagles than it was of the proto-punk movements developing in Detroit, London, Manchester, and New York City. But when Steve Greer’s disco-glitter band, The Lovelights, signed with Columbia Records, the teenage Lester Greer had enough.
Adopting the stage name “Butch” and teaming up with two fellow teenage ne’erdowells, the younger Greer brother launched what is arguably the first SoCal proto-punk band – The Govs. With much of the band lacking anything close to musical talent, and having spent most of their lives in the well-to-do Los Angeles suburb, the trio overcompensated with profanity and aggression.
The band’s first album, “Screw California”, was twelve adaptations of the Richard Berry classic “Louie Louie” with alternate lyrics and a tempo that clocked each track in a mere ninety seconds. But the messages, deriding the recently ended Vietnam War, the disastrous Nixon presidency, and a perceived Orwellian police state in which “the government collud[ed] with corporate interests to enslave the masses” resonated with the students of Laguna Beach High School.
The lo-fidelity honesty of the first album was quickly lost as parents of band members fronted the money for a true demo, the better known “Prison State.” Under the tutelage of a Benny Stills, a failed musician in his own right, Greer and his cohorts were put through the paces in a real studio, instructed in the use of their musical instruments, and given a basic understanding of song writing.
The experience is believed to have been detrimental to the outcome of not only the album but also the band. Produced to within an inch of its life, the Govs’ second album was derided as derivative, meritless, lacking in real world experience, and nearly causing the death of punk before the burgeoning genre was truly alive.
Several record labels professed an interest in Prison State, and it received a rather wide release. The band, however, broke up shortly after completion and thus never toured in support of the record. The impact of Prison State was far greater than any involved could have predicted, and is seen as a major influence on modern day acts such as Green Day and Nickleback.
The Joanna Newsom is out there, somewhere
What follows is an actual conversation between myself and a long-time friend, Justin Koeppen. No spelling has been corrected.
PBR: Ever listen to “The Do”?
JK: Never haves.
PBR: I was hoping they’d sound remarkably different. But they don’t, really. Female lead is kind of like Hope Sandoval, but not enough.
JK: How much more Sandovalic does she need to be?
PBR: About a 1/3rd. What unit of measure are we using?
JK: A sliding scale of preciousness that ranges from Pink to Mum.
PBR: Nice.
JK: It can also be repesented as a “Newsom”, as in “her voice is so twee she registers at 9.5 Newsoms.”
PBR: I didn’t think 9.5 Newsoms was realistically possible. I mean, it’s been mathematically proven under ideal circumstances. But get out of the lab once in a while, man
JK: Ok. So 9.8 Newsoms is theoretically possible in a pure vaccuum at or near absolute zero, and 10.0 Newsoms reaches the threshold of current science. It’s beleived that an artist with a 10.0 rating would occupy all genres simultaneously.
PBR: The God Artist, also known as the Les-Bosson particle.
JK: That’s if you subscribe to the current model of Harp String Theory.
PBR: Which, you know, I do. I could never get behind the Zepplin Field Theory
JK: Well, yesh, the physics break down as the artist approaches the event horizon, also known as the Coldplay Line, beyond which no talent can escape regardless of the force of opposing hipster cred.
PBR: I can’t abide by any school of thought that believes that Coldplay is actually inevitable. It screams of creationism, as if the boring and uninspired of the world are preaching some fanatical version of musical religious doctrine.
JK: It’s true, the musical cosmos operates much more akin to the Rolling Stones model; it began ages ago with a bang, then over billions of years colled and evened out to form a void filled with mostly empty space, continuing it’s course until it’s eventual heat death.
PBR: I’ll stick with Jenny Lewis Wave forms, which give you a really interesting quotient when you feed Kate Nash into the equation
JK: You know that’s dangerous. They tried a similar experiment in the 90s by trying to introduce a Belly variant into a stable Susan Vega waveform. that’s how we got Lisa Loeb.
PBR: But that overlooks the Costello-Dylan hypothesis, that the universe is expanding and contracting in repetition for infinity, with each action spinning off an infinite number of variants. In some parallel universes, Dylan was actually good in the 80s.
JK: Unless you believe in the Guided by Multiverse theory, wherein each song Robert Pollard pens creates it’s own parallel universe where the lyrics actually make sensen.
PBR: Bah, that theory hasn’t been used since people started to really trumpet the qualities of The Magnetic Fields Theory – in which happy songs are really sad songs, but sad songs are really sad songs too.
JK: Ah yes, the old Grandaddy era school of thought.
In the final two weeks before the inauguration, still President Bush has to perform a time-honored Presidential tradition – he must write a pair of letters. The first letter is to be sent to the president before him, Bill Clinton. The second is to be given to his successor, Barrack Obama.
Thanks to the speed in which information travels in 2009, copies of these emails have already leaked out.
The first, addressed to Bill, holds the following:
What can I say? After the tragic events of 9-11, I was able to gut the Bill of Rights almost completely. Can’t get rid of that pesky 2nd Amendment, and there aren’t many troops here right now to quarter on account of the two consecutive wars I have them fighting. The rest of the Constitution I was able to bend and finesse so that the careful system of checks and balances our founding fathers put into place were basically nullified. I was able to dictate the laws to Congress, and the Courts? Well you saw how I got elected the first time.
And let’s not forget the millions of Americans who were left bitter following the government’s lack of response to Katrina. Or the skyrocketing price of oil which is still attempting to recover from my time in office. Or the housing bubble. Oh, and I would be a fool not to mention the economy being in the worst shape it’s been in since the Great Depression.
Yup, and I still didn’t get impeached. I guess that thing you told me is true, it doesn’t actually matter what you do, as long as you don’t get a blow job.
W.
The second, addressed to Barrack, holds the following:
Not it!
PS. I put my finger on my nose when I wrote that.
W.
Only so much of this is actually satire. Sadly, here’s to the history book, let’s hope they don’t screw the pooch on this one.
Bradley Robb likes TV and books, and has an intense dislike for cinnamon. Once, Bradley stopped a Soviet T-60 with his middle finger. Bradley writes speculative fiction and edits Fiction Matters, and never really got the hang of talking about himself in the third person.