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.
Near the start of this year, I had come up with a couple of ideas, large, expansive, and incredibly labor-intensive ideas that I wanted to contribute to the greater writing community.
However, I kept bumping into the fact that while these ideas are really good, they didn’t quite fit on a personal domain where I wanted the freedom to riff on the latest episodes of television or vent about things I found on the internet. Putting those ideas here would muddle their inherent value, dragging emphasis away from the niche, and creating confusion for readers.
Compound that fact with the pure amount of industry watching I’ve been doing over the past few months, and searching, largely in vain, for a centralized website that caters to fiction writers the way that CopyBlogger caters to freelancers, and I saw a definite need.
After talking with a few friends and about the idea, I decided to make the leap. So, on February 18th, I grabbed another domain name and started outlining ideas. Within a few days, the general idea had started to take shape, and I was putting up the first of the content, as my Twitter friends have likely noticed.
For the name, I’m going with Fiction Matters. I couldn’t believe that the domain was free. I think it’s a great play on words – a statement about the importance of fiction, and a statement on the site’s content.
The method is to leverage the entirety of the knowledge that I’ve learned about blogging, from being a journalist, from my experience writing fiction, and from my experience writing many company blogs and working in SEO. To that end, it’s kind of a culmination of knowledge related to both writing and the web.
The goal? Well, that’s to create a solid resource for fiction writers, which I believe will only become more numerous as our current economic crisis pairs itself with the decrease in the barriers towards becoming a fiction writer.
What to expect from Fiction Matters
Tips – In addition to writing tips, I plan on addressing tips for being a writer, tackling the business and promotional aspects which are only going to be become more important to writers in the new age of publishing.
Tools – Technology is increasingly expanding the methods and options that writers have at our disposal. I’d like to address those.
News – It’s important to know what’s going on in the industry. And news comes from many, many sources. I plan to accumulate all of those into one easy to find location.
Resources – I’ve been slowly assembling a compendium of knowledge which addresses the myriad needs of the fiction writer. From a database of industry people and where to find them online to a dictionary that addresses the plethora of writers terms. The goal is to put it all online and make it all searchable.
Community – This one depends on others. Writing is a lonely art, and talking with other writers is a boon. It’s my hope that when the first four pieces come into place, the fifth will evolve organically.
Call to Action
Yes, it’s going to be a lot of hard work to get everything off the ground. The upshot is that once everything is up there and active, Fiction Matters will be a very valuable resource for those who love fiction. Please let me know if you’re interested in contributing in any way.
It was sometime in the past few days when I realized that I am embarking on the first vacation longer than a four day weekend since perhaps getting out of the Army. In the many years since then I have kept myself busy, typically balancing several side projects while maintaining at least one job and occasionally school.
But today marked the first day off, of nine. No work, at least not in the paid kind. It’s hard to come to mental grips with, shrugging off the rhythm of life that I’ve grown accustomed to, and as sure as one would expect, I was awake early this morning – weekend be damned. I fought the urge, and managed to roll back over. Sleep came as sleep is wont to, that is, sleep came in fits.
I woke up before my girlfriend, sliding out of bed and grabbing pants without waking her. I made it into my office, checked my email and the news online before popping out for a smoke and settling onto the couch for some quality time with the television.
I had grabbed a couple of movies the night prior, and wanted to get back to watching those, but settled instead for a bottle of Coke and a rerun of Law and Order on TNT.
The girlfriend woke up an hour or two after I did, the footsteps of our neighbor, or as we refer to him – the Elephant Upstairs – too loud for her to continue. The two of us hung out in the living room until she had to go to work. I managed to make my way through both of the movies from Friday night before she had to go to work.
We swung downtown together, and I came back home. Mother called, she’s excited about us coming into town and wanted to discuss sleeping arrangements. I brushed her off after a few minutes, I hadn’t eaten yet today and had a box of fried chicken and a six of Long Hammer waiting for me.
I tried to sit on the couch, but quickly grew bored with that. I shifted instead to my office and watched a movie. But, it wasn’t long before I settled down to what I realized I have to do on my vacation.
I popped open a couple of document windows and started working. So far, day one hasn’t been too bad. I just wish I could shake this black cloud from over me.
Twelve days from right now the polls across America will officially be open. By that evening we will hopefully know the results of the election, and all partisan bickering aside, we’ll be glad to see it over with. This election session has been best described as a contact sport, and one in which several words were used to much that they robbed of all meaning. As a fan of words, and the meaning inherent, I propose that two weeks from today we impose a moratorium of no less than two years on the following words and phrases. If one of these words is needed during those two years, one must consult a thesaurus and find an alternative. After the minimum of two years, each of the following words or phrases will be brought up for a reinstatement hearing to determine whether or not they have rehabilitated enough to be returned into the normal lexicon.
- maverick (and extensions thereof)
- change
- folksy
- pro-America
- that one
- reformer
- deregulator
- Hussein
- liberal
- communist/socialist
- approved this message
- The Bradley Affect
- Joe the Plumber
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.