The Ballad of Christian Wolfcock

[above: The author’s son is impressed into service.]

My one-day-a-year band, the Monkey Power Trio, has a new record out. It’s a 10″ called The Ballad of Christian Wolfcock, and it was recorded over two sessions – our 20th day as band, which was spent in the godawful exurbs of Atlanta in 2014, and our 21st day as a band, which was spent in a nondescript neighborhood of Cleveland in 2015. While our website hasn’t been updated since 1996, I think you can still order records through it, should you want to obtain a copy before investors scoop them all up. These particular records, if I’m not mistaken, are $15 each, which includes shipping. As for the quality of the material, I’ll just say that it’s not bad for five people who pick up instruments only one day a year, and walk into each session with not so much as even a single idea written down… Here, to give you an sense of it, is a link to one of the tracks on this most recent record. The song is called Feed Your Hunger. [Make fun if you’d like, but I’d like to see you do better in one take, accompanied by drunken 50 year old versions of the kids you sat next to in high school school math class.]

For those of you who might be new to the site, and don’t know this particular part of my origin story, the Monkey Power Trio formed back in 1995 with a promise between old friends one hot, summer afternoon in Brooklyn. On the spur of the moment, we’d decided to make a record. We gave ourselves just one hour. We gathered whatever instruments we could find, and we made our way into an unlocked basement storage room somewhere, where we proceeded to scream and beat on things while an old cassette recorder whirred away, suspended from a string tied to sewage pipe. The result was a 7″ record, which we decided to call The First Hour, acknowledging the fact that we’d agreed, shortly after finishing, to meet up and do the same exact thing every year until the point when only one of us was left alive. And, surprisingly, we’ve stayed true to our word for nearly 25 years now, despite the fact that, every year, it becomes exponentially more difficult for the five of us to get away from our real-world obligations, express ourselves creatively, and put up with one another.

A SPECIAL OFFER: For every copy of The Ballad of Christian Wolfcock to be sold and shipped between now and Sunday, a copy of the record will be surreptitiously snuck into a daycare facility, senior center, public library or forest somewhere in North America and left to be discovered.

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6 Comments

  1. Posted June 11, 2018 at 8:01 pm | Permalink

    I should add that the song “The Ballad of Christian Wolfcock” didn’t make the record, so, if you’re thinking of buying a copy in hopes of hearing a really awesome song about a witch orgy in the woods of Salem back in the early 1690s, save your money. I liked it, but the consensus was that it was too sexy for America.

  2. Alice Krum
    Posted June 12, 2018 at 6:28 am | Permalink

    Never in the history of the world has a group of men accomplished so much with so little.

  3. Iron Lung 2
    Posted June 12, 2018 at 6:30 am | Permalink

    It is good that you do things. You look back on your life and say that you did something besides smoke weed, defend racists and insist that the world is 4,000 years old.

  4. Eel
    Posted June 12, 2018 at 7:41 am | Permalink

    Building on what Alice said, you should be proud of what you have accomplished. Some incredibly talented bands go nowhere. You, in less than 25 days, and with little in the way of natural ability, have built an empire. If you can keep this up for another 25, you may event get a Wikipedia page!

  5. Steve Swan
    Posted June 12, 2018 at 9:43 am | Permalink

    Can I use the title “The Ballad of Christian Wolfcock”? I’ve got an idea for an adult feature.

  6. MPT
    Posted June 12, 2018 at 9:54 am | Permalink

    Only if we can have parts in it, Steve. Four of us would like non-fucking parts. The fifth demands to be in every fucking scene. He has been waiting for this opportunity his entire life, and he doesn’t want to blow it.

    Actually, he wants to blow it a lot, in every direction, but you know what I mean.

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