So, I took to Google and found the following ad… which does seem to feature a severed unicorn head rather prominently.

While I like the idea of sending Samsung a letter demanding compensation, I don’t know that we’ve got legal grounds. Even if my business partner Melissa and I were the first to suggest that, for the good of all mankind, we need to hunt down all of the unicorns on the planet and liberate their heads, I don’t know that the idea is legally protectable… Are there any intellectual property attorneys in the audience? If so, is it possible to copyright the decapitation of mythical beasts in a general sense, or would someone have to be specific as to the method?

For what it’s worth, if I was ripped off in this instance, it wouldn’t be the first time that an ad company had done so. As some of you may remember, several years ago a pervasive Fox Sports ad started running which featured a song written and performed by my one-day-a-year band, The Monkey Power Trio, without our written consent. In that case, we’d known about it, and we’d been exchanging emails with their advertising firm, but they started running the spots before we had a signed contract in place, which is apparently a big no-no in that industry. In the end, we worked it out. We didn’t end up making much money for it, but we learned a lot… most notably, that ad agencies, devoid of any creative ideas of their own, just mine subcultures for things that can be appropriated. And that, I’m thinking, is probably what happened in the offices of CHI&Partners, when they were called upon to find something “edgy” for Samsung.

[Here's that Fox Sports ad, if you're interested.]

Sepaking of MPT, the new record is now out. It’s called Misreattached, and it was recorded a few summers ago in the basement of Ypsilanti’s Dreamland Theater. (While we’ve managed to keep our promise of meeting one day a year since 1995 to record a single, we’re a bit behind when it comes to actually getting them out, hence the fact that our 2010 recording, which is our 16th, is just coming out now.) I’m tempted to take this opportunity and apologize for these four songs that we’ve just committed to vinyl, but, given the fact that they were all written from scratch and recorded in a few hours time, with no practice, by old men who only pick up instruments one day a year, I think that I’ll try to curtail my self-criticism for the moment, and, instead, share this very nice letter that we just recently received.

Dear MPT,

…I worked at — when I was an undergrad 10-15 years ago, and played your records on my show quite a bit. A few of the other DJs and I started an electronic improv/noise band that was definitely inspired by your style of DIY/just people hanging out and having fun/not ever practicing/etc…

Everyone in — hated us, but we constantly used our radio station clout to open for really great bands so we could shove middle fingers into the faces of all the pretentious rock n rollers who worked their buttholes off. Oh such sweet times.

I moved on to — for grad school, and have been lucky throughout my life to play music with wonderful people who tiptoe on the balance of taking art seriously and not taking art seriously. Really, I owe you guys a bit of thanks for never breaking your promises to the world.

Some day soon I want to buy all of the 7″‘s. Is there a discount for getting them all at once? Have you ever considered making a CD compilation or getting a label to throw everything together? Or a booklet to collect all the singles like Pokey Man?

I loved the radio show interview. In a sense bittersweet since it removed a bit of the mystery involved in your 20 years of rock n roll anonymity. But it’s cool too. Awesomely cool.

Keep on doing it, dudes!

So, I guess, despite what I tell myself, some people actually like what we do, and look forward to our records. If you’re one of those people, and you’re able to steal $8 from your mother’s purse, you can order a copy of Misreattached online starting today.

With that, I’d like to share the following 1981 episode of The Jeffersons, entitled “Sorry, Wrong Meeting.” (It’s the episode in which George saves the life of a Klansman.)

Speaking of Hemsley, if that was him in Ann Arbor, and I had it to do all over again, I’d sit down and ask him to explain the appeal of his favorite psychedelic rock band, Gong.

The following story comes by way of Gong’s Daevid Allen. (Allen was also in the band Soft Machine.) The rest of the story can be found in Magnet magazine.

It was 1978 or 1979, and Sherman Hemsley kept ringing me up. I didn’t know him from a bar of soap because we didn’t have television in Spain (where I was living). He called me from Hollywood saying, ‘I’m one of your biggest fans and I’m going to fly you here and put flying teapots all up and down the Sunset Strip.’ I thought, ‘This guy is a lunatic.’ He kept it up so I said, ‘Listen, can you get us tickets to L.A. via Jamaica? I want to go there to make a reggae track and have a honeymoon with my new girlfriend.’ He said, ‘Sure! I’ll get you two tickets.’

I thought, ‘Well, even if he’s a nut case at least he’s coming up with the goodies.’ The tickets arrived and we had this great honeymoon in Jamaica. Then we caught the plane across to L.A. We had heard Sherman was a big star, but we didn’t know the details. Coming down the corridor from the plane, I see this black guy with a whole bunch of people running after him trying to get autographs. Anyway, we get into this stretch limousine with Sherman and immediately there’s a big joint being passed around. I say, ‘Sorry man, I don’t smoke.’ Sherman says, ‘You don’t smoke and you’re from Gong?’

Inside the front door of Sherman’s house was a sign saying, ‘Don’t answer the door because it might be the man.’ There were two Puerto Ricans that had a LSD laboratory in his basement, so they were really paranoid. They also had little crack/freebase depots on every floor. Then Sherman says, ‘Come on upstairs and I’ll show you the Flying Teapot room.’ Sherman was very sweet but was surrounded by these really crazy people…

Sadly, I don’t think any current sitcom stars are fans of my band.

Oh, and if you want to honor Hemsley’s memory today, how about listening to a few of his old All in the Family rants over a soundtrack of Gong’s Flying Teapot? And, if you really want to have a good time, how about watching him dance on Soul Train at the same time? I think he’d like that.

The most interesting thing to come from it, from my perspective, was the possibility that, one day, we might be able to broadcast our annual, 24-hour session live, unedited, from the studio of KZSU. I think that could be incredibly painful for their listeners, but incredibly cool for us… I really like the idea of our being able to take calls, and song ideas, from listeners, whenever we get bored, or fall victim to one of our repeated creative slumps. I suppose, however, there could be a downside, as it would demystify the legendary one-day-a-year band to some extent. I think that it would probably be worth it, though… especially if it led to a live, 24-hour vinyl release that included several hours of us just snoring in our cots.

No bread 2 KZSU Phone Interview 5-5-12 MPT by markmaynard11

Among the songs referenced, in case you’d like to hear them, are Chiasmus and Don’t Excarnate Your Kids, from our most recent record.

Personally, I’d give our last effort a 4, but I was there, and I know how little work went into it.

If you want to, you can judge for yourself by clicking here and giving the record a listen. And, if you like it, you can even purchase a copy for your collection!

And, if, after that, you’d like to hear more positive stuff about the band, another California radio station broadcast a 4-hour special about us a few years ago, which you can find here.

As for this young Horatio Anger protagonist come-to-life, who I know simple as Andre (He still refuses to give me his last name), I plan to buy him a beer tomorrow night. Without him, this site would have collapsed under the weight of my ineptitude long ago. Anyway, I just thought that I should mention it here. Sorry if, by doing so, I ruin the illusion you have of this operation being a one-man-show. The truth is, we’ve now got about half a dozen people on the team. Most of them, it’s true, are worthless animatronic alcoholics purchased from the estate of Anton LeVey, but, together, we’re more than the sum of our pulsating, booze-sticky parts. (I had to purchase LeVey’s robots, as my other robot, Patrick Elkins, which I’d created years ago by hot gluing a found beard onto the beloved electronic daughter of my mentor, Ted Lawson, had become terribly lonely and despondent since the breakup of Manhole.)

As for migrating this site to the cloud, I’m not really sure what that means. I just kept getting emails from the company that hosts this site, telling me that, if I didn’t get my ass on the cloud soon, everything would start to fall apart. I, of course, ignored them, choosing instead to focus my attention on the nipples of Nancy Grace, and the like. Fortunately for us all, though, Andre was there, just waiting for an opportunity to embrace his destiny.

There are a million things that I should be writing about tonight, but, for some reason, I’d rather just ramble on and on about nonsense… Oh, speaking of which, how did you like the way I kind of wove together the fact that the site went dark, our migration to the cloud, and Lord Voldermort’s “dark mark” in the image at the top of the post? Pretty clever, right?

Speaking of clever… and this is isn’t really related to anything… I saw a brilliant video a few days ago of a group in San Francisco that does guerilla grafting. (They graft the limbs of fruit-bearing trees onto the trunks of public, non-fruit-bearing trees, so that those without food might be able to eat.) Here it is.

I’ve tried grafting on a few occasions, and I’ve never been successful at it. Maybe, one of these days, we could have a community workshop on grafting or something. It’s been a long time since I’ve talked with Lisa Bashert about it, but, as I recall, when we served on Ypsi’s 2020 Task Force together, she advocated for the planting of fruit and nut trees all over the City, with the same objective in mind. I’m not sure if she’s yet had an opportunity to act on it, but I still think it’s a great idea. And, judging from sites like Neighborhood Fruit, which set out to map all the fruit and nut trees on public land, the idea is catching on…

OK, I know I said that you’d have tonight off, but I really would appreciate it if you could leave some kind of comment today, on any subject that interests you. It just feels right to me today to ramble and make obscure connections, and I’d love to have you join me in that process.

As best as we can figure, it’ll be our 17th year/day as a band. Wish us luck… Here we are, about to eat lunch, after hiking up to Tamanawas Falls. Right now, we’re setting up instruments and getting ready.

I was, as coincidence would have it, just having a beer with a friend who works in the Michigan corrections system, and has firsthand experience with Attorney General’s office. According to her, Shirvell isn’t that much of an aberration when it comes to Assistant Attorneys General. It seems that Cox, at least according to her, is surrounded by an army of angry, stupid, little men like Shirvell, who couldn’t find employment elsewhere… If I’m thankful for little else tonight, I’m thankful that we’re rid of Mike Cox, at least for the time being.

Given the appearance of the girls, I was expecting it to be something gross, maybe in retaliation for yesterday’s post on the nastiness of dog-punching nomadic crusties. I don’t know what I thought would be inside. It was a small box. Maybe, I thought, it could be a well-worn pair of gutter punk underwear, or, perhaps, a handful of dog hair infested with bedbugs. It turned out to be something worse.

Apparently these two impressionable young street urchins had been sent by the men of Manhole, or, as they’ve taken to calling themselves lately, Manhood. The band, it would seem, wanted me to have one of their new t-shirts.

And, yeah, that’s me on the shirt, wearing pink flamingo glasses, like a 65 year old woman who wants desperately to show her friends how “wild” she is. Maybe that’s how they see me – like an old woman trying to be hip. Actually, it’s not a bad analogy, now that I think about it. There’s another possibility, though. Maybe they respect me, the way one respects an elderly uncle who survived something terrible, like a war, by eating lice and drinking his own urine. And, I guess, it could have something to do with them changing their name to Manhood. Maybe they want to grow up to be like me when they reach manhood, wasting their lives away online and in bars, instead of giving in to the temptation of a sedentary existence in front of the television, or, worse yet, with family. Or, maybe they just wanted to fuck with me. I suspect the truth is somewhere in between. It usually is.

On the off chance that you’d like a shirt for yourself, I suspect that they’d sell you one at a show. Or, if you wait a year or two, they may even give you one.

Oh, and let this be a lesson to you if you post photos on Facebook. You never know what kind of derelict is going to download your picture, photoshop some whacky glasses on it, and put it on a t-shirt.

I’m not pissed, though. I’m honored, actually. They’re good guys. Or at least they seem to be. Two of them even talk to me. And one of them wears an ascot. That’s enough in my book… At any rate, here’s hoping they make it big in the music industry, so that I can sue their asses off.

If you’ve never had the pleasure of experiencing Hole Hood, here’s a little video from this summer’s Shadow Art Fair.

[note: If it wasn't clear, about the girls who came to give me the box, I was kidding. They didn't look like acolytes of the Manson family. They were quite lovely, actually, and nice. They were also relatively clean, by Ypsi standards. And they didn't run away, so much as walk.]

The highlight for me was last night, when the band and I met up with our old friends Pete Larson and Andy Claydon at the Tap Room. Pete, Matt, Dan and I, back in the early 90′s, had been in a band together called Prehensile Monkeytailed Skink. Andy had been in another band, called the Monarchs, that we played with quite a bit around town. The “scene” back then, if you could call it that, was extremely small and incestuous.

There were certainly great bands around at the time, like the Laughing Hyenas, but they were doing something completely different. We, for the most part, were making what I’d call noisy in-jokes, without a care in the world as to how well it might be received. At least that’s what we did in Skink. I don’t know if there’s a word for it, but it wasn’t quite punk. It had some of the same assholishness associated with punk, but it lacked the anger, and, if you can believe it, the musicianship. (I still can’t play a single instrument.) I don’t know that we were aware of them at the time, but there was a band in California called the Zip Code Rapists that was doing somewhat similar work at the time. And, I suppose, there were some similarities with Ween, although they were significantly more polished and ambitious than we were, which is odd given the fact that they were huffing spray paint and industrial-strength floor cleaner most of the time. Anyway, at some point we decided that it wasn’t enough to just goad audiences here in Ann Arbor, and we started putting out records under the Bulb Records banner, with Pete being the President. (The first three bands on Bulb were Skink, Couch, which Pete was also in, and the Monarchs.)

So, we sat around last night, drinking beer, reminiscing about old times, and talking about music. And, at some point, the conversation turned to Television, the Ramones, Patti Smith, and the stuff happening in the mid 70′s in New York City, and how much it all meant to us. I think Andy, who had just seen Ivan Kral’s documentary Blank Generation the night before, brought up the fact that, comparatively speaking, so little documentary evidence of our scene exists.

Our scene, as it would turn out, never made too much of a blip on the popular culture radar, but there were some close calls. Our Bulb label-mate, Andrew W.K., who was just a kid in Ann Arbor when we first started putting out records, got as far as MTV and Saturday Night Live, but the rest of us never got to that level… And I’m certainly not suggesting that what we were were doing in Ann Arbor in the early 1990′s was in any way as significant as what happened over 15 years before, in and around CBGBs. I just wanted to bring it up so that it’s preserved somewhere. As no one is likely to make a movie about the scene in Ann Arbor at the time, I thought that maybe a thread here was called for, just in case the people involved had anything to say.

One of these days, speaking of preserving the legacy of early Bulb, I’d like to digitize some of the Skink stuff and get it online. In particular, there’s a song called “Anarchy is Stupid” that I think deserves to be heard by the post-internet world. Maybe one of these days I’ll get motivated. Speaking of Anarchy is Stupid, Pete mentioned last night that once, in the mid-90′s, when he was in Osaka, he happened to attend a show by the Japanese noise band the Ultra Fuckers, and they were covering, of all things, that song. For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure of hearing it, it begins as follows:

“How many of you out there think the system sucks?”
(people yell back in agreement)
“How many of you think anarchy is better?”
(people yell back in agreement)
(long pause)
“You’re stupid!”
(long pause)
“Yeah, you’re stupid!”
(music and screaming begins)

It doesn’t really sound great when it’s written out like that, but believe me when I tell you that it’s brilliant.

And, for what it’s worth, apparently Henry Rollins thinks I’m an OK vocalist, even if you don’t.

My friend Pete just sent me that Rollins link. Apparently, since our talk last night, Pete’s been poking around the internet. He also started a Bulb Records page on Facebook, which you can become a fan of. And, I don’t know if he’s responsible for it, but I also see that there’s now a a blank Wikipedia page for Prehensile Monkeytailed Skink. Hopefully, there’s someone out there with the time and interest to get it started, even if it’s just lies and nonsense.

And, I don’t think I say it enough, but one of the best things about moving back to Michigan ten years ago was reconnecting with Pete and Andy. They’re both great, brilliant guys who, in their youth, did a shit load of work to promote, encourage and otherwise help artists who were doing stuff that they appreciated, even if no one else did – Pete through Bulb, and Andy through his label, Flying Bomb. The world is a much better place as a result of their tireless efforts, and I’m fortunate to count them among my friends.

update: That was quick. No sooner had this gone up than I received a digital version of Anarchy is Stupid from my friend Leon in Seattle. Leon was in the band that was Skink’s predecessor. It was called Yeti Load, and our biggest gig was in the EMU food court. If footage of that show exists, I would be both amazed and terrified… Here’s Anarchy is Stupid.