Gnarboots and the Olsen Twins Loooove Pizza
If you haven’t seen the Olsen Twins video for the song “Gimme Pizza,” you must do so now. Here’s a quick synopsis: The twins and some of their friends buy a plain cheese pizza and put their own toppings on it, not the same old boring pepperoni and mushroom. They top it with fried chicken, ketchup, whipped cream, fried green tomatoes, meatloaf, caramel and fish eye. And they sing about it in the process. It’s a delight.
My band Gnarboots did them one better and played the song live in concert, albeit an abridged version. How did we do? You tell me.
Whipped cream falling down like waterfalls…
Middagh Oh Middagh
The best band to come out of Stockton is not Pavement, it’s the lesser known (and still living in) Novocain, headed by The Plea For Peace Center organizer, Middagh Goodwin. Recently, I not only got to watch this crazy dynamic, improv, noise band play, but I got to sit in with them in drums. My good friend Adam Davis joined the band too, alternating between accordion, drums, and vocal loops.
As a special treat for the show, Adam and I showed up wearing T-shirts with Middagh Goodwin’s face on it. Look at him. He loves the attention.
Three Brothers Middagh:
Jeff Rosenstock (Bomb the Music Industry)Will Never Miss a Shinobu Set
I interviewed Jeff Rosenstock at Nickel City in San Jose when my band, Gnarboots, opened the show.( Dan Potthast and Shinobu were also on the bill.) It was a weird night. I completely exhausted myself during our set due to the fact that I was wearing a suit, tie and a wig the entire performance.
I was nearly incapacitated during the majority of Dan Potthast’s set and knew that I had only a small window of time to get my interview with Rosenstock. He didn’t want to interview during Shinobu’s performance. Cause as he told me earlier, “I will never ever miss a Shinobu set.”
The interview went smoothly. I found him to be delightful. My favorite moment of the interview came when Jason Rodriguez, one of the San Jose kids that comes to all the Gnarboots shows, interrupted our interview with some random comments. It was brief, but it made my night.
I first realized that Jason and his friends were coming to all our shows when we’d played Homestead Lanes in Cupertino a month earlier. I was outside the venue by myself when Jason (who I didn’t know at the time) and some of his friends walked by and started doing the Gnarboots chant for me. They didn’t stop, and they didn’t look directly at me, but I could see them checking out my reaction from the corner of their eyes. Anyways, what were we talking about? Oh yeah…Bomb the music industry.
Read my interview with Jeff Rosenstock over at Amp Magazine!
Good Evening humans and frogs! Gnarboots greets you with most excellent happiness!
Fakeboots preparing to pirate the stage while...
When you play in rock band, strange things are bound to happen. Particularly when you play in a band as weird as my band: Gnarboots.
There was the time Cody Red, a Oakland homeless man, joined our band mid-way through our set at Mama Buzz Café. He was promptly tossed out of the band and allowed to rejoin three times.
At the Stork Club, our bass player Bob challenged the audience to an all out full-scale hip hop competition. He of course won all three rounds, but barely.
...Gnarboots unwittingly eat some burritos.
While opening for The Phenomenauts at Homestead Lanes, we lost our voices and had to program all in-between song banter using a computer voice. Careful to master the robot dialect, the sentences came out like, “Good Evening humans and frogs! Gnarboots greets you with most excellent happiness! Pleasure to make music sound good for all of your ears! Next song we will play has a lot of delicious guitar sections.”
But when we played Nickel City, something so peculiar happened, even I was shocked. The lights dimmed and the MC started to introduce us. Even though we were the first band, he was throwing around words like “legends” and “before their time.” I felt good. Before we had a chance to climb up on the stage, a different group of guys beat us to the punch. Huh? Who were they? Worse yet, they announced to the audience that they were us.
“Hi everyone. We’re Gnarboots…I’m Adam!” one said. “I’m Bob,” another said. “And I’m uh…Aaron,” the third said. No you’re not, I thought, I’m Aaron. I couldn’t move. Fake Bob looked at the audience and smiled. They quickly went into one of our songs. They knew all the words and everything.
I turned and looked at the real Bob and Adam. They were standing next to me. At least I was fairly certain they were the real Bob and Adam. What if we were the fake Gnarboots and only thought we were real? Time was slipping away from us. We had to do something. Fakeboots was stealing the show. The audience loved them! In a matter of minutes they would no longer care who was real and who was fake. I did what any sane thinking person would do. I pulled the plug on the power, grabbed real Bob and Adam and marched to the stage. As soon as the imposters saw us, they skittered off the stage. I shouted, “We are Gnarboots!” The crowd cheered. And now the show was just beginning…
