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Last Updated:
Mar 19th, 2008 - 07:43:02 |
I could sit here and try to explain Johnny Headband to you. I could
tell you about how twenty-something brothers Chad and Keith Thompson
grew up outside of Flint, sort of in a world unto itself, one of their
own creation, where they made weird music and even weirder home movies,
and how those pursuits eventually evolved into the performance art
group-come-band-come-multimedia-artistic juggernaut that is Johnny
Headband. I could mention how the album they’re about to put out —
their first full-length LP, entitled Happiness Is Underrated — will
probably rank highly on many smart people’s lists of the best local
records released this year. I could do all of that, but it wouldn’t
matter.
You either get Johnny Headband, or you don’t.
Maybe “get” is too severe a word. The band members themselves (Chad and
Keith, along with longtime friend Rob “RGS” Saunders) wouldn’t be brash
enough to put it that way. “If you’re standing on a street corner and
you see an accident, everybody describes it differently,” Chad says of
the labels others employ when describing Johnny Headband’s music, but
he might as well be talking about people’s varying reactions to the
group’s concept as a whole. “Some bands, everybody says the same
things. I’d rather everybody not say the same things (about Johnny
Headband). … Some people are passionate about what we do and some
people could care less. Some people defend us; some people bash us. You
can’t worry about it too much.
“If the concern as a band is, ‘Is it gonna go over everyone’s head?’ or
‘Do we have to water it down?’ We operate under the policy of ‘Less
explanation is better; you figure it out.’”
More than anything else, Johnny Headband as it is today — the
impossible-to-accurately-describe music that sounds like hyper-modern
Prince-infused bedroom electro and ‘80s/‘90s basement four-track
experiments a la early Ween with a touch of Wesley Willis’ earnest
energy all at the same time; the wildly weird and energetic live shows
that are both spontaneous and heavily rehearsed; the carefully
cultivated image of self-referential and self-interested oddness; the
consistently funny rock-band-as-corporation Web site videos; the
bizarre side project where they don foreign personas and Keith irons
clothes on stage while Chad sings — all of this essentially exists as
it does because of three things: teddy bear-costumed toddler dance
classes, nonlinear video editing and coffee.
Chad and Keith fight sometimes, as brothers will do. Over what?
“Nothing, basically,” Keith says. “Petty bullshit: shoes, pants,
drumsticks, man-dannas (male bandannas).” “The biggest thing we fight
about is directions to venues,” Chad continues. “And we get all-out
warfare over sock choices. Like sometimes [Keith] wants to wear full
one-piece jumpsuits, and I’m like, ‘This doesn’t go in line with what
we wanna do.’ Then he does it anyway.” “But it works,” Keith explains,
“because rules have to be broken. If [Chad’s] going to make rules like
that, someone’s gotta break ‘em.”
“This goes back to our days as three-year-olds and we had to go out on
stage because our mom was in dance class, so she signed us up for dance
class because we had to go along,” Chad says. “So that’s where
[Keith’s] costumes come from. We wore like teddy bear uniforms and
stuff like that. I hate that song, the Elvis song …” at this point Chad
starts singing, “’Your teddy bear …’ ‘cause we had to do that song.”
Both the costumes and the surreal stage show aspects of this early
childhood routine have found their way into the current group’s
concerts. “[Johnny Headband] is an extension of performances we didn’t
necessarily sign up for and have seeped back into our lives,” Keith
says. “I guess that’s what life is, though. You don’t sign up for any
of the stuff you get cast into, you know?” “It’s very similar,” Chad
continues. “If our parents ever get mad at us for crossing the line in
public, we can always just blame that: ‘Well, you’re the ones who
signed us up for those classes.’”
That the primary members of Johnny Headband are brothers helps the band
more than the occasionally petty fights might hurt it. They have
similar childhood experiences and influences, yes, but they also have a
blood bond that allows them to push one another without fear of
breaking up the band, so to speak. But they didn’t set out to be a
“band.”
The Thompson brothers have always played music together. In the early
days, this was mostly, it seems, because the other was there and it was
something to do, a way to have fun and be funny, make music and one
another uncomfortable by pushing for ever-increasing levels of
experimentation. They didn’t think of themselves as a band.
After college, Keith moved south to suburban Detroit for a job. It was
then he learned about how to be in a “band” while playing guitar for
groups around town (including a stint in The Beggars). “We didn’t know
how to get a show,” Chad says of Johnny Headband’s knowledge of being a
“band” before his brother’s experiences with local groups. “Didn’t know
anything — didn’t care — until [Johnny Headband] decided to be a band,
I coulda cared less.”
“And then one day,” Chad continues, “’Hey, there’s this structured environment for making an ass out of yourself …’”
“Sign me up!” Keith interjects.
“In front of people,” Chad continues, ”with what we’ve been doing our whole lives.”
“I knew from the day I started air-guitaring Cinderella in my bedroom
‘til now what my vision was,” Keith says. “And when it’s your brother,
that vision’s not identical, but when I go out and play or whatever,
it’s based on being in a lot of other bands and getting sick of how
they do stuff and thinking — I don’t want to offend any of them,
I like them, I’m friends with them all, most of these people have
improved and all this other stuff — I wanna do it my way, and [Johnny
Headband] is our chance to do that. Even if [Chad] tells me not to do
something, I’m still gonna go and do it and piss him off at the last
second — and then he’ll go along with it. There’s not a lot of other
places in our lives where you can do that — and not a lot of other
people you can do that with, either. When you’re related, you can get
away with that.” “A lot of people can’t handle it,” Chad continues.
“They’re like, ‘What do I do? You just messed me up; now I’m fucked up
for the next hour. It doesn’t bother us.”
A big part of Johnny Headband’s appeal is the “package.” Sure, the
individual parts of the package could stand on their own as driving
reasons behind the band’s success — the creatively dynamic music, the
unpredictable live shows, the
better-than-a-lot-of-televised-sketch-comedy online videos — but as a
multi-faceted unit, they’re almost transcendent. Johnny Headband
becomes a world unto itself.
In the videos, this might be a world where Chad and Keith appear as
corporate drones slaving away at Headband Headquarters, diligently
working to increase the Headband’s (completely factitious) Crowd
Turnout Analysis. They’ve been making videos like these, though far
less coherent or cohesive, for years.
“We got a video camera at a certain age and that was it,” Chad says. “I
explain it like, what you see now, in some form or another, we were
doing [as kids]. It’s the same mentality of right brain or just
freeform thinking: ‘I wanna do this’ and then you go and do it. That’s
kinda the concept behind our videos. … It’s basically bringing our
living room to wherever we’re playing.
That’s what we did for the camera, or for our parents, or for our
friends. Friends come to our shows now that were a part of those videos
and the look around at the people and say, ‘[This audience has] no idea
that they’ve been doing this since they were 13 or 14.’”
The videos then were not based on the brothers’ music. The music and
the videos were separate entities because there was no easy way for
them to combine the pursuits. “We didn’t have nonlinear editing,” Chad
explains. “We had to do it all in-camera, so it was just all random.
You couldn’t go and shoot it and then put a soundtrack behind it.”
Once they got better video editing equipment (both Chad and Keith have
day jobs in the video production industry) and could combine the
pursuits, the multimedia world of Johnny Headband was
born.
Chad and Keith tend to dislike how people describe their music. They
wouldn’t like if you called it danceable, off-kilter indie rock with
heavy leanings toward darker electro and even touches of keyboard pop …
but that it’s still kinda … dirty feeling. But dirty in a good way,
like Prince or something.
They would not like this.
“I don’t like to listen to the positive or the negative,” Chad says. “Not really, ‘cause it’s just kinda all over the map.”
“I’ve heard people say certain words I like about it,” Keith offers.
Words like? “’Bold.’” | RDW
Johnny Headband’s CD release party • December 16 • Magic Stick
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