Grifters: C er D?

LPOE? If so, yeah that was on time. I tried to make the Murphy's show w/ Wallendas the other night, but was road worn. (Juicy J was, up until a couple of months ago, my boss. I know S. from when Yvonne B used to make me go to yoga with her. Ok, she didn't make me.)

Kristen found me via the grifters myspace page so that was cool.

Stan's 15 year old son runs the grifters page but I give him stuff for it all the time.

I'll try to put up that live version of Crashing Jet sometime.

Also, if you look on our friends list and go to Flecton Big Sky that's our old friend Miche Jette. the songs on his page are from his record that features der grifters backing him up (as well as Califone). Those recordings represent the last time the grifters recorded together.

we did record 2 songs later that year but the tape was lost forever so the Flecton recordings are it.

rad ... I will check that out

I saw Kristen a couple years ago at (drumroll) ... an nyc Bloodthirsty Lovers show. ha.

I still see Tim whenever Califone's in town. Which is never enough for me.

http://www.myspace.com/dragoonmemphis

Also, if you frequent the BOB page, right now I'm kind of posting stuff from our tenth grade year (1982 or so) but pretty quickly it'll get into our eh.. less-goofy years and you can start to hear me and Stan find our footing as musicians.

still works.

you have to be a huge nerd to give a shit.

I'm sorry I broke up your black panther party.

I've made a huge mistake.

Is this the Goner board!??! AW SHIT!!

somewhere i still have awesome 4 track cassette recording of that show at barking legs in chattanooga (also known as the one where ***kicked*** that exercise ball into the overhead light, and better known to me personally as the first date with my ex-wife).

speaking of wives, when stan jokingly introduced me to his wife as "the fifth grifter," i was so totally weirdly elated by that. hah.

Used to talk to your little brother sometimes but it's durn good to hear from you. When's the new Yeti coming out?

Piddlebach is the coolest fucking song ever recorded.

I am done here.

Bardo Pond's done pretty good for themselves, eh?
We had a collective band-crush on Isobel.

ALSO I listened the hell out of the Shelby Bryant album after a friend picked it up by chance on emusic and loved it, and it just seemed so totally out there that I don't know if I'm excited to read that he was in other bands or if I don't want to hear them in case he begins to make sense. It tickles pretty much the opposite neurons to the Grifters for me though, just as a warning to anyone who might scratch their heads at my excitement.

everyone should own the Clears' first (only?) cd.

Every single track is fantastic AND it was recorded in my old apartment (by Roy Berry)

and have we mentioned the simple ones yet? that's kinda mandatory with a grifters/memphis/indie thread.

this is a band I played with from late 98 to 2001.
I wasn't doing too much musically after the grifters'
initial demise so I was elated when my friends Stu Sikes
and Brian McKay called and asked me to join.

Initially the band was the 2 of them with Max Tepper.
Max moved back to NYC and started the band Natural History
but we carried on with some guest guitarists. One of whom was
Tim Prudhomme who lived in Mempho for about 5 years.

If you listen to the song Song In F you can hear pretty much
every guitarist who ever played in the band. It was a song Max
kinda started, then he left. In fact, when Max he announced it
to me first and the first thing out of my mouth was "Can we keep
Song in F?!"

So Max wrote a good chunk of the verse, Brian wrote the chorus
and I more or less came up with the bridge (bridges are my specialty)
and on the bridge you can hear Max's guitar, Brian's, Tim's, Jared McStay's, and Jerome's. (as well as my bass and I also laid down all the electric piano and mellotron.) So that one part of the song features performances recorded over the course of a year and a half.

It was pretty sweet being in a band with Stu because it meant we got to practice at Easley/McCain's. And record there for free basically.

If you like what you hear you can order it from Shangri-La.

http://www.shangri.com/cd_memphisindie.html

ALSO I should mention that Max left us Song In F before any lyrics were written so we all took a try at writing them but ultimately we took a poem my wife wrote and rearranged it slightly. Then Jerome and Lori McStay sang it.

My wife cried just a little bit the first time she heard it.

or here

http://www.myspace.com/lamarrecords

it's a little label me and Jared McStay started a few years ago
(Jared from the Simpletones, now owner of Shangri-La records)

We basically started the label so the Jetty Webb cd would see the
light of day.

We also put a STAFF ep. STAFF was me and Tim Prudhomme and Geoff Soule of the band FUCK. Technically, I'm still in Staff but Geoff now lives in Italy. Tim moved to New Orleans about a month before Katrina hit. They use whatever bass player they can get their hands on but if they're ever in my neck of the woods I get to be the go-to guy.

the other band on there is PAPER PLATES which is another band I got asked to join. I probably would've passed but Bobby (Dragoon) was writing really sweet pop songs and I couldn't resist. So I pretty much joined Staff and paper plates around the same time (2002)

And Breeze isn't that hard to find on the InterWeb, for anyone lookin'

I put some live stuff from the 2000 reunion tour on the myspace page.

the version of Crashing Jet on there alright. the mix was a little wonky, drums are way up there. BUT it's the only version there is of us doing it.

the live version of Bronze Cast and Dayshift (which I'll post sometime soon) are from the same show. Lawrence, KS. December 2000. I believe we were playing with Califone that night!

For those looking to contact me, I can be found during my days right now at the Middle East where I'm in charge of local booking. I've also got a slew of bands I'm playing in that you can find online: myspace.com/mostbitter myspace.com/cbop most prominent among those.

Anyway for Grifters content: I still have my 'Grifters Rock My World' handmade t-shirt from that first show at the Blue Note (Monday Night with Zoom and Seam) (hey Tre, I always thought you were in the rafters with Dave not Tripp). I'm trying to recall how many states I saw the band play in but there's a lot between Boston and Texas and Atlanta (hey this is Superbowl weekend, you're not in some stripmall bar in Miami, are you?)

Last time I saw the band was at the Pilot Light in Knoxville which was a truly divine night in late 2000...

xoxo to all
Jeff

http://www.myspace.com/141849898

I don't expect anybody to be impressed but hopefully it'll make you laugh a little. But like I said, once it gets up into our senior year of high school things suddenly get a lot more rocking.

here's a little bit of trivia for ye..

...where to begin..?

I use to date this girl named Jean when I was like 21. It turned out she was Shouse's main squeeze and she was kinda using me to make him jealous. I guess it worked cause she dumped me after a month or so. But we remained good friends.
The first time I met Dave was at a DB's show at the Antenna Club in mempho circa 1987. He knew about who I was and I knew who he was and we didn't say much to each other.

So a while later they broke up. She and I hung out a lot (she was gorgeous and I had a huge crush) but she knew about BOB. I'd played her some stuff which she probably thought was terrible.

in late 1988 Dave met Scott through Think As Inca's drummer Paul Buchiniani (sp?). Paul and Scott went to school together and paul gave Dave a hot monkey tape. So that's essentially how dave and Scott met.
they tentatively started a band that had no name.

in early 89 I moved back to memphis after living in Roanoke Virginia for about 8 months. I ran into Jean pretty quickly and she told me her old boyfriend Dave was starting a new band and was looking for a bass player. She said she had told him about me and BOB and that he loved the name BOB for a band and, according to her, he wished he could've used it.

What did he come up with instead?

You guessed it.

BUD.

.....

I told Jean I wasn't interested if for nothing else i was scared to death of playing in front of people.

a month or so later jean pointed out to me that Dave had placed an ad in the Memphis Flyer. it said something like "Bass player needed. Influences: Mission of Burma, Pere Ubu.. (somebody else). call Dave"

I didn't answer and as far as I know only a couple of dudes did. And they didn't pan out so well.

So out of desperation Dave called me and we got to talking and it turned out he lived literally right around the corner from me so I walked over and he smoked me out and played me a few things. I think it was The Want, Daydream Riot, and an early version of Black Fuel to which I added the bridge.

And we were off.

I didn't meet Scott til a month later. He apparently was following the Dead around selling acid quite a bit back then. We finally met and realized we'd seen each other at the Tiger Den (the commissary at our college Memphis State) and it turned out he was friends with all the hippy kids in my art classes that I couldn't stand. Little did I know they would all end up being our original fan-base.

And they had some goood weed so that didn't hurt.

We made it to Mempho in '98 and amongst other less obvious sites, we made it to Shangri La and The Antenna - I swear i spooted two Grifters shirts there that night, but sadly it was some hardcore band from Ohio playing.

The Antenna was like a bigger Adelphi to me. Classy joint.

GRIFTERS - out and out classic to me.

Reformyafuckers

Cheers
Paul

Remember that time in the bathroom at the Corky's in Germantown with the german sherpard and the paraplegic fortune teller?

Steve Shasta
Professional Wakeboarder
Asst. Editor, WakeboardingOnline.com

this is kinda weird cause i was just talking to a co-worker of mine about that Hull show this afternoon I swear to god.
Told him how I made the classic american blunder...

our FIRST show overseas was in Hull, England. We flew into london, went and rented our equipment, stopped at a truck stop and had mushy peas and gravy then hit the road for the 5 or so hour drive to Hull.
So we were pretty zapped. When we finally pulled into the verdant paradise that is Hull (wink) I went right to the bar and got a beer. the big lug that ran the place and apparently lived upstairs (?) gave me a nice big pint and I took a sip and said 'Whoa man, I think your refrigeration unit is out or somethin;...'

So he loved me, I'm sure.

that was also the night whassisname came to the show and wrote about it. ... ...... god what was his name......
Everett True!

I remember my bass fell off me during our set and the head of he bass landed on my beer glass. But I caught it by the strap so it didn't fully hit the floor, the head just hit the pint glass with a 'tong' sound and a big triangular piece of glass broke off and landed in the glass. Since it was my last beer (fuckin' drink tickets!) I picked it up, pulled out the shard of glass and finished it off from the unbroken side.

hey. I've done grosser shit, believe me.

Btut Everett romanticized that moment in his article like it was some great punk rock moment. Really, I'm just a clumsy drunk.

Paul Jackson - still lives upstairs and still wears his Grifters shirt. No, really. . He gets quality beer in and turns it all into warm vinegar.Legendary cellarman - but it ain';t a cellar - I can't tell you where it is. So where you stay that night?
Legendary club though thanks to that man really - hey you tread the same boards as Radiohead, Oasis, PJ Harvey, Naked Raygun!, the once OK soul Asylum, God Machine, my band.

Take care.

Some nice insights there.

Let snobby people scoff, but I loved a lot of Grifters music- I really did. You had your own special sound and gave me a lot of pleasure.

Hull Is not too disimilar to Memphis btw. i guess you didn;t make it down town? The gallows and so on?

I remember ET being there. Wasn't he Kurdt Cobain's dad or something? He posts on here I think- or has done

really.

so how widely read is this board?

Cause i've been saying all this wacked out shit.

Tabloid journos, solicitors, Gary Numan, the peabody ducks, Poison Idea roadies.

Keep noodling that bass fella - us Limeys off to bed. Good talking to you. Cheers

goodnight you....Princes of Hull.

we stayed upstairs at the Adelphi that night. with the other band I think. It was just some big junky room with some sofas and carpets and crap layin around. it really was like some kind of weird dream.

mostly what i remember is our tour manager, who we'd obviously just met, this is our first night all bedding down together. a) he's walking around in some pretty tight Calvin Klein underwear and socks and thats about it. While we're all fully fully clothed for fear of bed-bugs ( which we had encountered before staying at some punk rock club in kansas) .

and b) our new TM gets up in the middle of the night and walks over to the wall near where Dave is sleeping, and he whips it out and starts to take a leak!

good times.

ps. no-one was peed on

nobody loves babies in bars
better than yourself

Still salty I missed the NYC show in 2014.

Cool jerk
No particular slogan
Signs are for the bottomless pit
Where nobody's going

love that song so much

i am

the mambo king

― mookieproof, Monday, April 19, 2010 1:31 AM (twelve years ago)

Wrapped tight in my tarantula skin

― CaptainLorax, Monday, April 19, 2010 2:45 AM (twelve years ago)

The situation's growing hopelеss
So I pretended not to noticе