Does the "Irish" stereotyping of the Lucky Charms leprechaun bother you as much as it bothers me? I guess the lack of outcry is just more proof that the Irish Anti-Defamation League is drunk again. (Ha. Blatantly stolen from yellojkt...)
Anyway, before he rose to semi-fame as engineer for Interpol, Peter Katis was in the Philistines Jr. with his brother Tarquin. This song - more or less the title track from their album Analog vs. Digital (the song and album have different subtitles: the song's is "Peter vs. Tarquin," the album's is, uh, very long and in the ID3 tag) - is one of the better self-referential recordings I know of.
Katis is, of course, not the only musician who went on to greater fame behind the boards. I offer you "Decline and Fall" by Sneakers - which featured a disturbingly young-looking Mitch Easter (who, of course, went on to produce the first few R.E.M. and Game Theory albums, and whose sadly underheralded band Let's Active released a handful of fine, slightly tweaked '80s-style guitar-rock records: I avoid the "j*ngle" word). Sneakers was a bit of a pre-all-star band: Easter's songwriting foil was Chris Stamey, eventually of the dB's. (Speaking of which: Stamey has reunited with the original dB's lineup, including Peter Holsapple, to record a new album due out, I believe, early next year. Two tracks are available for download at the dB's website: one for free, one for a charitable donation to a fund to help musicians rendered homeless by Katrina.)
The Philistines Jr. "Analog vs. Digital, or Peter vs. Tarquin"
Sneakers "Decline and Fall"
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2 comments:
all along, we had big problems with my brother...
And I thought that after I picked up the only copy of "the continuing struggle of the philistines jr" at a table at the indie rock flea market in Arlington VA in 1993 that I was about the only person on earth to know about them outside of wherever in connecticut they were from.
There are actually a fair number of relatively well-known musician types on the CD - Adam Pierce (Swirlies, the Dylan Group, Mice Parade) plays drums and percussion, and one track features solos from a zillion different folks including Moby and several other people (at the time, Moby was relatively obscure, mind you). But I can't claim any real discovery or curiosity credit on this one: the CD came my way back when I was reviewing for the old Milk magazine. So blame/thank Josh Modell, currently at The Onion and freelancing for Magnet, who was Milk's editor, for that one! Actually, I have his address in Chicago, if you want to hunt him down and make him do obscene dances at gunpoint or anything.
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