Our Ten Years of Tears retrospective tape has made it into some physical stores! It's at Amoeba (in the 'new CD' section, which is kinda funny for a cassette) and Permanent Records in Eagle Rock. They will soon be at Vacation Vinyl and, eventually, Burger Records, although it might take a couple of weeks for it to get to Burger.
If you are inclined to buy a copy it would be extra super specially great to get it from one of these places--but of course if you're not in town you can buy a copy here. One million thanks to Geoff of Vanity Projects for making this happen!
For those of you who weren't able to see our set last night, we made an announcement. Here is (more or less) what I said:
Over the past ten years Mary and I have been privileged to have so many wonderful people playing with us in the Monolators, and we're grateful for the time, energy, and love they gave to be a part of it. Inevitably life and family and school and work does get in the way, and the time comes for them to step down and move on to a new part of their lives. It's Ray's turn now, he needs to spend more time concentrating on his education and his work--so last night's show was actually the second-to-last that he'll play with us. We will miss him very much, but we're also very proud of him and we know he's doing the right thing.
This puts the future of the Monolators into question. We aren't looking right now to replace Ray, and we aren't interested in having the band go back to a two-piece, so we have decided to put Monolators on hold for now. Of course we aren't going to stop making music--Mary and I have already been playing as a duo called Dawn Of Sequins, and it makes more sense to us right now to put our energy into that band instead. You can expect more Dawn of Sequins shows in the future and a full-length record in 2013, which we're very excited about.
But Dawn of Sequins isn't just Monolators Lite plus sequins. No, it is a different entity, with its own repertoire and aesthetic. Plus sequins. So please bear that in mind.
I want to be clear on something: I'm not saying that we're DONE done
with the Monolators. It's really, really hard for us to say goodbye to
something that we've both poured so much of our lives into for the past ten years. Neither of us likes the idea that we'll never play the Monolators songs again (I'm not gonna lie--tears have been shed at the prospect), and honestly when we did our ten year anniversary show in September I felt that we still had a lot of life left in the machine. There may very well come a time when our situation changes and we want to make another garage rock record, and at that point the Monolators will play again. I truly do want that to happen, I just don't know when it will be.
So: we are going to play one last show sometime after the New Year. I'm not sure what day or venue yet, we're still trying to figure that out. We have decided that the only thing to do is to make it an ALL REQUEST SHOW. Do you have a song of ours that you really really want to hear? Send us your request! Doesn't matter what it is, we will do it, whatever it is (obviously it has to be a song from one of our records--we're not re-creating our God Of Thunder cover, sorry). If we get three requests, our last show will be three songs long. If we get twelve, it will be twelve. And I think we're going to have to limit it to one request per person, unfortunately--no "please do the entire side A of the Don't Dance LP." Give us a single song. You can send it to mail[at]themonolators[dot]com or send us a facebook message, either is fine. I will let you all know when we have our date and venue nailed down.
Oh and don't bother requesting Best Friends In Space, because that one's a given. Of course we're playing that one.
I think that's it for right now. Writing this makes me sadder than I can describe, and yet Mary and I are both looking towards the future. It looks pretty good.
An hour of Laughs, Emotions, Hits, And Especially Magic
Here's a sweet b&w bee gees show from 1971 in Australia. I hadn't really started listening to their pre-disco stuff until pretty recently, and one thing that I notice from this show is how many of their songs are ballads--um, basically, all of them. Pretty great ballads, but yeah. They're not exactly rocking hard here,
Still a great show--full orchestra! Harps! To Love Somebody sounds great...and this my favorite version of Spicks and Specks (their very first Australian hit).
Also--I did not realize, until watching these shows, that Maurice's name is pronounced "Morris."
We haven't done a Halloween show since the Abbalators which, the internet tells me, was 3 WHOLE YEARS AGO. Shock gasp! Anyway, some people asked me why we aren't doing another ABBA show, and while I loved doing the first one, we felt that without Ashley and Jillinda in the band that was basically an unrepeatable show. So, we decided to look at great trios instead, and settled on this very fine group from Australia that you might have heard of:
It goes without saying that I've been looking forward to a chance to play some Bee Gees for a long time--but, like the ABBA show, I have to warn you that while we may play some songs that you're familiar with, we're definitely NOT playing them the same way as the Bee Gees themselves, so purists looking for soundalikes will go away disappointed, I'm afraid. And we agreed that we wouldn't play Staying Alive, either. But they have about 50 billion other songs, so it wasn't hard to find other great ones to get into.
Each of us is going as a particular Bee Gee, although we aren't necessarily playing the same instruments as the individual brothers did (since none of the Gibbs played drums). Can you guess who will be Barry?
See you on Monday!
PS: anyone know where we can get some really tight satin pants?
PPS: I'm pleased to note that there are a whole bunch of complete Bee Gees live shows up on youtube at the moment--I've been enjoying this 1974 Melbourne show quite a bit, particularly the random b-roll footage of them riding around on horses, and Maurice's velvet/planets blazer ensemble.
