Nowhere Band News

I have not ever done this, but god knows there have been lots of times I’ve wanted to.

Also: somehow, I guess this is the 1-year anniversary of Nowhere Band. Huh. It doesn’t seem that long, but that’s pretty cool. Lots of ups, lots of downs (the biggest down being the stretch from about #5 to #10-ish when I was really struggling with a move to a different computer/scanner system). All in all, I guess I’m pretty happy with the way things have moved in the first year, and really it’s probably completely in character that The Awesome Boys have managed not to play a “real” show during that whole time.

Aaaaand speaking of real shows… my band, Derailleur, actually has one! Sept. 12 at the Bedlam Theater in Minneapolis. Details here.

As we often do, Rebecca and I watched another movie we used to like and determined that, well, Tom Hanks is probably happy that people have mostly forgotten his early comedies.

Josh has some worries about the stability of the band. Is he justified? Read and judge for yourself!

Not much in the way of direct liner notes… Intraband relations are always complicated, and the Awesome Boys aren’t any different.

As for the numbering change, yeah, I’m correcting for the a/b/c thing I used to use for extended storylines, which was throwing off the numbers.

Peanuts fan fiction. Jesus fucking Christ, people. Jesus fucking Christ.

I mean, seriously. Kill this shit with fire.

Wow. If you need me, I’ll be in the corner with a bottle of bourbon and a Bowie knife.

One last gasp on the covers discussion. The Boys are wrestling with something I still see a lot of, to my puzzlement and amusement: the Replacements still cast a long, long shadow up here. When I was a music writer a couple of years ago, every local band I interviewed, without fail, would mention the Replacements, even if it was just to say that they see part of their mission as getting the Twin Cities music scene out of the Replacements rut. If one band says something like that, it doesn’t mean much, but when everybody does, it gets kind of interesting. Anyway, the vast majority of Minnesota bands do seem to go through at least a very short phase where they see themselves as the heirs to the ‘Mats, either in sound or in work ethic (IE, “we’re so talented that we don’t need to practice, so let’s get FUCKED UP”).

To be honest, I like the Replacements a lot, but I always kind of preferred Husker Du. And yet nobody compares themselves to them. Weird.

Jim Davis is allowing a Garfield Without Garfield book to be published, and has a sense of humor about the existence of the strip (I suppose it helps that the book will also provide him with assloads of money).  Good for him, I guess.

…and we continue with last week’s internal Awesome Boys debate over how to get ready for their show at the Terminal.

I don’t know what the deal is with the rule Jon cites, but it seems to be pretty ironclad… covering still-active bands that you like is just Not Done, for no good reason that I can think of. Especially weird since I remember reading about Jimi Hendrix covering “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” like a day or two after it was released, and the Beatles being really flattered, etc, etc. Essentially, I think it’s hard to say that something’s uncool if Jimi Hendrix did it (especially death by vomit!).

Future comics note: I’ve gotten a little bored with the formatting and general look of Nowhere Band. Played with it a little bit for this one, and it might drift some more as time goes on. Depends on how some experiments go, and how much drag they put on the comic-making process.

I survived the monster bike ride I was talking about, although lack of daylight forced us to cut it off at about 75 miles. We made up for the shortfall, though, by spending the weekend splitting a metric shitload of wood.

I don’t do a very good job of keeping my weekends restful.

Here she be. Not much needed in the way of liner notes, except to say that every band does this, I think, and that I was kind of gratified to get the chance to play off a little bit of past continuity (I did resist the urge to add a Stan Lee-style “*as seen in Nowhere Band #17!”

We’ll say 8/1 for the next one, because Crazy Recreation Summer continues to eat up time. I’ve got a 120-mile bike ride cropping up in the next comic cycle, and god only knows how many comic-making days that’s going to derail…

Holy crap, it’s true. The Derailleur Bond EP is done, and available for download over at the Derailleur site. Listen, learn, and love, my friends.

In case you haven’t heard me babble about this before, this EP is our attempt to write theme songs for Bond movies– some are replacements for the original theme (I mean, do you even remember what the official theme to Octopussy was?) and others are themes for Bond movies that haven’t been made, but should.

And if you like this one, there’s more on the way. Our man Jay is hard at work mixing our second full-length album, tentatively called The Dirtiest Dudes in Rock ‘N’ Roll. 

And oh yeah, that comic that gets done around here…. on schedule, and looking good for a posting on Sunday night or Monday morning.

So, this week Jon learns a harsh lesson that’s surprisingly common, I’m told. I’ve never actually played Guitar Hero or Rock Band (I’d like to, it just never works out), but I’ve had enough guitar-playing friends complain about getting waxed by children that it seems to be a universal right of passage.

Couple of other items:  my old band Red Hay, which provided a bunch of source material for Nowhere Band, got a nice writeup on Tried to Rock, a wonderfully kick-ass site about bands that don’t go anywhere (you can see why the site appeals to me). Go over and check the whole site out, it’s good, good stuff.

And, hopping away from comics and music, Rebecca and I have once again sat down and tried to decide whether another beloved movie stands the test of time. The latest contender? Say Anything.