Readers, this may not be hip of us to admit, but we increasingly enjoy watching bands perform that are actually fun. And fun is the primary goal of Atomic Pajama Party (this is a band, after all, that sells Atomic Pajama Party thongs and whose last gig was an actual "pajama party" at Barnyard Beer). The band has just launched a Kickstarter campaign so they can record an album that puts the fun on wax, so please go here and kick in a few bucks to help them reach their modest goal.
We spoke with APP ringleader and longtime LFK musician Tim Morrell in a wide-ranging interview that ends up covering about a decade of the local music scene and closes with a promise that, for a mere $200, the band will be happy to immortalize Chip's boner in a song (Chip: "Totally worth it!").
Chip: Your mission statement is “to make rock music danceable again,” a noble goal! But it’s soooo fucking hard to make the apathetic scenesters in this town dance! Are you having much luck? Or do you mostly play for old geezers who aren’t worried about looking cool all the time?
Tim: I do a pretty good job of making myself look like the biggest fool in the room so that people feel more comfortable loosening up a bit. We honestly haven’t seen much of the scenester crowd at our shows so we haven’t had to deal much with the shoegazer mentality. We’ve tried to target the college more than anything and that crowd is a bit more comfortable with going out dancing. Frankly it’s almost hard not to at least move around a bit when you are at our shows listening to our music, and we rock out some well-placed covers to help get people moving such as "Jungle Boogie," "Get Down Tonight," and the newest addition "Oops I Did It Again." We put so much energy into our set, we jump around, we play our songs on the edge of being too fast. We just do everything we possibly can to make sure we are having a good time and I think it’s contagious. Most people going out are only looking to have a good time, so when you have an act on stage making fools out of themselves, taking you by the hand to lead you to that good time, it’s a bit hard to resist. It’s a lot harder getting people to give this band a shot in the first place, considering rockers (myself included) have been so against dance music ever since the disco retaliations of the 70’s. We’ve seen a couple of the silver-age audience members dancing, but the majority of the people dancing are younger, albeit probably not scenesters.
Richard: Quite a few of the “aging scenester” demographic are readers of this blog and
are well-versed in LFK rock history. Tell
us about your old band The Disagreements and how you got from there to the
hijinks of Atomic Pajama Party.
Tim: The Disagreements started as a pretty crappy pop rock band with
a wretched name in Toast! (thankfully another band with the same name wanted to
keep it, so we happily changed it) and ended as a pretty decent punk rock band,
all the while claiming to be a straight-up rock band. Labeling various forms of
rock is confusing and hurts my brain. We played for the first time live on KJHK
when Nick Spacek was hosting "Plow the Fields."
We always had a fairly decent following, but I think through the duration
of the band it changed from people coming out to support us to people that
actually liked our music and wanted to see us play, so that was cool. We got to
play with a lot of the acts around that we admired and were friendly with such as
Tawni Freeland, Podstar, Jade Raven, Emma Feel, Thulium/Anything But Joey, Slurry,
BeNon, TopHat. We never really “broke
up” per se, but after our final drummer quit, we never got around to replacing
him (although we had every intention to) and that was that. The main two people
throughout, Matt Herbert and myself, were always a bit on the goofy side of things,
much to the chagrin of everyone else that played in the band with us, so as we progressively
took control of the band we became a bit more about entertaining ourselves and
less about what we were supposed to be doing. We played Andy Morton’s (of Danger Bob fame)
birthday show in our underwear, played songs with our instruments behind our
heads, jumped around a lot, even used strobes and a bubble machine at our
shows. Hell, half the time I was known
as the guy who would play with his pants around his ankles. Turned out
entertaining ourselves entertained the audience quite a bit too.
Between
The Disagreements and Atomic Pajama Party, I did a lot
of songwriting that I was never happy with, filled in for a couple of
bands for
one off gigs, but didn’t really find anything I wanted to continue
doing. I wanted to be on stage again, so at some point
I had to ask myself, “What is it I want out of my music?” The
overpowering answer was fun. I actually sat down and wrote out the
various
things I would like to do, and what I ended up with was “Pop vocals, big
metal
guitars, underwhelming melodic bass lines, dance beats, raw rock songs, and punk
rock energy.” I also scribbled down in big letters at the bottom of the
page, “Stop
worrying about if you are ripping someone off or not, chances are that
you are!”
In random conversation I mentioned this to the guy I was working with
who just
happened to be a guitar player and he said he was in. We tried working
with a couple of different
drummers but it turned out really hard to explain to a drummer what type
of
beats we were actually looking for, especially because we weren’t using
just
club dance beats, but a variety of popular dance beats from the last
century
including funk, swing, disco, rockabilly, etc. We recorded our demos
with me
programming all of the beats into my computer and used those for
recruitment.
They turned out a lot better than we could have hoped. Not only did the
first
drummer we audition want the job and was perfect for it, we were able to
use
those demos to promote the band and create a bit of a buzz before we were even
ready to play a show.
Chip: I
know you played an actual pajama-party at Barnyard Beer on Stop Day. How did that go? And what’s the origin of the band’s
name?
Tim: I don’t know that I’ll ever leave a show being completely
satisfied, I’ll always wish there were more people there or even that we hadn’t
messed something up, but really I was very happy with the show. Barnyard Beer is a fantastic place. We love
what they’ve done there; they are great guys to work with, their self-brewed beer
was fantastic, and it’s a nice set-up.
However, it is a bit off the beaten trail and does not have a high
visibility so it’s an extra challenge to get people there. All in all, we had a great audience--many of
whom were sporting some cool pajamas--fantastic sound, had a helluva time playing,
people danced, and we got to witness someone dancing with an Atomic Pajama
Party thong on their head. You can’t
really beat that.
As far as the band name goes, I probably overthought it as
well. I wanted a three-part name that
sounded like it should match together (but not quite) for two reasons. The first
was to make it easier to avoid trademarks and specifically other bands with the
same name. The second reason had to do
with a conversation I had overheard a long time ago. After Eric Melin had
joined Ultimate Fakebook they had played with the idea of dropping the Ultimate
from their name. Byron Huhmann of TV
fifty ended up talking them out of it because with it they have a great rock
chant with the three letters UFB. I guess
that stuck with me. Maybe we can get people chanting APP at our shows. As far
as what three words, we chose Party first to help promote the fun party atmosphere
we are trying to project. We chose
Pajama second after playing with such words as Vampire (thought it sounded too
goth/industrial/Twilighty) and Disco because we like the idea of a Pajama
Party. We wanted to make the beginning
word something to refer to the energy of the music. We thought about Electric,
but I decided that made it sound too much like UFB’s first album Electric
Kissing Parties. It probably took us three
weeks of going through words such as Amped, Nuclear, Jolt, and a whole other
bunch of energy related words before I even thought of Atomic. Once the word
came to mind we thought it was perfect.
Richard: You’ve
currently got a Kickstarter campaign going. Tell us about the album you
envision making?
Tim: I really envision trying to pull off a Foo Fighters-esque album
that is full of singles but really more cohesive as an album. I’ve been working
on DJing the flow of the album to make song-to-song transitions a bit more
similar to how you’d hear it in a club versus what you’d hear on a rock album,
we’ll see how that works. We don’t want
the over-produced sound you get on dance records. It’ll definitely be a rock
album. I’m sure you can see we are tearing up a very fine line here. It’ll
include everything we demoed out before because those need to be recorded with
a real drummer, plus our concert staples and at least one song no one outside
of the band has heard before. We’ll always keep at least a couple of surprises
back. Who knows, you may even hear a
waltz on the album. Really, we are looking to capture the fun, energetic passion
that infuses our live shows. I’m thinking of naming the album something that
sounds like it’s been badly translated from Japanese, like Happy Tiger Dance
Time. Our logo looks like it would fit into anime, so why not?
Chip: Your
song titles such as “Bump and Grind” and “Jiggle in your Pants” totally make me
want to get laid [listen here ]. Are there
a lot of sexy chicks at Atomic Pajama Party shows? Also, leave us with a blurb that
convinces our readers that they absolutely MUST contribute to your Kickstarter
fund. Also, If I
donate $100, will you write a song called “Chip’s Boner Song” for me?
Tim: Those make you want to get laid? Hell, you haven’t even heard
"Bang Buddy" or "All Night Long!" We actually wrote those songs as a tongue-in-cheek homage to what currently plays on pop radio. In fact, in our initial round of songwriting
the rule was that every song had to be about sex, drinking, dancing, or
partying. Preferably all of the above.
As far as sexy chicks at the shows go, we are a danceable act
that promotes a party environment, lots of fun, getting primped up in your
pajamas, and our best piece of merch is our Atomic Pajama Party thongs. Why wouldn’t we have a lot of sexy chicks at
our shows? Seriously, why won’t they
come? Really, we’ve had some cuties
there, but there’s always room for more.
Why MUST you contribute to our Kickstarter campaign? Atomic Pajama Party is that nice perfect-length wooden backscratcher that precisely tackles that itch right in the
middle of your back that no amount of twisting and contorting your body will
make you able to reach with your own arms and is on that curve that makes it
practically impossible to fully scratch rubbing against a door frame. We fill that niche that you never really knew
needed filling, but now that you’ve had a taste of its possibilities you never
want to go without. We are the hope that
represents all ideals of mankind; would you really want to inhabit this world
without hope? Don’t you already feel a little bit emptier inside without an
Atomic Pajama Party album already made? Wouldn’t you like to feel whole? How
could you not want to be at least a small part of contributing to the band and
album that could save mankind? Besides
which, our modesty is pretty admirable on its own.
Here's a T-shirt, but where's the thong??
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