Welcome / Our Band Could Be Your Life

Welcome to the little brother records blog, a semi-regular, semi-coherent collection of ramblings about music released or distributed by the label. This blog will be a place to discuss a record or artist in a little more depth than on the web site, often with an mp3 sample attached to prove a point or to pique interest. Ultimately, I feel like this blog is the answer to a question that no one really bothered to ask me, but you're here now and you're reading, so hopefully it will be interesting to a few people.

So, with that in mind, I think it's appropriate that the first post should focus on the release that really was the genesis for the record label, Our Band Could Be Your Life: A Tribute to D. Boon and the Minutemen. It ended up being released at the end of 1994 with tracks from 34 different bands, but it started simply enough over two years earlier with a comment that I made in passing. At the time, there were plenty of tribute albums being released, and I wasn't too convinced that the tribute record as a concept was a very worthwhile pursuit. (Almost 15 years later, I'm no more convinced.) Regardless, I mentioned to a friend that I thought that the Minutemen were one of the few bands actually worthy of a tribute album. I think we discussed the idea for about fifteen minutes or so, and then I forgot all about it. The friend hadn't, though, and a couple of months later I was approached by two different bands that had recorded tracks for a record that I had never even really planned on producing. So I figured, what the hell, let's make this thing happen.

Once I knew that this was a record that I really was going to help create and release, I decided that I had two main goals: 1) to include cover versions that were recorded in the same spirit as the cover songs that the Minutemen themselves recorded, and 2) to make a record that was actually enjoyable to listen to. That second goal is, of course, extremely subjective, and I'm sure there are plenty of people that feel the record fails to meet that goal. I'm pretty sure that after years of working on the record, I was not really likely to have anything even resembling objectivity by the time I was actually holding the finished product in my hands. Some people think it's shit--I remember Forced Exposure wrote that your money was better spent on the purchase of some crack instead--and I'm not really interested in arguing too vigorously with those that feel that way. Still, I was pretty happy with the results, and vast majority of the feedback has been very positive, so it must be kinda alright. (Or maybe most people are just horrible at lying to your face.)

So while I understand that not everyone may love the record, I am very proud of the overall aesthetic of the record. Too often, cover songs come off like bad copies of a good song, where the artist is handcuffed by the power of the original version, unable to change or improve it, and so content to merely mimic it. Of course, these copies end up falling short of matching the power and intrigue of the original versions, sounding like the musical equivalent of a photo that has been copied and then re-copied and copied once more. If this is true of cover songs in general, it seems that this is especially true of cover songs on tribute albums. Yet when the Minutemen covered a song, whether it was by Steely Dan, Van Halen, Creedence Clearwater Revival, or The Meat Puppets, they made it their own.

In that sense, I really do think that Our Band Could Be Your Life is successful, as I feel that most of the artists on the record were able to take the Minutemen's songs and make them their own. They showed appropriate respect and reverence to the songs, without being intimidated by them. After all, the Minutemen were vocal proponents of the Do-It-Yourself ethic; music was a means of expressing yourself, in your own way. They weren't going to be told how to play their songs, or the songs of Van Halen or Steely Dan for that matter. And fortunately, most of the artists on Our Band got that. They understood that the Minutemen's version of the song was a starting point, and that it was OK to jump off from there. They got that it was not sacrilegious to alter a Minutemen song; it was, indeed, the highest compliment. These songs were good enough that they worked as Irish folk tunes (in the case of classic Minutemen producer Ethan James and his partner Cindy Albon), lo-fi acoustic stomps (as Saccharine Trust guitarist Joe Baiza illustrated), psych-rock freak-outs (Sparkalepsy), sweet indie-folk tunes (Lou Barlow, Kaia, Seam), or whatever else anyone wanted to make them. These songs were bigger than the Minutemen themselves, and I think that is the strongest tribute that can be given to D. Boon, Mike, and George.

Download: Nels Cline Trio-Self Referenced / West Germany

Download: Seam-This Ain't No Picnic