Unhinged live Keneally album comes to Bandcamp Friday!
Hi! It’s Mike again! Hey! And look:
"OFF-BROADWAY" (a one-off 2006 live performance by Mike Keneally, Bryan Beller and Eric Slick) COMES TO BANDCAMP THIS FRIDAY, May 1!
Off-Broadway will be available at 11:59pm PDT this Thursday, April 30. And you won’t believe all the other MK treasures that you can get right now at Bandcamp!
https://mikekeneallymusic.bandcamp.com/
All the archive releases we’ve put out as Bandcamp exclusives over the past several years have held their share of revelations for me, but probably none more so than this one.
Scott Chatfield and I, the co-cap’ns of Exowax, will periodically scour our respective archives, looking for interesting stuff to release. Recently Scott unearthed a massive, stuffed package, mailed to us twenty years previously by a gentleman named Mark Leaver, and residing undisturbed in Scott’s home since then.
This package proved to contain a trove of CD-Rs, with attendant and copious documentation generously provided by Mark, of a one-time show played in St. Louis by what was billed that night as The Mike Keneally Trio – me, Bryan Beller, and Eric Slick, a drummer I’d played with at several Project/Object gigs, but I’d never played my own music with him before. Mark had wired his digital recorder into the soundboard that night and ended up with a serviceable batch of multitracks.
Bryan and I had been traveling together for three weeks prior to this show, doing a bunch of Taylor Guitars clinics in music stores, with Scott tour-managing and merch-slinging. Several months before, a MySpace friend in St. Louis named Dan Kinney had taken note of our upcoming clinic schedule, and reached out to me via the MySpace private message pipeline (the very same pipeline I’d use to secure a gig in Dethklok the following year! MySpace works!!) and proposed that we end our tour with an electric gig in a St. Louis venue, which he then proceeded to set up. It was also Dan who suggested using Eric Slick for the gig, a perfect choice – I’d heard him absolutely eat Zappa material alive, and he was only 19 years old at the time of this St. Louis gig.
Keneally, Slick and Beller post-show huddle, October 13, 2006. (Photo by Mark Leaver)
The three of us rehearsed the songs, some of my hardest stuff, for the very first time at the venue during soundcheck, and a few hours later we played this gig, and pretty much laid waste to the place. There is a really ferocious energy to this show that seems entirely connected to its one-and-done nature – we didn’t have any other gigs booked afterwards, for us to refine and hone the material further – this was IT, our one shot, and we just sank our teeth into the stuff.
After Scott had found the multitracks after their twenty years spent in a box, I spent several weeks in March and April mixing them at home (with sonic insights offered by Sarah Crochet upon request) and I was frankly flabbergasted by what I heard in the tracks. It understates the case considerably to say that the recording exceeded my expectations. I think it’s fantastic. It’s loud and raw and real and I sure do hope you enjoy it very much; I’m freaking thrilled with it.
Bryan, Eric and I all wrote liner notes for the pdf that comes with the Bandcamp download (as did Dan Kinney who made the gig happen, and Mark Leaver who recorded it). Bryan’s notes make reference to how someone might assume, given Eric’s youth and the fact that he’d never played this material before, that Bryan and I might have needed to sort of coach Eric along during the gig, and this is very much not the case – Eric unapologetically OWNS these tunes, and my unavoidable feeling when listening to this is, why didn’t the three of us do more of this?? Apart from that day’s soundcheck, this is literally the only time this trio ever played together (so far anyway - none of us are done yet), and I’m so grateful to have this recording documenting it.
The tracks:
1. “You Guys Gonna Start Right Away, or…?”
2. Snowcow
3. Father’s Day
4. Intro to Dolphins
5. Dolphins
6. Pride is a Sin
7. My Dilemma
8. Intro to 2001/The Entertainer
9. 2001
10. Intro to Supermarket People
11. Supermarket People
12. Not Really Roy/Intro to Uglytown
13. Uglytown
14. Haugseth
15. Performing Miracles
16. The Mystery Music
17. Panda
18. “Can I Get Some Water?”/Intro to Nonkerchunk
19. Nonkerchunk
20. “Eric, You Rock Tonight”
21. Potato
22. Inca Roads
23. “I Know What You Wanna Hear”/Intro to Breakfast
24. ‘Cause of Breakfast
I’ll leave this here: Bandcamp Friday is the periodic Friday wherein Bandcamp does not take a cut of artist/label proceeds, so the income from every Exowax product you purchase on Bandcamp Friday goes 100% to Exowax. We are continually grateful for the support you’ve shown us on Bandcamp Friday – thank you, friends!
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