1995.

So three ex-high school buddies walk into a bar. One of them has moved away from this Brooklyn neighborhood and now lives in Michigan, so his visit requires a round of brewskies. Or five. As the night goes on, talk turns to music, and somehow or another they decide it'd be fun to record a few songs. Wait! How about... no wait, wait, how about THIS! A band... that only plays one day every year, records it and releases that recording. No matter how old and crippled they get, no matter how far afield they get from one another, they must meet one day every year, and they must only record for an hour, and they must improvise! Agreement is reached, some of it enthusiastic, some murmured cautiously, but the drinks keep coming, as does dawn, eventually, and after sleep and discovery of hangovers, the newly named Monkey Power Trio wake to meet the afternoon.

So three ex-high school buddies walk into a basement. They have a boom box, some crappy instruments and very little musical ability, but they are determined to do... something. Dan "Deadhand" Richardson is playing guitar. His nickname is said to be a dual joke, the obvious one being a reference to Eric "Slowhand" Clapton, the other refering to the concept of an unmanned "button" mechanically pushed in the event of nuclear war if no Americans were left to push it, known as the "deadhand button." In his bio, Richardson's playing is described as being as powerful and pointless as that deadhand button.

Drums weren't available at that first session. Mark Maynard, who is also the MPT vocalist, wasn't slowed down a bit by such a trivial detail. "I just yelled and beat on things with a couple sticks," says Mark in a universal description of the DIY attitude. "I think that there were some old gas cans in the basement and a piece of a metal ladder, the grate off of a heater and some kind of cement mixer." The third member of the trio, Matt Krizowsky, is the one with musical training on his chosen instrument, the saxophone. He is also the only one who wasn't sure about that DIY/improv thing.

"Matt hates playing the way we play," sighs Mark. "He hates having to improvise. I wouldn't say he's a perfectionist, but it's something like that. He doesn't like just fucking around. He wants to have everything mapped out." Listening to The First Hour one suspects Matt was having fits. There surely weren't any charts for You Like-a The Cheese? or "Kling Klang Bang Bang Pop." Then again, his out-of-tune recorder had a lot to do with the classic punk appeal of Baby Eyes. All through the record Mark sang strange lyrics and smacked the various objects before him at random intervals as Deadhand Dan whacked away at the guitar without regard for its safety. "Dan's guitar, as I recall, only had a couple strings by the time we were done," says Mark Maynard now, eight years later. "It was totally un thought-out and we had fun."

In the years since that first hour, the trio have become a quintet, but why change a good name? First came the mystery bandmate who is appropriately known as Number Four. As a quartet they recorded "You've Got To Have Hope" for their 1998 EP, Things Get Ugly, and that song would soon pay surprising dividends. 1999's Chasing Monsters With Our Love brought more change as Mark turned the drumming duties over to Dave Miller, who also plays bass both in and outside the MPT. "Dave is the most musical of us," allows Mark, "and he's only been on board for the last four or five years. He's with us forever now, though." There it is again: once you're a Jet you're a Jet all the way from your first cigarette 'till your last dying day. Or words to that effect.

The MPT web site is filled with claims, by the band themselves, that they never improve as players, and yet listening to their music chronologically proves otherwise. While nobody will ever mistake them for The Beatles or even The New York Dolls, something's there. Something that grabs you, amuses you and keeps you interested, and it's something that gets better all the time. The obvious difference between 1995's MPT and 1999's MPT is the addition of Number Four and Miller. As Mark readily admits, "there's a huge difference between me hitting a furnace with a stick on the the first record and Dave playing drums on the most recent ones. He can keep time and stuff."

And then there's that business with Fox Sports Network. Remember the commercial with the guys watching the baseball game on Fox? Shown in slow motion, you see the expection and tension on their faces, and then you see someone blast a home run. The guys jump up from the couch in celebration. Throughout this whole scene an a-tonal punkish tune, the aforementioned You've Gotta Have Hope, has been playing at high volume. Even with the volume down it sounds loud because Matt's recorder is piercing and not exactly in tune. Now how did a band that meets once a year wind up with a song on a national commercial? It started as a practical joke. "The way I understand it," Mark begins, "a friend of mine in Chicago recorded one of our songs from vinyl onto his computer. He then emailed it to another guy I know, a guy I used to make pizzas with in Ann Arbor back in the day."

At this point you're thinking hey, it made more sense that this one hour per year band got a Fox commercial; how did a PIZZA guy get one? Yeah, I was confused too, but hang in there. It starts to make sense in a second. Really.

[Artwork by Mark Maynard]

"The guy, I think, is was a creative assistant at an ad agency in San Francisco," reveals Mark just in time to save me from utter confusion. Aha, AD agency! Gotcha! "The way I heard the story, his boss was looking for some kind of song for a Fox Sports ad spot. He was choosing songs and sending them to his boss. His boss had the flu and was feeling really bad one day. The guy thought it would be funny to send him this loud, awful song with piercing horns as a joke. So, he sends it to the guy and the guy likes it."

And to think I was fired for playing my Black Sabbath CDs too loud. But that's another story. Back to the ad agency sales pitch.

"He tags it onto a CD with 20 other songs and takes it to his clients." Mark pauses a moment to let me catch up, then says the words that could sustain any musician for the rest of his life: "They then proceed to pick our song over Marvin Gaye and 19 others. It was weird. It was good luck."

And the money wasn't too bad, either. The Monkey Power Trio have stretched their Fox earnings to pay for subsequent recordings and the construction of a website. On top of which, "It made us want to keep selling songs, even though that's probably a bit difficult," Mark admits. "We got used to not having to pay to record and press vinyl every year. It paid for everything for two years, except for our travel. It was great. We just took money out of the account to pay for stuff." A luxury many bands with contracts don't even have, by the way. The downside? "We got spoiled. Before that, we split all the expenses. In the wake of that though, we got to thinking that perhaps we'd get another big break that would bring in some more money." But it hasn't happened yet, despite blatant fishing by the band that would have fans screaming "SELLOUT" if a) the band wasn't gleefully admitting to the crime up front and b) we all didn't want to hear another MPT song on another commercial so bad. Selling out isn't a sin in the MPT camp.

"That's what our 2001 song, When I save time (I save money) is all about," says Mark. "We wrote that one in hopes that we could sell it to an advertiser." And yet they just don't have the Madison Avenue killer's instinct to be true sellouts. "We haven't really tried yet though. We aren't terribly motivated. We hope that someone will seek us out."

Meanwhile, they continue to gather fans. Radio stations continue to add them to their playlists. Articles (besides this one) and reviews are written on a regular basis, all without the band having ever taken the stage before a live audience.

"I have thought about the idea of one day doing a tour, though," confesses Mark, quietly so that Matt can't hear. "We wouldn't play live, but we'd sit on stage and play our records and discuss the songs and stuff. Or we'd lip-sync." It sounds strange now, but MPT's fans would be there in a flash. After thinking about it for a few more moments, Mark wises up to the reality of the situation. "No matter what though, MPT will not play more than one day a year. It's not an option. Matt would kill us."

I am never going to sit around recording for a whole week with MPT. Let me repeat this once again. I hate 'jamming.' I hate improvising. I hate the entire MPT modus operandi as a means for creating music. I'll tolerate it one day a year. That's it. -- Matt, personal e-mail to other MPT members, 7/11/00

Matt showed up again for Future Past Present, the latest offering from the Monkey Power Trio, and once again his contribution was significant. The opening tune, a punk masterpiece called Black Fulton, explodes from the git go, but the nuclear meltdown occurs when Matt has a sax tantrum for the ages. There's a punkish psychedelia to Future Past Present that is instantly addictive. Fall into the spinning confusion of The Land Of MPT. The EP concludes with more psych, a simple continuation of the "The Land Of MPT" theme called Hey Matt that just cycles the lyrics "Hey Matt, whatcha doin', Matt?" 950 bands would make that suck. 950 bands with Les Pauls and Marshalls and a ton of musical ability. One band makes it stick in your head. Sure, MPT has a drum set and a bass now, and it's not done on a boom box anymore, but "The Land Of MPT" would sound good in that old setting, banged out on ladders and cement mixers.

"I'm convinced that no matter what we do, it will be interesting," says Mark, correctly assessing the situation. "It really wouldn't worry me if we had to do it without instruments. We'd still have fun and it would still be better and more honest than most of the other stuff out there in the world."

But will it continue? What if everyone gets tired of traveling once a year? No more Monkey Power? The end of hope?

"I think that we're all intending to keep our promise," says Mark reassuringly, "and that is to keep going until the last one of us is dead." But how can such a promise be enforced? "I personally will haunt the fuck out of anyone who doesn't keep it up once I'm dead," claims the still alive and kicking Mark Maynard. "I think the rest of the guys will do the same too. I'd hate to be the last one on earth and to have 365 days pass without recording. Four ghosts would be kicking some elderly Monkey Power ass."

(C) 2002 - DJ Johnson