Bio
Who we are: White Courtesy Telephone is a weird New York band, two
novice singers thrown together with four experienced musicians.
What we do: Because the music is both complex and old-school punk,
both fun-loving and scary, a wide range of comparisons have been made, from AC/DC and Frank Zappa to the New York Dolls and Devo. But musical comparisons are less apt than cinematic ones: if there'd been a band in"The Bad News Bears," or in "The Great Escape," the music would sound like White Courtesy Telephone.
About the CD: On White Courtesy Telephone's first CD, "Everything Is
Fun," the loud guitars and the rapid cultural references -- Charles Oakley,
Arthur Koestler, Billy Joel, Tootsi Ploughound -- create an unmistakably New
York accent. In songs like "Killing Spree," "Prison Wife," "Use Your
Hand," "Stephen Hawking's Wheelchair," and "Cobain(e)," WCT examines themes of madness, homicide, weird sex, suicide, prison sex, and fratricide -- the full sick sprawl of the American Dream. Obsessed with death? Nah, justpaying close attention.
The backstory: At their first gig, WCT headlined a party at Irving
Plaza in New York, attended by 400 people, to celebrate the release from
prison of celebrated computer hacker Phiber Optik. Reporters from "Time," "The New York Times," and "Newsweek" covered the bash, which ended as fans stage-dived all around WCT. Very heady for a band's debut.
The band's unique strategy -- two singers, neither of whom had ever
been in a rock band, mixed with four skilled musicans --created a buzz that
spread all the way to America Online. After only their second show, WCT
was recommended in the infamous "industry dirt folder" on AOL; the hostess of the forum listed WCT, along with Polara and the Dirt Merchants, as one of the "Bands everyone's talking about."
By their tenth show, WCT had:
*Opened for national acts like Nada Surf (Elektra) and Hamell On
Trial (Mercury).
*Been reviewed in "The Village Voice" and "Time Out New York," and
earned a critic's recommendation in "New York magazine."
*Been photographed and profiled for "Wired" magazine, as the first
band to form in cyberspace. (The members of WCT met on Echo, New York's hip cybersalon.)
Who we are: Doubling the strangeness of conventional bands, WCT
features two very different singers. Rob Tannenbaum is a contributing
editor at "Details," where he has profiled Cindy Crawford, Sean Penn, and
Uma Thurman, among others. As a music critic, his harsh judgments in
"Rolling Stone," "The New York Times," and "The Village Voice" incited
public feuds with Elvis Costello and Jon Bon Jovi. Tannenbaum writes lyrics to the poppier material, including "Cobain(e)," a tormented tribute to the late Nirvana singer, the perverse love confession "Chalk," and the sex
anthem "Use Your Hand." "I used to think musicians were lazy, spoiled,
oversexed brats," Tannenbaum says. "Now I know they are."
Garbled Uplink is a columnist for "High Times" magazine, a roustabout
for Cirque de Soleil, a licensed stockbroker, a card-carrying Satanist,
and a thorn in the side of the FBI, who've been keeping a fearful eye on
him for years. A recovering child actor who made his singing debut onstage with Jimmy Durante and then moved on to "The Patty Duke Show," Garbled fills his songs with a Dadaesque sensibility. In improvised rants and trance-readings that mutate at each live performance, he narrates the
jailhouse love song "Prison Wife," the cyberspace travelogue "And Now?",
and the explicit murder fantasy "Killing Spree."
The four musicians who anchor this verbal tag-team tumult share
little except bravery. Bucky Dave, an experienced guitarist who turned down a slot in the Plasmatics because he wouldn't wear a tutu, has been in
dozens of bands, all of them really loud. His guitar companion, Mike
Caffrey, graduated from the esteemed Berklee School of Music in Boston,
where he played with a lot of people who are now seen regularly on MTV.
G. Brewster Smith, a graduate of the fabled New York punk bands Youth Gone Mad and Letch Patrol, plays the drums and also writes much of the band's music. And bassist Michael Koch, who joined the band after the CD was recorded, also plays in Eve's Plum, who have recorded two albums for Epic Records.
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