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| Chapter One | Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapter Four: One-and-Onlys | Recent History |
29 Mar 96: University Sports Bar. With Pea Soup and Harvey Danger.
10 Apr 96: Moe's Mo'roc'n Cafe. With Speed Twin and Marble.
10 Apr 96: Here's an excerpt from a review that ran in the Stranger on this day: "This Busy Monster is an odd beast to encounter at a club show. Their music sounds alien at first: quiltpatches of tempo and harmony sewn alongside one another within a single song. Pieces collide and coalesce in jarring succession. Songs jump from melancholic drone to aggravated rock stir to bouncy holding pattern. There are verses, choruses, and bridges, but those parts contain hidden crags and nooks where the musicians can climb around and get lost. And though moods change frequently - taking structure hostage as they do - a tone of eerie pop calm abides."
22 Apr 96: TCI Cable Public Access Studio. With Pea Soup. Well, this was an odd gig—recording a show for public access, which won't be shown until September. There were lots of technical difficulties and we weren't really happy with how it turned out.
21 May 96: Re-Bar. With Harvey Danger and Flake.
28 Sep 96: MOE. With Gerkin, Miracle Baby, and Harvey Danger. This was a pretty durn good show, with a large and receptive audience, and a good set. It was our first set wherein we tried out our idea to play one song which we'll never play again live (our "one-and-only")—we played Wire's From the Nursery. Everyone really liked it.
06 Dec 96: MOE. With the Bun Family Players, the Readymades, and Torture. Barrett had the flu, but he's still the greatest rock drummer. Pretty good show, good attendance, lot of fun. We played a strange reggae-ish version of I Could Give You a Mirror (Eurythmics) as our one-and-only.
08 Jan 97: MOE. With Raoul and the Hate Fuck Trio. Our one-and-only song was an improvisational piece, dubbed gridlock by Barrett. The first time we've ever done an improvisational song on stage, and it wasn't half bad.
08 Feb 97: 3B Tavern (Bellingham). With Modest Mouse and 764-HERO. As an homage to Jay Chilcote (of Gian-Carlo's Reaction and Virginia Creeper), we played his song The Antiphony, with all four of us singing the end part ("...I would like to go to Virginia, someday...").
22 Feb 97: Allied Arts Gallery (Bellingham). With Modest Mouse and Virginia Creeper. This was an afternoon all-ages show. Barrett lost at least 4 drumsticks during the set. We played another Jay Chilcote song as our one-and-only: Cotton Mouther Wash.
18 Mar 97: Crocodile Cafe. With Ida and Harvey Danger. It rained on the stage (the ceiling was leaking). Our one-and-only was a Matt Johnson (pre-The The) song called Icing Up.
06 Apr 97: RKCNDY. With Duster, Satisfact, and Built to Spill. In the very beginning of the second song (3D'd) Josh broke a bass string. So we stopped the song, and Jason and Christopher played stone wall. Then we started 3D'd again, and this time Jason broke a string in the first verse. We kept playing, though, and Jason changed his string and rejoined us at the end of the song. Then, in the third song (clockroute), Josh somehow managed to fall on his ass towards the end of the song---but still kept playing! Finished the song that way. Very amusing. The rest of the set went much more smoothly, and the crowd seemed to be behind us. We played Sorry Entertainer (Daniel Johnston) as our one-and-only.
16 Apr 97: Showbox. With Throwing Muses. Wow. The ultimate show. We played great, Christopher got drunk as a skunk, and the Muses rocked our world. fear (an old TBM song, not the Muses' song) was our one-and-only.
17 Apr 97: Berbati's Pan (Portland). With the Maroons and Throwing Muses.
18 Apr 97: MOE. With Joel R. L. Phelps and the Downer Trio, and Silkworm. We played a slightly kooky set, opening with an instrumental version of Jason's song (untitled as of this writing). It was Silkworm's record release party.
10 May 97: This is the day we started recording our album, like icicles.
20 Jan 98: Re-Bar. With Little Champions and Pea Soup. Our first show in over 8 months. It was a lot of fun—both Little Champions and Pea Soup were great. Pea Soup did an Elvis Presley song (Surrender) and an Elvis Costello song (Party Girl). We were a bit rusty, but not too bad. Just about everyone I talked to said that it was one of our best shows ever. Go figure. For our one and only, we did Tears for Fears' Mad World, with Josh playing the Rhodes electric piano.
25 Feb 98: Crocodile. With Death Cab for Cutie, the Revolutionary Hydra, and Harvey Danger. Another great great great show. Death Cab is now [Christopher's] favorite current band—they're righteous. Great performers and great songs. Rev Hydra had eight people up on stage, including a guy doing a shadow-puppet show behind a sheet, and a girl dancing in the corner. They were great as well. We played third, were a bit rusty at first, but played a good set. We brought up Elias (Avinger, Jason's brother) and Sean (Nelson, singer for Harvey Danger) to do one of Elias' songs (...papers stacked in order), with Elias playing Christopher's guitar, Sean singing backup vocals, and Christopher playing organ. Then we brought up Sean again at the end of our set to play organ on clockroute and the f word. Lots of fun. Harvey were their usual self—tight, great performance—but they threw a surprise at us. They covered a TBM song—underground—doing it, as they said, in a Radiohead fashion. It was a very surreal experience. Sean belted out the third verse in a way that I could never match.
11 Jun 98: Our debut album, like icicles, is officially completed.
11 Jul 98: Rendezvous. Album release party! We finally got to show off all our hard work by releasing our debut CD, with an event to beat all events. We had 4 different kinds of t-shirts made up (a TBM t-shirt in 3 colors, plus a Barsuk Records t-shirt), lots of CDs to sell, a programme explaining the night's event (complete with lyrics for all the songs we performed), stickers, and 3 great opening acts: Elias Avinger played a short acoustic set to get the evening going (with Jason and Christopher from TBM backing him up), followed by the inestimable Revolutionary Hydra and the unflappable Pea Soup. We played a strange set, starting out with an instrumental one-and-only (dubbed "Shark"), and containing many of our older songs, including darkling, i live odd, and belated. It was a classic TBM performance—Josh broke a bass string in the very first song, and Barrett broke his snare drum somewhere in the second half of the set. Despite cruel fate, we played well and had a good time.
1 Aug 98: Crocodile Cafe. With Death Cab for Cutie, Peter Parker, and Harvey Danger (disguised as the Fell Swoops). Could this be the last This Busy Monster show ever? Rumors are flying, but it's hard to discern the truth. If it is, all I have to say is: thank you to all of the people who have supported us over the years. It's been fun. Sometimes, though, when you hang on to something for a very long time, thinking you're saving your life, you suddenly realize that you're not, that your hands are cramping and you just have to let go. Only time will tell where we'll fall.
| Chapter One | Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapter Four: One-and-Onlys | Recent History |
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