Hotshot Robot.
Up next, it's the latest from the Dayton, Ohio band,
Brainiac, who in their four year history has opened for,
among others, The Breeders, Jesus Lizard, Unsane and.
Girls Against Boys, here it is, Timmy Taylor and the guys.
They sound like you might get zapped if you touched 'em,
you know, like, they were Brainiac, you know,
there was this like, they sizzled.
I didn't know you could do it like that.
Legends and myths behind it, like, they set the standard.
They set the bar really high.
They had so much momentum.
That band, the fervor was insane.
Watched that right as they arrived at that moment.
Meanwhile, it was a bad news week for fans of the
rising indie band, Brainiac, whose leader singer,
28 year old, Tim Taylor, was killed in an early morning
single car crash near his home in Dayton, Ohio last Friday.
Brainiac was being courted by the majors
at the time of Taylor's death.
All right, we're recording.
Hello, my name's Tim
and this is my second cousin, Tyler Trent
and we are with the group, Brainiac.
I'm sorry.
My name's Todd Yunglen, I already mentioned.
All right.
I'd like to introduce you to our bass player, Monasterio.
Hi.
Buenas noches.
Monasterio, cool.
I'm in a band.
You're probably one of our biggest influences
as a matter of fact.
- I like it, all right. - It sounds good I don't know.
I think in 20 years, people are still gonna be listening
- to it, that's the thing. - I hope so.
But with that, every time I listen to it...
We just need more people like you to rip us off
and that'll sort of give us more credibility.
- Yeah. - Keep the myth alive.
And now at last, we turn the stage over
to those mad geniuses.
The answer is, hybrids, half conservatory trained and
half trained at the College of Hard Rock.
I'm not quite sure what they're going to do with this music
and wherever they take it, whether you approve or not,
one thing is sure, it's going to be fun and who knows,
it may even be beautiful.
Hello.
Dear Brainiac, I miss you.
You were a symbol of a dream and an explosive energy
that meant everything then and still now
and I still describe it like this to this day.
Brainiac, the perfect symmetry of energy between
childhood friends from Dayton, Ohio, Devo robot
meets punk rock James Brown in a one of a kind
new wave industrial band.
There is no other band like Brainiac.
Timmy Taylor,
you are terribly missed.
There is a quiet place in my heart held for you
that will never disappear the way that
you did to the outside world.
A Brainiac torch burns every day for all of us that have it
and I can see yours and it is burning
very fucking bright tonight.
Thank you.
So, Tim, you say you and your buddies are
going to visit one of Jupiter's moons.
- Yeah. - Well,
how do you suppose you're going to do that?
Well I don't know if you've heard about it or not
but they have this new type of gum out
and all it requires is that you learn how to blow a
bubble and you too can space travel.
The first day of fifth grade
I just have some
memory of Tim walking down the hall
clapping his hands and saying, Quasimodo, Quasimodo
and I didn't even know who Quasimodo was.
I thought he'd made that name up and I was like,
man that is such a cool word.
And then we pretty much just started
hanging out all the time.
Right away we were just interested in the same things.
We liked comic books and music and yeah just weirdos.
Tim, you know, he always had the creativity
going on even as a kid.
Then he started playing cello in the fifth grade
and Juan was his band mate.
I remember we got in front of the school and we had to do
like this duet, you know, we practiced it forever and I just
got up there and I saw the thing and I just like blanked.
So Tim kinda played the song and got us through it
which is just amazing to me because like,
Tim was like an amazing musician.
He listened to everything, I remember he loved The Beatles
but he listened to everything from Charlie Parker,
Ella Fitzgerald to classical, he'd go to the library
and bring home lots of classical records and just kind of
listen to them and study the sounds.
Timmy was pretty much a prodigy.
Comin' from parents like Terry and Linda,
he was inundated with music.
Growing up, I started piano when I was six
and then I also played cello.
It's amazing, like, Linda is a cellist.
Terry is an accomplished jazz musician, you know.
Both well respected in their fields and
we have Tim.
Just had turned 19 and
I went to hear Terry play one night
and I was just really impressed with his talent.
Man, he was just a brilliant guitarist.
He'd go into a solo, they give him a solo and a half hour
later, you know, their jaws are all dropping and you know,
then they all come back in but, you know,
he took it a lot of places, so.
I think what really impressed me was some drunk that
just kept pestering me, poking me and tried to
get my attention and I remember Terry had grabbed this guy
by the arm and he says, "You touch her one more time and
I'll break your arm," so it was, I was in love.
Back in those days he was on the road more than he was home.
He said, "Come and join me and we're gonna do this,
we're gonna get married," so I said, "Okay."
So I took a Greyhound bus to Butler, Pennsylvania 'cause
that's where he was on the job at that point.
What was the urgency?
Timmy.
This was Tim's favorite place to sit when he was a baby.
His dad's guitar case.
It was usually open because Terry was always playing.
Tim just loved to sit there and listen to him play.
So when Tim was about three, Terry bought him a drum set
and it wasn't a toy drum set, it was a nice drum set
and that's how he learned how to read drum notation,
he learned how to read rhythm.
Basically how to read music.
My dad is so talented, my mom is so talented
and my brother was so talented, it's something that
I just like couldn't believe.
I think he was bit with the show biz
bug at an early age.
I remember him entertaining a lot of the kids
out in the driveway one day.
I think he was about six
and he had a Cheech and Chong record.
It was song on there that was a little dirty.
But I didn't know he knew until I was watching him
hold court in the driveway with about six of the
neighborhood kids singing this song.
It was, goin' downtown, gonna see my gal,
gonna sing her a song, gonna show her my ding dong.
And I, Tim, get in here
and I was like, oh my gosh, I'm gonna have
parents calling me.
So yeah.
His sense of humor was so dry but so goofy.
Do you know the words to the familiar
pop melody, "Mary Had A Little Lamb?"
Very unique but you knew he was super, super smart
just talkin' to him, you know?
Tim had a jazz background.
He had heard records that none of us had heard until
our adult years when we decided to go listen to Coltrane
but he is immersed in that.
My brother and my dad were in a band with Michael Bashaw.
Michael Bashaw is a phenomenal musician.
But he's also nationally known for his music sculptures.
Tim was actually still in high school
when he started playing with us he was 16 years old.
Terry asked Timmy to play and we called the group,
The Bridge, first time I heard him play, I mean,
I knew he could really play.
I think Tim really loved playing with his dad
like that and he learned so much.
Timmy brought his own stuff to the group too.
Timmy said, "I got this line I've been foolin' with."
It became a song called The Lazarus Effect.
This is called The Lazarus Effect.
Gonna try to raise the dead here.
He had this line he played, goes...
You know?
Tim coulda gone on and just played in a jazz band
with his dad the rest of his life but the thing that
being in a jazz band didn't provide for him was
creating like an entire package.
When he was in high school, he played the drums,
he played the bass, he learned how to play the guitar.
He was so versatile in all of the different instruments
that he could play and I think he realized at a very young
age that it was better to stand out.
Dayton is a unique mix.
You went to school in Dayton and half your friends were
locals, like the natives and were briars.
The other half were the children of either military
personnel or like civilian contractors from the
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
Wright-Patterson, our country's
most important military installation.
All of us in town who were creative or alternative
or different, we found each other really quickly.
Juan and Tim found each other.
We would try to make music.
We would try to do things with like drum machines
and like keyboards, we tried to do the goth thing.
Even though maybe it was a little bit more glam.
We'd never play out
and we'd sort of never gather up other people.
It was always just me and him.
They had been
trying to come up with something.
They were clearly like going through mutations.
Tim started playing with the guys that ended up
being in the Whizz Bangs.
Whizz Bangs were, I don't know,
it wasn't my kinda thing at all.
And then Tim sorta forced them
to let me be in the band too.
Why are they doing this like bad kinda Chili Peppers.
Musically, I don't think we were ever that really into it.
And, you know, it was still somebody else's thing
and I think we were getting closer to a point where we
wanted to do our own thing.
But I remember Tim had like a,
like one of those big harmonicas like Stevie Wonder played.
Like with all the notes
and it was like, yeah it was incredible, like, wow, like...
You should be the front guy for everything
and we just kinda stole the show.
And I just remember it was a popular band.
You know, but we just didn't like it.
I was just like, what am I doin', I quit.
I'd rather fail trying to make something that like,
is something that I like than sit there and be loved for
something that you know your heart's not in
and I remember Tim kinda like shyly asking me, he's like,
"Well do you wanna do another band?"
And I was like, really, like,
you wanna be in another band with me?
Like, 'cause I kinda felt like I blew it, you know,
he got me in that band and then I was like, fuck this,
I don't wanna do this and then Tim was like,
"Well if you quit, I quit."
I was like, yeah.
And then we just got really excited.
When Whizz Bangs ended I was like, okay we're gonna do this
thing, if we're gonna do it, then we really gotta do it.
Then we started thinking about who
do we want to be in this band?
You had to have a great drummer.
Like, as long as you had a great drummer,
you could be a great band.
I mean, I don't know how old Tyler was.
I mean, for all I know, he was 19 years old.
I don't know but he was, maybe he was still in high school.
He looked like he was 12 and that was the thing.
We used to call him The Kid, it's like
the boy genius kind of thing.
I just remember he was around
and he was The Kid.
So we just kind of arranged kind of a try out
which was a trip because both Tim
and Juan had like hair down to their butts.
Tim had on like this black leather jacket with like
a faux rabbit fur vest over top of it.
And they both just looked amazing, they're like rock stars
and I was so intimidated.
I don't really remember him being nervous.
I just remember him being great like, right from the get go
and it's like when we got Tyler, you know he just,
we just knew he was it.
So Michelle...
The Bodine.
Hair's such a big deal in Dayton.
Michelle and her brother were local fixtures.
We'd cruise around and look for parties and
just pull out our equipment and just start
jammin' at parties, you know?
They grew up with a Les Paul of their dad's
and a Marshall stack next to their crib.
Scott and I figured that we're at least
fifth generation guitar players.
My grandma and grandpa Bodine were in a band together.
Funny story, they would go to these chicken fights
and they were like the music for chicken fights.
- Seriously? - Yes.
That's crazy.
What kind of music do they
play at a chicken fight?
They played like boogie woogie kinda stuff so.
And even in a town full of rockers,
you'd notice her right away.
Besides her being super talented, there weren't always
a lot of females in the bands back then.
And she was no poser, she could hang with any of 'em
and she can really play guitar.
She just personified perfect chick guitarist at that time.
Tim just came up to me one time at a show and asked me
if I wanted to play with him and Juan.
The people you are with, you know, they bring more to it
than just their musical ability because being in a band
is so much about personalities and like that sort of like,
the sort of chemical interaction between
people that make, you know, the music.
We had a lot of bands that we just loved.
If I was gonna trace the sort of path of the way it went...
I know we listened to a lot of Sonic Youth.
The Stooges.
The Cure.
We liked Jawbox.
And Bauhaus.
And I liked New Wave.
That jazz stuff was a big deal.
The Beastie Boys.
Joy Division.
Led Zeppelin, AC/DC and Black Sabbath.
Nation of Ulysses.
I love Devo.
I mean, and we were definitely interested in funk.
I didn't think they'd wanna listen to
the heavier stuff like I liked.
Psycho Sluts From Hell.
Transposes over keys, I'd be like,
do it like a dog, do it like a dog.
Yeah, that's pretty much all I listened to.
We sorta had some broad ideas about what it might be
and then, you know, that sort of progressed but
what were we talking about?
Sorry.
Tim and Juan already had some songs written a little bit.
Well mainly it was Tim that wrote everything but they
had 'em worked out and so they showed 'em to me.
I think the very first song I played to
kinda try out was "I Could Own You."
And that's when I just knew, wow, this is incredible.
When I first moved in with those guys
they still rehearsed in our basement and I couldn't believe
what was comin' out from the floorboards.
We knew he was workin' on somethin' but had no idea.
Tim wrote songs like probably every day.
He had a new song almost every practice.
He would basically come with the songs completely done
with all the parts for everybody to play
and he'd be like the beat is like this.
This is the guitar part.
Here's what the bass is like.
And he would have it sort of all worked out in his mind.
He sorta put all those pieces together
and we had a list of names so I think
the name's on there were Shesus.
One name that I remember was We'll Eat Anything.
Popgun.
The Girl Who Met Ozzy.
Because Michelle had just recently met Ozzy.
And then Brainiac and I got that out of a comic book
price guide that I bought when I was into comic books and
we pretty much unanimously picked Brainiac.
When Brainiac started because of all the electro funk
in the early 80s, like Dayton, it was so prominent.
By like 1990 there's just all these moogs like
sitting in the pawn shop that weren't
cool anymore and Tim snatched 'em up.
Having that keyboard, he would sound out Prince songs
for hours and hours, I'm like, stop that!
It would make you crazy, he'd do the same song for like
two hours, you know, 'cause it was so fascinating to him.
I think that got his charge started, gettin' that keyboard.
I mean I just thought he was like
a musical genius, really, I mean he could play pretty much
anything and he could sing and he had these great ideas.
Tim was on his own artistic journey
to the point of even resisting us sometimes.
Tim would do this thing and I think Tyler
will tell you about this too.
He'd bring a new song to practice
and it would be like really catchy.
And then you'd be like, oh my god, it's so cool.
I mean just like an instant overnight success.
And he'd be like, oh yeah?
And then that song would just disappear.
And then just slowly deconstruct it
and do a Brainiac song.
You know?
Would just come back so fucking weird and mangled.
Anytime you told him that something, if it was like,
oh my god, that's amazing, this is gonna be a hit,
it would just be like, oh you think that, okay.
You had to be very careful about how you liked a song.
You'd have to kind of like hold it in and be like,
oh my god, I like that song so much.
He just was not interested in writing hits, like,
he wanted it to be something beyond, you know what I mean?
It wasn't just like, oh yeah, that song sounds like.
Nirvana, or whatever, it's like, this song would sound
great on the radio, he was just like, nope.
And so we make that demo, that's the demo that we
must have sent right away to Mike.
We were getting like hundreds of demo tapes a year.
It was one tape that stood out out of hundreds
and it was guys I knew that I had grown up with.
Which was cool because he put out a.
Smashing Pumpkins seven inch
before anyone knew who they even were.
Yeah he put out our very first seven inch ever.
It was not just a song, it was a whole package.
It was a band and a concept.
I still can't put together how you listen to that much.
Bach and jazz and then put that into a distorted moog.
There's no explaining how Brainiac
came out the other end of that.
He brought the tape home and he says, "Listen to this,
this is the new band," and I said, "Okay."
And he played it for me and I didn't react a whole lot.
Last thing I wanted to do was hurt his feelings but it
wasn't really, didn't really get it then
'till I listened to it more.
So tell me about the first time that you
went and saw the band, like, what were your impressions?
Oh boy.
Felt like I was in a time capsule spinnin' to the future
which was now, it was like, what is this?
And I remember being absolutely like,
so blown away and that was it.
Like, just watching like, one of the best bands you've
ever seen and it's like, that's weird, I know those guys.
I was just like,
who is this guy up on stage?
I had never seen Timmy as a front man and really,
talk about charisma, he exuded it.
You'd look around and the crowd was just,
they had 'em, they had the crowd.
And it was 25 minutes long and you didn't think,
oh my god, why didn't they play longer, you thought,
oh my god, we made it through the 25 minutes.
I think that is what I came away with
the most the first time.
Was thinking, holy shit,
if they played one more minute, somethin'
woulda gone wrong here.
Like, I'm completely convinced that somethin' was gonna
break, somethin' was gonna burn,
someone was gonna bleed, something could explode.
Or all of those things like, it was,
yeah, I've never,
I never seen anything like those 25 minutes.
Ever.
I wanna picture someone visiting our planet and
listening in and they hear Brainiac
and they go, what the fuck is goin' on in that planet?
I don't think I had set foot in Dayton
until the mid 90s when my band, Shellac
played a show there with Brainiac.
My love of Dayton started because of Brainiac.
We didn't even think of them as a band from Dayton.
We thought of them as like, who is this great band?
It's like Ohio bands are just weird,
weird fruit, you know?
Devo and Chrissie Hynde and just like
understanding like why is Ohio so cool?
There was some martian-ism going on there.
Yeah, Dayton, what's going on over there?
Course some weird shit's gonna be comin' out.
I love that, I love seeing that that's the underbelly
of America, you know, it's not just what's on the radio.
There's this strange rumblings coming out of nothing
assembling something really interesting.
It's what's in the water.
All that plus Wright-Patterson Air Force Base
is supposedly where all the aliens are stored from UFO
crash sites so we all grew up absorbing all the radiation.
We could've moved to LA, we could've moved to New York
but I thought it's so much cooler to be from parts unknown.
You know, I'd rather be the guy that like,
the gunslinger who just shows up
and you're like, where did that guy come from?
Also with hip hop, they'd be like
rappin' about where they're from.
And I was like, this is it.
Parts unknown.
Back then if you said you were from Dayton,
people were like, oh Dayton, oh, you know,
or like, how's that?
We love this town and we loved the
creative flow that was in Dayton.
You know, there's so much that has come from here.
Industry and its output
is representative of Dayton.
Great music.
We're proud of being from here.
It was like our thing, it didn't belong to anybody else.
We're Brainiac and we are different.
We're different, you like that?
- Thank you. - So that was like,
it was a huge deal to us.
We were like, yeah Dayton, fuck you.
I walked in after work and walked into the kitchen
and there were just t-shirts hanging everywhere and
Juan and Tim were busy hanging them up to dry.
The first thought was, hey, great, they're making t-shirts
and then I started looking closer and then I saw the back
of it and you know, I saw the famous,
fuck y'all we're from Dayton.
You're gonna actually put that on a shirt, you know and,
they're like yeah, I'm like, well, okay.
It was brilliant, it was this home town,
they definitely weren't bastards.
I'm tellin' ya, the mayor shoulda been payin' us.
And at first I was just kinda mortified, I thought,
oh no, this is gonna cause some trouble but you know,
it didn't take me long to warm up to it
and I actually thought it was kinda funny.
That's the brilliant mind of Juan Monasterio.
Juan was so, he was awesome, he did
all of our artwork, all of our album covers.
Tim and Juan were both so focused, Tim was basically
in charge of all the music and Juan was
just like such a smart business person.
Juan was not only willing to do the job
and to make the phone calls but he was really good at it.
So I really took on that part of like,
well we're not just gonna sit here and
be the biggest band in Dayton.
So yeah and then we just started,
just touring, we just went for it.
We had bought like a $400 van and we'd give ourselves
five dollars a day and we slept on people's floors.
We did a lot of that.
A lot of announcing at the end of the show,
hey can we crash at somebody's house?
Yeah, I need a place to crash because
this bar is paying us $50 tonight
and the next gig is $95 worth of gas money away.
I remember people lookin' at us like...
What in the world is this?
I thought it was a good sign really.
You know, 'cause it was makin' people think
and like experience somethin' totally different.
When you just believe in it 100% there was never a
feeling like, oh we're gonna play this music in front
of people and if they don't get it,
that means this music sucks.
It was even funnier if they didn't understand it
because then you're like, you know, who are you?
We played one show in Birmingham, Alabama to zero people.
And that was a really good show too.
Still, you know, either playing to hardly anybody or
playing to a packed house, you know,
it was always different, it wasn't consistent.
I remember we did get a show with Fugazi.
It was in the middle of the week in Illinois
and it was at last minute, we had to drop everything
to drive there and that was a big crowd
that was over 1,000 people.
How quickly in the span of a year they went from
literally begging me to put out their record to me begging
them not to leave my label for a bigger label because
it was quick, I mean it was genuine competition for who
could put out the first Brainiac real record.
And I lost but I mean.
And then that's when I got the call from Camille.
Juan sent a tape with artwork on it.
It was really a cool looking tape
but I remember the first time we heard it.
I was playing it so loud that people from upstairs
were coming down to hear it.
I've gotten good bands along the way but not like them.
Not like when my heart was coming out of my chest.
Just that, you know, that we were gonna sign them.
The next step was, you know, recording a record.
One of our favorite bands that we just couldn't
get enough of was Nation of Ulysses.
Every part of what they were doing, Tim and I
were like, oh this is what we wanna do.
Whatever they had, we wanted it too.
And so, you know, just looking at the credits on the
back of the record, we saw that it was produced by this
guy names Eli Janney so we were like, we gotta get
this guy to do our record.
I think that they were just calling
a bunch of people whose work they liked
and I was like, sure, you know, do you have any demos
or whatever, send me some stuff and so they sent me these
crazy ass demos and I was like, this is great!
And they wanna work with me, that's even cooler.
We were totally shocked that he'd agreed to do it.
'Cause he was also in Girls Against Boys.
I think that they were like at that time the most
heavily courted band by the major labels.
To us, they were like, you know, oh they're signed
and they know all these people so we could like barely
look them in the eye, you must, I don't know,
like, are you a millionaire?
1991 I had no job and no money,
I was pretty miserable, yeah.
We lived in a warehouse that didn't have a kitchen.
It just barely had a bathroom, it was just a
huge empty warehouse space.
We had a lot of people staying there and people would
just like put sleeping bags...
- Right. - On the ground and
you'd kinda wake up and be like
who the hell's here, you know?
One advantage of living in a giant warehouse is that,
and you can stay with us, no problem,
we have plenty of space.
It was awesome, it was great just like livin' the dream but
it was really bad, the neighborhood was so bad.
Somebody sawed through our wall and robbed us like with a
electric saw, like, how does that happen?
That was good times, bro.
So he brought us up there
to New York to record that record,
to record Smack Bunny Baby.
I put on Smack Bunny Baby and...
It sounded so depraved and so maniacal
and just so evil genius.
At that point, there weren't any bands
that sounded like Brainiac, I mean there wasn't,
they weren't like the next generation of something else.
They were completely unique.
The integration of the noise colliding with the
melodic sense, clearly they were the whole package.
No indie record you could ever listen to at that level
at that time compares, it just blew
everybody away, it wasn't just me.
The picture that was painted sonically in my mind
when I would hear them was so fantastic.
I would try to
emulate or find where he got a lot of those vocal effect
ideas, you know, and you can't find 'em.
There was like an early vocal effect, I don't know how
he did it, if it was a pedal or what.
They would tell me things like oh well he's just making
up noises with his mouth as well.
So that adds to the legend.
Really, I never rolled him back 'cause I was just like,
it's genius, you know, it always seemed to enhance what he
was kinda doing, I was like, yeah,
let's try it, let's just do it.
Most of the recording with them was really just kinda like
trying to get outta the way 'cause their group mind
worked very fast, and it was like we wanna make that
really distorted and messed up but not through a
traditional amp, like what can we do?
And so I was like, okay here how about this?
I got this toy, let's try that, let's just plug it into
a mic pre that you're not supposed to do and turn it up
all the way and just see what happens and that's how a lot
of that stuff was made just doing stuff intentionally the
wrong way to get a unique sound out of it and that was
definitely a hallmark of that band just like, it was cool.
After Smack Bunny Baby, we went from just self-booking
these little one offs or little mini jaunts
down the east coast to landing a west coast tour
opening up for Girls Against Boys and The Jesus Lizard.
It was crazy it was like an overnight, just,
just kinda hurled into that world.
And they like our stuff which just started
to give us more and more confidence.
It was so angular and disjointed.
They impressed me that way.
And I think it started to give Tim a lot more confidence.
And I think a lot of stuff was born during those days.
Just getting into people's faces in the crowd and
swallowing the microphone half down his throat
and just really freaking people out.
You were stuck in between these two bands that
were furious on stage, I mean, crazy good and we were
just like, well, we can't hold anything back.
Those kids got their money's worth let me just tell you.
And when you go on a long tour like that especially a tour
with I think very good music, you start to find yourself,
you start to find your voice, you start to
pull together all these loose elements and say
this is our identity as a group.
It just started to get, to peek into this other
world that we were gonna be a part of.
In the early 90s there developed this kind of a
fraternity of people in bands.
Music of the 90s was original, experimental
and Brainiac obviously are like, on the top of like,
the most original, coolest, unique sounds like, only them.
I watched them play and was like, wow.
And we stayed friendly, I mean we didn't, there were no,
there were no cellphones at the time.
Brainiac's stuff is, you know, really pioneering
in that they kind of, it's the type of music that
explodes the framework, it kind of explodes the song.
It's like, here's a song, we're gonna have, in a way,
a song, we're gonna have, I mean some other bands that
come to mind like maybe even, I don't know if they even
heard each other but At The Drive In or something.
Yeah we liked them, they're fuckin' weirdos, you know?
I just really feel like they exemplify super weirdo.
You know?
And maybe they were influenced by this that and the other
thing, what James Brown, Nine Inch Nails, I don't even know
where their influences were but they were like
coming through in only their sound.
The record went really well, they were
really happy with it, Grass was really happy with it.
And then we were touring and we were just having this
really fun time on tour just really pushing
each other to play better and better.
Going up there, recording that record,
once we toured with The Jesus Lizard,
it was like all the right people at the right time.
What's so cool about the 90s, obviously, I like talk
about every day of my life today is that music
was so original and so exploratory.
I have a 90s phone.
What would I do, I can't believe it.
Probably,
hello?
That's incorrect, the answer is...
Just say who you are and what you do.
My name's Tim and I play the synthesizer
and I fantasize about playing the bongo.
All right so you're on Grass
and you're touring, what was it like doing like,
full cross country tours?
Second tour we did was with Jesus Lizard so hell,
you can't beat that, you know?
So was there any real heavy stuff
in the van with Michelle or was it just like...
It was just like building tension type thing where,
I mean a lot of it was our fault too because like,
obviously like, whenever you get four people together,
a lot of times they will just pick out the one person
that they focus all their, you know, anger on
and I guess, you know, to an extent that was
kind of what happened with Michelle.
All right, so did she leave or...
We kind of asked her to leave, I guess.
Well, Tim actually called me, he was the one that
said that we should go our separate ways so
I wasn't expecting that, I was very shocked,
I was not happy about it, I really
did not want that to happen.
I remember like, actually, you know, people like
Jesus Lizard and Girls Against Boys, they weren't so much
pissed but they really liked Michelle
and they were like, are you sure?
Yeah I was nervous when that happened,
I was a big Michelle fan.
Really what it came down to with that was we
loved to tour, Michelle had a really, pretty good job.
Touring was hard on me, you know,
and my job at that point, they were starting to kinda
give me a little bit of friction.
I was freaked out all the time 'cause I'm like,
well we have to tour because like, if we're not touring,
then what am I, I'm just some guy working a minimum wage
job in, you know, in Dayton, Ohio.
We just wanted to go nonstop.
Just be on the road as much as we could.
So you start off with that, you have that tension
and then after a while, when people are telling you
they can't do this or that then everything starts to bug you
so it kind of mixed over into some personal stuff but it was
pretty unfair to Michelle, really, like it wasn't,
you know, we were just kids and dummies and like,
you know, and you're sitting there going like,
I've got a record deal and this is gonna happen and that's
gonna happen and you're getting in the way of this.
I was really confused for a while and kinda mad, you know.
I let him know later, about a month later that I was
really mad, you know, and it wasn't too long after that
where we made up and I'm really glad that we did.
You know, I didn't wanna hold a grudge, I just wanted to
let him know, you know, I wasn't happy.
You know but, it was good while it lasted.
I don't know, I don't feel particularly proud about it
but at the same time I think it was necessary.
So we got rid of Michelle but I didn't really have an idea
of like, who we should get in there, I just remember
Tim, he saw it more as an opportunity, like, well okay,
I can get somebody else in this band that can maybe do
some different things that I wanna do and then Tim
was the one who started pushing for John.
And I remember being like, I don't know
if I want that guy in there.
- Why? - I mean, you know,
'cause fuckin' John is fucking, you know,
he's fuckin' John.
Like what about him,
I mean, specifically...
'Cause like, I think we went to his house and I just was
like, oh man, you know, he's just a weird guy.
Perfect.
Got that down.
I remember, you know, hearing about Brainiac starting
and then eventually seeing them.
I was just like, man, these guys are so good, you know?
And I remember Tim telling me he was
writing back and forth with John.
Tim sent me a letter first of all.
You know, he explained how they'd been touring and all
this stuff and I'd obviously seen the band and for me,
I was just like flattered to be asked to be
in a band that I was a fan of.
But it was perfect timing for me 'cause I was going
to school in OU, almost the entire time I was taking
classes there I had that thing that a lot of musicians
get that's like, just like, playing envy, you know,
I'd see bands playing and I was just like, I wanna be
doin' that, I'm not doing that right now and I feel like
it's actually time for me to either get outta school
or like, or something, you know, or just be sad
for a long time and then I get this letter and it's like,
yes, it was kind of like, this is exactly what you wanna do
so it didn't, I did think about it but not very long.
Once John got in there, it's like, oh
we always needed this, you know what I mean?
It happened pretty fast, I packed up my stuff,
moved to Dayton, we started rehearsing
for the tour that was coming up.
Yeah, so John was just kinda instantly plugged in and
just, we didn't miss a beat, really.
Yeah he changed everything and I think once people saw
how great he was a lot of people were like,
this is kinda awesome.
I had chills, I remember the hair
on my arm was standing up.
They stepped it into another gear.
I mean their trajectory was already unstoppable
but John was just, you took somethin' that was already
at 10 and you put it up to 10 and a half.
Timmy with, you know, John and Tyler and Juan and
they had the chemistry and very daring and experimental.
And you could tell there was something different about
what these guys were doing and just in the people that saw
them and how they reacted to seeing them.
I was pretty mesmerized because they were
so different at the time.
They blew my mind, when we saw them, just a lot of
energy, you know, just an awful lot of fuckin' energy.
For me, it's exactly what I wanted to do and
think I was the right person for the job so
yeah it felt good immediately, I think the thing that was,
I was still green in the sense I hadn't been on tour.
But we were playing with this band
and the drummer comes into the dressing room.
He couldn't say anything basically and he just showed us
that he had acid and Tim, he looked at me and he,
he's like, sure, and he took it and so I also took it.
I thought they took the acid after the show,
that's what they told me, 'cause I'm sure I would've
been mad 'cause we had a rule that you weren't allowed
to get wasted that everyone probably
broke that rule eventually.
And I just remember it really started kicking in in
that song, "You Dropped A Bomb On Me" was playing,
it was just like...
And I'm sittin' there, I'm staring kind of
like out into space, that's a
terrible drug to take to play Brainiac.
I mean, it's certainly learned music.
I just remember feeling like there was an elastic quality
to doing what I was doing that just felt kind of strange.
But drugs never affected our performance.
And an album as well, you contracted...
An album, yeah, we're gonna be recording an album
in about a month.
Do you know where and who's
at the controls and all that?
I think we're gonna try to use Eli again.
You get along with Eli well
on a musical level, then?
Oh yeah, totally, we all get along really well,
like a lot of the same music, same like ethic,
I guess, just wanting to pervert the sound somewhat so.
We did that tour and then Grass was like,
guys make a new record for crying out loud.
When it came time to make their next record,
we were still so close that it was a easy match up.
Eli was great to work with, he was up for trying anything.
Whenever he would ask Tim what he, you know, like,
what do you think this needs and Tim was always like,
let's run it through some more distortion.
He was relentlessly creative, you know,
and for me, having an artist who just
will push everything aside including eating
and just do that is pretty cool.
May not have been the easiest person
to be in a band with but...
That, I think, is almost where like, Tim and I,
in a lot of ways, we sort of started to go on a slightly
different musical path, like, where I started to fall
behind and didn't quite understand what he was doing.
With John and Tim in the band, you can have one visionary
person, but having two of these nutcases.
In my mind, I wanted the next record to sound even more
polished than the first record, I was like, the first
record isn't polished enough, we need to get
more polished but that wasn't the case.
It was more experimental and you know, things that were
like, "Fucking With The Altimeter."
Remember he was tellin' us about that
parakeet record that he was using?
Yeah.
The Complete Parakeet Trainer.
Yeah this, I think he got this before I
joined the band, I think in like Detroit.
He had that record for a long ass time before.
It was just sitting there waiting for its moment, you know?
Waiting to happen.
- Give me some love. - Just kinda like
playing around with the variants of the...
- Give me some love. - The record.
That song
does to me what I think rock music should do.
It sucks the air out of the room
and it makes them feel like something's communicating
to them from some other dimension.
So we did that record
and by the time it was done, it was even weirder than like,
because all these sort of things were happening.
I remember that thought too, where it was
just like, what have we done?
Seemed like a good idea.
I was fuckin' scared, like, I was like...
We really enjoyed making it but we were just kind of like,
is this going to be a total failure in other people's eyes?
If you think about the stuff that was coming out around
that time, the more mainstream stuff that was selling big
was, you know, nowhere near that weird.
And I remember taking it home, putting into a boom box
and laying on the floor in my parent's living room
being like, this is terrible, like
this record is the worst record.
We were just kinda looking at each other like,
is anyone gonna wanna listen to this?
Just 'cause it was, you know, there was some
weird things, there was a poppiness to.
Brainiac anyway, you know, the first album...
- Oh that was you, oh. - Such a pretty bird.
- Yeah that's okay. - Oh okay.
They found this weird sound they wanted to make
and they made it, it was theirs.
No one else was doing what they were doing.
And the whole world was all about grunge.
Yet that came out, that's incredible.
They had a really good sensibility about modernizing
pop music in a way that appealed to me.
It just had a edge to it that I thought was not common.
I don't know what they sounded like, I'm not sure exactly.
So I remember being kind of freaked out
and not really sure about it.
What do you mean?
But you know, then you get good reviews
and then you're like, oh yeah,
I always knew it was great.
I remember Eli was like really blown away.
He was like, this is awesome.
I just thought it was a really cool record and
something that I'd never done before
but cool doesn't always mean sellable.
You know what I mean, that's the thing and it's like,
I just didn't know the Grass people that well
to know whether they were gonna freak out or not.
People at Grass just,
they just, they loved it.
- Have you met Camille yet? - Oh yeah.
It was amazing, that's all I could say.
It was genius.
She was, it's genius, you guys are geniuses.
Everything you heard from him was just,
'cause it was like I said, it was so
different than anything else.
Oh my gosh, I love the record, you guys are geniuses.
They always delivered better and better.
The kid was a genius.
You know, that was the thing about Tim.
What that music was, really was a lot about what,
about his artistic journey, you know?
I mean we were all along for the ride but
it was definitely his thing.
He was like, I was watching him unfold of the guy
who was gonna arrive and be this really remarkable,
unique artist that was unlike anybody else and that's
what I was, I kind of watched Timmy more from the far
because he was so...
Tim was, and he was a man of few words at times.
I wouldn't say brooding, some other people would but,
okay he was brooding.
I don't know if I was intimidated by Timmy.
I felt like I never really got to know him
as well as I knew Juan or Tyler.
Why, you felt intimidated?
Maybe, sorta, kind of.
He was really good at what he did and I probably had
issues with that.
And then the more attention he was getting,
I think the harder time he was having.
I think it was after a show and we ended up staying,
it was one of the few nights, maybe a label paid for this
hotel and it was like in, near Times Square or something
like that and it was like an old thyme hotel and we were
like on the 30th floor and it had one of those ledges
like in the movies and Tim just got out on the ledge and
just walked around the building, like
so you couldn't see him anymore, like,
and I'm like, fuckin' terrified of heights, I'm just like,
laying on the floor going, what the fuck is he doing,
it's just like windy, just like,
just walked away for like five minutes.
It seemed to me that there was some part of his
personality that he wasn't quite comfortable with
and he always kept hidden away, he would bare himself
more live, I think, 'cause it was a fleeting thing.
He was gettin' stiff stuff out of his system,
you know, when he was performing, it had to be cathartic
and cleansing, it was cathartic and cleansing to watch it.
It was like just hyper kinetic James Brown guy or...
I always thought about James Brown.
In the school of like James Brown.
Draw some of that James Brown and
include it in punk rock, really.
A front person who understood how to work the room.
Never seen anybody play keyboards get as into it.
Just havin' a bird's eye view from behind the drum set
of just his genius insanity on stage,
it was just infectious.
And a little bit scary, you know,
you didn't know what was gonna happen.
Song stops and he's like, I'm the fuckin' king of pop.
The king of pop.
Bring that, the king of pop.
I'm the king of pop, somebody
give me a kiss and I'm like...
You're like, who are you?
Tim could look like a pretty aggressive guy onstage.
You weren't sure but then in the next moment he'd be
totally goofin' off about something.
I don't know, it was just definitely like
somethin' took over.
The thing was, it wasn't just, it wasn't just, you know,
musically, yeah also with things like, you know, with style.
That was at the phase where they were like wearing
all that stuff, I'm remembering the color orange.
I'm remembering sunglasses.
They would shop behind a slightly different rack
at the thrift store, you know?
Always fashion before function.
Yeah they did wear weird clothes, I mean we probably
just thought all Americans dressed like that.
You know, there's the thrift store chic with the
tight t-shirts and the belt buckles and then
there's the time with the ear muffs.
Fuckin' ear muffs, just the way they wore it.
At some thrift store, those, Brainiac
had all bought roller skates
and then just roller skating around the blocks around the
venue which was like in the middle of nowhere.
You would believe that there was some
flack to be caught from that.
Of course, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, fine.
You get to like, North Dakota,
you gotta stop for gas at some point, man.
We got out at a gas station in
middle of America, wherever it was,
you know, it was weird.
We'd walk in there and people would just be like...
If a band is like a gang, you have to
have your gang colors, you know?
I think that's kind of where the magic happens in bands.
When you're around each other all the time, you're like,
and going different places all the time together
and so you're just sort of like, you know, the
tour jokes and all these things developed.
Like chihuahua, do you want to kiss chihuahua?
Oh no.
Come on guys, be a little serious.
You're comin' to the darkness with me, cameraman.
I look back on that, we were just
so poorly behaved, you know?
- That's because we're... - Fuck the number system,
oh yeah.
- Never a dull moment. - No, no.
Again, they're so compelling as a group.
That's what I think made them stand out
and why labels and people like myself
were so gung ho to get them.
Everybody loved them,
you know, but they had to finish their deal with Grass
and then Corey just grabbed them as soon as he could.
I always thought they were great.
Super high energy and they were like one of those bands
where who they were was always shining through
and who they were was always moving forward.
They were just progressing as a band and it just sounded
different than anything else at the time.
Touch and Go had a bigger arm of distribution.
They could pack shows, you just say
it's a Touch and Go artist, place was packed.
I was sad 'cause I loved them but...
- Yeah. - I mean I might've
even whispered to them, go to Touch and Go.
By the time Hissing Prigs came out on Touch and Go,
it was like they had hit a stride that was like,
it's all its own.
You know, one thing I think that
we never really looked back too much.
I just remember it was just kinda this straight line
where we just kept moving forward
and doing different things and yeah.
It's funny, I always thought, oh this is
how all bands are gonna be.
No.
Yeah.
No, they were definitely unique.
They also, like the way that they did the numbers
in the names of the songs and stuff,
it was so ahead of their time.
That's what made, I think another thing that makes it
so timeless, it just gets crazier and crazier but at the
same time somehow more and more familiar.
It's an interesting challenge to be able to make a
record that is cohesive and eclectic at the same time.
You know, you can listen to different songs
and kinda feel like, oh this is like
a different world than the last one I heard.
We did talk about his lyrical process a little bit.
Well the words were just so weird and they kind of
flowed together but they didn't
necessarily make a lot of sense.
Even to this day, I don't think this is what he's saying
but I'm always going, mythical devils.
I don't know what he's talkin' about.
And chihuahua, chihuahua, like I can't...
Hot metal dobermans
covered with cinnamon fins, I think is
one of my favorites of them.
That's a pretty good line.
It's like, what is that?
Sounded cool.
And I said to him, I said, "It sounds like you're saying
can I get a witness," and he said,
"Well if that's what you think it is."
Yeah he wouldn't own up to what the lyrics were,
we had to make 'em up.
Because the vocals were so distorted,
it became more of like a relationship of vowel sounds
and things like that and if you got to go and actually
read the stuff, you're like,
don't be so shy, man, like this is
really like, this is good.
Not like there's some political message, just clever.
- You know what I mean? - Yeah.
Seems only fitting that on the fourth of July,
the town of George Washington is the
lawn site for Lollapalooza 95.
It's like, how did we end up on Lollapalooza?
The year we played, Hole, Jesus Lizard, Beck,
Sonic Youth, I mean, you know, there really wasn't
anything else in America like Lollapalooza.
They were startin' to get bigger.
It was very rapid but at the same time it was a
deserved ascent, yeah, 'cause they were just,
you know, just super original.
They were those bands that other bands
just look at and think they're cool.
I do recall a lot of bands loving Brainiac, you know?
Yeah, I remember back watching them at Lollapalooza.
And it was like when "Loser" was really big and
Beck would disguise himself, like ball his hair up
under a hat and wear cop sunglasses and try and watch.
Brainiac and like two or three songs in, like the
girls would spot him and yeah, he'd have to leave.
That's the thing is if you saw them live,
you were just like, man, these guys are fucking amazing
and they still have so much room to grow.
Hissing Prigs and during Lollapalooza too was the
beginning of major labels and how many more records are
we gonna make on Touch and Go and what major label
are we gonna sign to and are we gonna sign to a major label
and how much money are we gonna get and like
who owns what and all these things that like,
you never have to think of, you know what I mean,
when you're starting out and then you start to
think about that stuff and you know, people are,
yeah, just, it was very stressful.
You guys are goin' places, especially, I love the CD,
tons of great cuts on there.
Thanks.
Okay so let's time travel a little bit.
Okay.
Brainiac appeared at that transitional moment
when the scene was going from being sort of purely
underground, the transition into where there was a
professional class that had attached to the music scene.
When Nirvana broke and became huge at the beginning
of the 90s, it started a feeding frenzy.
Every major label, A and R person, their directive was
there's this whole indie scene out there there's gotta
be another Nirvana out there, you know.
If you value your job, you'll go find 'em.
I mean, to me, really, the 90s just felt like a gold rush.
I mean, it felt like a gold rush plain and simple.
I've only been to Dayton for one reason
and that was for Brainiac.
They were just, I mean just throwin' money hand over fist.
A million, two million dollars and
just tons of hand wringing.
Man, there was so much money being thrown around.
It was insane, it was insane.
How many bands got so much money that
no one even knows who they are.
Some bands were harder to get to know
and they kept you at distance.
Those guys were definitely one of 'em.
They were holding that pole with the little
feather on it and you were the cat, you know?
Brainiac was really good at
hanging out with all the label people to get hotel rooms.
I remember one time he was staying at a really nice place
and the message on the postcard said this sure beats
waking up in someone's kitchen floor
with a dog licking your face.
I'm like, yeah I bet it does.
I could tell you stories about being at dinners
and choking on, like literally coughing
at them passing on deals.
They just saw a lotta bands at the time get signed
and then go nowhere and get burned
and they were smart enough to realize
they should be careful about that.
How amazing is that, like they didn't wanna be
somebody's million dollar flavor of the month.
Like now, you know, musicians are trying to survive
and if they can get a deal, they're gonna take it,
you know what I mean, or do a commercial,
or whatever it is they need to make money.
But at that time it was a huge deal
to go from an independent label to a major label.
Even we had a huge backlash, like,
you know, sell outs, basically.
Juan, Juan, Juan,
wake up, Brainiac is too popular.
You could spend 10 years building up,
crowd, your audience and just, it could just be wiped away.
Like with just one bad deal.
That fear that you could,
you weren't going somewhere and that you ultimately
were making a terrible mistake that would
end you career was very palpable to me.
You're worried also about, well if we go to a major label
are you gonna be allowed to do what you want to do?
Artistic freedom is a big, big deal.
So many bands, they'll sign a contract,
take a big advance and then not be able to produce.
He wanted to make sure that when they did
sign a contract that he could back it up.
If you take away this lifestyle, if you take away this
and you start giving us money and you start letting us
stay in hotels and we drive around in a
nice van and we do all this other stuff,
is the art gonna go away, is what
makes us good gonna go away?
All these things are sort of percolating around you.
You guys are brothers, you're like the best perfect band.
I'm always like, please do not break.
Nothing ever went wrong for us for a long fuckin' time.
I think touring also, some of the cracks had
started showing a little bit.
I don't know if mad at each other's the word but
everyone was just kind of like living and operating
in their own crazy, sort of mini universe.
That caused me a lot of anxiety,
was like, what are we doing?
You're in a situation where you're relying on three
other people to keep it together and to keep going.
My girlfriend got, at the time, got pregnant.
The due date was basically in the middle of the.
Hissing Prigs campaign, to make it more stressful,
the baby came two and a half weeks early.
I kinda had to convince the guys that
we needed to drive back.
And I missed the birth
and I was not well liked by anyone
during that time period including myself,
so it was stressful.
Every single person in the band, one way or another
has power over you, you know, I would say Tim probably
had it the most together but he also had the most
pressure on him, he blew up at me.
We were in a hotel room and I
dropped the bomb and he's like,
you're ruining my career!
Like he literally like outbursted at me and I was like,
fuck, well what could I say?
It's like everybody holding everything in
and then so when everything would come out,
it just always comes out like...
That's the thing about being in a band, you really can't,
you just, you're flying by the seat of your pants.
Played that show at Lounge Act, I like,
took a just of thing of beer and went...
And threw into the crowd and then somebody threw a beer
bottle and it smashed right in Tim's face and we just
kept playing, kept playing, it was the end of the show
and then I got off and I was like, oh my god that was a
great show and he just grabbed me and threw me up against
the wall and he was like, don't ever fuckin'
do that again and I was just like, okay.
It's not your best self, you're not your best person
at the time and I think we all kind of became
not the best versions of ourself.
It was kind of like tension building.
People getting pretty fuckin' pissed at each other.
People yelling at each other.
John got punched.
Eventually we got into fisticuffs on tour.
He was super pissed at me and
he took a swing at me.
I mean you're putting like 20 year olds into like
a situation where like, here you're gonna sign this
two million dollar deal maybe if everybody
can just keep it together.
I started having panic attacks 'cause I was so freaked out
by all the stuff that was kinda going on, like people
weren't getting along that well and no one
ever told me what a panic attack was.
So I literally thought I was going crazy and I was trying
to hide it from other people 'cause like I'd have these
just like debilitating panic attacks
where I was just like freaking out.
Like, I definitely felt like I was losing my mind
and I felt like everybody was sort of acting out in
their own way, it's like a lot of extra partying going on.
Yeah, there's tons of stories.
One of the craziest things was
Marilyn Manson came through Dayton and Marilyn Manson
ends up having an after party at the show at Tim's house.
But that party is sort of famous and like
the stories from that party, like the
weird shit that happened at that party...
I'll tell you off camera but like...
Not tell you here.
And so what did you guys do with Manson?
You know, I just talk about,
just you know, daily life stuff.
I don't know.
I actually remember thinking that was funny and
I don't think Tim was too happy about the whole thing.
Just felt like things were like spinning a little bit
out of control, while at the same time
still keeping our momentum.
So I'm your host, Matt Pinfield, up next it's the
latest from the Dayton, Ohio band, Brainiac.
This is the first clip off their third album,
Hissing Prigs In Static Culture.
It's called "Vincent Come on Down"
and here it is on 120 Minutes.
Then it was like, whoa, and Spin's doing this
and you know, they're on MTV now.
It was wild, Brainiac mania.
They just say that about so many bands like there's
no one like them but they really do stand out.
They were so special and like no one could deny it when
they saw it, whether it was MTV or like a major label.
And somebody else called us up and was like,
Beck came and watched us at Lollapalooza.
Then Beck asked us to go on tour.
It all seemed in line, going on tour with Beck
just seemed to be like, a part of that momentum.
And that tour was fuckin' awesome, yeah,
I mean I think they're the biggest shows we ever played
in terms of like audience size and great after parties,
just felt like you were winning, you know,
like just things were happening.
And just energy there was so incredible.
If you could somehow bottle that, it could
power an entire city, those shows were just incredible.
On the Beck tour, just in the middle of a fuckin' song,
looking out and playing bass, just totally getting into it
and I just like, sometimes you just snap out of it and I
just like snapped out of it and I'm like,
what if this is the last time I do this?
Like, I remember thinking that, like,
what if this just stops today and I've always
kind of thought about that 'cause I remember
it was jarring like, just you know, it would jump around
a lot and just this moment of like, it just like
came into my head like, yeah, it was a very, yeah.
Do we go now?
Anytime you're ready yeah it's still recording.
Hi, I'm Tyler and this is Tim and
we're from Brainiac and you're watching The New Frontier.
Good enough?
- Yeah. - My name's Todd Yunglen,
I already mentioned.
All right.
Thanks Ben, I'm here in the backstage of the side door,
actually above the side door in the very dim room
with two of the members of Brainiac.
You've got a new EP out, is that right?
Yes, sir.
And I really like it, Electro-Shock For President.
That's true, that's true.
I'd like to introduce you to our bass player, Monasterio.
Hi.
Buenas noches.
I'm in a band,
you're probably one of our biggest influences
as a matter of fact.
- I like it all right. - This song's good,
I don't know, I think in 20 years people are still
gonna be listening to it, that's
- the thing. - I hope so.
That's good 'cause we'll still be getting the checks then.
But with that, every time I listen to it...
We just need more people like you to rip us off
and that'll sort of give us more credibility.
Yeah.
Keep the myth alive.
So please, tell your friends, rip Brainiac off.
Rip Brainiac off, from Brainiac, from the horse's mouth.
Not to say that they're horses or that they have mouths but,
- you know. - But we are both.
Yeah true.
Back to you, Ben.
We did the Beck tour and then we were
gathering pretty regularly.
We were working on new songs trying to figure out
what the next record was gonna look like and also
just kind of in, you know, heavy discussion about the
future, you know, what label we would be on,
yeah so there was a lot going on there.
We had a meeting and Tim was like,
we've toured, we've made these records.
He's like, if you guys wanna keep doing this,
then we have to keep pushing this thing forward
because otherwise this is like, then we can just be done.
I think he was drunk one time but he was like,
he got really wasted and he's like, he kept talking
about the phoenix, he's like, we gotta rise again
like the phoenix, like he just kept saying that
over and over again and that's what he was talking about
like we sorta had to destroy what we'd done before.
It was also a turning point because I think our
relationship, our creative partnership was basically
coming to an end, that they had kinda outgrown me
as a producer and so I was excited
to see what was gonna happen next.
You know, we had made like three records with Eli.
We were deciding to just branch out.
We were using trigger drums, samplers, drum machines,
while at the same time sort of mixing it
in with the low-fi aesthetic.
He was trying to push that stuff in as much as he could
while still keeping a little bit, I guess, of what we had.
That was us kind of trying to take it to the next level,
we started using samplers and just other experiments.
I got into circuit bending at the time.
What's that song sound like?
With a kind of a French guy.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah. - Yeah, that one.
Bands have a tendency to just repeat themselves.
Once that band develops an identity and they start
getting rewarded, there is a strong incentive
to stop experimenting and keep doing
the thing that people like.
So when you hear groups make radical changes like this,
I think of a band like Radiohead or somethin'.
Then you realize something's at work that's like,
there's a lot of possibility there.
Whether it's based on the friendships of the people
in the group or somehow in that dynamic
that change is possible.
I don't think it's possible in every group.
Some of those things were like kind of four track
experiments, some bits at home and then we brought
the reels in to Jim O'Rourke's studio.
I mean the first thing that occurred to me was that
they were integrating these things in a much more
interesting way than other bands.
Working with Jim was great.
I liked a lot of his records that he had made and
he's a improviser as well.
Usually mixing people's records.
They would come to me with something
they didn't know what to do with anymore.
I sort of became the go to guy for when you've hit a wall.
We brought this like,
you know, murky sounding recording with a wet blanket
like draped over it and was like,
can you make this into a Brainiac record?
Electro-Shock For President record, I thought that was
one of the best records I'd heard.
Electro-Shock For President, pretty fucking amazing.
It's pretty ahead of its time too.
The EP they did with Jim was tremendous.
It kinda made me realize at the time I thought,
wow this band's really capable of something,
I think extraordinary.
Thank you, that was a new number.
And this is one of the hits.
You'll be hearing a lot of this song in the future.
I think I'd had like a talk with Tim
about like, what the future was gonna be like,
it just didn't feel that resistance anymore.
I think he just had become okay with like,
we're gonna do this major label thing.
You know, when you're that in demand,
you can set the rules and set the guidelines.
If I choose your label, you have to let me
do things this way and they became that in demand.
It just kinda seemed like the next logical step
in the evolution of Brainiac to just go to
that next level with a major label.
A cloud had been lifted, I think things had been
kinda worked out, we'd sort of decided who we were gonna
sign with, some of the other acting out that was going on in
the band, like, that had also been addressed finally
and I just think we were just in a really good spot.
We were supposed to fly to New York the following week to
talk to Interscope or maybe another label.
Meet with a lawyer, talk about contracts,
options, all that kind of stuff.
You know, working through this new thing
for whatever the next LP would be.
Just kept getting better and better and better.
Rick Rubin's called and he wants to produce your record.
I was like, oh that's cool then I get another call
and they're like, Rage Against The Machine called,
they want you to go on tour with them
and we're like, that's pretty fuckin' cool.
We were at the final word on the final page of the chapter
and it felt like okay now we're gonna,
here's the next chapter.
Having your band from the beginning,
having your like, boys from home that you
get onto the world stage.
You know, but you know, like you said,
things happen the way they do.
They weren't trying to be current,
they were trying to be timeless.
They were making art, they were making somethin' that was
gonna withstand the test of time.
It was craft, it wasn't like, oh we have to
have something so we can go on tour.
We have to have something so that we can get reviews.
No, like, they were making
great records to make great records
and then they played live shows because they liked to
play great live shows and those things go together.
Yeah well.
I still see it.
Well look, let me...
It was on the news while I was eating dinner
and for some reason I didn't look at the TV.
And I remember hearin', when they were interviewin'
the policeman, he was sayin' that was
one of the worst crashes he'd ever seen.
And then my cousin called me and she told me that was him
and I just couldn't believe it.
I get a call and it's my sister
and she's just freaking out.
They had been trying to get a hold of me
and they didn't know where I was.
They thought I was like, in the car maybe
and then they sort of told me and I was just like...
I don't think I had any reaction at all.
I was completely in shock.
Drove down Main Street and made it about a quarter of a mile
and I just pulled into the gas station
that was there and I just lost it.
I just went into Tim's room and was
just like looking at his stuff and...
I just remember...
Being numb.
We were just, it was just unbelievable.
Yeah, couldn't believe it.
I just thought it was horrible, I mean,
you feel sorry for the people that are around him
more than anything.
I think a lot of people just,
myself included, just compartmentalized it, you know?
Because trying to make sense out of something like that,
it doesn't, there is no rhyme or reason to it.
What happened that night, like, I wasn't there,
I know what different people have said and like,
it was just like, it didn't make any sense.
I know it was a car accident but beyond that,
I don't know what the circumstances were.
I heard it was icy, I heard it was, I still don't know.
From what I understood, is that Tim had this 72 Mercedes,
he loved this car, it was green and
just loved driving around town.
I remember Tim had just bought that Mercedes-Benz
and he opened the trunk for us, it was like,
totally rusted out in the back so the,
you know, the exhaust was just
coming into the vehicle and he basically said,
like, yeah it's got some issues and
you know, five days later that was when it happened
and basically it was just the carbon monoxide
was building up in his system, like during those days.
He just slowly
reached the threshold of that carbon monoxide poisoning
and just happened to be driving home at the time
and lost control of the car and hit this pole,
so that's how I understand what happened.
You know,
part of the tragedy is just what
would have been next, you know, really.
'Cause I don't think that unit was done
speaking, really, you know?
To me, Tim was Brainiac, so the minute I got that call,
I was like, I was just like, okay this is just done.
We just really enjoyed what we were doing as Brainiac and
you know, that was gone, it was tough livin' without that
'cause it was who we were for the past five
solid straight years, that's all we knew, it's all we did,
was just, you know, make music and travel and tour
and see the world and meet amazing people
and it was just gone.
I just didn't really talk to people from before like,
I just cut myself off from that world almost completely
and just like this wall came down and then I was just like,
I didn't really have the tools to deal with it.
I just didn't wanna do anything, didn't wanna
leave the house, just utter, total depression.
The practical side of me just, like, I guess I gotta
go get a job, gotta figure out what my job is gonna be.
When the dust had settled I went around the neighborhood
to try and find work and there was a place called.
Park Chili, I remember going there, manager's looking over
and he's like, so what brings you to Park Chili?
And I didn't cry but it was just almost like a breaking
point for me 'cause I was not gonna tell this guy like,
what had just happened to me but I was just kinda like,
well I just love chili, sir, you know?
And as soon as I left there I was just like, this is nuts,
I can't, I gotta figure something out.
Tim's passing was clearly an explosion that just
rocked everything and sent everyone
careening in different directions.
You know, once someone is gone,
it's the job of the survivors to pick up the pieces and
figure out what works from there or not.
Brainiac was done in 1997 and my own personal life
just kind of spiraled outta control, just drug addiction
and very rapidly put on a bunch of weight.
I was a wreck, I was a mess.
It's kind of a fog what happened to me.
My strategy was just to cut myself off.
You just move somewhere else and start again and just
do something else and don't really talk to your old friends.
I was like, you know, I was depressed,
trying to make music, some people say you can't run away
from your problems but sometimes a fresh start is
an entirely different matter, you know?
Loaded up all my worldly possessions and
drove to New York.
Some of the details are fuzzy, you know?
It wasn't until Kim Deal asked me to
play on a Breeders record that I kinda popped
out of it a little bit and got together and
started playing drums again and went up to New York
for a couple months and we were up there for a while,
a lot longer than expected, I was gettin' pretty burned
out so I just left to go get a slice of pizza
and got on the airplane and went home to Dayton.
And when I came back home from that it was just kinda
back to the same depression and just doing nothin' really.
There's just not a solution to that.
Yeah, there's not a like,
I don't know, maybe people just do what they can do,
like they deal with it the way that they can deal with it.
I think it was therapeutic for him to continue
making music, everyone was stunned and his way out
was to keep making music.
You know, I was always still tinkering a little bit
on my own just recording on a
four track and stuff like that.
And just really being in a new environment
and that, that's how Enon started.
I don't know how long it took for like,
for John to put it back together and start something new,
Enon, you know, which then became like
a really influential, brilliant band.
John kinda spiritually just kept going.
Took what he was doing in Brainiac and just kept going
and augmented it and still to this day
is doing interesting music.
Where I am today is, you know, it's all progression
that makes sense to me now, part of my momentum in
moving forward, it's not like painful for me to look back,
it's just like, kinda draining, it's like, that was
like a lifetime ago, it feels like.
Schmersal, I definitely kept in touch with
and in terms of his kinda commitment to music.
Juan, I, again, think about as like a business person
who just went and was like, well, you know, I'll move
and I'll get job and things related to what I believe in.
I'm a motion graphics designer, work a regular job.
People don't really know what you did.
Maybe you're not who you were before but
you're definitely, you can be somebody else.
You can be somebody else but you haven't...
- Yeah you don't process... - Yeah, so it's like,
my question is, how long did it take for you to...
Well that's what I'm saying, if that's my strategy,
did I process it, I don't think I
really did, like I don't know.
You know, I think if you poked me hard enough,
it probably would all come out pretty easily but like,
I feel like, you know, I put in 20 years to not really
try to deal with it too much so and then
time definitely helps, you put it far enough behind you,
it's like, it gets easier.
John's doing Enon and Juan's gone in different directions,
you know, and clearly Tyler had gone
in a whole different direction too.
Say, he is risen.
He is risen.
Around 2007, I found myself just like, in the pretty much
the darkest, lowest possible place I could be.
It's the drug addiction and just all this crazy stuff.
I stayed in that darkness for
about a decade so it was like a 10 year journey
of just spiraling outta control
and so I went back to my church that
I grew up in as a child.
I came back to my church just full of doubts and
just read a whole bunch of books and
started reading the bible again and
kinda gettin' a fresh start.
Hey, Happy Easter!
And I started servin' to my church and
I started playin' drums in the band and
then I came on part time and now I'm there full time
as an assistant pastor and I just love what I do.
I'm grateful to be breathin' much less to be
able to do what I do and so I'm very grateful.
Okay just stand by and mark it.
Perfect.
What's been cool is over the past few years, we've
definitely been reconnected which has been
wonderful and I don't want that to ever end.
I think for the most part we processed it
individually, don't you think?
- Yeah. - Yeah.
I think it was really weird but I mean like...
- Sure. - You're talking about some...
A cataclysmic change in everyone's lives.
And also we just were like...
Planets realigned.
When something like that happens, you just kind of,
at least for myself, it's just easier just to go off
by yourself and not be reminded of
like, everything you've lost.
It was so bizarre, it was like a two fold grieving process
because first and foremost, you lost your best friend.
- Right. - And someone that
you were close to and you love but then once that
whole grieving process kind of started to die down,
then it really sunk in, like, oh my career's over.
You know, this dream of Brainiac.
The shift of all of that stuff happening and then
all of that stuff not happening.
We just happened to have something really incredibly
- tragic happen. - Right.
And that forced a great change in
all of our lives, you know?
Yeah, when we got back from tour, I mean, we probably
wouldn't talk for a while, I think.
Get me away from these people.
I've lived in a 85 Chevy van with for 45 days straight.
I remember Tim's dad was, of course, very distraught
but he said something that was nice at the service,
he said that he was so happy with his life at that point,
you know, and in a way, I think this was a plea also to
the guys, the band mates themself to say,
try to remember that.
I feel just so fortunate that I had been there to witness
the power and the magic and for unknown reason this
changing moment but I feel like I witnessed,
some said almost biblical, mythical thing.
And I think Timmy would've led
a paradigm shift in musical taste.
I really do believe that.
I think that band was so cool and so unusual
that what we lost, not just was his life and you know,
clearly his friends and family lost that but I thought
that we could've lost something that was
more impactful to just the art.
Hearing Tim's vocals, it's just crazy.
Just weird to go back to those tracks and just suddenly
turn it on and be like, oh there he is.
He's not gone, he's right there, like
fully alive singing at you.
- Yeah that's haunting. - Yeah.
It's crazy but it's also awesome.
When I was going through some posters
getting ready to have some stuff scanned
to send to you actually,
there was a music box that I hadn't played in years,
so it's a little man at a piano and he was sitting
clear across the room and I found this one poster and I
thought, oh yeah I'd forgotten about this one
and I was rolling it open and I heard just like
two or three notes from the music box and I thought
that did not just happen, I mean, it's, I know it sounds
probably crazy to a lot of people but, it just,
to me it was a sign like, yeah, go through this stuff,
this is good for you, mom, because it was, you know,
like I said it was hard for me to, for a long time
to look at the posters or watch videos or listen to the
music and it just, I don't know, it just, I've heard
from many people that think, he's out there
giving them little messages now and then.
This dream that I had shortly after he passed away,
we hugged and he said, "I'm sorry, I didn't know."
And I said, "I know you didn't know."
And he says, "But I can't stay, I gotta go."
And I said, "I know."
And we hugged and that was it.
That was it.
I had this recurring dream, every single night.
I was in this unrecognizable bar and every single night
I'd walk in and I'd see Tim and I would instantly get
ecstatic to see him and then mad because I thought he was
faking the whole thing or somethin' and just like took off
and didn't wanna do Brainiac anymore, you know how
dreams are and then I'd always run to him and the joy
would overtake that and every single night I would hug him
and as I would hug him, he would just slither out of my arms
and disappear and that was the end of the dream.
I had that exact same dream what felt like forever
and I don't why, I don't know what it meant but eventually
the dream just stopped and I don't know if
you'd call that closure or not but,
yeah, I don't know what you'd call that.
I was, I came home from work and I was just
kinda mad at somebody and I was kinda complaining
to him about it and he said, "Mom, I think you might be
overreacting," and he just looked a little annoyed
with me and I just it, it hurt my feelings
and he knew it hurt my feelings and so he felt bad about it
and the next day I came home from work and on the table
in the entrance was a little cactus with a note.
It doesn't want me telling this story.
I hope people realize that, yeah, this is a
tragic story but it's not a story about tragedy.
Leading up to the show, like that day, it just seemed
kind of almost overwhelming then when we started playing
it was just, you know, it was such a
good time and it was great.
You know, we made it about having guests,
involving other people that were like
related to the band.
Even though I was lucky enough to work on this stuff,
I was a genuine fan of it too, so it's like,
it's just part of my musical history.
I can't imagine my life if.
Brainiac hadn't been in it.
It felt like this is the time to do this.
Feel what you avoided before.
Kind of now or never.
The show was spectacular and it was,
the energy, it was electric.
It was just amazing to me to watch the reaction
to the music and just see all that energy and there was just
this overwhelming feeling of love in that room.
That energy lives on through you,
you and all these other people.
From where I'm at, it's about celebrating that memory.
I've always been very allergic to bands getting back
together, I don't wanna be up there and like not do it
justice so I feel like that gig turned out really great.
It just felt natural.
Doing these shows was more like therapy for me personally,
just being able to see all those people I hadn't seen
in years and realize like, how much, you know,
instead of internalizing this like, that the music
meant a lot to them and just see them again
and to have that experience.
Just seeing that whole family of people and you know,
feeling that feeling of being sort of
part of the music world is like, it's a great feeling.
I think a lot of it was cathartic and I think what
happened too, I wasn't prepared for how emotional
it was gonna be, like I was kind of a wreck
after the show, like in a good way, you know?
And seeing people that you haven't seen in a long time
and it all kinda centers back to my brother.
It was kind of heartbreaking but on the other hand
it was like, wow, here we are and this music is livin' on
and people are playing it and there's so much love here and
wow, look at what he left behind.
You know, Tim just, he died so suddenly and
it just changed my life forever
and I thought, it just felt like everything was over,
you know, the music, everything was the end
but I've come to realize lately that
you know, a huge part of Tim is still here.
His music and the memories and all the love that people feel
that's everywhere, that's still here and so his story really
didn't end 20 years ago, it's still being written.
You know, the School Of Rock stuff
that's been going on in Texas.
And I was like, oh my gosh, that's crazy.
It's so amazing for me to be able to pass this on
to the next generation and they were playing with more
passion and power than I've ever seen them play
in their lives and some of those kids
I've been teaching for eight years.
They came from the 90s, were doing something completely
different, so then I was like, okay this band's like amazing
'cause they were super weird, and like I hadn't listened
to anything like it at all and so now I'm using them as like
a huge inspiration for like a bunch of stuff.
Brainiac's a band that's been
really inspiring to me from a sonic standpoint.
You can kinda hear that and other people
took those influences and incorporated them
and Trent Reznor, you know, I guess was one of them.
I don't think most people even realize that
it just has a stamp all over lots of, lots of pop culture.
In the landscape, when I like, look at the
last 25 years, they definitely inspired me.
Make us all dream to find that kind of magic in the future.
The impact is immeasurable still for people that like
any of the bands I'm with, I will always try to sit down
and say, if you like what I do,
you're gonna like what this did for me.
I think the main inspiration that I got is just like,
just let go of all your insecurity,
just chase the wild sparks.
Just pushed all the walls out a little bit, you know?
Or just made you realize, like, there aren't any walls.
The music is always there.
I mean as different as he was creatively, as a person
he was just very unique and yeah, I don't know,
charismatic and smart and, I don't know,
he was somebody I could talk to
and I hope the film brings out some of hanging out with Tim
but yeah I mean I really miss that.
You know, I think Tim was extremely and uniquely gifted,
I really do, I think he was just an amazing mind,
a musical mind and in fact,
to this day, my favorite Brainiac songs
I don't even play on.
Those are just Tim, those are just Tim and
a four track and just his brilliant mind.
Now I can finally after all these years,
really listen to the music, I couldn't for a long time.
You know, I could watch it in just small amounts
and then I would just almost feel like I was suffocating
because I missed him so much and a lot of that has changed
just recently and I'm hearing a lot of stories about
how he inspired people to follow their dreams and
that just feels great so I think this whole process,
the documentary, the tribute concert has just,
for me it's been so healing and.
I just feel a lot of gratitude, I'm just really lucky
I got to be his mom, so it's,
I don't know how I got off on all that, but...
It's gonna waste our time a bit,
all right, thank you, thank you, yeah.
Okay, so, just so when we lose the label on the tape
20 years from now when they're doing the big rockumentary,
no all right, can you give me your name?
My name's Tim and I play the synthesizer and I sing.
If we got to shine in that period of time,
I think that was a great time to shine.
You're just like the guy like in the western,
you're the guy who comes from parts unknown,
you do what you're gonna do.
And then you disappear into the sunset.
Yeah.
Good game, guys.
Could you just clap for us?
I can.
I, Steven Frank Albini, being of sound mind,
hereby allow, what's your thing called?
Give me one second.
Brainiac documentary to use my likeness for all eternity
for anything, forever in perpetuity, don't give a fuck.
Juan keeps tellin', what did Juan say?
Guy who had lived in there before had used it
as like kind of a sex dungeon.
- That's cool. - Marker's ink.
Over the top kinda rock and roll thing, like a...
Yeah.
Fuck you.
The entirety of the 90s is kind of a fog.
Think I went to a show with them, I don't remember
what we were watching but we went some place together.
God, I wish I knew what it was.
I might not have been there.
I heard you were there.
- I was there, okay. - Yeah.
I probably was there.
Just fuckin' pop another pill, bro.
Rolling.
Just keep 'em rollin'.
No regrets.
- No regrets. - No regrets.