Bennythejet

"Gardening your wig" - Lotion, Around EP

Okay, little background on this one.

So, the band I was in back in the 90s, Lotion, were well liked by the UK press. That said, we got a fair number of comparisons to R.E.M. and Hüsker Dü. Which was both A) perfectly fine with us and B) rather obvious, given that we'd all become writers and players during the golden era of what used to be considered "college rock" (to be fair, our drummer, Rob, was more steeped in both 60s jam music and more angular new wave). Weirdly, one of the names we originally considered was Sugar. And Bob Mould was apparently at our second show!

Anyhoo, our UK label wanted to release a song from our album as a single* so we needed b-sides. Not sure who came up with the original idea to do this proto mash-up, but we got to record it at Fun City with the esteemed Wharton Tiers, who was an absolute sweetheart (although I do admit I wanted it to sound more Sonic Youthy, which may have led to my biting of SY's "Tuff gnarl" at the end - if he noticed the swipe, he didn't say).

So...two covers in one! We got someone else's chocolate into someone else's peanut butter.

in (approximately?) THREE DAYS (so on 4/16/24), it WILL BE.....

STEVE FAINE'S BIRTHDAY!!!!!!!!!!!

☆ above picture courtesy of: source ☆

please draw or make some sort of extravalegant birthday cake of some type for the occasion!!! even if YOU, the person reading this, has LITTLE TO NO CONTEXT as to what you're seeing!!!

DISCLAIMER - this is NOT organized in a way that is harmful or mean to ANYONE including the person this is.... addressed to???? idk how to word it. i randomly thought of this while reblogging neil banging out the tunes posts and figured id do it lol

now.....GET OUT THERE AND MAKE SOME CAKES (or sushi?) BY (or on) THE 16TH!!!!

Hello, Ben!

We fully recorded “Vanillaroma” for the second album, Nobody’s Cool (including a flamenco inspired flugelhorn solo by Kurt Ralske), and even did a rough mix before it got dropped from the final tracklist.*

So, it’s never had an official release of any kind. But it may pop up on here one of these days if I can find it. 😉

so basically on the original mid-late '90s website for Decal (an obscure San Francisco punk band I like that I talk about a little bit on my pinned post) there's....this section of the site (called Homemade Spaceship) which i assume was a side project of Decal's lead singer/lead guitarist Bob Conlon. (screenshot of main menu below)

another interesting thing is not one, but TWO (and maybe even three if you count the main-main menu) pages on the site that this strange amalgamation is on POSSIBLY INDIRECTLY mention the Homemade Spaceship site having some kind of audio: