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Lucky Pineapple!

L’histoire du Lucky Pineapple

First it was me and Joey Kelly. He was going to play drums, I was going to play guitar, and we were gonna call our band something like “John and Stacy” and then change it every time we played to something else like “Steve and Monica,” “Tammy and Rick,” you get the idea. Then we realized that wasn’t a very good idea so we decided to call it Lucky Pineapple, and to play tropical sounding songs. Since there were only two of us, I bought an octave pedal to make my guitar sound more bass-like.

We wrote a couple of songs, tried out a couple of people to sing,* decided we needed to have better songs before we got a singer, and never really accomplished that.

I knew JC because I had been in a band called Haywire Act with him. One of the things I knew about him was that he had a keyboard and a sampler, so I talked Joey into getting him to do some keyboard and sampler things, regardless of the fact that he had never done this in a band and didn’t really know how to play the keyboard very well.

Jon Cook was at the Dodds Hotel at the time, so he wandered downstairs one day while we were showing JC some things I think and started playing bass. Or guitar. I forget which one it was, but he started playing with us, mostly bass, because we didn’t have anyone doing that yet. Soon after this Jon met Lee Banks somewhere and told her we had a band and asked if she wanted to sing. Or maybe she offered, I wasn’t there. So we started picking Lee up for practice too. And that was the first line-up of Lucky Pineapple.

A couple of months, a dozen four-track tapes,** gallons of beer, scores of cigarettes, and a lot of noodling around on our various instruments later, we gave up.

Then nothing that has much to do with L.P. for a while.

Then JC moved to a place a few blocks from me and we were drinking and talking about playing music together, the way that people who know each other and are drinking often do, only we actually did start playing together, because I found a tape that had the first few songs me and Joey came up with and JC’s a really good drummer so I knew he’d be able to pull it off. So we started re-learning the songs in his dining room.

JC figured he could talk Brian into playing with us, and apparently he did, so that made three of us in the dining room. And when you’ve got three people in a dining room working on some weird-o songs, you might as well make it four. So when Ben was telling me at a cookout that his band, Tyrone, was calling it quits, I invited him to come by and play with us as well. And he did.

I had seen Su playing trumpet in Vaginal Ashtray and the Hate Basement, and drunkenly hassled her a couple of times before I finally got her number and gave her a rough tape of the rest of us playing. Fortunately she took me seriously, or at least had nothing better to do, and so there were five people drowning out the TV, stereo, and any other appliances JC’s roommates may have been wishing to listen to.

I’m sure you’ll agree that if you’ve got two guitars, drums, keyboard and trumpet, you should probably also find a bass player. We didn’t have to look very long, or very hard. In fact I think we talked about getting a bass player for longer than we actually tried to find one. Ben’s brother, Dave, who was playing bass in a different band with me (The Teeth), wanted to try playing bass in Lucky Pineapple as well. So he did. And a week after the first time he played with us, we played our first real show at The Old Louisville Coffee House. We had played some sort of battle of the bands at IUS*** a month or so before Dave joined, but that was more of an on-the-spot-we’re-all-off-work-so-let’s-do-it kind of thing. We won first place, and with the money from that we were able to buy a cheap P.A. (which allowed us the luxury of actually hearing Su’s trumpet at practice, as well as writing songs with lyrics).

After a bit of sketchiness involving ski-masked burglars attempting to steal our equipment, we moved practice to Dave and Ben’s rented house, where we practiced in their living room, and then their basement, until the basement wall imploded during a flood. Luckily none of us were drowned (though we were in the house when it happened and felt the foundation crack in half literally minutes after we’d grabbed the last of our equipment.) We relocated to my basement, where we continue to practice, and where most of the band has lived at one time or another.

All this time we had been playing shows, writing songs, making recordings****, devising fun things to do at the shows(smoke machines, weird videos to play in the background, inflatable palm trees, long ridiculous introductions, a go-go dancer, etc.)but most of that stuff can be discovered elsewhere here.

So that’s about it, really.

* I feel that it is worth noting that one of the singers we tried out was Thaniel Lee, who came up with an arrangement idea that we still use. Thanks!

** I don’t know who ended up with most of these tapes, but if it’s you, I’d like to get some copies!

*** IUS is Indiana University Southeast. They were also nice enough to let us record our CD, The New Rainbow there in the Stem Concert Hall. Also it should perhaps be noted that Brian Sweeney is a graduate of this institution.

**** Places we’ve recorded are the aforementioned concert hall at IUS, Jason Hayden’s Playground Studio, Brian Sweeney’s Orange and Brown Audio Lounge (both in Louisville, KY), Electrical Audio Recording in Chicago, IL where we recorded with Mike Bridavsky of Russian Recording in Bloomington, IN, and last but certainly not least,  John Denison’s Denison Studios in scenic Floyd Knobs, IN.