Thebrosmad—pronounced "The Brothers Mad"—a two-man, lobster-wearing rock band, was formed in September of 2009 in Portland, Oregon by local cable-access singing-songwriting cult hero Pontifex vonHummer and the heretofore unknown Sir Raleigh Grey, a singer/songwriting outsider artist. They met August 27th of that year at Alberta Street's "Last Thursday," where artists and art lovers clog the streets at the end of the month to sell, buy, see and be seen. vonHummer was walking around promoting a live show coming up that weekend and Sir Raleigh was on a corner hawking his line of painted clothing. Like long-lost brothers, the connection was instant. Although Sir Raleigh wasn't in lobsters at the time, as vonHummer was, he'd worked for years in his native Chicago walking the streets downtown dressed as a giant lobster to promote a local seafood restaurant. Both had an interest in using clothing and footwear as a canvas for painting, but when Sir Raleigh said, "My real love is drumming..." the wheels of destiny rolled over them both and they resolved to try and work together.
Privately, vonHummer had given up working with other musicians years before, as he just couldn't work it out.
vonHummer: "Portland is a wonderful town full of excellent musicians with absolutely no work ethic or ambition. I like what a collaboration can create, but I'm a secret tyrant who always reserves an extra vote for myself, so things are never 'even-steven' with me. It's never too long before I'm disappointed by whoever I'm working with when they don't think as big as I do or work as hard or show up late or..."
Sir Raleigh: "Yeah, all the bands I worked with just wanted an excuse to do drugs and drink themselves to death. I feel so much energy coming out of me and I want to practice to get to the stage and show the 20 somethings what two middle agers can do. As I get older I am actually getting wilder on stage not slowing down. I feel my musical skills are to share joy with the world not to lord over others., "
Happily, it became clear right away that they worked well together.
vonHummer: "Sir Raleigh, he's very expressive with his beats. He's not on auto-pilot at all. Almost nobody drums that way anymore. It's very classic the way he moves the rhythm along, but he's creating an atmosphere, too, by what he's playing. He works hard and he takes the song seriously. And, like me, he's out to conquer the world, which is an attitude seldom seen past the age of 27."
Sir Raleigh: "It's the best collaboration I've ever known. vonHummer treats me like I'm actually human. He's open to my ideas and I'm an equal artist to him, not an unpaid drumming employee. I'm doing vocals and keyboard and the sound we've got is really a combination. It's not 'vonHummer + drummer,' which was the assumption at the start. We've become a unique band."
vonHummer has done all of the songwriting so far. By agreement, they'll share any royalties or mechanicals, though vonHummer retains credit and rights.
vonHummer: "My songs are my children and I don't mind splitting the money but I won't give anybody else custody. If Sir Raleigh loses his mind someday and wants to license 'Each and Every Woman' to Tampax, I want complete veto power."
Sir Raleigh: "Hey, I'll take the same deal. If we ever do a song I've written, I'll split the money. I don't give a shit."
To work out their sound, Thebrosmad set about recording 12 new vonHummer tunes as demos.
vonHummer: "I've always found recording to be the best way to learn songs and sort out a band. You get to manufacture piece-by-piece, and if something isn't working it works well to arrange, listen, rearrange, listen... I'd thought initially, well, Sir Raleigh can be a henchman to help my act, but the demos made it pretty clear that we had something way beyond my solo sound."
Sir Raleigh: "We set in right away to the vital work of picking a band name. A couple of them stuck for a few days. The only one I still remember was 'the Controvertibles, but when vonHummer suggested 'the Brothers Mad,' I was sold then and there."
vonHummer: "I got the name from an early Mad Magazine paperback compilation that I had as a kid. Back then, Mad would give their reprints names based on popular books and I think this one must have been a take on the 'The Brothers Karamazov.' It seemed like an apt name because there's definitely a 'brother-from-another-mother' thing going on with Sir Raleigh and me. Also, I liked joining the ranks of other fine musical brothers like The Brothers Johnson, the Smothers Brothers, the Clancy Brothers, Doobie Brothers, and so on."
Thinking the name a bit too long, vonHummer suggested mutating it to a more user ID-like 'Thebrosmad' spelling.
vonHummer: "It's what I call a 'speedbump.' You want to make being a fan a little bit harder, but also more exclusive. REM had a similar thing. People who didn't know the band might pronounce it 'remm,' or say 'Oh, does it stand for Rapid Eye Movement?' and then the fans say smugly, 'No, it's just REM. It doesn't stand for anything.' At that point the band name gets stuck in your mind. So we're hoping someday to have fans who will sniff at the unknowing fellow who sees a poster and says 'thebro-smadd?', 'It's pronounced 'The Brothers Mad...' The name is a speedbump to easy consumption. If somebody chokes on the spelling not being obvious and is put off by it: good riddance. We want the kind of fans that enjoy being put upon by our conceits. Like the costumes."
Ah, the costumes? vonHummer has always performed with his bizarro outfit: the lobster in the hair, suits spattered with housepaint, and dark glasses with eyes painted on. Which often strikes people strangely when they hear his music, as there's nothing particularly bizarro about it.
vonHummer: "People would say all the time, 'Your songs are great, why do you need the lobsters?' because it trips them up. Usually bands dress up to neutralize the fact that their music sucks, so when they find my music enjoyable, they can't understand why I bother. But they don't see what I'm actually covering up: my shame about my music being so accessible. It's similar to the way exceedingly beautiful girls like Sinead O'Connor and Annie Lennox—and Lady Gaga, come to think on it—uglify themselves. Everyone loves beauty but the unique audience I'm after are uncomfortable with how easily they love beauty. Those people—I'm like that myself, of course—we want artists who can tease us a bit. Don't make it so easy to love art. Jack Johnson and Michael Buble can have the millions who like it made easy. I prefer to cater to the thinkers who love good music but can't love it mindlessly. There must be at least ten or twenty of us out there, I think."
Often seen sporting a top hat while not performing, Sir Raleigh modified his own look to be branded with vonHummer lobsters, glasses, and paint suits. Rather than braiding the lobsters into his hair as vonHummer does, Sir Raleigh opted to have his lobsters—done up in silver—attached to a paint-spattered top hat.
Sir Raleigh: "We're working on modifying the paint suit for performance. I'd risk heat stroke if I played a show drumming in a latex covered suit. On my live suit, the sleeves and pant legs velcro off, and the shirt front and tie are one-piece, so they just pop off. We make a big deal about the unveiling when we play live as I prepare to sit at my kit. It's pagentry. The fans love it."
Thebrosmad has an amazing sound for a two-man band. The drums are cut down to just a three piece set—a kick, a snare, and a hi-hat, and the bass has only 3 strings and two notes, and is strummed rather than plucked. The effect of it all is a kind of sonic impressionism, an indistinct Police-like sound. vonHummer's reedy voice cuts across the bass-heavy murk and Sir Raleigh Grey's odd voice—harmonizer enhanced—accents the song with back ups like a chorus of demented Eagles. One would probably have to go back as far as the Who to find band with this kind of cunning—taking the familiar elements of a rock instruments and turning them inside out to forge a sound completely their own.
vonHummer: "Nobody plays a bass like this in the whole world. Nobody. It's a small-scale Danelectro Longhorn. The lowest string is taken off. It's tuned to the first three notes of 'Also Sprach Zarathustra.' An extra pickup is added to get just the high pair of strings, and that's fed to its own amp and effects. Because it's a drone tuning, I can strum it instead of pick it, and the illusion of bass and rhythm result. And all that leaves Sir Raleigh lots of sonic space to do the fancy percussion work that he does. So people's eyes really pop out when they hear us play. And we're careful to have our live sound be as close as possible to our sound on the EP."
Thebrosmad released their first EP, the self-titled "Thebrosmad," a six song work of rocking simplicity, May 12th 2010.
vonHummer: "It's an age of songs now, not an album age, so we prefer releasing a lot of EPs. Hopefully every six months or so we can release a new one. We don't want to get eaten alive by doing live shows and recording and the tv series."
As the crowning tribute their OCD-like ambition, Thebrosmad is also putting their own web series together. vonHummer: "I like tv-movie kind of bands, where you feel like you know the artist personally. The Monkees, the Beatles, Elvis, the Partridge Family...They live in a whole other subdivision of Rock n Roll Heaven. Most bands don't really have an interest in that kind of thing, or have a talent for writing or producing, much less acting, but Sir Raleigh and I are kind of rich in that regard, so it's not a big deal to us."
vonHummer's got quite a bit of experience with that, and his previous series "The vonHummer Hour," with 54 episodes still reruns weekly in Seattle and Portland, and in 2007 he released a vonHummer film, "Bübiwulf!"—an Elvis-like yarn about a singer-songwriter-professor-turned-boob-squeezing werewolf.
vonHummer: "20 something kids come up to me and say, 'Dude, I grew up watching your show,' and I think 'yeah, it's been on since 2001. That's teen to grown up. I wonder what they got out of it?"
The new series, tentatively titled "Thebrosmad," is a kind of "Odd Couple" knock-off, in which vonHummer moves in with his step brother Sir Raleigh to reform the band they had in high school and finally take it to the top of the pops. Like "The vonHummer Hour," this series is done in a fake foreign language with subtitles, with music videos in English.
vonHummer: "You can't spot bad acting in a foreign language. Also you can't blow a line."
The series is due to start appearing on Thebrosmad.com in Summer 2010 as the final piece of their marketing machine.
vonHummer: "We're big on diversification. It's not enough to have an EP to sell. There should be more...So with us, the EP sells a live show, the live show sells the EP, the web series sells the live show and the EP...Interest in any artistic element of our act may expand to the others."
Thebrosmad. Enjoy them if you can.
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