LAWSUIT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So, I don’t know if anyone else follows comic books, but Monsoon! can’t afford it. Instead, we collect whatever free comics they hand out in the toystore when some company does promotions. This is the new DC comics design for batman with a few seemingly-sedated villians being pummelled. Note The Riddler’s Mohawk . . .

Exhibit A

And, for the Jury’s consideration:

Exhibit B

We’ll take the settlement check in unmarked Monopoly bills, please.

Stuff About The Secret Government Hobo-Death Beam Hidden on My Stoop

Monsoon! is currently constructing a hobo-proof fence for the front door of the abandoned San Francisco halfway house we’ve holed ourselves up in. It has urinals and signs reading “You Are Here” on a map . . . even though there are only 2 floors.
We’ve stolen some of the U.S. Border Patrol’s schematics and have stocked up on weapons-grade plutonium for the “Warning Shot”  death ray that will soon be shooing crackheads off of Monsoon! HQ number . . . uh, whatever we’re at.

Oh, and there’s a new EP floating around:

Noise Annoys, or How I Learned To Start Worrying & Call The Police

Market Street, the crack of sometime past 3 in the afternoon.

Our story begins.

Monsoon!, plucky as ever, is enjoying a righteously sunny afternoon following a morning of cheap gin hangovers and park practicing pipedreams.

Our original sign said "Why Lie? I Need a Beer!" but apparently that's copyrighted

The boys are in front of the local Safeway, a fine institution offering a constant stream of free industrial sized guitar picks under the guise of discount cards (or some other such nonsense!). A 15 year old highschool-punk couple told us we sucked and called the cops on us.

Where The Fuck Does A Band Practice In The City?

You try to play music all night and just as the liquor is warming you up spiritually, the rhythms are warmed up physically, and you don’t feel so annoyed about carrying your gear 5 blocks in a bag it keeps falling out of . . . . Some old dude who forgot what being young was like shows up and tells you not to play in the park.

For the record, telling people to stop playing music in the street at like 11 PM is the inner-city equivalent to telling those dag blasted kids to get off your lawn and stop running through your sprinkler. “I don’t care if it’s 90 degrees out, ya’ll can’t run through my gosh damn sprinkler all willy-nilly like that, you’ll ruin my dog gone grass! YOU HOODLUMS!”

That was the scene at Dolores Park last night. So we tried going elsewhere in the park only to get the cops called on us. They were fine, but noted that the hobo we’d unintentionally attracted with the power of rock n roll was notorious for drunkenly stabbing people. There’s something eerily haunting about hearing a cop ask, with no feeling or surprise, “You stab anyone else tonight, Charlie?”

It wouldn’t be so bad if people weren’t cheering us on. And as always, THANK YOU for making Monsoon! men of the people. I LOVE when people come to chill with the band. Problem is, we just get louder when that happens an I always lose it when people are cheering in one corner and the figure of authority or whatever is saying “STOP THE MUSIC” on the other. That’s how Monsoon! almost got to throwing ‘bows with one of those human robots in Fisherman’s Wharf.

Some people think San Francisco robots are heartless, godless machines of calculation and street break dancing, but here we see that they have families too

That’s also how my old surf band, The Cissies, lost our drumset. We used to end every song with “OH SHIT, THE COPS!” so that when one of the 4 house parties we’d play a week would get shut down, we’d be prepared. When you consistently can’t get through a set of songs though due to noise complaints, you get a bit pissed off. It came to a head this one time where, during an outdoor show IN THE DAYTIME (an important distinction), the cops came in to break up the show within the first song. That was the last straw. The drumset I was playing was bought for 20 dollars and already half broken, so I started throwing pieces against a tree when we were told to leave as I shouted “Oh Yeah, what are you going to do about that?!?!” The cops just looked at the busted drums and asked “Is that yours?” I go “Yeah, what you going to do about it?” Then the flatfooted college cruisers shrugged and said “We can’t really do anything, that’s just fucking stupid.” And it was, but you tend to go crazy in a band with matching white suits and endless songs about beaches in an area where the water’s unfit to swim in . . .

The Cissies in matching white suits at An Beal Bocht Cafe

Anyhow, evicted from Dolores Park, Monsoon! tried playing atop Twin Peaks after that but nearly froze our gear and limbs off. The perks of being able to play as loud as you want atop a giant hill with swirling fog rolling about are greatly outweighed by the feeling of being on a tilting ship amidst stormy seas. Plus, when you mute your drums with pajama pants so as to hear the guitar, odds are the wind will take them soaring. It’s slightly less embarrassing than losing your real pants to the wind while playing drums. In fact, I’d rather lose the pants I’m wearing if I’m drumming than the pants I use as a mute.

Inviting practice space, no?

This reminds me of an age old question, how do you get head while playing the drums? Anyone else in the band could get a knob job while playing their instruments at a show or in a recording studio (like that Guns N Roses song “Rocket Queen”), but it’s rather hard to get brains when you’re moving your pedal legs behind a set. This is a question I’ve posed to drummers and girlfriends for years, a challenge that when I solve I will send to Vic Firth as a drumstick poster idea. Yes, I know I stand up and drum now, which solves the problem by default, but think of all the horny set drummers out there who need this kind of research!!!
Anyhow, guess we’re a daytime street practicing band now . . . So you can catch us in Dolores Park then unless you wanna give us a practice space for way little money. We’re broke.

Monsoon! Phase 3 (The Wait Is OVER)

So thus begins the hail mary shot.  I’ve moved back to SF from NY to end the month-long hiatus of early morning stockyard/deli slicing shifts and begin the next step of Monsoon!’s evolution with Milo (Nickname Pending) Rayo. It’s sort of like how the Replacements made good and became that band you sometimes hear on 80s comps instead of that band your older brother tells you was way cool but too punk for you to ever hear on the radio. Pretentious much? No, just excited and drawing all the wrong analogies.

So what do you have to expect from Monsoon! Phase 3?
BIGGER DRUM STANDS FOR COOLER DRUM PARTS (But don’t get us confused with the Talking Heads, we like to CHANGE CHORDS from time to time)
ELECTRIC INSTRUMENTS (Including a buzzy 3-string bass tattooed with the unfortunately not-ironic monicker “The Very Best” . . . which is also missing a few letters)
MICROPHONES . . . WITH STANDS
A PA SYSTEM (because everyone pays attention to the loudest guys in the streets)

Yeah, looking at this checklist it makes us sound pretty . . . uh . . . let’s say “lo-fi” in Phase 1 & 2, but we’ve been a street band, folks, and all of these things are getting put into our street show which is going to become a mainstay over at Dolores Park. There’s a bunch of applications on the FaceSpace we might start using to tell you where we’ll be setting up for hours of music.
AND WE HAVE NEW SONGS AND A NEW SINGLE ON THE WAY!

So, you know . . . stay tuned . . .