The World's Most Over-Educated Rock Band: 4 musicians : 8 collegiate degrees : 4 advanced degrees : 14 professional certifications : 3 chords
Mary's Garage Band
Music is important to us all because, whether we admit it or not, we all feel connected to something larger. Music is important to us because the time the first person you loved dumped you and you spent the night crying on the stands at the football stadium there was a song that captured just how you felt and made you feel connected to that something larger. Music is important because that time you fell in love the most deeply and had the best night of your life there was a song there that captured just how you felt and made you feel connected to that something larger. At both times it profoundly mattered that someone else knew what it was like and had written a song about it. It did not matter whether it was Bob Dylan rasping, Robert Plant wailing, or John Lennon crooning.
We are not about trying to be cool, or pushing new musical genres, or making piles of money, or playing with astounding virtuosity. We are a classic rock band because over the past 40 years there have been some songs that really mean something, and playing them connects us to them in a new way and helps keep them alive. We write songs that are meaningful to us and express parts of our lives in a way we hope connects to other lives. We hope that they become meaningful to you.
Mary’s Garage Band is the world’s most over-educated rock band. We like music because of what it means. And we play intelligent rock and roll.
We play music with each other because it is fun. The rest of this page is dedicated to showing the impish side of Mary's Garage Band.
MARY'S GARAGE BAND VIDEOS NOW AVAILABLE ON-LINE!
Click here for the "Streak of Gray" video, the ultimate academic college debate video. (Technical notes: It streams reasonably well if you have XP and a recent browser. The only trick is the maximize the Windows Media Player window. Otherwise, right-click it and save it to your computer and it should run on Real Player or the Windows Media player. Then the only trick is to turn the volume up really loud. If you are viewing this in a debate squad room, surely someone has downloaded pornography on the squad computer -- any of those players will work fine).
If you have DVD capability on your computer, you can download or play the "Daughter of the Moon" Video. (Technical notes: This is a Windows Media file that occupies 87MB. We think it is virus-free, but Osama Bin Laden considers Mary's Garage Band to be one of the most obscene excesses of the western world and may have hacked into our site to put a virus on it. If your machine tries running it with the Windows MediaPlayer and it doesn't work, we blame Bill Gates, and encourage all Americans to watch the South Park movie where he gets shot, not that we encourage violence, except for Casey, who once got in a fight with Eric Chavez -- now of the Oakland A's -- in a high school baseball game.)
Video update: Beta version of Lucky Numbers.
If you are a moron, click here.
LIVE PERFORMANCE UPDATE: Due to a pregancy, meteor showers, a lineup change, and the World Series victory of the Anaheim Angels, we are not actively scheduling local shows and are instead focusing on recording and the digital side of MGB. We are still actively distributing CDs and producing the music. We WILL play specific live venues as the opportunities present themselves, and we thank everyone who's been showing up to keep the live shows going. We'll thank all of you individually at the Emmy's.
Playing at Hodi's Half-Note in Fort Collins, Colorado, July 8 and 9.
CAN'T GET IT TO DOWNLOAD? Does the download take FOREVER? RATHER GET YOUR OWN CD with music and the video on it? Write to us at feedback and ask how you can get a CD mailed to you.
This very long page has been divided into these handy sections:
Kenneth Burke was a scholar of social behavior earlier this century. Unlike James Dean, Otis Redding, and Vincent Van Gogh, he wasn’t discovered after his death. He was discovered too late in his lifetime to really enjoy the sex, drugs, and rock and roll part of fame. Even without the fame part he enjoyed the sex and drugs, as he was a notorious drinker and he fathered several illegitimate children and subsequent illegitimate grandchildren. Ironically enough, one of the illegitimate grandchildren was Harry Chapin, who added the missing rock and roll. At any rate, he is credited with the idea of "mystery" – the idea that because of some innate feature of human social behavior the concealed is compelling and attractive. Thus, the theory goes, when nobody knows what the lyrics of "Louie, Louie" really are, they become mysterious. The human imagination then runs wild and starts to believe that there are deep, profound, abstruse messages hidden in the lyrics. Or when we hear that there may be strange, backmasked messages on "Hotel California," there is an overpowering urge to find out what the message might be. It becomes fascinating because the mysterious might be connected to strange, powerful truths or, better yet, invisible forces of good or evil that are accessible only to a few. All of which is to say that rock and roll marketers have figured out Kenneth Burke’s idea pretty damn well and are exceptionally good at marketing it.
Marys’ Garage Band is a complete rejection of the concept of "mystery." Behind every song is a story. The point of this web page is to tell those stories.
The idea behind Mary’s Garage Band is that there is plenty of stuff in music when it is played forward to make it interesting. Hearing the insights of the musicians who make the music can create a dialogue that is every bit as fascinating as the bizarre forces we might imagine to exist when, say, we ponder what the symbol that now represents the Artist Formerly Known As Prince is supposed to mean. This page is designed as a vehicle to allow us to distribute and talk about our music, for our tens upon tens of fans to interact with the music. The meaning of a song resides in the interaction between the author and the audience, and we hope you’ll join us in creating that meaning.
In 20 words or less, Mary’s Garage Band can be described as: "Two 30-something PhDs playing classic rock with younger players who would rather play punk." The aged include Dr. Bill Loges (PhD, 1991, USC) and Dr. Jon Bruschke (PhD, University of Utah, 1994). The fact that we are over-educated is relevant in three regards. First, our extensive exposure to social theory allows us to drop random facts about guys like Kenneth Burke. Second, as professors we have keys to the tech. production rooms and can record lots of stuff for free. Third, (and least importantly) our readings of advanced ideas creep into our music.
We have also noticed that a certain amount of sex appeal aids in the rapid rise to fame. We thought we'd spend more time exposing bare skin on the stage, but the top of Bill's head was not producing the desired effect. We went with youth who met the following criteria: They would work for free, they happened to know us, they would not run up a bar tab larger than the amount we were getting paid, and they could play their instruments. The players are William Cameron Ward (Giles Scholarship recipient), Casey Arbenz (M.A. candidate), and Danimal Kruse (CFI, CFII, MEI, BA in business, and 5 other professional certifications). Waylan Kruse, brother of Dan, often sits in on bass (and holds a B.A. and advanced degrees in Nursing and EMT training; he is studying to be an anaesthesiologist).
At many Mary's Garage Band performances, fans have noticed that there is a keyboard in front of Jon Bruschke, and scholars from a number of fields have spent a good deal of time and effort trying to figure out why. The most prevalent theory to date involves tomato paste and desktop cold fusion, but recent discoveries have made it clear that some audio is involved. Click here for more about Jon.
Bill
actually contributes very little to the overall Mary's Garage Band effort other than
lead and backup vocals, lead and rhythm guitar, and song writing. From a drumming
perspective, he is totally useless. It is also quite plain that of the various
MGB performers, Bill is the one who most nearly mimicks the Boy Bands of the 1990s.
Despite this, we manage some musical integrity. Click here to
read more about Bill.
Casey has a master's degree
at CSUFa B.A. from CSU Chico, and a law degree from Gonzaga. He can't
get past listening to Social Distortion and has bizarre moments alone in his car listening
to old Tiffany tapes. He plays the bass for Mary's Garage Band, and was selected
to do so (a) because the primary qualification for playing bass is that you look cool
in a pair of sunglasses, and (b) litigation costs can be excessive.
CAMERON WARD
Cameron was a debater on the CSUF debate team who finished in the top 8 in the nation, the recipient of the Terry Giles scholarship, and the only non-athlete ever to injure his knee while playing the rhythm guitar. He can hear the phrase "Smashing Pumpkins" from a distance of 4 miles and dressed as Dirk Diggler last Halloween. He adds a downright necessary middle section to the sound while Bill is off playing a lead and he is renowned for having the most suggestive t-shirts in the band.
Click here for more pictures of Cameron and Casey.
DANIEL KRUSE
Danimal
is a professional aviator who holds a business degree and 8 professional certifications.
He is the coolest persyn on the face of the earth. As evidence, consider that
when they tried to make Tom Cruise look cool they put him in a role in Top Gun as
a flyboy, which was nice, but it remained true that Cruise wasn't his real name (it's
Thomas Maphother) and he couldn't fly a plane. Dan's real last name is, in fact,
Kruse, and he really can get a bird in the air. Daniel often generates jealousy
because he can play his instrument better than Keith Moon. To equalize things,
we've made him barely visible in the picture between Cameron and Casey above.
Click here for more stuff about Danimal.
LEGAL STUFF: The songs are posted here for you to enjoy, listen to, and share. Feel free to copy them for your own non-commerical use. If you want to give them to all your friends in the music industry and make is rich and famous, go for it. However, we do retain the copyright on all these songs, and reserve all rights.
WARNING FOR THE IMPATIENT: Some of these songs will take a while to download. You don't have to wait until the song is fully downloaded to start playing it; if about 40% of the song is downloaded you can start playing and the downloading with catch up by the end of the song. Also, you can browse the pages and look at, for example, the lyrics while you are listening to the song.
SAVING THE SONGS FOR PLAY LATER: If you want, you can save them to your hard drive and listen to them at your liesure. You can play them straight off of your hard drive or, if you have a read/write CD burner, you can make your own CD. In either Netscape or the Microsoft browser, right-clicking should let you download.
RECORDING QUALITY: Some of these songs were recorded into a Tascam 8-trac recorder, mixed down to .wav files, burned into a CD, and copied back into .wav files that are posted below. Somewhere in all these transmissions there is a certain loss of quality. When in doubt, we tried to retain the original sound, sometimes at the expense of volume. The rest were recorded professionally at Road Records.
Here's a list of songs we have up and running. Clicking on a song title will link you to a page that has an audio file you can play, the lyrics to the song, and comments about the song. For fun we have included "That Good Old Baylor Line" on this page just below the list.
Click here for the studio version of Dreamchild.*
* = Produced and engineerd by Conrad Askland, Road Records.
Click here to hear the song: that good old baylor line
Notes: Baylor University is an unabashed theocracy. And they fired me. The most notable thing about the University is neither its strange stance toward dancing, nor its willingness to base tenure decisions on church attendance, nor the presence of a live bear pit on campus. The most notable thing about the place is that its "fight song" is actually just "That Good Old Summertime" played very slowly and with some of the lyrics changed. In that spirit, we changed the lyrics yet a third time and spiced up the beat a little. Everyone who has heard our version of the song believes the entire concept to be "immature." We heartily agree.
If you have comments about this page, wish to remark about the music, or generally have ideas, plese feel free to e-mail us. If you simply wish to mock us for our lack of musical talent, please direct your inquiry to Dr. Robert Sloan, President, Baylor University. Write to Jon if you'd like a copy of one of our CDs.
Click here to e-mail Jon Bruschke
Click here to e-mail Bill Loges
