by jon bosworth jaxvillain@yahoo.com
WHAT: Super Pizza Party and Dandi Wind
WHERE: TSI
WHEN: July 11
When you Google "Chris Spohn," this Jacksonville musician/performance artist's AudioStreet.net page comes up first. On it, Spohn lists some of the names he has played under, both by himself and with a large variety of other Jacksonville musicians and performers. When I first met Chris, he and I went to Orange Park High School together and he was in a band called Gothic that played post-progressive 80s, Bauhaus-inspired rock music. Later he formed a band called Dust that played Dinosaur Jr indie rock. But after high school is when Chris found his true calling in innovative performance and noise projects.
When I first came across his name after high school, it was in an Ink 19 article about Crack Rock Asteroids, one of his early noise-art projects. Some of his other titles have included Milk of Amnesia, Brotherhood of Neptune, Barnyard, Green Aura, Holy Bible Heavy Psych, Astro Infinity Rainbow, and Astral Plains Drifter, among others. He also categorizes his genre as "Witchcraft." Since those adolescent days of high school, Chris has become a prolific self-published author, releasing five avant-garde books (as well as a number of fanzines and DIY publications), he has released twelve solo CDs (my favorite of which is The Worlds of Chris Spohn Volume 14) and since the proliferation of the Internet he has found a perfect medium for creating his many personalities through sites such as You Tube and MySpace, among others.
One of Spohn's newer projects started off as a joke. Spohn describes Super Pizza Party as sounding like being at a video arcade and the Super Pizza Party MySpace likens the sound to three ice cream trucks. Imagine being at a child's birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese or Cici's Pizza when twenty guys in neon, women's athletic wear come running in and spaz out on children's toy instruments for ten minutes while throwing pizza around. That is Super Pizza Party. I caught up with him in Riverside to ask him a few questions about this project.
EU: How many band names have you played under?
CS: In my whole life? At least fifty.
EU: What are some of the prouder ones?
CS: Well, the Crack Rock Asteroids made quite a name for themselves back in the day. Green Aura was good. Telepathik Friend did pretty good with itself. I played with a lot of those guys.
EU: Who are some of the local musicians that you have collaborated with in the past?
CS: Oh geez, I played in Wolfdick at the Lightening Bolt concert, I played Theramin in BoJack once. I played on some of the old Hank El Diablo albums, one of Jay Peele's projects. I played sitar on a lost Rein Sanction recording. I do all kinds of crazy stuff.
EU: Would you call your work more music or performance-based?
CS: It's a little bit of both. It's probably more of an artistic endeavor than anything else.
EU: Are some projects more musical and some more performance?
CS: Yeah, yeah, you're right. Definitely. The thing we did last night was all music, it was pretty straight. It was rock, and some of the things are more about what the stage looks like. Super Pizza Party, in particular, is really an odd thing because we do the shows in the pizza parlors and guerilla performances in pizzerias and then the ones we do at the clubs are totally different. There are fireworks and chaos. It's totally different.
EU: What is Super Pizza Party? How did it start?
CS: The Psychadelic Kid asked me to do something at one of his noise festivals, come out and play something, and I wanted to do something different, something that would throw off the other noise guys. I thought it would be funny, ridiculous, preposterous. I never thought people would like it. And when people said they liked it and said it was cool, one of the coolest things at the whole [festival], they convinced me to do it more.
EU: Who are the members of Super Pizza Party?
CS: It's pretty much anyone that wants to be in it. We just tell all of our friends that if they want to be in it then they're in it. Jay Peele always has a big hand in it. Yeah, it's mostly me and Jay that run it. He runs the website and we correlate the whole concept. It's pretty simple, you know, you just have to wear the neon women's athletic wear and play the key-tar, that's about it.
EU: What made you take the SPP project more seriously?
CS: People liking it. I was only going to do it one time and I always say I'll never do it again. But I try to make it bigger and better. I was influenced by a friend who told me about these guys that only play once a month in the electronics department of JC Penney and that's their band, so that kind of influenced me a little bit. It made me think about a novelty act in a little different of a direction.
EU: Are attendants people that you bring to the show, or do you bring the show to surprise attendants?
CS: A little bit of both. I think people were a really surprised the first time they saw it. The original show, the first time we did it at St. Noise a lot of people were there and a lot of people saw it. Now, I want to have 20 or 30 people in it this time. Maybe more, maybe fifty people. It's just a big crazy free-for-all and it's gotten to the point now where people know that it is something to check out. And the website, the MySpace page is really cool and its got video and pictures. And the whole neon thing has kind of made a comeback now.
EU: Why the bright jumpsuits?
CS: I wanted it to be kind of nerdy, kind of funny. I like neon a lot. All the art I do and all of the projects I do have neon. The neon women's althletic wear is readily available at any thrift store, man, and it just seemed to be the best, most logical choice for uniforms. And you can't be up there unless you're wearing them, it's one of the main prerequisites. It's very important.
EU: How do you select the toys that will be played at Super Pizza Party?
CS: Mostly just kid's baby guitars, but if it has an output, like an earphone jack, that's extra good because then you can run them through amps and once you turn those things up they sound super crazy, they get all distoprted and we just pump them as fast as we can.
EU: What aspects of SPP are consistent attributes of a SPP show?
CS: You can always count on some pizza. You can always count on some silly string. You can always count on a good time, lots of smiles, lots of laughter. Everybody is just goofing off, we don't take it too seriously. But there actually is this kind of coolness factor to it, maybe just to me, I don't know, but I think it's pretty cool. I think its cool that it's funny and it's nerdy. I don't think it would be cool if we took it too seriously.
EU: Has Super Pizza Party transcended the local scene?
CS: Yeah, it's a worldwide phenomenon. We've got a lot of friends in Europe a lot of friends in Japan. We've been asked to play in Europe and Japan, but how are you going to get twenty people over to Japan for a week, it's almost impossible. But we're gonna have people coming from around the tri-state area, if not nationwide to this show. To play and participate in it. We've played as far south as Miami. This will be Super Pizza Party 5. The recording being 000, so technically it's six, because we actually wore the outfits and went to a pizza place. But it's going to be bigger and better than ever, for what its worth, it might be the last one. I'm kind of burnt out on it. I'd like to try something else. I heard that some of our West Coast friends are going to have a Super Pizza Party West.
EU: Tell me about the Miami show. You said that was a satellite contingent of Super Pizza Party that went down to Miami?
CS: Yeah, I took a little time off from the whole thing and those guys were all gung ho about it, so I gave them the outfits and the equipment with some simple instructions and they went down there and they killed it. They got pictures on the Internet and great reviews everywhere. I still run into people all the time that saw the Super Pizza Party without me.
EU: Is that bizarre?
CS: It is weird. It's almost like a Brian Wilson thing, when he sent the Beach Boys out on tour and he stayed home. It's pretty interesting.
EU: Is noise art relevant?
CS: It is definitely as relevant as anything else. You want to have your guilty pleasures with radio pop and some people have their guilty pleasures with a little noise art.
EU: What is the objective of innovative performance art? I would consider Super Pizza Party innovative, it's groundbreaking in some ways.
CS: Definitely. That's something that's a big deal to me. I've had so many projects, so instead of rehashing the same thing again and again, you definitely want to do something that's a little different. I think you're right, I think it is kind of groundbreaking, you know? It's definitely relevant.
EU: What makes it relevant to some lady that's having a birthday party for her kid at Chuck E. Cheese when Super Pizza Party comes in?
CS: There's a lot of different facets to it. The people there are exposed to it, like any other guerilla performance piece. The ones we do in the pizzerias are kid-friendly and family-friendly and everyone is shocked and amazed. The people that work there stop, everybody pretty much stops what they are doing and we usually only last about ten minutes and then it's over with. Usually everyone is kind of smiling, you know, they think it's funny. It's kind of goofy. It's a weird thing to do, you know? Some people may not understand that the guerilla performance aspects of it are very simple and harmless. It's mostly to get video for Internet. The club performances are more noise and experimental. Chaos and happening and fluxist.
How a lot of these projects go has to do with the fluxus principle. You start with a basic idea, as John Cage proposed it and Al Hanson had done a lot of fluxus stuff. You start with a basic idea, and you don't know exactly what's going to happen, but you accept and are pleased with the final result. That's the whole piece. It's weird.
EU: It's the organic chaos.
CS: Yeah. You got some dancers and a fire-eater and a percussionist and that's all we know. And we know that we are going to do this. Therefore we're all looking forward to seeing what the outcome is. There really is no pre-determined outcome. That's how you make the magic happen, bro. This one at TSI, I told everyone, is supposed to be like the New Year's Eve countdown. Ten, fifteen minutes of that ball dropping, man, that's the vibe we're going for.
EU: What do you hope to achieve with SPP?
CS: Yeah I don't know what's going to happen. I never really think about it. I don't hope to achieve anything. I'd like to pull it off. I'd like the people involved with it to be satisfied with what we've done and the people that see it to be satisfied with what we've done. I'd like to raise the bar for performance projects I'm involved in to where the next people that come along have their work cut out for them, you know, in a way. You know I encourage it. To see more interesting things in the club scene other than just rock bands, although I play in rock bands too. You know, it's like extra TV channels, you know, it's good to have them every once in a while.
EU: Are you working on any new concepts?
CS: Well Friendless Outsider is a sort of Telepathik Friend offshoot. We had a really good show the other night, I don't know if you heard about it, but we videoed it and it's going to go up on the MySpace, it's pretty incredible. I got a bunch of other ideas. Bounce House, Candy Dinner, Acid Majik, the stoner doom band, I'm trying to get those guys up and running a little heavier. Whatever else comes around. I don't really plan them, they just happen, man.
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