Ulaanbastards
The Bastards was the first band I ever put together. They say the first one is always the most difficult one, which is generally true, for most things — that’s what ‘generally’ means.
Circa 2009 Knoxville, there was this joint called Backroom Barbeque in the Old City. I once ate an entire plate of their nachos, which probably to this day remains as the largest meal I’ve ever eaten in a single sitting.
Chris and I went to Backroom one night. As I thanked the barkeep and sipped on my beer and turned around, Chris was already talking with this group of people sitting in a booth. An unheralded level of suaveness from this man. There were girls at the booth, girls with names like Sara, Megan, and Rachel, and a dude named Sid. We all ended up going back to Sara’s place and jammed until the morning. Their upstairs neighbor hated us.
A few months later, I joined Sid’s band, which was kind of a bluegrass folksy band. We wore suspenders and I played banjo and bass. That’s how I met Mike, who was the drummer of the crew. We played a few gigs at a rundown bar called Longbranch Saloon, drank $2 PBRs and smoked on their rickety balcony during breaks.
Mike would later become the guitarist of the Ulaanbastards. We picked up another Michael from craigslist who sat in on drums. With me on bass and singing in Chinese, and the first lineup for Ulaanbastards was formed.
We debuted at Pilot Light. Played a few shows at the Birdhouse, and at Fireproof, which was this old warehouse by the railroad tracks. The first floor was some sort of co-op art space with walls and floors full of graffiti, Andy Warhol-esque TV stacks and indoor skating ramps, that sort of stuff. A hipster art major type would take cash only cover at the loading dock. Everybody drank Schlitz because PBR was too mainstream.
One summer, we played at this weird biker music festival somewhere in the rolling hills north of town. It was a random patch somewhere in the Tennessee Valley, an hour from the nearest highway, a two-day festival for two hundred odd people, most of them not expecting to see a Chinese punk band. I had no idea who booked us.
Some guy grabbed an oil stained shirt from his truck bed and offered us a single strand of Twizzlers from its pocket. Mike took a bite. I did not.
The guy asked me if I was Chinese but had no follow up questions after I answered yes.
We weren’t planning on staying overnight. Our slot was penciled for 10 P.M. Around 9, it started to rain and never let up. We waited until around 11. Our photographer friend had bowed out. Mike said fuck it and went on stage to wail on his Gibson Les Paul.
The stage consisted of a wooden platform, with a metal pole up the middle that held up a tarp like a circus tent. There were lightning strikes. There was a metal pole.
Lightning strikes, metal pole.
A woman, drunk on whatever was in her supersized Weigel’s cup, began to dance on the fucking pole. Michael and I laughed.
Nothing else happened that night. I drove home with my then-girlfriend, who was also Chinese and weirded out by the whole thing.
A year or so later, Mike got a divorce and moved in with the drunk woman he met at the festival. Another year would pass, and I received a call while working at an experiment in Oak Ridge. Mike was involved in a murder suicide. Both he and his newfound love were dead.
After that happened, it took a while before the band started up again, this time with a complete different lineup. Brandon, on bass, had been playing bass for Casey’s Trunk, which had played a few shows with us. On drums, Nija. I can’t remember how I met the guy, but he was selling vape pens way before it was popular, and for a short while, owned and operated a kick ass arcade at the Knoxville Center Mall. And finally, Chris, whose band Badger Cannon had recently disbanded, finally joined me on stage. He was also the Best Man at my wedding because I didn’t have any close friends, literally, friends who were close by.
We recorded some songs and played a few shows, did a Chinese punk cover of Rocky Top which the locals liked. But we all knew that at some point, the band would probably end with my graduation, unless one of them would learn how to sing in Chinese.
And it did end, in 2015, six years since its conception, when Sid and I scribbled down band name ideas on napkins at the booth table in Backroom Barbeque.
By the way, Ulaanbastards was a play on the word Ulaanbaatar, which is the capital of Mongolia. Meaning ‘the red hero’ in Mongolian, ‘Ulaanbastards’ essentially means ‘the red bastards.’
I thought that was obvious.
Click here to access the entire catalog of the band.
Foucocos
So, back in 2010 or ’11 I had a crush on this girl. We met at some artsy undergrad house party, and like a huge dork, I waited a few months to ask her out — via a Facebook message, which of course turned out horribly. It made things awkward, well, maybe not too awkward, but awkward enough for both of us to not talk for a good few months.
At the time, music-wise I was busy with the Bastards. I was obsessed with self tortured writers and musicians like Bukowski, Hunter S., Hemingway, Tom Waits, Nick Cave, Beefheart… you know, old to middle age white poet types with long ugly faces and deep wrinkles, smoking cigarettes, sometimes with a holder, and the occasional rosewood pipe.
For my own music I was trying to imitate the White Stripes, the Black Keys, and the Blues Explosion, basically anything with a color and a noun. Sensitive music for masculine men who don’t like guns and pickup trucks but would still like to grow a beard and learn how to chop wood.
But I couldn’t grow a beard and I was gradually getting tired of the same sound. I missed the brighter, cheerier sounds of Brit-rock and skate punk from the 90s. So, I clicked around on YouTube and before long, the algorithm had sent me down a French-pop rabbit hole and I discovered artists like Stereo Total, France Gall, April March, and Elli et Jacno.
I wanted to play happier music but that wasn’t on brand with the Bastards — as if anybody would care. But even if I were to have a happy band, I didn’t want to be the singer. I needed to find a front man/woman and build it from scratch. And guess what, that girl from the first paragraph majored in French, I think, or it was her minor, or she just took French. Anyway, Genny knew French.
So, this happened.
She came up with the name for the band. Our first song was a play on Foucault’s Les mots et les choses, and foucocos, which sounds like ‘Foucault’ and roughly translates to ‘crazy coconuts.’ I know, again with the puns. I might have nudged the name in that direction.
I wrote most of the music but Genny wrote all the lyrics. We played a few shows around Knoxville and had a practice space at the now bulldozed Groundswell, which used to be this nail salon turned art collective/food pantry. Our bassist Elias once built a penny-farthing bicycle out of an industrial wooden spool in the parking lot. It was hipster heaven.
The lineup for the band consisted of Genny and me, and her brother Sam, and Attea, who is the sister of Paul, whom Genny would marry a few years later. Their wedding was great. They have always been community-oriented folks, so they had loads of local friends helping out.
They had barbeque and square dances and bluegrass music at this super cozy venue that used to be a church. It was everything an Instagrammer would want and try to imitate with money and mason jars and string lights, but couldn’t, because their wedding also had authenticity, a heart felt warmth that no amount of filter can fake.
My date at the wedding was my now wife. We had only been dating for a few months then. But as we slow danced on the dance floor, we thought maybe we should also have pies instead of cakes at our wedding.
