“You shouldn’t try to borrow other people’s skin.” - Lucas Gunn
“Inspiration: Petertag and Joshua McSmiles in Cheeseburger, OR”
(choose yr own adventure: read on, or just split straight to the purchase page or at least to the end of this page where the meat tastes best, i.e. a 'simple' description of the sounds)
I just the other nite saw someone ‘online’ sayin' that people need to stop dumping on Eugene, Oh Are once more, but nah, dump away, i say. It’s Oregon. Or-eeee-Gone. Where burnouts and misguided, and/or never guided, hippies and the overly liberal to a fault go to die. False complacency capitol, despite the ever prevalent protest contingent in the PacNW and the ones really making it weird and not just a bumper sticker some businessman swiped from Austin, TX. “Reality is not real and I love this place!” Despite those making it more than just another commodification of culture so the NY Time$ and other$ of that ilk can pretend to have relevance via ‘coverage’ of the cool. Love to the visionaries, misfits and all you protest kids tho, mean it, no shit. - Signed, Vee Tee
If ya already ain’t, start thinking The Blimp here. Don’t forget why ya clicked. Just because it’s the internet does not mean you are not in charge.
Back to the general guh of that map spot tho - the end of the world, where burned out burners go to die. Young(-ish) artsters who cain’t get it up in the ‘big city’ and/or wanna ‘big fish / small pond’ it in the smallville vibe that OR meccas such as (my residence of a few lost years) Portland promote, and also to a less populated extent southward, Eugene, where our heroes, The Blimp, make their residence. Some genuinely righteous, brilliant and artastic souls there, to be sure, but a whole lots o’ desperation, loss, d-runk, and drugged out to a scum-dirt level of dying w/ eyes wide open mis-repped as ‘living’ abounds in that rain-soaked part of the world. Some are simply born there, they had no choice but to deal w/ it somehow.
Beauty abounds in that part of the U.S.A. The ocean is indeed beautiful until you drown in it and trees, they do fall. But that’s nature, not people, and not even my pal, Plate Tectonics, has much to say about the people there, “good and bad, bottom-line like everywhere else”, ol’ P-Tec will tell ya. Fall into the ocean- learn to swim, or die.
Don’t let any of the opening rant get in the way of Good Music, via The Blimp especially, i myself will tell ya. Give ‘em enough rope and they’ll swing. Give ‘em rock n roll and they’ll
Read some rock-write critique amidst Bone-twan’s b-ball speak and see what they is/was sayin’ in ref to his scribble regarding thee almighty Blimp unit and the initial ref sparking this opening spew. FIY and let’s move on to the record and band at hand.
The presumed relevance of the preceding rant in this soft-grey is that astute readers may indeed have noted that this is the kind of environs in which The Blimp have arisen and been operating on a small scale since nearly ten years prior. WHY has there not been a previous vinyl missive from these dudes (and lady) before, you might think upon hearing their brilliance? I have no tangible answer for you, friend. Thinking about knowing and other thoughts people have is not quite in the books I have skimmed looking for pictures or photos, drawings, and crayon-speak. All things will happen “in” their time, as they are meant to happen. It’s already the end of tomorrow, yesterday’s gone and by the way, who are you? (I'm a dropout.)
Think differently (and don't forget to have fun along the way.)
However, one doesn’t need an occupation to know that everything’s not quite right these days, in the PacNW or the rest of the world. Because, to quote a long-lost friend hiding under her bed, “Monsters are real” and often the best, most fulfilling way to blast away the blues is w/ a full-frontal fucked up and loud, hairy, guitar animal rock n roll band. Which is what Lucas Gunn and The Blimp excel at.
Dance to the music. Get down. Feel it. Crawl. The Beat is hit. Shake yr hips. That’s hot and Rock n Roll is sex. Do it.
This is an ‘ancient’ quote, inked in the year prior to my escape from OH (to my exile on the prison planet PDX) - “C’mon let’s be demon / let’s be demon like the last time”. Most likely wine writ but certainly stained w/ some kind of hope, however lost or desperate, scrawled to a love long expired. I feel that heat now, as then, and that kind of fire also ignites in the sound of The Blimp. --- wait--- This is all making much sense to you, right? Starting back there at the front where it ends? --- Fuck it, let’s talk plainspeak, make it reeeaal eeeeasy on the blind who might still be reading. Let’s get down, done, to the damaged, and let’s get hell, let’s get real gone w/ The Blimp. Starting now, back there at the front where it ends. ("finally")
Here’s what I did write back once upon when asked to provide a preview/bio/whatever when The Blimp was set to perform at the WOW Hall last summer in Eugene, Oregon. It was ‘banned’, refused publication, tho myself and the band both agreed and knew it was good/worthy and described the band and at least part of what that means in no uncertain terms- any half-wit cretin could/would understand. More smrat types might shake their heads disapprovingly, (“what an asshole”) but still ‘get’ it.
Master, Master, it’s The Blimp! That’s what one gang of lysergic magicians foretold in Glendale, CA during one visionary’s acid 60’s. Paint the sound, paint the sound! Van Vliet’s ghost takes a trip on a wild ride to the scumpit oasis of Cheeseburger, Oh-ree-gone - long gone, let’s get real gone, beyond all the Johnnys and Jonies and into the get down gong bong foggy go gone on and on to the bent n busted days and nites of today...
According to Lucas Gunn, the man leading this twisted airship, the music that The Blimp makes is akin to driving a car upside down, and if that joyride is to yr liking, then how’s about you and I go for a spin in his nightmare? Gonna die in a car crash baby, won’t you drive me home tonite? Wild times, Violet Times, Wild Life is gonna run away…
When people ask me about The Blimp, and they don’t know shit from shazam, I tell ‘em that The Blimp is like if Mirrors were perpetually 17 years young but mutated accordingly for the past 40 years, got me? (these same people are usually only talking to me cuz I put out that Mirrors LP to start this label- otherwise i hate to reference other bands and generally steer clear of it ya know.)
The last, only, time I was in The Blimp’s hometown I peed in a trash can bag because the girl traveler was puking in that motel toilet and I couldn’t wait to contribute. Tied and threw it in the slough where my pee piss still floats to this day, many years later.
Lucas Gunn has been known to play in a trashcan, which is where garbage belongs, but I can’t exactly say that I’ve ever known any trashmen who’ve known their way with a song quite like this haunted head.
Finally, just so I know on which side of the line you stand, besides all of this other psychedelic pstuff–and I really do wanna know- when’s the last time you saw Petertag?
"Just watch me now" ((or)) "Listen to this"
“The Blimp, The Blimp, THE BLIMP” – thus spoke Antennae Jimmy Semens
The Blimp is something akin to all of the above and something else entirely, soaring beyond mere caveman crunch evident in passing, ferociously ripping thru the past and any kind of perceived influences, providing the mass ear w/ a clatterist cacophony of sound/s for now times and beyond. Guitar flight, zig-zag wanderings, warped sense shatterings, spoken/acapella yearnings, theremin derangement, and more -sometimes combine, sometimes crash- wailing high, revealing to the listener a not hardly hidden pop-sensibility evident almost at once to even the most ‘never been experienced’ of ear and/or idea, life or song.
When every single mind in the physical has already been blown, what can ya really say or do? Blast away my blues. This is just a small tasting of things to come from this waking nightmare alive band.
4 song, 12" vinyl only EP w/ pro-printed covers and inner sleeve, recorded by Justin Higgins at Old Standard Sound in Portland, Oregon
The Blimp - Not Beer 12" EP
RIYL: Mirrors, Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, The Hunches, good music
The same high quality you've come to expect from Violet Times, it's our first 'modern/current/new/unknown' band release and there's a definite reason for that. The Blimp belongs in this same hi-quality company, no question.
"The Blimp is alright, even if they is just a dream, just a band.” – J. Ames
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