Wouldn’t It Be Funny If
Plastic Bastards songwriting stories
Most bands sit down before writing a song and ask serious questions.
What are we trying to say?
What is the emotional core?
How will the audience receive this?
Will we be comfortable with this in ten years?
We ask one question.
Wouldn’t it be funny if…
That is the whole meeting. Somebody says it, somebody laughs. Bingo! Song fodder. Focus groups? Suck me! A plan thought out? Suck my mothafuckin dick! The intended audience for a Plastic Bastards song is The Plastic Bastards. Anyone else is welcome to come along and abhor the ride. And sometimes the audience is for whoever we are trying to annoy at the moment. Which narcissistically feeds back into the first intended audience, because we are perpetually 14 years old mentally. And generally two little shits. These are a few actual Plastic Bastards songwriting stories.
Case In Point
Reuben’s sister was a New Kids on the Block fan. One day in the living room, Will started playing random chords and started singing “we shot the new kids on the block (opens in a new tab).” It properly annoyed her.
That was the entire goal. Nobody planned anything past it… for the first three minutes of us laughing our asses off. And as usual we would stop and look at each other for a second and both exclaim “Song!” Of course, now indifferent to the plight of our previously intended audience we sit in a corner with guitar, pen and paper for fifteen minutes writing something to escalate the situation. All the while laughing hysterically at our own jokes, much to Reuben’s sister’s dismay.
We recorded it that night. A few days later that song then got handed to Steve Dahl (opens in a new tab) at the Avalon, got played on The Loop (opens in a new tab) the next day, and got sent to Dr. Demento (opens in a new tab), where it enjoyed several airplays.
All of that from annoying one person in a living room. Sometimes it’s good to be a dick.
Bad Ideas Get Dangerous Fast (fortunately)
A stupid idea is safest as a conversation. Somebody says something ridiculous, everybody laughs, and the moment passes.
Then Ned starts writing lyrics and Will starts writing music, and the idea grows a pulse. Sometimes Will’s music comes first and Ned writes words to fit it. Mostly it all lands in the room at once. Sometimes a die decides. One die picks the chord, the other picks sharp, flat or natural, and since a die only goes up to F, any chord that comes up twice in a row becomes a G. It’s anarchy, I tell you!
The dangerous moment is when the joke starts sounding good (relatively speaking). Once there is a hook, the question was never “should we really make this?” It was always “how far can we push it?” “At what point does it stop being funny?” And “Can we at least write one more verse after that point?”
For Example
I Wanna Go To The Morgue (opens in a new tab) started in a hospital. The two of us were talking about wanting to go down to the basement and visit the morgue. Will’s girlfriend Janine found that problematic. We were acting like a couple of kids begging for ice cream. Then, in the elevator, completely unscripted, we both said in whiny child voices, “Janine, we want to go to the morgue.” That also happens to be the last line of the song. We did not write it. We just exploited it.
Excuse Me While I Go To The John (opens in a new tab) came from a bet. Our manager, Mr. Reuben Kincaid, bet us we could not write a song from the first words out of the next person’s mouth. Will stood up and said, “Excuse me while I go to the john.” We looked at each other. Reuben gave us that look and said, “Nooooo,” we said, “Yes!” Ned picked up a pen. By the time the last flush was heard, the lyrics were half written. The music came to realization about twenty minutes after that. We were laughing hard, this was one of the worst songs so far, absolutely delicious. Then while we were recording it we were like there’s gotta be a way to fuck this up some more to be the worst song possible. The possibilities were hysterical to us. Usually when we are at this level of a self-indulgent juvenile, our manager rethinks his career path. So what would make us laugh even more: every track slightly out of sync (check – giggles), the verse being hard and the chorus being acoustic folky (check – full laughs), Ned slowly detuning Will’s guitar strings during the solo (check – laughing too hard to do it in one take). Decades later, we still laugh our fucking asses off at that song.
Bla Bla Bla Yack Yack Yack (opens in a new tab) exists because cassette sides never came out even, and everybody else just left a few minutes of dead air at the end of side two. We said fuck that corporate fascist commie pig-dog buffoonery and wrote a song to fill the gap. Half an hour for the music and lyrics, dice included. Fans call it one of the better songs on the album.
INFOWARS.COM is a parody of “Institutionalized (opens in a new tab)” by Suicidal Tendencies. The song we parodied is about a kid nobody will listen to. Ours is about a man nobody should. The trouble is that Alex Jones (opens in a new tab) was already doing the bit, and every time we pushed it further, he got there first. Satire ends up chasing reality down the street yelling at it to slow down.
Lack Of Mental Growth
Somebody says “boobies” and the whole creative process resets. The only difference between us and an actual fourteen-year-old is that we have recording equipment. (Although that is not so true anymore in the age of DAWs.)
The first song we ever recorded (of which we did not write, it is a cover of a song of the same name written by Randee of the Redwoods (opens in a new tab)), Either Way It’s Fine With Me (opens in a new tab), has lead guitar played by Will and Ned on the same guitar, at the same time, with fingers and a knife and fork, just because Laurie Anderson (opens in a new tab) did something experimental once and we thought that looked cool enough to want to try.
So Should We Have Thought About It Longer?
Fuck no.
There is a smart, responsible way to think about all of this. Satire ages unpredictably. Old jokes need context. Cleaning up the archive turns history into public relations. All true, all sensible, and a very good idea, which has no place cluttering up the Plastic Bastards ecosystem. (It’s very crowded already and we need the room, mostly for large bongs.)
We have no fucks to give. Stopping to check would just slow us down, or even worse, lead to success.
The worst thing a band can be is boring (unless you are Mitch Miller (opens in a new tab), then it’s kind of your whole appeal). A band that worries about being tasteful and understood by everybody ends up with nothing real, dangerous, meaningful, or inexcusably stupid getting through. We don’t worry like that. We would rather not worry and make something that has all of that. What we usually end up with, however, is something stupid. And we laugh. Do other people laugh? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Either way, it’s fine with us.
Wouldn’t it be funny if we kept doing this? Of course it wouldn’t, that is exactly why it is hysterical.
So we do.