

This article was written one
month before the tragic and untimely death of Brainiac vocalist Tim
Taylor, who was killed in a car crash. Everyone who knew him or just
loved his music will truly miss him. Our condolences go out to the
rest of the band, his family, and friends.
In the early days, Brainiac's Tim Taylor
and Juan Monstaterio were not co-workers at the local burger joint,
nor were they fellow bartenders in Dayton's hipster dive. No, Tim and
Juan were mere tykes, schoolboys if you will, vying against each
other in math competitions, and later, playing cello together in the
high school orchestra. Simply enough, they were not the sex-driven,
thrift-store clad rockers that they are today.
So how then, did they make that
transition from being the geeks in the band to the babes in the
band?
"I still feel like a geek in the band,"
vocal sensation and Moog maestro, Tim, laughed on the phone from the
backwards Mormon city of Salt Lake. "It's all the same I think, to an
extent. I mean Juan and I grew up together. We've known each other
since we were 10 years old. We just went through a series of
reinvention. We figured out when we were 16, we finally were like
"Wow! You can just reinvent yourself, and after six months, no one's
going to give you any flak about it...At first we had this complete
goth thing, then we did this or that, and it was to sort of to test
everybody around us and what they thought. And we've had all these
bands [and] there's no connection whatsoever to Brainiac. The band we
were in before this sounded like Sly and the Family Stone and it was
totally, completely 100% different and I don't know why more people
just don't realize that they're totally at liberty to do
that."
Well, it's 1997 and Tim and Juan still
make up 1/2 of one of Dayton's most off-kilter and eclectic bands
(along with drummer Tyler Trent and guitarist John
Schemersal)&emdash;eight years after their inception. They've just
released "Electro Shock For President," an e.p. that combines a
penchant for pop hooks and the band's trademark Moog-laced electronic
stylings. And although the band hasn't changed dramatically between
releases, their latest e.p. emits a different aura from the very
warped electro-twisted "Hissing Prigs In Static Couture."
"I kind of feel that the e.p. is a
little more straight myself. There are a couple of songs that are
more structurally, just pop songs. Plus I think that after "Hissing
Prigs," we were like, "We're not going to do this anymore." It just
felt like we were trying to outweird ourselves and then we kind of
realized that we worked ourselves into a box...After we did "Hissing
Prigs," it was like "Well, this is our music in the end, we have to
make something we can enjoy."
However having all four members agree on
what's in or out, in terms of the music, is a far different
matter.
"I think if anything, there've been
things that I wasn't happy with that were because somebody in the
band, or everybody else in the band felt happier with. The only
[album] I was completely 100% happy with was "Bonsai Superstar." But
there's a lot of stuff where I'd just go steamroll over everybody
else's opinion or bad idea...Usually what happens is that if somebody
says something, then I'll get really defensive and mad and then at
the next practice I'll realize I was just being a defensive idiot and
realize that they were right or whatever and come back down to the
ground."
But one aspect that they all seem to
agree on is their desire to completely and utterly confuse people and
their perceptions of the band. One instance is when the band put
"Fuck E-Mail" next to their mailing address on the sleeve of their
last album. "I'm totally an e-mail guy and [Juan] is too. But he
designs all [the artwork] on his computer and somehow when he was
working on that record actually, lightening got into his
line&emdash;he thinks it was lightening that struck the
house&emdash;and erased a lot of the artwork and it also blew his
modem up...That's not anti-computer at all and I think a lot of
people have confused it as that...At least what I can tell from
[Juan's] graphics and stuff, he just puts a lot of things in
deliberately to irritate and confuse people...I don't really ask him
much about it. I mean, I put in a lot of things [in the music] to
irritate and confuse people."
I suppose that Brainiac get their
craving for the outlandish from growing up in such an un-hip town
like Dayton. Although the press would like you to believe otherwise
after the success of The Breeders, Amps, and Guided By Voices. "It
might give you the allusion that there's a happening scene, but
there's not at all. As of right now, there's not even a record store
where you can buy our records in town. You have to go to Columbus to
buy a Brainiac record, it's ridiculous. Three years ago, it was
totally different, there was this great record store and there were
all kinds of new bands happening, it was really fun.
"The Dayton daily newspaper picked up on
what was going on with the bands because The Breeders and Guided By
Voices were getting all this national press and The Dayton Daily was
like "Wow maybe we should write something about them." And the local
music reporter started to come around...the shows were getting huge
and all these people were into it. And then that guy got fired and
now it kinda went back to zero again."
And although the city resembles more of
a burnt out factory town than a budding cosmopolitan, it did have
it's 15 minutes back in the day.
"We had our glory years with WKRP in
Cincinnati. What's funny is that all those people are from Dayton. A
couple of the people went to school with my mom like Gary Sandy [who
played that 'fox' Andy Travis] and that Gordon Jump guy is from
Dayton. I used to play in this other band with my dad&emdash;this
jazz dinner music type stuff&emdash;and we played this banquet where
Gary Sandy spoke and it was really funny. We hung out with him and he
looks exactly the same. Same hair, he even had one of those 70s apple
hats on and a denim shirt...He's waiting for the comeback I think. I
can't wait."
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