Me First and the Gimme Gimmes

I used to think multitasking was the ability of a person to download porn while playing Quake III and eating cold pizza at the same time. For Spike Slawson, today’s interview subject, it’s actually a lot more than that. I caught the velvet-throated vocalist of Me First and The Gimme Gimmes on an errand run to take his Italian friend to the post office and as he navigated his vehicle through the Mission District of San Francisco while dodging baby carriages and double-parked cars, he chatted to me over a cell phone about his dislike of the Pope’s papal decree against birth control.

"You’d think that in this day and age they’d get with the program — especially in some of these impoverished spots in the world, these Catholic nations — that maybe, just maybe, less people would be the way to go?" Mr. Spike, the sometimes bassist for the Swingin' Utters, as well as the karaoke-loving vocalist for the Gimme Gimmes, was on a soapbox. "I blame the Pope." he was ranting, but in the vein of "political correctness," I’ll spare you the rest.

Anti-Catholic diatribes aside, I found Spike to be an affable guy. As the mouthpiece of the Gimmes, he had no apparitions about his stature of his Bay Area based cover band. With three full lengths and a handful of EPs under their belt, The Gimmes have built an admirable following, considering they are widely known for butchering the classics. They’ve tackled Broadway show tunes on Are A Drag and everything from Simon and Garfunkel to Billy Joel on their first offering, Have A Ball. Their latest album Blow in the Wind, has them punkifying hits of the ‘60s and ‘70s. For the next record it’s anyone’s guess. "We were thinking maybe standards or the ‘80s," Spike said. "There’s no end to coverable material."

"What about some symphonic opera stuff?" I prompted.

"See, that’s the thing," he muttered while trying not to intersect with a parked bus, "you’d know in five minutes if that kind of thing would work or not, it’s totally trial and error. We’ll run down the different genres while we’re trying to make it work because there’s a finite amount you can do with a song and still say it's punk. Like "Summertime," [by George Gershwin] that almost didn’t make it until somebody said ‘Surf!’ and then it happened. When we did that show tunes record, that’s as complicated as we really want to get. We want to be able to play the stuff live," he said.

So it turns out that even with an all-star back up cast of Fat Mike [NOFX] on bass, Dave Raun [Lagwagon] on drums, Jake Jackson [Foo Fighters] and Joey Cape [Lagwagon] on guitars, there’s still some limit to their abilities.

"As accomplished as everybody would like to think these musicians are, they’re not," Spike came clean, "I mean, I forget the words. Joey and Mike forget their parts."

"Are you saying you lack talent?" I asked.

"Oh yeah, that’s exactly what I’m saying." Spike retorted.

Well that’s good to know that there’s a little humility in the music business. Being punks though, the Gimmes can get away with it. As it turns out, they are getting away with it quite well. The albums sell well, and it seems to surprise Spike just a little, but not too much.

"I was kind of caught off guard. I mean, I thought at first people would buy it because Fat Mike was in it." Spike elaborated. Later it turned out that people were buying it because they liked the music, a novel thought for this band, which was just an amalgamation of karaoke fiddlings between friends in the punk scene. "It’s not surprising when you look at it in retrospect because someone already made these songs popular a long time ago. The whole idea of a popular cover band is a bit cynical. Just pick songs people made big ages ago, practice a couple of times, record in a few days, and then just rake in the cash."

Sounds easy enough, but it gets better. The Gimmes maxim for musicianship summed up nicely as Spike facetiously put it in perspective. "Any band can write a shitty original song and work diligently and meticulously, and suffer and scrimp and save and starve — pretty much bleed creatively and artistically — and put their blood, sweat and tears into their work…you know…but I’m going to be rich. Playing covers requires no intelligence, creativity, artistry or anything like that. Not even any effort. And I’m going to be rich." He paused a beat for effect and irony "Fuck original bands."

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