Complete and Utter History of Vile Blue Shades

"If it’s a sample of John Thursday she’s after, hishead is already up. I lay her skirt up to her belly andslip her pants down ..."
~Under the Roofs of Paris, Henry Miller

Around the time the U.S. army dragged a Unibomber-esqueSaddam Hussein mumbling from his rat hole in central Iraq,one would occasionally encounter Ryan Jensen wandering thewintry streets of downtown Salt Lake City wearing a solid blue T-shirtwith the word "VILE" embroidered in stark black letters where aminiature polo player might otherwise go. Jensen was often drunk,but a common theme among many of his distracted conversations inlate 2003 was a new project he was planning—something as epic inscope as it would be baffling in content—called Vile Blue Shades.His initial idea was to create a doppelganger band of his then-currentproject, The Corleones, which would consist of the same membersbut play art rock instead of punk. When none of the other Corleoneswere interested and the band seemed to be twitching out the last nervespasms of its generally self-destructive lifespan, Jensen elicited thehelp of Joe Guile and Dan Rose, whose schedules had been recentlyfreed by the break-up of their band, The Cronies. The germ began togrow, but slowly.

If not for Jensen’s fortitude, the project would have been stillborn. He,Rose and Guile had grand aspirations and wanted more peopleto take part, but soliciting membership proved difficult. "We’dsensationalize it," said Guile. "We’d be drunk at the bar andbe like, ‘Hey, we’re starting something new that no one’s everheard,’ and everybody was like, ‘Yeah, great, cool.Good luck.’"

The earliest Shades demos, which the original memberspresented to prospective players, were not exactly accessible.Eli Morrison, an occasional Shades guitarist and integralbehind-the-scenes man, said, "On the original tracks, Ryanplayed all the instruments, sung, and done everythinghimself. It was cool, except he doesn’t know how toplay any instruments at all, except for tambourine. Sohe played drums and guitars and everything, and justbecause he didn’t know what he was doing, it madefor some really odd, crazy, strange stuff."

But the believers came. Jensen, Guile and Roserecorded a demo that would later become theband’s first official release, Dark Wizard. Theyused it to recruit guitarist Shane Asbridge (I AmElectric, Lazerfang) bassist Chris Murphy,and guitarist Justin Wyatt (The Corleones). Atthis point, the group was less of a band thanan idea—one that involved an open-doorpolicy under which anyone who wanted tocould play, and the conceptualization ofthree records: a Dungeons and Dragonsrecord (Dark Wizard), a drinking record(Bottle of Pain), and a sex record (JohnThursday’s California Adventure).
The band obeyed a demandingpractice schedule—9 a.m.on Sunday mornings atthe Moroccan—andmembershipbegan to boom."We’d make recordingsand demos, and we’d invitepeople in on them," Asbridge said."People were coming in and out while wepracticed—they’d come in and get their guitar,and maybe if we were doing something they wouldsit and make some noise, and then before you knew it,they started showing up on a regular basis."
Asbridge invited Dan Thomas, drummer for the Red Bennies andTolchock Trio, to join the band in 2005. "I don’t think Shane had toldanyone that he had asked me to play," Thomas said. "I showed up atthe Moroccan one day and a few of the guys were wondering what Iwas doing there."

Morrison, who also plays guitar in The Wolfs and Ether, experienceda similarly casual initiation into the band: "I told them, ‘I’m totallyhooked on Dark Wizard. You guys have to let me play with you.’ I wasblown away because their answer was ‘That’s fine. We don’t care.’That really took me aback, because I was used to an answer to aquestion like that being ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ So I was like, ‘Well, that’s cool. Iguess if you guys don’t care, I guess I’ll be there.’"

A slew of members accumulated. Jensen’s open-door policy, whichhe intended to encourage people to come and go, only workedhalf way.

"Nobody left," he said. "The revolving door just sort of stopped andeverybody piled in."

The group topped out at 13 musicians before they began firingpeople. Today, it consists of eight permanent players and twoalternates, all of whom are men, and dancer Meg Charlier—whose estrogen, according to Jensen, is potent enough tocounterbalance 10 times the testosterone.

With a lineup larger than a manageable orgy, Vile Blue Shadesrumbled onto the scene. Writer Coleman Motley of the nowdefunctGray Matter Magazine reported in April 2005 that "VileBlue Shades have got scenesters, shut-ins, pansies, hard-asses,girls, boys, transsexuals, and everyone else who knows theirass from their elbow paying attention, whether they want toor not." By this time, the Shades had officially released DarkWizard and recorded Bottle of Pain and Obleaske of the Orb,which came out in spring and summer 2005, respectively. Theyaccepted invitations to play live from any promoter or oddballcharity event that approached them, provided music for thesoundtrack to the 2005 documentary This Divided State, andinfected the western US with mini-tours whenever a dozenseparate work schedules permitted. In May 2006, they putout We’re Here, We’re High, the band’s first proper fullscalerelease.

"The problem," Morrison said,"was that the band had putout these records, but theyhad only issued them inreally, really low numbersof copies: 30, 20,a dozen. Theeditionswerepreposterously low on those early titles. Like the Dark Wizard thing—itwas awesome. It came with this 28-page book and all this stuff, butthey only made somewhere between 25 and 30 of those records."Morrison, a venerable veteran of facilitating local releases, took itupon himself to gather and combine the Shades’ three early albums,have them remastered, and re-release them in conjunction withPseudo Recordings in fall 2007. That disc, called Triple Threat, wasthe last anyone had seen of a Vile Blue Shades record … until now.Sometime in October, depending upon an array of confoundingfactors, Missoula, Mont., -based record label Wntage USA willrelease a vinyl LP (with digital downloads) of the long-awaited VileBlue Shades sex record, John Thursday: California Adventure.The majority of the album’s music is imbued with funky dancegrooves. Eerie, airy ditties are interspersed throughout the A-side,but the second half consists almost entirely of tracks that will sexifythe listenership as much as freak people out.

Jensen said composing the lyrics for an entire album aboutsex forced him out of his comfort zone—the realm of personal,debauched experience from which he has drawn material for theentirety of his vocalist career. For John Thursday, he had to create."When I wrote Bottle of Pain," he said, "I wasn’t trying to make upsomething. It was almost like diary writing. But when I was doingJohn Thursday, I was seriously trying to come up with fiction. I don’thave enough sexual experience to fill a fucking record. Are youkidding me? I’d have herpes by now."

For coital inspiration, Jensen turned to one of the most intenselypornographic pieces of literature from the 20th century: HenryMiller’s Under the Roofs of Paris. The novel is essentially one longjaunt through brothels and bars in the French capital. It’s guidedby "John Thursday," the name by which the book’s narratorrefers to his own penis as he describes the vulgar and abnormalpenetration of dozens of Parisian women and their daughters.Jensen said his choice to portray sex in his lyrics as somethingprofane was the result of a familiar Utah upbringing under whicheverything sexual is unspeakable and downright dirty.

"If it’s dirty, why exclude the dirt?" he said. "Sex is bad? Guess whatelse is bad: I’m going to stick it in your asshole. But don’t worry. I’mgoing to take it real slow. Oh. My. God."

The process of creating John Thursday accorded to the all-toocommonSalt Lake City trend of taking forever. Initial recording beganin early 2007 with former Shades guitarist and longtime Shadesproducer Jeremy Smith. It came to an abrupt halt, however, whenSmith, according to several band members, chucked his audiorecordingequipment out a three-story window. The band regroupedand approached local producer extraordinaire Jud Powell, whosemeticulous methods delayed the record’s release dramatically, butalso made it the best-sounding Shades effort to date.

Enemies of the Shades complain that the group is a glorified hippiejam band in denial. While the concept behind John Thursday’s musicinvolved funky grooviliciousness from the get-go, members scoff atclaims that its sound defines them, and are planning a full-frontalonslaught of weirdness in their new material to silence the naysayers."The whole idea for John Thursday was that it would be a dancealbum," Asbridge said. "Now we have to get our weird back. We will.That’s in our nature. It was more out of our nature to do more funkystuff."

The band’s proclivity for the bizarre is a natural sum of its parts. Itsfounding fathers are all outcasts—addicted, as Jensen would say,to chaos. These tormented-poet types have attracted establishedmusicians who lend their considerable talents to the Vile vision, butlead otherwise normal lives. This dichotomy—between the freaksand the players—fuels the Vile Blue Shades machine.

"Even when [the original members] are not as in control as theycould be, everybody else in the group is loyal to them," Thomassaid. "It’s almost like working for a president’s administration—you’re going to be in some department doing something, andyou may not have oversight directly from the Oval Office, butyou’re going to adhere to a certain set of principles and ideas thatwould be consistent with what they want to do."

Armed with a new album, a new record deal, and under thebanner of "Bringing back the weird," Vile Blue Shades marchesinto the future. One part concept, one part chaos, the swarthy 11-part apparatus will storm the experimental frontier and vanquishits foes: the normal, the boring, the benign. The secret to victory,however, lies not in grand designs or ideals, but in the quirkylittle nuggets that exist inside all of us.

"The only way to create original art is to just be yourself," Jensensaid. "There’s no one else like you, ever in existence. You areyou. That’s what I mean by bringing back the weird—just doingsomething your own. There’s nothing more weird than beingyourself."

Vile Blue Shades will headline SLUG Magazine’s Localized on Friday,September 12th at the Urban Lounge. Fuck The Informer andcomedian Travis Bird open the show. All proceeds benefitSean Hennefer.

VBS, Utah Art’s Festival June 2008.Photo: Ryan Powers

 

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