Complete and Utter History of Vile Blue Shades

“If it’s a sample of John Thursday she’s after, his head is already up. I lay her skirt up to her belly and slip her pants down ...”
~Under the Roofs of Paris, Henry Miller

Around the time the U.S. army dragged a Unibomber-esque Saddam Hussein mumbling from his rat hole in central Iraq, one would occasionally encounter Ryan Jensen wandering the wintry streets of downtown Salt Lake City wearing a solid blue T-shirt with the word “VILE” embroidered in stark black letters where a miniature polo player might otherwise go. Jensen was often drunk, but a common theme among many of his distracted conversations in late 2003 was a new project he was planning—something as epic in scope as it would be baffling in content—called Vile Blue Shades. His initial idea was to create a doppelganger band of his then-current project, The Corleones, which would consist of the same members but play art rock instead of punk. When none of the other Corleones were interested and the band seemed to be twitching out the last nerve spasms of its generally self-destructive lifespan, Jensen elicited the help of Joe Guile and Dan Rose, whose schedules had been recently freed by the break-up of their band, The Cronies. The germ began to grow, but slowly.

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

The earliest Shades demos, which the original members presented to prospective players, were not exactly accessible. Eli Morrison, an occasional Shades guitarist and integral behind-the-scenes man, said, “On the original tracks, Ryan played all the instruments, sung, and done everything himself. It was cool, except he doesn’t know how to play any instruments at all, except for tambourine. So he played drums and guitars and everything, and just because he didn’t know what he was doing, it made for some really odd, crazy, strange stuff.”

But the believers came. Jensen, Guile and Rose recorded a demo that would later become the band’s first official release, Dark Wizard. They used it to recruit guitarist Shane Asbridge (I Am Electric, Lazerfang) bassist Chris Murphy, and guitarist Justin Wyatt (The Corleones). At this point, the group was less of a band than an idea—one that involved an open-door policy under which anyone who wanted to could play, and the conceptualization of three records: a Dungeons and Dragons record (Dark Wizard), a drinking record (Bottle of Pain), and a sex record (John Thursday’s California Adventure).
The band obeyed a demanding practice schedule—9 a.m. on Sunday mornings at the Moroccan— and membership began to boom. “We’d make recordings and demos, and we’d invite people in on them,” Asbridge said. “People were coming in and out while we practiced—they’d come in and get their guitar, and maybe if we were doing something they would sit 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 and Tolchock Trio, to join the band in 2005. “I don’t think Shane had told anyone that he had asked me to play,” Thomas said. “I showed up at the Moroccan one day and a few of the guys were wondering what I was doing there.”

Morrison, who also plays guitar in The Wolfs and Ether, experienced a similarly casual initiation into the band: “I told them, ‘I’m totally hooked on Dark Wizard. You guys have to let me play with you.’ I was blown 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 a question like that being ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ So I was like, ‘Well, that’s cool. I guess if you guys don’t care, I guess I’ll be there.’”

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