The MayTrick ethic was this: Bands that restrict themselves to any particular genre are cheating themselves and their listeners out of vital parts of themselves. If the point of a song is to express something, and the style is supposed to somehow aid in this expression, then trying to fit everything that any given person is about into "funk" or "blues" will be a miserable failure. In fact, musical style should be used to express beyond the stuff that ordinarily needs to get expressed in normal life... Music should be used to explore your dark side, or your wussy side, or your idiot side, or whatever. Just about any kind of music (at least ones with a substantial number of fans) must have something to it, and if you want to experience music to its fullest, you've got to get in there and figure it out.
With great help from avant-garde
lead guitarist Geoff Esty and a number of other guitarists (Dave Roof, Matt
Diaz, Brian Drake, and Cliff Kaminsky, respectively), this open-ended aesthetic
yielded three albums from 1991-1994: The MayTricks (completed
Dec., 1992), So Chewy (completed Sept., 1993), and the double
album Happy Songs Will Bring You Down (completed Sept., 1994).
Mark wrote (and sang lead on) about half of the material on these albums, and
for the most part played bass.
The MayTricks played a sporadic string of inconsistent but always entertaining shows to fairly small numbers of people throughout these years, but with no record company offers pending, Mark took his leave to the University of Texas to pursue a Ph.D. in philosophy. The MayTricks did regroup, however, to record two Post-Mortem tunes in the summer of '95 (which featured more collaborative songwriting than their previous projects), and Steve (and Cliff) contributed a number of parts to the Mark Lint & The Fake Johnson Trio album in '97. Steve will also guest on percussion on the Mark Lint and the Fake album, So Whaddaya Think. Over Christmas, 1999, Steve and and Mark wrote and recorded their first real and total collaborative song (which will eventually be posted to this web site). This was a pretty darn special experience; they plan to slowly build up an album of duo material.
Steve has been (slowly) remastering the MayTricks albums onto CD: So Chewy has been available since '97, while The MayTricks was completed in '99, including the Post-Mortem songs as bonus tracks. The two Happy Songs disks will likely be available within the year. We're also planning a compilation release or two to get out some of the live material, a few songs recorded prior to the first album, and at least one song from the unfinished "Fingers" album, which is what the band was called for the year after Mark left (though Mark added parts to the tune). If you'd like to order any of these albums, drop Mark an e-mail or go to the Tenacious Productions home page, from which you can e-mail Steve or find out about Steve's current activities. After Fingers broke up, Geoff and Cliff played together in a now-defunct band called Ape 7, which you can read some about by clicking here. Geoff has finally released his solo gutar album on CD.
A sad update: I've been informed that Cliff Kaminsky
