The Dumb and Ugly Club//Red Dust

Dumb, Ugly and Local.
Tell me...what is this Local Music Fridays?

Here I am doing this again, but it feels ok, because honestly, it’s been so long since I was in this band that it truly feels like ancient history at this point (sadly). Also, there’s a reason!

This is a band that Michael Beauchamp and I started our freshman year of college. We decided to name ourselves The Dumb and Ugly Club after Liz Bair made some crack about us being dumb and ugly in the East Quad caf (something along the lines of, guess who’s the dumb one; guess who’s the ugly one).

Michael holds a special place in my heart for a few reasons. One is just that he’s a remarkable human being. Another is that he’s the only other person I’ve ever been able to actually write songs with, which turns out, when it works is a super cool experience. We wrote and wrote and wrote and then went to Chicago to recorded an EP in this friend of my aunt’s (same aunt as yesterday, guys) basement. We called it Dead in Chicago. Get it?

A little time passed and we decided to write another album, but we also decided to give ourselves some parameters. Here are the parameters:
1. The album is set in 1967.
2. In this version of 1967, JFK has not been assassinated.
3. In this version of 1967, we are fighting a war on the mars

What emerged was a retro-sounding space-themed sci-fi-esque album, with a cultural storyline told song by song from vastly different perspectives (the child who watches her father leave for war, the veteran who sees his life desimated, the citizen who waits for his lover to return, or in the case of this song, the soldier drafted into the Martian fiasco). Copies of the album, called Mars, 1967, probably exist in numbers around the mid-70s. Most of them are likely floating around Michigan



Red Dust.mp3

If you're around for this holiday weekend, Michael and I are playing a show together, with our respective bands, this Saturday at The Sidewalk. As for a reunion...oh, hmmm. Who knows?


Oh the red dust eats me whole,
Smoke a bowl.
They tell me it’s for freedom,
But they mean rich guys.