The Van Burens

JJ Abrams, creator of the television series Lost, talks about his love of mystery and specifically his love for his unopened mystery box in this Ted talk (it’s 18 minutes long and not the crux of this post so if you don’t have a lot of time, you can skip the video and take it from me that Abrams likes to leave his mystery box unopened because it’s more exciting not to know its contents than it is to reveal some cheap prize kept within).

The development of discipline required not to open such a box is an exciting challenge. The highest form of such a challenge is undoubtedly abstinence, and we take our party hats off to those folks, but there are many little mysteries hidden behind unlocked doors that we can choose to reveal or not. My own mystery involves a blocked number that calls me every day. Once in the morning and once in the evening. We’ve hypothesized that the caller is a process server waiting to subpoena the VBs for any number of copyright infringements we have committed, or perhaps it’s Obama trying to hit me up for some loose cash. Perhaps its a future me calling to warn present me not to move to Mars and become the house band for the first human colony on the red planet. I don’t know who it is, and I’m more excited not knowing who it is.

We have recently been pumping out Van Buren ringtones through our beanseries, and to continue that practice we bring you a ringtone entitled “You Think You Want It.” The tone is a meditation on the joy of man’s desiring. Click the question mark for access…or don’t and imagine what it might be like.

Hey, Boston Van Buurens fans.  You’re looking good these days….you been working out?  Ya, we know you’ve been good this year, bringing the noise and funk when we play the Middle East, Brighton Music Hall, and all the other Boston haunts we frequent.  But we always show up, play our one set, and leave you screaming “give us more, VBs, give us more!”  while we’re smoking our post-show cig and showering in the green room (just kidding, Van Burens don’t shower!).  Well, we hear you.  That’s why this Friday night, the VBs are playing an extended two-set full-night show at the Rosebud in Somerville, a really great venue hidden behind a diner of the same name in Davis Square.  It’s our first show at the ‘Bud and we can’t wait to rock out with our hometown crew while going deep into the Van Buren song list and maybe bringing up a few special guests.  Click the pic of 33rd Sexiest VB Fan Ryan Gosling for the FB event and more info.  See you Friday!

The Van Burens are believers in intertextuality, the concept that we derive all of our creative ideas from past experiences, that there are no “new” ideas. We think of the unwitting recurrence of past experiences as rhymes or echoes of the voices and faces we’ve been lucky enough to be surrounded by. Recently I have taken up two discrete hobbies: climbing and beer brewing.

The unlikely combination of a couple craft beers and the urge to pull my body UP seemed all-too-natural an idea to me, as though I didn’t invent the concept, until I remembered that I hadn’t. When VB members lived together with friends in Providence in the summer of 2007, we lived with the avid climber, Buddha. On Tuesday evenings, after work, he would bring home a six pack of Honey Brown Ale and engage in a ritual known as “Drunk Tuesdays.” After two and a quarter beers, Buddha would be ready to climb every doorway and window frame on Power Street, and sometimes even the grad center if he was feeling especially saucy. As part of our beanseries, we bring you the Buddha ringtone: Climbing on a Tuesday. Click on the cowed out Buddha hanging with P Bear to access the tone.

“Climbing slowly and gracefully”

My junior year of college I studied in Cork, Ireland.  I met amazing people and got to play music with a lot of them.  I was lucky enough to become friends with Darren Concannon–a great musician from Galway.  He and I would trade war stories of our childhood bands, and discuss our plans for reuniting with them after college to go for the gold.  That was 5 years ago now, and both of our groups have never been closer.  Allow me to introduce, A Band Called Wanda.

Here is a video of them playing on Balcony TV in Dublin:

The Van Burens will be appearing at one of our favorite bars, Penuche’s in Concord, New Hampshire, this Saturday night. Penuche’s is an underground bar that turns into New Hampshire’s version of Studio 54 on weekend nights; instead of a disco ball, there’s a glowing, spinning cow; instead of scantily-clad cage dancers looking for a good time, there are fully bundled, bearded New Hampshireans looking for a good time….etc. Pretty much the best place on Earth. The show will start a little after 9.

We’ll be joined by Strangers Helping Strangers, which sounds like a great name for a Christian indie hipster rock band or a Doors cover band, but is in a fact a non-profit that conducts food drives at shows around the country to benefit local food banks. It’s a great program and the VBs are proud to be part of it, so if you come to the show, try to bring an item to donate. Click the pic of Jimbo Morrison for FB event and details. For more info about Strangers Helping Strangers, click here.

Few people appreciate the service industry like musicians, and few musicians appreciate those everyday heroes like the Van Burens do.  The VB consider the waitstaff, bartenders, caterers, managers, and hostesses we encounter with the same regard most people give to movie stars and athletes.   In the van on the way to a gig, we’ll get hyper and giggly disuccing our favorite burly bouncers and  barwomen like fourteen year old girls talking about Justin Bieber.  Our reverence comes, perhaps, from the similarity between being a musician and working in a bar or club: you stay up late, you sleep late, and insane tipsy people are your customers.  The only difference is your waiter will never melt your face with a shredding guitar solo and you can’t ask the keyboard player for more ketchup.  Essentially, the professions are identical: service people are the rock stars of our everyday lives, and the Van Burens are like a stage full of bartenders, dispensing foamy beats and riffs.  The VBs are very excited this week to return to the home of one our fave service teams:  The Half Door in Hartford, CT.  We’re playing $2 Guiness night this Wednesday, and it will be great to return to such an awesome spot after several months and hang out with such a great crew.  Come on by if you’re around, we’ll start a bit after 9. Click the ‘shows’ link on the top of the page for more info.

And, in the spirit of teamwork, here’s five people playing one guitar:

The Van Burens hope that during these holidays, people of all faiths and even those without take the time to reflect on how hard they rocked this year, and summon the courage necessary to rock even harder in 2012.

Sorry, but there is no rock harder than diamond.

It’s in times like these that I turn to then-President Martin Van Buren’s famous Christmas day speech of 1839, the one where an infuriated MVB discovered that Secretary of the Treasury Levi Woodbury had got the Prez socks for Christmas again:

“What ruinous treachery is this?  Woodb’ry, you pinchbellied muckworm! You spitlicking, shallow-pocket toadeater!  I requested (quite vociferously, mind you, and with a tone stern almost even as mine presently) for upon this holy-day that I, Martin Van Buren, President of these United States, be presented with only the pearliest white of combs  – for the upkeep and grooming of my muttoned-chops, that’s why! -  fashioned from only the finest of ivory extracted from the mighty African oliphant! But yet I undo this bow tied by your plump wollydrog strumpet wife to find merely…..garters?  A pox on you benzonian noddypoles, you gundygut mollygrubs, you, you, you grunderheaded dunderwhelp loobies!!! I’m retreating to my quarters!”

Martin sure did have a way with words, and we do apologize for all the blue language, we hope none of the hundred-and-thirty year old folks in our readership were offended.

Indeed: before 2011 is out, there are still a few opportunities to catch the Van Burens and ring in the new year with style. We’re playing this Thursday night at Tommy Doyle’s, our first show in Harvard Square. Click the pic of Ambrose Burnside for details and FB event.

Ambrose Burnside, the inventor of side burns

NYE will see us at the barn in Bethlehem, NH, a party that seems to get crazier every time we play there, and the only downside to our New Year’s Eve gig will be all the paternity lawsuits no doubt coming to our horn section. Again, click the picture of Tom Selleck, and make sure to get your butt up there on the 31st.

Tom Selleck, inventor of the Tom Selleck moustache

Many thanks to the good people who came out to support our first show at the newly-renovated Brighton Music Hall opening for Cris Cab. We had a blast onstage and hope you all had at least 15-25% as much fun as we. Here’s the setlist from that fateful eve:

12.23.11 Brighton Music Hall.
One Set: Tranceformers, Lee Harvey, Stinkoff, Yukon, Shotz in L.A., Santa’s Back with a Big Fat Sack, Pussy Galore > Taft Punk, BitterCities

The Van Burens are known worldwide for their use of a variety of musical scales.  Essentially, a musical scale is a collection of tones used in a musical moment, kind of like how a painter uses a selection of colors in his palate.

Happy songs use major scales and sad songs use minor scales, generally.  The pentatonic scale (from the Greek meaning “five tones”) in an even simpler palate found in the indiginous folk music of almost any area: much Chinese, Jewish, Native American, and European folk music features a specific order of five tones that musicians label ‘pentatonic.’  Recently, a 35,000 year old flute-like instrument was discovered in the south of Germany – the oldest known instrument in the world, predating Noah’s flood by 31,000 years – and it was found to produce a pentatonic scale. Our pal Bobby McFerrin, the supremely talented vocalist (basically to Michael Winslow (the Police Academy “crazy sounds guy”) as Radiohead is to Oasis) demonstrates the innate human tendency towards this specific scale in a brilliant video: