In the Fall of 2002, several Lincoln bands who were of the same opinion that: A) Lincoln had "a lot of great bands, but not necessarily a great music scene", to quote group member Tery Daly, and B) that something should be done about that fact. The group combined resources, talents, and efforts in an attempt to raise the profile of the music created by Lincoln bands. They met formally, brainstormed dozens, if not hundreds of ideas of how to improve the local music scene, and decided they'd pick one initial idea and go with it, and that was to put out a compliation of Lincoln bands.

The group of bands called themself "a situation" and because of their structure preferred to be referred to as a "connective", rather than a "collective". Originally made up of Crush The Clown, Ideal Cleaners, Junior Mighty, Post-Trendies and The Honey Hush, the connective set to work on their first goal. They held a launch party to raise money for the group to make its first CD, and the launch was a huge success. Each band recorded their tracks, and the group was getting ready to mix. As the CD seemed to be nearing completion things began to fall apart. While waiting for one of the bands to complete their tracks, the group itself went through many of the problems that make having a thriving, cohesive music scene a difficulty. Several of the bands broke up. The Honey Hush went first (evolving into Suzy Dreamer & Her Nightmares) Post-Trendies was next, and then finally Crush The Clown bit the dust. It seemed that the group had died in it's infancy, but the interest and persistence of of a few members of the group kept the project alive, and after nearly two years, the group is ready to release their first group effort, "A Situation Presents Itself" a compilation CD of the members bands.

The group will be holding their CD release party this month, the proceeds of which will be used to finance the 2nd compilation of Lincoln bands. Starcityscene.com caught up with a few members of the group to find out what's coming up for them.

SCS: It’s been a long time since your connective started. Why don’t you start out by telling us what “a situation” is, how it started, and what its goals are?

Malcom: Well, the name refers to the Situationist who were political and artistic upstarts in the late fifties and sixties. The Situationist were linked to art movements like dada, surrealism and fluxus but their name comes from the idea that one should construct situations in day to day life as a way of opposing mind-numbing, passive living. I think the title of our group, which some of us have taken to calling a connective, is telling. A Situation is a situation. We are all Lincoln musicians who gathered to talk about how we could work to evolve the local music scene, one of our chosen methods of creative living. We are all getting together in this time and place, in this given situation, to see what we have, what we want to do and how we’re going to do it. I like the name because it is also flexible. It doesn’t confine the activity based on membership or products (like a record label). The inference is that A Situation is something that is in flux. Some of the ideas that came from the initial brainstorm included ways to help bands tour more, to encourage more media coverage of local music, creating a website to promote local music and making some local compilations, plus a bunch of other crazy ideas.

Tery: There were many of us in the band crowd who were kind of all thinking along the same lines; that we had a lot of great bands in Lincoln, but not necessarily a great scene, certainly not as vibrant as it had been in the past. I was hearing a lot of people talking about "the good old days" of the Lincoln scene in the late '80's early '90's. I'm sure there's an element of "rose colored glasses" involved there, but the fact that people talked about the Lincoln scene as if it's best days were behind it kind of bothered me a bit, and it seemed dismissive of the really great bands who were currently playing. Bands weren’t getting much attention, locally or otherwise. Individually, we each wanted to do something about it, but didn’t really know what to do, or how to go about it. Malcom and I were discussing this one night, and he said he’d had similar conversations with Dan Jenkins, and it just kind of grew out of that. We spoke to a few other friends from other bands, and decided to put something together more formally to discuss the Lincoln music scene, and what could be done to make things better and get it the attention it deserves.

SCS: How do you plan to achieve the goals?

Malcom: We all agreed that the most immediate and feasible goal was the compilation CD which we began right away. It was less immediate than we thought. The idea with the compilation was to parlay it into a series of compilations along the lines of Broadside back in the 80s which many of us enjoyed in our youth. The second compilation is in the works. We’re negotiating with bands so I won’t name any names but they are going to be great. One of the other goals was to create a website promoting local music. Not long after our conversations Star City Scene appeared. So thanks to Tery, we didn’t have to do that part of the master plan. I think the media coverage of local music has improved. This is in part due to the immense activity of local bands right now. I think Star City Scene, and all its events have been extremely helpful in this department. Things like the Powerless shows and Scenefest get media attention. Then there is the upcoming Lincoln Calling and Duffy’s doing things like “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” or other out of the ordinary events helps too. I hope “A Situation Presents Itself” is beneficial in a similar way. Plus a compilation is just a good way to get people to sample more of what is happening locally.

Tery: Starcityscene.com actually didn't come along quite that soon. We started a situation in like the end of September of '02, and I didn't start up Starcityscene.com until April '03, so it was about half a year between the two.

SCS: How was “a situation presents itself done”?

Malcom: All five bands contributed two original, unreleased songs to the disc. They recorded them at the LaBORatory. We played a benefit show at Duffy’s to raise money to cover some of the cost of producing the disc so each band contributed their time to that. The idea behind pulling a bunch of bands together into a connective, was that we all had different talents and resources and we would benefit from helping each other out. While organizing 16 musicians to do anything is somewhat slower than worrying about just your band, the benefits did come. We had Nick Westra step up and agree to record all the bands at The LaBORatory which had to be a headache but he handled it all with great calm and skill as you can hear on the disc. Then lots of other band members did other portions from setting up shows, to making posters and t-shirts, to writing press releases, etc. We even incorporated local musicians who were not on the disc. This thrilled me because it is completely selfless. They are willing to pitch in on something even though their band gets no direct benefit. For that I want to mention Mark Wolberg who did the mastering and Aaron Coleman who did the artwork.

SCS: What do you like and dislike about the music scene in Lincoln?

Malcom: If you want a critical picture you’re going to have to talk to Justin Firestone. I love what is happening in Lincoln. I think that the past year or two there has been a level of excitement and effort that I haven’t seen in quite a while in Lincoln. I think anyone who is participating in the local scene as a musician, a reviewer, or a fan is helping us keep Lincoln interesting, or as they say in Austin, “weird.”

SCS: Ok, then rather than like or dislike, more generally, what's your assesment of the state of the music scene now, and do you feel that your efforts have led to an improvement in “the scene”?

Tery: Well, whether our efforts have directly lead to an improvment in the scene is a tough thing to measure by any mean, isn’t it? I don’t know. The connective started out really strong, we had a lot of plans in mind, but things got really bogged down during the very first project we chose to work on, which is the comp that’s just coming out. We did the launch show, raised money to get the CD made, but while waiting for one of the bands to finish their recordings, not much else was done. I had expected the comp to take a matter of a few months to get done, but that wasn't the case at all. In a big way, it was the sluggishness of a situation that led to the creation of Starcityscene.com. The goals of Starcityscene.com and a situation are exactly the same, but working by myself, I could get a lot more done. It’s really funny. When we first started the group up, we discussed in our very first meeting keeping the group small, initially limited to just 5 bands, so that we could be fast moving, make decisions fairly quickly, and get shit done, but unfortunately, even as small as it was it STILL took nearly two years to get the comp done. Working alone, I can get stuff done…fast. So even though I started up Starcityscene.com on my own, it’s always been working toward the same ends as a situation. Plus Starcityscene.com has always been of the community, for the community and by the community. As Malcom points out there are a lot of people, both in bands and not, who are participating in the scene right now, so I guess the result is the same. I would say that the scene does seem more cohesive and exciting now than it was when we first started a situation or when I started starcityscene.com. Hopefully we’ve had something to do with that.

SCS: What are your future plans?

Malcom: Right now I plan on selling enough of these comps to pay off my credit card, Guy Debord would have my head for that statement. Also, as I said earlier, I hope we are able to continue with the compilation idea and release A Situation part two somewhere down the road. We’ll see what happens from there.

Tery: I think that doing the first comp was a learning experience for all of us, both in just the mechanical aspects of doing it, but also in how to manage getting it done in a more timely manner, so hopefully we’ll be able to turn these things out a bit more quickly in the future and get greater exposure for more bands. As for other plans, we’ll have to go back and look over our notes from our first meetings, because we threw out a LOT of ideas, some feasible, some not so much, but every one of them was worth considering. Seriously, the comp was just one idea out of dozens, so now we need to go back and figure out what we need to do next.

In one of our situation meetings we discussed that the Lincoln and Omaha scenes used to be much more united than they are now, so I’m working on a new Starcityscene.com event with Joe Vavak and Somedaynever.com to put on co-produced shows with Lincoln and Omaha bands playing shows together in both cities to expose more Lincoln bands to Omaha crowds, and more Omaha bands to Lincoln crowds. It’s a 30-45 minute drive to anywhere in Omaha, but each town’s music fans pretty much stick to their home turf. I’d like to see it get mixed up a bit more. I’ve got several other events in the offing, but I’m not spilling until they’re a bit closer to actually happen.

SCS: Who are some local bands or musicians that you admire or feel should be recognized?

Malcom: Right now I just feel fortunate to have participated on “A Situation Presents Itself” so I’ll say a huge shoutout to Crush the Clown, Ideal Cleaners, Junior Mighty, Post-Trendies and Suzy Dreamer & Her Nightmares.

Tery: I'd suggest keeping an eye out on future comps by a situation, they'll certainly all be bands that we admire and feel should be recognized, that's what the comp series is all about!

SCS: Tell me about the CD Release show

Malcom: It will be at Duffy’s on October 10th. Junior Mighty, Post-Trendies and Suzy Dreamer & Her Nightmares will all be performing. We’ll have a limited number of A Situation t-shirts available as bonus gifts for those who buy them that night. If you can’t wait though, they are available already at Spindle (formerly Zero Street), Recycled Sounds, King Dollar Pawn shop and Homers.

Tery: Yeah, and some of them are collectors items because ours say “The Honey Hush does not sound like Crush The Clown”. Since neither of those bands is together anymore, that particular T-shirt is going for upwards of $2.50 on E-bay. Seriously though, we want to implore people to come on down to the show, and buy a CD, because as with the first benefit show, this one will be a fund rasier to cover the costs of making the 2nd CD, which, by the way, is going to be awesome. The 3 bands playing this CD Release show won't get paid for playing, they're donating that money to the making of the next CD.

SCS: Anything else you want to share with our readers?

Malcom: Call KRNU and KZUM to request your favorite local band. Take an uninitiated friend to see a local band. Buy local music for all your holiday needs.

Tery: Yeah, turn off the TV and go see a band!






- Tery Daly