This party is also an "official" Bravery afterparty, with the band hosting the goings-on after its 9:30 Club show.
Be Your Own Pet, Unleashing a Howl
Hot New Punk Band Shuns Conventional Path to Fame
By J. Freedom du Lac
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 2, 2006
Want to know what Be Your Own Pet's 17-year-old bass player, Nathan Vasquez, thinks of the Vans Warped Tour? You know, the annual summer rock-and-roll road show and marketing extravaganza that currently favors the high-strung and highly popular strain of music known as emo?
Burp.
That's what.
"It's not really our thing," Vasquez -- he of the peach fuzz moustache and rack of braces -- says with a shrug after having belched loudly and spontaneously.
Punk rock, baby!
On the same day the Warped Tour ("Presented by Cingular Wireless") is kicking off up the interstate at Merriweather Post Pavilion, Vasquez and Be Your Own Pet's 18-year-old guitarist, Jonas Stein, are sitting backstage at the 9:30 club, explaining why their barely legal Nashville garage-punk quartet spurned overtures to join the touring celebration of consumable youth culture.
"We didn't want to be with all those other bands that are playing," Stein says. Nothing personal against AFI, Senses Fail, Against Me! and the rest of the Warped acts, he says, but -- okay, maybe something personal: "All this emo-screamo stuff seems so overdone and pretentious and not real."
Instead of throwing down with thousands of their fellow teens, then, the pups in Be Your Own Pet are preparing to sprint through two spiky, snarling sets of high-volume, high-velocity music in front of a couple hundred comparative elders. Inasmuch as gnawing on Pop Tarts, slurping Coke and debating the culinary merits of Ben's Chili Bowl constitute pre-show preparation, anyway.
The young punks -- and we mean that in the nicest possible way -- are the opening act for veteran noise-rockers Sonic Youth, a band that formed a half-dozen years before the birth of Be Your Own Pet's oldest member, the hyperkinetic platinum blond bombshell of a singer Jemina Pearl. (A forceful presence blessed with Debbie Harry's looks and Karen O's vocal timbre and tendency to spasmodic twitching onstage, Pearl turned 19 two weeks ago.)
"Any rock band of 17-, 18-year-olds would love to do the Warped Tour," says Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore, whose Ecstatic Peace record label released BYOP's eponymous debut album last month. "But they were like: No. Way. They see it as fabricated, moronic music and a propagation of dumbed-down youth culture, and it's who they tried to set themselves apart from in high school."
The band is not made up of wannabe child stars desperate to crack into the big time, Moore says. Though all four musicians have parents in the music business -- Stein's father, for instance, manages rock star Vince Neill, while drummer Jamin Orrall's father co-wrote Shenandoah's 1990 country hit, "Next to You, Next to Me" -- there are, Moore says, "no annoying ambitious tics" in the band. Just four former classmates from the Nashville School of the Arts with an affinity for loud, marginalized music and thrashing out together onstage like the love children of Bikini Kill and the Stooges.
"They just want to be in the van playing doughnut shops across America with their friends," Moore says. "They know that right now, that's the coolest thing they can do."
Says Pearl (whose real last name is Abegg): "We've never thought about becoming really big. Just having the album come out in America is pretty cool. And getting to play shows every night is awesome. That's our favorite thing to do."
Oh, those crazy kids.
Be Your Own Pet may not be the most popular band in its own demographic, but it might be the most promising: The group's CD is among the year's most exhilarating releases, buzzing along at a breakneck clip with 15 playful songs running just over 30 minutes.
There are lyrics about zombies and Xanax, independence and sexuality, plus parties and bike riding ("We're on two wheels, baby!"). There's also dark humor in songs such as "Bog," on which Pearl purrs: "Wanna get a cat / My boyfriend wants a dog / We got into it / But I drowned him in the bog."
It is pulverizing, puerile punk rock with a brain. Not to mention a cheeky reference to the D.C. hardcore legends Bad Brains: On the manic 58-second track "Let's Get Sandy (Big Problem)," Pearl screeches, "We all have holes in our socks / And Bad Brains totally rocks!"
Will the rest of the world think similarly of Be Your Own Pet, which was the subject of an overheated record-label bidding war last year?
The band's debut album has been receiving rave reviews, and even the prickly indie gatekeepers at Pitchfork offered an enthusiastic endorsement, referencing Pearl's decision to ditch high school last year thus: "Hell, if I were as good as these guys, I'd drop out of high school, too." (Stein and Orrall graduated early; Vasquez is still trying to get his diploma, though, he says, he's given up on an earlier experiment of taking classes online.)
The band, whose name came from a song written by Orrall's father, has also landed on MTV's radar with an arty black-and-white video for "Bicycle, Bicycle, You Are My Bicycle." So far, the video's exposure has been limited to the college channel, MTVU. But MTV's vice president of music and talent, Amy Doyle, says there's a chance Be Your Own Pet might graduate to MTV proper. All depends on audience feedback, she says.
"It's good music. It's different, but it might pull in a big fan base. A female-fronted band is cool, too. And in terms of relating to young music fans, their age helps them. We're rooting for them."
Moore says: "Be Your Own Pet's music isn't what you're hearing on MTV. And what they're doing is a real exciting model for their demographic. It's a real alternative to some of the more cornball aspects that are being presented in youth culture. . . . MTV is certainly keeping an eye on it. We'll see."
(What you won't see: the band being sexualized on MTV. "They're teenagers playing rock-and-roll with a lead singer who's a teenage blond dynamo," Moore says. "I'm very conscious about not exploiting that they're young and foxy. The fact that they are young and foxy is so obvious that to use that as a marketing tool would be kind of grotesque.")
The prospect of landing on the same playlist as emo stars Panic! at the Disco, Fall Out Boy and their ilk thrills the BYOP moppets to no end. No, really. It does.
"Hopefully, we can help change people's tastes," says Stein, the brooding, swarthy guitarist with the Jim Morrison mane. "I'm not implying that our music is great or whatever. It's cool if people like it. I'd just be glad to help inspire people to check out something else that's not that same old average MTV guitar-rock [expletive] that everybody's doing."
For now, though, Be Your Own Pet has more important concerns. Like where to practice upon returning home to Nashville.
Love the parents and everything, but the band appears to be outgrowing its environs.
"We're still rehearsing at our parents' houses," Stein says. "We like to stay up later than our parents do. Personally, I feel the most inspired at night. I think it would be cool to start heading to the rehearsal studio at, like, 10 at night, just go, like, hang out, stay up as long as we want, play some songs. But right now, we pretty much start an hour after we wake up, and we're done before dinner. It's getting old."
