The R&B-themed Take a Break was a low point, Slawson says. The Gimmes proceeded to savage show tunes, ’60s oldies, early R&B, even bar mitzvah classics, covering REO Speedwagon, Styx, and “Hava Nagila” alike. What started with one-off punk covers of Billy Joel, Neil Diamond, and Paul Simon songs grew into 1997’s full-length Have a Ball, which sold hundreds of thousands of copies on the strength of the Gimmes’ treatment of ’70s and ’80s classic rock. The band formed in 1995 as an excuse for some friends (members of the Foo Fighters, NOFX, Lagwagon, and Swingin’ Utters) to get together and jam its name is a ripoff of a children’s-book title. “I think they were in a position where they were just willing to try anything to generate publicity and get people into the stadium.” Similarly in need of a PR boost, the Gimmes were getting ready to release their new album, and no ordinary promotion would do. I had weird crazy misgivings,” he says, exhausted on the phone after an eleven-hour day chopping vegetables for a Bay Area catering company. The town practically made him a punk out of aversion. Slawson, 37, grew up getting his ass kicked in Pittsburgh.
PAUL SIMON OAKLAND ARENA PLUS
It was a member of the Pirates’ staff who contacted the band, offering a boatload of money, plus airfare, lodgings, and a decent rider, to come and play three shows. With its mix of cheesy live music and pyrotechnics, the Skyblast postgame show was the one redeeming aspect of Pirates games. It’s destined for mainstream radio airplay the only thing defter than the album’s musicianship might be the Gimmes’ decision to play their biggest show in history before a crowd guaranteed to demand their bleached skulls.Īs representatives of a storied yet economically hosed town, the Pittsburgh Pirates are dead last in their division, new stadium notwithstanding. Recorded in San Francisco earlier this year, the album molests the Eagles’ “Desperado,” Dolly Parton’s “Jolene,” Johnny Cash’s “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” and nine other country staples, all done with the power chords, professionalism, and pluck of veteran punkers. This October, punkdom’s best cover band hopes to parlay the press bump born of this Pittsburgh rejection into sales for its seventh full-length, Me First and the Gimme Gimmes Love Their Country. “What if they were cheering?” he thought. “Well, what did you think was going to happen?” Mike asked. He looked toward legendary Gimmes bassist, Fat Mike of NOFX, clad in a white Pirates jersey like the rest of the quintet. Yet it felt as if he were being repeatedly punched in the stomach.
It was the biggest crowd Pittsburgh native, SF resident, and Gimmes frontman Spike Slawson had ever played to. Throngs stomped toward the exits in protest. “Boooooooooooo!” The refrain grew louder. Led Zep, however, is sacred to working-class Pittsburgh. First a punk-style Neil Diamond cover, then an uptempo, snarling rendition of “Stairway to Heaven.” Postgame fireworks burst over the irate crowd while, down in the diamond, postgame entertainers the Gimmes savaged yet another American classic.
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