WASHINGTON -- Want to know what Be Your Own Pet's 17-year-old bass player, Nathan Vasquez, think... Be Your Own Pet shuns conve
WASHINGTON -- 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 'n' roll road show and marketing extravaganza that currently favors the high-strung and highly popular strain of music known as emo?
"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.
On the same day the Warped Tour is kicking off nearby, Vasquez and guitarist Jonas Stein, 18, are backstage at the 9:30 club here, explaining why their barely legal Nashville, Tenn., 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 -- OK, 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.
"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."
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 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."
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. There's 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.
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 the group could graduate to MTV proper. "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."
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."
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