Now We Are 21:
The Complicated History of the Concept of the Mr.T Experience

Nobody in the Mr.T Experience is really 21, though not too long ago they could say that their ages averaged out to that number (thanks to drummer Alex, still in high school as of this writing). But metaphorically, sure... 21 is the perfect age for this band. Not all the way grown up, but getting to that point in life where you look around and start thinking, "Whoa, this stuff is getting serious."

For their first year or two, the Mr.T Experience had an undeserved reputation of being more or less a joke band, which isn't surprising considering the band's name, not to mention songs like that seemed to rely on their inspiration on 70s sitcoms like The Brady Bunch and The Partridge Family. In fact, in an early interview vocalist/guitarist "Dr." Frank declared that he had learned everything he knew about family life and being in a band from those shows.

The Mr.T live show would reinforce the impression that these guys aren't a bunch of intellectual heavyweights. Every song is introduced as, "This song is about a girl", except for the two or three that are about cows. In between songs, guitarist (and occasional lead singer) Jon Von regales the audience with a selection of jokes that read like out takes from a Ronald Reagan script. Byron (bass) stares straight ahead in a catatonic trance (although he has been seen to nod his head once or twice), while Alex resembles the archetypal crazed drummer who has to be kept chained up in the basement until just before showtime.
 
In reality, the Mr.T Experience are (though they may never forgive me for revealing this) closet intellectuals, and even, in the case of Dr. Frank, philosophers. Not that it necessarily proves anything, but three out of the four are college graduates. Sure, college boys who can play guitar are a dime a
dozen these days, but you don't get out a place like MIT (Jon Von) or the University of California at Berkeley (Dr. Frank) without some sort of smarts.

With credentials like that there was no way those two boys were going to hide their braininess, but they tried to keep up the dumb rock 'n' roller image at the expense of other two members. Byron has always been portrayed as a Zorg-like character who made his living carving up cows with a chainsaw down
at the slaughterhouse. "They always circulate these weird stories about me. I'm supposed to be the rough and tough one," says the soft-spoken bassist. In reality, the closest he got to hacking up dead meat was the deli where he worked while putting himself though college (history, specializing in the Balkan States).

Alex comes closest to a traditional rock 'n' roll lifestyle ("Call him around noon," Frank advised me, "any earlier and he'll still be asleep; any later and he'll be drunk."), and hasn't allowed annoying details like high school to interfere with that. Alex joined the band when he was 15, but like many people didn't take it seriously at first. Back then he was putting most of his energy into dying his hair black, taking drugs, and playing in a gothic death rock combo by the name of Scarlet Macabre.

But even Alex sees things a bit differently these days; he will admit to occasionally being happy, though he balked at the word "positive," and having somehow managed as of this month to graduate from high school, is planning on starting college himself next fall (when pressed on the nature of his intellectual
pursuits, though, he reverts to form: "...parties, girls, getting drunk...").

Anyway, it all started way back when... well, Frank and Byron got together about 1979, in a band called the Bent Nails. They were both in high school then, and the two highlights of the Bent Nails' career were probably playing at an all-girl slumber party and appearing on the Maximum RocknRoll double LP compilation Not So Quiet On The Western Front. The Bent Nails disintegrated when one of the members joined a religious cult, but Frank and Byron kept in touch and played together whenever they could, even after Frank went off to school at Berkeley.

Meanwhile, Jon Von was finishing his computer studies at MIT, where he was also in a semi-serious band called the Sacred Cows. After graduation, he ended up working in Berkeley, and he and Frank met at the campus radio station, KALX, where they were both DJ's (Frank was already experiencing some in-house success with his self-produced rap version of Dr. Seuss' classic Green Eggs And Ham). Alex was a high school classmate of Frank's younger brother, and suddenly all the pieces were in place.

This was the summer of 1985; after a few months' practice, the band had their first show sometime that fall. At that time the Bay Area scene was headed into a slow period; most of the traditional places for the shows were experiencing difficulties and/or closing down. One place that was still going was the Club Foot, a tiny store front in San Francisco's Hunter's Point district. For some reason the police didn't seem to care what went on there, and there were few neighbors to complain about the noise. There were occasional gigs at the once-legendary Mabuhay, and the usual parties, but during that first year most
of Mr.T's energy went into getting a record together.

Everyone's Entitled To Their Own Opinion was recorded in 15 1/2 hours in July of 1986, and even before its release that fall, the band was getting heavy airplay on KALX (Frank and Jon were pretty scrupulous about not playing their own music on the air, but they couldn't stop their fellow DJ's from doing it. Not that tried very hard). KALX is a pretty influential station in the college radio world, so when the MTX LP hit number one for several months running, it gained a lot of notice from stations around the country.

So the KALX connection gave Mr.T a foot in the door, but it wouldn't have done them much good if they didn't have the music to back it up. But the firs LP was a classic, full of pop-punk Ramones-type mold. Short on chords and long on melody, they worked themselves into your brain and wouldn't go away. There was one overly political number, "Marine Recruiter," and a couple semi-tragic love songs (like the haunting yet slightly bemused "Disconnection": My old girlfriend just went insane; disconnection in her brain), but the songs that got the most airplay were one about Danny Partridge getting busted for cocaine and a somewhat leering tribute to the Pandoras lead singer Paula Pierce.

Then there was "The Empty Experience" (Empty=M.T Get it?), which represented the band's first overt venture into philosophical realms, with its existential musings on the fundamental vacuity of America's cultural iconography. Witness couplets like:

and finally winding up with:

Take for example Jon Von's musical musings on the timeless question "What is Punk?" Is it merely a sarcastic novelty song? Or a metaphorical approach to a metaphysical dilemma? And surely you can not dismiss the profoundly nihilistic "A Mind Is A Terrible Thing" as just another joke song, Ditto for "A Zillion Years," with its stunning glimpse of the entropy which ultimately enfolds us.

But the philosophical centerpiece of Night Shift At The Thrill Factory is undeniably Dr. Frank's graduate thesis set to music, "The History Of The Concept Of The Soul." In less than two minutes, and to a driving rock and roll beat, he sums up not only everything that he learned in college, but a well-encapsulated version of the essence of western civilization. It is in fact quite conceivable that young people who buy the new Mr.T record could, after listening to this one song, abandon their formal education secure in the
knowledge that they already possessed the answers to the truly important posed by life. Everything else: merely details. 

Naturally the Mr.T Experience don't recommend that you drop out of school and devote your life to listening to rock and roll, unless of course you find that annoying details like homework and classes happen to interfere with your ability to attend their shows and listen to their records. After all, one of the
most important lessons in anyone's education is learning establish priorities. If, however, you do find time to attend classes on occasion, you would be doing both your teachers and fellow classmates a great service by bringing your Mr.T records (and don't forget the lyric sheets) to school with you to supplement the normally inadequate resource materials generally supplied by the board of education. In the words of the great English philosopher Eric Burdon, "It will be worth it, if not for the sake of this song, but for the sake of your own peace of mind."