John Brennan - master of poopin' and musical extraordinaire - uses the medium of blogging to introduce himself to a whole new wave of fandom...
Hi, I’m John Brennan… no, not John Brennan from the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), I’m John Brennan from the other CIA (Cookie Institute of America). The good people at Ship to Shore Phono Co. are releasing a 45 RPM record of Joe Bob is Back In Town – the theme song I wrote for The Last Drive-In with Joe Bob Briggs – as well as a cassette tape compilation from my back catalog titled Celebrated Standards. You’ve definitely never heard of me, so here’s an overview of my musical history.
I co-wrote my first song in Kindergarten. It was called Jamie Poops All Day Long, She Never Stops Poopin’. It was a sing-along with an extended mouth-fart solo built-in as the finale. My friend and I performed it for Jamie, a 1st grader we both had a crush on. She didn’t like it.
In the fifth grade I joined my first band, a proposed heavy metal outfit called Bloodshed. We wrote lyrics for twenty songs in one night at a sleepover and had two practices after that. I played bass on a broken electric guitar with just two strings and no amp. We totally sucked, so we broke up, but I continued to write down lyrics and create music in my mind.
Hi Jamie! How's it going? Still poopin'?
I took a handful of guitar lessons in the sixth grade. My teacher taught me bar chords first, then some scales. I barely practiced, so my parents canceled the lessons. I started playing again in junior year of high school on a cheap Yamaha acoustic. I remembered the bar chords and taught myself open chords using a book of Beatles tunes.
Over the next two decades I wrote 700+ songs and home-recorded twenty albums, genre hopping from goofy comedy to heartfelt love songs to hymns about food, and so on. About 42% of it is listenable. A couple of these songs, Mr. Benjamin’s Car and Road Rage, were chosen as finalists in The John Lennon Songwriting Contest and the International Songwriting Competition.
While living in LA I played in a band called Diablo’s Jamboree; a promoter at The Cat Club called us a cross between Motörhead and Tito and the Tarantulas. In NY I played in a group called The Money Hams; we specialized in Irish drinking music. I formed a hip-hop duo with my brother Dan, The Bocce Brothers. I’m “The Rooster”. He’s “The Hambone”. We released an LP called Hard Ass in 2011. It’s one of the greatest rap records of the last 25 years.
In 2015 I recorded a knock-off of Goodbye Horses by Q Lazzarus titled The Silence of the Ducks. It was for Troma Entertainment’s feature film Return to Return to Nuke ‘Em High aka Vol. 2 (available for rental or purchase starting this Christmas Eve on http://watch.troma.com/). The Silence of the Ducks plays in Vol. 2 during a sequence where Lloyd Kaufman, the film’s director and star, mimics Buffalo Bill’s dance from The Silence of the Lambs and tucks his penis. Me gusta! A must see!
In early 2018 I submitted a demo version of Joe Bob is Back in Town to the producers and director of The Last Drive-In with Joe Bob Briggs. I didn’t think they would actually choose it as an official theme song for the show, but amazingly they did. The Last Drive-In is now a wildly popular hit for AMC’s Shudder streaming service and has a bright future. I also get to perform songs with Joe Bob Briggs on the show. Fingers crossed next season we do a rendition of Jamie Poops All Day Long, She Never Stops Poopin’.
Music has always been something I made for fun, an incredible hobby, but of course I dreamed that someday someone would come along and release my work for real. Now, thanks to Ship to Shore Phono Co., I have my first two official releases, a dream come true. I hope everyone enjoys the songs on Joe Bob is Back in Town and Celebrated Standards as much as I enjoyed creating them.
I want to thank Ship to Shore, everyone at The Last Drive-In, Joe Bob, Shudder, The Bigfeet, Levi White, all the incredible musicians I’ve collaborated with over the years, my mother, my father, my brother, my friends, the muse, and Jamie, wherever she may be, hopefully still poopin’ all day long. Never stop poopin’.
- John Brennan