OH NO!

The Party is Over

Faux Friends,

There is an adage among my tribe¹ that one must create bad art before you can make good art.

I offer today’s song addition to the “Mixed Up Files” as proof of that concept. (Listen in the player above.)

I listen to “Oh No!” now, and I think, “What the hell was I thinking?!”

And then I remember, I was having a blast experimenting with guitar tones while endlessly overdubbing on the 4 track cassette recorder.

I was really still learning how to do all this stuff and it was fun and exciting just to make noise and capture it in an electromagnetic fashion!

Then I think about the lyrical content of the song and the house party that inspired it, and it makes me happy, even though we lost the person who inspired the song on February 10, 2024.

G.R. Anderson was an amazing drummer, writer and overall personality who was a dominant force in the Minneapolis cultural scene for the entire time I lived there. (1992-2013.)

You can read his obituary is here.

Jerry was the drummer for Rex Daisy who were THE BIG DEAL at SXSW in 1997, and thus the biggest band in Minneapolis at that time.

I was a nobody from Duluth Minnesota who was trying to figure out how to make it in the Minneapolis music scene.

If Rex Daisy were a snake, the diamonds on its belly were like stars in the sky to me.²

So you can imagine how stoked I was when they showed up at my little house party on the corner of Lake St and Knox in Uptown back in the 90s there, eh?

Rex Daisy: Jerry, Steve and Mike (left to right)

I remember looking out the window and seeing some guys in tuxes and ladies in strapless dresses coming up the front steps.

I believe they were being led by Willie Wisely.

Rex Daisy and another band, Shatterproof, entered the apartment.³

Minneapolis rock royalty in my apartment.

I was elated.

One of the Shatterproof girlfriends was drunk and yakking about how they had just signed to a major label and they were going to be huge and all that.

The party was largely over when they arrived, but I was excited to have them come in and we started playing loud music out of the CD boom box.

Jerry was sitting on the ground carrying on about this and that, I think his girlfriend was saying how fun it was to be at a house party like this, as it had been some time.

At that moment, my roommate Kristin, who had to work in the morning, barged into the room, yanked the CD boom box cord out of the outlet, stopping the loud music, and announced “The party is over!” and walked back into her bedroom.

And that, my friends, is what this song is about.

See lyrics below.

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In the past few years, Jerry and I engaged in a sort of “song exchange” where we shared mp3s of our works in progress and commented to each other on the merits of the work.

I shot him this song “Poverty is the Enemy” and he wrote back: “This is one of the stranger things I’ve heard in a while! That’s good! Small leap from the Beach Boys to Beefheart.”

Sometimes it’s words like these that can keep you going as a songwriter when your show is in the lost and found.

Rest in peace Jerry, the diamonds on your belly are like stars in my sky.

I remain your humble servant,

OX&C,

Faux Jean

Here are the lyrics:

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Oh No!
Don't you see it's time to go
I said it time for you to leave
Don't you see it's time to go

Get out of here
Would you please
Oh the party is over
She pulls the plug
the CD stops
And we all look at each other
We were having so much fun
No we've all got to run!!!!!
Oh no!
Oh no!

1. artsy-fartsy types who read about the drive to be creative and suchlike.

2. I’ve stolen this verbiage from a friend’s sorority pledge from back in the day.

3. The Shatterproof guys (later called Landing Gear) had been at a wedding, hence the tuxes.