Thank You, Google, For Uncovering My Unknown Talents (And A Brief History Of Garage Sale Warrior)

With the help of google.com, I've just discovered that I'm younger than I thought. More importantly, it appears I have some musical talent. While playing the tuba is quite lame, the didgeridoo would make a fine addition to my old college band, Garage Sale Warrior, which relied heavily on the cup and straw, garbage cans, and a tape recorder.

We toured extensively throughout the Urals and the Pacific Rim, but never caught on here in the States for some reason. Even our most critically acclaimed album, Beat Box Phone Call (produced by indie god Steve Albini), was panned by Rolling Stone, Circus, Good Housekeeping, and Seventeen. While we expected to get some feedback, possibly negative, from music-oriented publications like Rolling Stone and Circus, the Seventeen review caught us offguard because our sound was as musically opposed to the boy band sub-genre as possible. We assumed we got lumped into the category of teenie fodder because we were all incredibly good looking college kids.

Then came the Good Housekeeping debacle. Someone on the soccer mom magazine's editorial staff didn't do her homework and sent a writer out to us for a piece on garage sale warriors. Apparently, there is an obsessive-compulsive subculture of people who live for Saturday morning yard sales. Some of these freaks actually sell off brand new or like-new property to feed their twisted disorder by buying old, useless crap. Anyway, when she arrived at our studio/ terrarium in Albuquerque, she was quite shocked to find a genre-defying musical group in the place of a sanity-defying consumer group. Needless to say, she never gave the music a chance to speak for itself, and she hurried away vowing to make us pay for sabatoging her career. We thought her parting accusation was over-the-top and completely out of line until, 7 years later in a strange twist of fate, she was momentarily considered as lead editor of Oprah Winfrey's O Magazine until the Garage Sale Warrior story found its way to Queen Oprah. If you haven't put 2 and 2 together by now, the woman was none other than Linda Hanrahan.

Ironically, our biggest fan in the press was Walter Branson of the Des Moines Free Press, who caught our show in Melbourne, Australia, during our Elmo's Cake tour. He thought we sounded like a mix of Beck, The Beach Boys, and Ministry. Unfortunately, neither Walter Branson nor the Des Moines Free Press hold much weight in the American musical scene, and our band suffered the same fate as The Bay City Rollers and Led Zeppelin.