So long, farewell

Published Jun 15 2005, 05:23 PM by webteam

Cubby Berk and Tim Howard at ZuZu. Photo, as always, by Kelly Davidson.

Wanderlust has been biting Boston's young songwriters. This past May, Soltero dude Tim Howard and Carolyn “Cubby” Berk ditched their sometime backing bands and went on a sullen-songwriter solo tour. Now that they're back, we find out that Howard moves to Philly at the end of this month, while Lovers’s cutie Cubby will defect to Portland, Oregon. Berk always had a foot in Athens, Georgia anyway, but now she’s taking that other leg, and her gorgeously wafting ballads, contemplative twilight beauty, and infinite sadness elsewhere for good. Definitely Boston’s loss. Via e-mail, Cubby Berk confirms that Lovers’s third album’s already laid to tape, they’re just looking for a label. Paging Slim Moon or Robb Nansel...

Lovers, “The Garden” (via official Lovers site)
Lovers, “Winter Takes a Lover” (from Starlight Sunken Ship)
Soltero, “Songs of the Season” (from Hell Train, via official Soltero site)
Soltero, “I’ll Be a Writer” (from Defrocked and Kicking the Habit, via the Phoenix’s MP3 Studio)

On top of all that, Aubrey Anderson from the Skating Club is moving away to San Francisco. Say goodbye on Sunday at Great Scott.

Speaking of g'byes, Clickers played their last show ever on Monday. (We hear it was super. Sorry we couldn't make it: we were holed up in the office working on tomorrow's big arrival.) But since we had the LAST INTERVIEW EVA with guitarist/vocalist Mike Gintz and guitarist/vocalist Doug Harry before they became ex-Clickers, we thought we better not waste these outtakes.

Where was the most random place you ever played?

Mike Gintz, guitar/vocals: We did this thing called Boston versus Burlington because Doug and Ross are from Vermont. Where we were going to have four Boston bands and four Burlington bands trade weekends and play in each other’s houses. Burlington kept wimping out on us. They’re bands kept breaking up during the planning process so it ended up being like Boston travels to Burlington. So it was us, Dial M for Murder, Piles, Tristan da Cunha, and Night Rally all went up to Burlington. But there was nobody there at the Common Ground, all ages showspace. So we set up in a circle and played the most absurd set we ever played. Andy Crane from Dial M was throwing a milk crate up and down in time and kept on hitting him in the head.

Doug Harry: Shit just went crazy.

Mike: There’s some video of it that Ernie from Tristan da Cunha took with his digital camera. None of us were wearing shirts by the end. I was screaming “Superband, Supergroup” over and over again into two microphones.

Doug: Last song turned into these crazy jam, people were ripping apart the drum kit and taking pieces of the drums, to the point where everybody in all those bands who were there and played were all had played, were all jamming and freaking out on guitars and drums and yelling and running around. It was total craziness.

How you'd come up with the name Clickers? Why not 'the Clickers'?

Mike: 'The' bands were played out. But it’s funny though, because without the “The” is now played out. But it’s not a remote control thing. It’s a reference to a comic by Alan Moore called Top Ten where it takes place in this city where everyone has got super powers, even just regular people. And they have a lot of robots and the derogatory racial slur for a robot is a Clicker. More specifically, they have Clicker bands and they sing about being robots. And they all suck.

Doug: It’s like a style of music. It’s like Clickers music.

Mike: Everybody hates the Clicker bands except for other Clickers. We were really desperate for a name and we had gone through a couple...

Doug: We were actually called Design Your Own Dance Accident. We were Quail Cat for one show, and then we were Design Your Own Dance Accident for a couple of shows.

Mike: Dance Disaster Movement came out after that. [The way we came up with Design Your Own Dance Accident was] I always really liked the word 'accident.' I really like accidents. I like the fact that things that you planned might be bad or might be good. A lot of our music is accidental too. And I really like the phrase 'dance accident' -- it brings to mind people falling while dancing or someone wetting their pants at the school dance... But he other guys they didn’t think it was enough. So we became Clickers.