I don't want to join your stupid club anyway

Congratulations are in order for Dragqueen's Scotti Fletcher, who got married on Thursday, Jan. 6, to Karen Novak at the Simpson House. May your life together be long and prosperous and may the new husband never treat the bride as shoddily as he treats his guitar.

If the five power-poppers in Thulium are considering giving their parents and relatives copies of their new disc, The Secret Club, now might be a good time to reconsider -- if only because no loving mother or father wants to hear his or her little boy all liquored up. That's exactly what's going to happen, however, on "21," which also happens to be track number 21 on the disc.

"It's a little drinking song," says guitarist Steve Nick as he attempts to recall the night Thulium laid the tune down. "The last of us had just turned 21 while we were recording it, and it's basically about a 25-minute-long medley of six or seven takes of the song. During the first track, we're pretty sober, and we just kind of let the tape run ... (while) we were all sitting around a coffee table drinking. By the last take, we're pretty much not very sober anymore."

Those were not the only kind of spirits that allegedly invaded Wheeler Audio during the three weeks that Thulium holed up there, Nick claims. "Brian (Chesen), our other guitarist, was having some problems getting the intro down to 'Math Problem,' the first track on the record, and we decided to try another guitar. We switched him to a Fender Strat, and it was like Jimi Hendrix came out in him. He just started bluesing it up, put on some sunglasses, we dimmed down the lights, and Jimi came into the house. From then on, Brian was playing like we'd never heard him play before," Nick says, also noting that it was probably time the man got a new guitar anyway. "The pickups were falling out of it and spiders were actually coming out of them. He had a spider's nest in there."

And though Nick is perfectly willing to give up the goods on these subjects, one thing he's keeping mum is just where the title The Secret Club came from. "I really can't say," he says, somewhat apologetically. "I've got to keep it on the down-low. It's kind of an inside joke that nobody would understand, and some people might be kind of offended by it."

With that warning, feel free to grill Thulium at Davey's Uptown on Thursday, Jan. 13, with Mi6 or at its official CD release party at The Bottleneck on Wednesday, Jan. 19, with Stir.

Conversely, Takedown's guitarist and frontman, Brett Stewart, is more than happy to share where the band got the name of its new disc, '62 Fashion. Apparently, he and his brother Chad, the bass player in the pop rock act, once had punk legend All for neighbors.

"Those guys used to live next door to us when we were here in Brookfield, Mo. That's where me and my brother went to high school. They saw a picture of my mom, she was Miss Brookfield 1962," Stewart recounts. "They were thinking about using it for a cover of one of their CDs, but they never did. So we ended up using it for the cover of ours. I think this would have been the first Interscope record they did. We were kind of brainstorming ideas, and my mom kind of whipped that one out. It's her on the cover in a swimsuit hanging out by the Brookfield pool, and it's from 1962. One of the songs is called 'Fashion,' so we just went with '62 Fashion."

These events took place before Takedown existed as a band -- a day that arrived when the musical Stewart siblings met up with future drummer Pat Brede two Octobers ago. "Chad met him at Mid-America Nazarene College in Olathe, and we got lucky coming across him," Stewart says. "'Midnight Hour,' which is the number-two song on there, it was the first song we ever came up with. Chad and Pat were jamming together one weekend -- it was the first time they'd ever been together and they just came up with it."

This and others can be heard during the CD release party for '62 Fashion alongside The Creature Comforts at The Hurricane on Saturday, Jan. 15.

"It doesn't seem like there are too many heavy bands around here," says Noise Carnival's frontman, Derek Neibarger, who says his band's seasoned members are more than happy to pick up the slack. "We're heavy like a kind of Alice In Chains heavy, Faith No More. It's kind of contemporary metal: very heavy but intelligent, melodic, and catchy, too."

It's ground that Neibarger began covering with some of the same people in the early '90s. "We were in a band called Trinity X -- me and the guitar player, Paul (Hagedorn), and our drummer, Steven (Orr) -- for about three years. (We) played all over this area. They've been in another band together since then called Larry, and eventually we wound up all back in the same band again."