Naked and Shameless
Back in about ’86 or so, the world paused for a moment in its orbit as the musical colossus known as Naked & Shameless spontaneously appeared, boozily clambered to the very apex of the Vancouver musical scene, and then flamed out and disappeared, all in the space of days, if not hours.
Well, what really happened is that my buddy Deviant, who was responsible for the creation and dismantling of various Vancouver bands of moderate success over the decade, decided that it’d be pretty damn cool to get me liquored up in his studio, record one of my infamous spontaneous rants, then put it to music.
Unfortunately, no matter how much Ouzo I swilled, sitting on the stool in front of the mike, it just wasn’t spontaneous. Performance anxiety. I did force it a bit once the booze kicked in, and pulled some ranty stuff out of my ass, but the resulting track didn’t meet the high standards we had anticipated, and after a few plays on CiTR, the UBC campus radio station (“all spaceship and satan music, all the time”), sank into history unremarked.
For the purposes of branding, though (we were ahead of our time, baby), I’d come up with the name ‘Naked & Shameless’ for our two-man band. Myself being Jim Naked, up there under the hot lights, baring my soul, and Deviant being Dave Shameless, the evil rocknroller exploiting my gentle drunken poetic weiner-talk to get chicks and stuff.
That part was good.
Wisely, though, with our first track sucking so heinously, we decided to shelve the project.
Fast forward to a few years ago, and Deviant, who has been living in Chicago and whom I haven’t seen for almost a decade, has restarted Naked and Shameless, with cousin Buck Naked replacing the dearly departed Jim. Buck can actually sing, and play. This is a good thing.
Why am I telling you all this? Besides the usual ‘I’m so goddamn hip I can’t see over my own pelvis’ stuff, mostly ’cause I remembered that N&S have an mp3.com page with some fun songs on, which I’ve been listening to this evening as I get slowly plastered, and they’re currently on tour, and will be playing one of our favorite Vancouver haunts this weekend, the Railway Club.
(The serendipitous thing here being that through completely random chaotic f–king weirdness, one of the owners of the Railway Club, Roger Trentenero, since deceased (murdered on his boat not long after I’d decamped, so to speak, at Playa Los Cocos, by hammer flung headward by his 16-year old Costa Rican girlfriend, is the story that I heard), was the owner of the first sailboat I crewed aboard in the Sea of Cortez, approximately midway, temporally speaking, between then and now…but that, as I find myself saying all too often, is a tale for another day.)
Drinking Song #16 is the one dedicated to me poor old Jim Naked. It’s funny, but not my favorite. C’est la vie.
If you do go have a listen to any of their stuff, don’t miss “Lawrence (Head of Lettuce)“. A true story from our UBC days. Not even the names have been changed to protect the guilty. Rock’n’roll verité, man.