Brian Bonz and the Dot Hongs
A Feeling Of The Hot Weather That Will Never Change
Mar 31, 2010
Words by Sean Moeller
Illustration by Johnnie Cluney
Sound engineering by Mike Gentry
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Welcome to Daytrotter
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Terror In The Bonneville
unreleased
This is one of the first new songs written after our first album was released. It's about the series of memories growing up spent in my father's old, blue Pontiac Bonneville, traveling throughout the summer to the countryside, to the unforgettable nights spent on McDonald Ave. in a small apartment with our cousins, under the subway lines above. That car reminded me of a certain period of my life that was very pivotal to shaping me up as a New Yorker. It also shares a line about how I broke the last working lock on the doors, and making my father's face turn blue.
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Judy & the Alpha Queen
original version appears on Sumi To Japan
I am not a fan of writing tunes about girls much. This one is certainly about one I met that turned out to be a good friend, and kind of taught me a lot when I look back on that particular relationship. It's the traditional story of bringing an out-of-town girlfriend into your neighborhood and introducing her to your life, though she is 10 years older, a war veteran, and on a completely different page as me. Sometimes you write a song and it grows a different meaning over time. This is one of those tracks. It was written a week before we headed into the studio to do our first record, and I'm glad it made the cut. This is a more stripped down, folkish version of it.
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Sea-Fence
original version appears on Sumi To Japan
This may be the oldest song that ended up coming back to life and being reworked for our album. It's the first time ever reworked on an acoustic this way, and we had a blast doing it every night with John & Camille Nolan. Written in college during winter break when I spent most of my time ordering pitchers with just a friend in an empty bar and ordering small pizza. Real sad, Right?
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Dee The Dinosaur
original version appears on Sumi To Japan
This is a more stripped down version of the song featuring EJ DeCoske on drums, Jinda on bass and the Nolans on guitar and piano. This song is about a childhood friend drifting off after a late movie at my house, looking for some drugs deep under the highway in Sunset Park. He was not heard from for a week or so since he was jumped, and beaten by a local thug. It's a very personal story and I thought it would be nice to include such a dark tale over an acoustic tune like this.
Of the four songs that the squeezable and adorably youthful Brian Bonz taped for this session, only one of them is pegged as having a very specific nostalgia tied to his childhood memories. "Terror In The Bonneville" is not about Little League or a first crush - though some of that could be invisibly included in the fogged remembrances. It's about the memories that turn lovably fuzzy, that feel like slow-motion camera work, as if they're panning from the scenery flying by to a young boy in a dirt-stained tee-shirt, staring out a backseat window, cracked as far down as it can go (so, still halfway closed), smelling the country air as it bathes him and fucks with his shaggy, oily, unkempt hair. As the shot lands on the boy trying to strain his way out of the window, we're not sure what he's thinking, other than a chain of "oh boys" and a sizing up of the heights of the skyscraping trees, perhaps some tougher questions about what happened to that opossum splattered dead out on the graveled shoulder. Most songs are rooted in the past tense, for it's how we recognize them, how we know them - once they've already rustled through us, taken what they needed, hopefully leaving a little mint or some wise accident behind to remember them by. They get rusty and they chip and fade into forms of themselves, but we remain true to what we believe to be their original outlines. Bonz tells us that the song is based on those summers he had when he was younger - and who here can argue that it was the summers of our youths that we recall the most of any periods of our lives - the road-tripping vacations with the rest of the family and the visions of a big city entrusted to urban romanticism. "Terror In The Bonneville" is a song that reminds us of ding-dong ditching, of running away in load shoes, down a silent street, of feeling as if the hot weather will never change into anything different, of never, ever getting older and having to change the way we behave. It's a song that reminds of windows we've accidentally broken with thrown rocks. It reminds us of sizzling power lines and subway tracks. It reminds us of slowly licking a rare ice cream cone, trying to beat its rapidly melting body to our hands.
The Brooklyn-ite, Bonz, first came to the Horseshack with Kevin Devine and the Goddamn Band and he's been known to pal around with the hearty emo-ists Manchester Orchestra. Here, he was joined by tourmate John Nolan of Straylight Run and the results are about what you'd expect, a twisting of the recorded versions of these songs into even more passionately rendered instances of monumental causes and monumental effects, as they originally existed - nominally. Bonz sings gracefully, as if all of this happens in due time, as if the importance of it all sneaks up on you and hushes you right down into some kind of unspoken awe. It's as if a readjustment has taken place and we're suddenly cast again as bystanders, amazed at the people we've met and all of the things that we've taught each other along the way. Bonz's music feels as if we're taken back and asked to look more carefully, discovering all that we once missed.
Brian Bonz Official Site
