TEAM LAST CALL

It’s October, which means it’s time for Team Last Call’s annual Halloween column. Most of TLC’s previous October columns were devoted to scary subjects like Mark Wahlberg’s superfluous nipple and John McCain’s old man smell. But this year, we were really looking to raise the bar, to find a story subject that, like the realization that Larry King might still be sexually active, would haunt readers long after the column was over.

That’s when we came across the KFC Double Down sandwich, without a doubt the single most terrifying thing we’ve encountered in 2009. This bad boy is like the Steve Buscemi’s teeth of handheld food. At its core, the Double Down is a bacon sandwich, which is already bad news, only this bacon sandwich comes slathered in swiss and pepper jack cheese and the mayonnaise-based Colonel’s sauce. Oh, and instead of bread, the Double Down is held together by two deep-fried chicken filets. In summation, that’s a bacon sandwich in a bun made of fried chicken. I don’t know what kind of magnificent pervert thought it up, but he deserves a medal, and then deserves to be shot.

When we first heard about the Double Down, we thought it was a joke. So we decided to consult the leading authority on the subject, a website everyone should visit at least once a day: This Is Why You’re Fat (Tag line: “Where dreams become heart attacks”). Sure enough, we dialed up the site (www.thisiswhyyourefat.com) and there the sandwich sat, glistening and greasy like a breaded Rush Limbaugh. Our curiosity piqued, we decided to track down the folks behind the scenes at This Is Why You’re Fat, Jessica Amason and Richard Blakeley, to ask a few questions about the Double Down.

Team Last Call: Why was the Double Down a good fit for the site?

Jess: Needless to say, any meat-on-cheese-on-bacon-on-cheese-on-more-meat is a given for This is Why You’re Fat.

Richard: Cause that’s why you’re fat, duh!

TLC: What were your first thoughts upon hearing about the sandwich?

Jess: I thought it was what SNL’s Taco Town Taco was to Taco Bell, except this was KFC actually owning its own absurdity!

TLC: Did you, like most people, think it was a joke?

Richard: Yes, and a very good one at that, because there was a commercial to go along with it on Food Geekery.

Jess: The commercial sold it for me. I thought, “Well, they’ve gone and done it now, haven’t they? They’ve taken fast food to the next level.”

TLC: Have you had a chance to try one?

Jess: No, and honestly, I never had anything against the traditional sandwich structure. If it ain’t broke, don’t throw more meat on it!

Richard: I don’t eat chicken or bacon, so I’m not planning on doing it any time soon.

TLC: Is there another sandwich you’ve discovered this year as heart attack-tastic as this?

Jess: In the same spirit of “sandwiches 2.0,” I’m partial to the Pizza Burger. [A giant burger between two large meat pizzas, topped with eggs, bacon and colby and pepper jack cheese]

Richard: The Pattie LaBurger. [A triple bacon cheeseburger with deep-fried patties as buns]

It didn’t take long after its debut for word about the Double Down to circulate. “How can I get one?” everyone wanted to know. “And how bad is it for you? Would eating it kill you right away, or would it take a few hours? And why is Rush Limbaugh such a massive turd?”

Speculation about the sandwich’s caloric content was running wild. Men’s Health food and nutrition editor Matt Goulding wrote in an article, “Independent labs are estimating that [the Double Down] has around 1,200 calories and over 50 fat grams, based on what’s in the other KFC sandwiches.” But were those numbers to be trusted?

Not according to KFC public relations guy Rick Maynard, whom Team Last Call contacted in early September.

“There have been numerous incorrect reports in the media regarding the calories in a Double Down,” he says. “While we wouldn’t run final numbers on a product unless it is rolled out nationally, we estimate the Double Down at about 590 calories.”

Stop laughing. He’s serious.

While Maynard wasn’t able to come clean about the Double Down’s stats (he also claimed the sandwich has precisely zero grams of trans fat), he was able to take the time to crush our dreams of trying one for ourselves.

“[The Double Down] is a test market item that is available for only a brief time and in only two markets: Providence, RI, and Omaha, NE,” he says. “At this time, there are no plans to introduce it in Pennsylvania.”

At least we still have Pattie LaBurger.

It’s two in the afternoon, and Kimberly Schlapman is in a hotel room somewhere near Portland, OR, trying in vain to pacify her 2-year-old with ice chips.

As one of four members in Nashville band Little Big Town, Schlapman is wrestling to reconcile her two new identities: mom and country music star. Her life as it stands now is a blitzkrieg of diaper changes and meet-and-greets, with nightly stadium concerts peppered in for good measure. Despite the hectic schedule, however, she and her bandmates are enjoying one of the first truly peaceful moments of their career, which up to this point had been pockmarked with record label strife, divorces, and family deaths (Schlapman’s first husband died of a heart attack in 2005).

After more than a decade of trials and tribulations, the dust seems to have finally settled in Little Big Town. The release of the group’s latest album, A Place To Land, signaled the beginning of a healthy relationship with new label Capitol Records. All four members are happily married (two of them to each other), and the babies are coming in rapid fire. Team Last Call caught up with Schlapman (and daughter) to talk about tragedy, triumph and other aspects of life during Little Big Town’s pregnant pause.

Team Last Call: Until recently, your life as a band was just one tragedy after another. Do you feel like survivors to a certain extent?

Kimberly Schlapman: Oh, definitely. We have persevered through all kinds of stuff. We are definitely survivors, and we are survivors because we love the music and we love each other. When one of us is down, the other three pick up the load and carry that one along. We have a really special bond.

TLC: To be a band for this amount of time and to still have your original four members is amazing in and of itself, but then to go through that kind of adversity ...

KS: I’m proud of it. Karen and I had this idea about 13 years ago, I think, to do this band. We knew that we would have to put together the best vocal collaboration we could, but also, it had to be the right personalities that could live together, because we knew we’d be stuck together more than we would our families. Thankfully, I guess we made the right choices. Karen and Jimi ended up getting married, so that was the perfect choice for her.

TLC: I read that before you were successful, you were at a point where you would have qualified for food stamps.

KS: We made such very little money. My late husband was my provider. He had a good job, so it was OK that I wasn’t making anything on the road. But some of the members of the band didn’t have someone to provide for them. The four of us would drive ourselves in the van anywhere in the country that would have us play, just for gas money and to cover the van rental. There were many, many very lean years for our band.

TLC: Now you’re on the other side of the spectrum with these huge tours. You can hardly sneeze without being nominated for some kind of award.

KS: We’re just thankful for our journey. As we look back, we know that every part of our journey was meaningful and for a certain purpose. We wouldn’t want the easy road, looking back. Our journey is the reason we write the songs we write today and the reason we make the music that we make. I’m sure of it.

TLC: You guys are like a commune on wheels with your spouses and children in tow. What’s that like?

KS: We love it. We thankfully have gone from a minivan to two buses and trailers, so we’ve got a little room to spread out. We have the crew on one bus, and then we have the four of us and spouses and two babies on our bus. It’s fun. It’s a challenge. As a mother, it’s a challenge with a two-year-old to keep her quiet at times. But when we get down and get kind of drudged in the business part of it, it’s nice to have the perspective of a little infant child. We just love it.

TLC: It must be tiring, because you have downtime as a musician, but you don’t really get to punch a clock on being a mom.

KS: I’ve waited a very long time to be a mom. It’s the best job in the whole world. I wouldn’t trade anything for it. And it is challenging at times, and it’s tiring, definitely, but I’m used to it now. I think I’m just tired all the time and I don’t even notice it. I’m just used to sleep deprivation and just being run ragged. But my husband also comes out. He’s just my rock. He is my helpmate and is Mr. Mom out here on the road.

TLC: There really isn’t even a hint of controversy in your background. I think there’s something about being in the country market where having a clean image also seems to be expected.

KS: It is expected. I think it has a lot to do with how we were raised. Not that any other artists were raised poorly or anything. But we were raised to appreciate what we have and to give back. It probably is expected in our format, and I’m glad. We’re just normal, average people. We’re not perfect. We certainly know how to have fun.

TLC: What would you put on Little Big Town’s tombstone one day?

KS: I think this is a band that never quit and always persevered through the struggle, and it paid off. Why have we made it? Because we never gave up. The times when nobody wanted to hear our music, we believed that we were making music worth hearing. We pumped our arms. My late husband used to say, “Pump your arms!” And I think of that so often, because that’s what we’ve done as a band. We just pumped our arms through it and made it.

*Reprinted from Fly Magazine

At this point in his career, Gabe Witcher has a fairly sophisticated palate. He’s sampled the finest vintages of the finest strains of music, sniffed, swirled and spit.

Since the age of 5, the prodigious fiddler has performed with the most titanic of bluegrass legends, recorded on more than 300 records by artists from Willie Nelson to Beck, and contributed to film scores ranging from Brokeback Mountain to Toy Story. In short, the dude’s been around the block a time or two. But that didn’t stop Witcher from freezing up the first time he heard the composition his Punch Brothers bandmate Chris Thile had developed for the band’s debut – a 42-minute, four-part suite titled “The Blind Leaving The Blind.”

“I pressed play for the first time and it sounded like Super Mario Brothers on crack,” Witcher laughs during an interview from his southern California home. “It took me three or four days. I had to slow it down, get inside of it and read the score. Once I started to be able to hear it past the video game-iness of it, it started to make sense.”

That particular opus – the centerpiece of Punch Brothers’ debut album, Punch – was the launching point for the band’s sonic voyage into what the New York Times dubbed “American country-classical chamber music.” As unlyrical as that title may be, it’s as good a tag as any, although still barely vague enough to contain Punch Brothers’ expansive sound. Armed with banjo, fiddle, mandolin, guitar and upright bass, the five virtuosos deftly transcend the limitations of acoustic music and yield something literally and figuratively unheard of, something that breaches the worlds of both Bill Monroe and Bjork and inhabits every inch of the land between, from the complex grandiosity of classical music to the precise immediacy of pop.

Witcher puts it in simpler terms: “Music that we like, put through the filter of a bluegrass ensemble.”

“We’ll play a Radiohead song, and we’ll do Bach, then we’ll play Flatt & Scruggs, then The Strokes,” he explains. “Music is just music. It’s all made up of the same stuff. A good piece of music will translate through any medium, any instrument.”

Witcher and Thile, the latter most famous as one third of million-selling newgrass trio Nickel Creek, hit upon the concept for Punch Brothers (named after the Mark Twain short story Punch, Brothers, Punch) in 2006 while commiserating over recently failed relationships with the help of plenty of whiskey and several jam sessions. The idea to start a band came immediately, but didn’t come to fruition until Thile introduced the first tastes of “The Blind Leaving The Blind,” a meandering, yet intricately plotted piece pregnant with leitmotifs and counterpoints. The two dropped their other projects, rounded out the band with friends and likeminded musicians, young prodigies all, and set off like Magellan into the black waters of sound.

“It’s been the best, most positive musical experience that I’ve had,” Witcher enthuses. “One of the things that I think interests all of us as musicians is to come up with something that people haven’t heard before, that we haven’t heard before. We’re always searching for a new texture, a combination of instruments, a new form of song, a new way for a collection of notes to be ordered. Especially coming from the bluegrass world, there’s a lot still to be explored.”

Meet JBOT, a musician who, tired of dealing with egomaniacal bandmates, decided to start a rock band with robots as backing musicians. He built the robots himself with tender, loving care, giving one a guitar, another drums, until the band was completed. On the seventh day, he rested.

Then tragedy struck. JBOT’s beloved robots turned evil, captured their creator and yanked out his intestines and eyes. Now JBOT lives a tortured existence under the cold, watchful eyes of the robots, who delight in nothing more than humiliating their creator during their nightly concerts.

Team Last Call interviewed poor JBOT in anticipation of Captured! By Robots’ October 26 concert at the Chameleon to see how long we have before the robots take over the entire world.

Team Last Call: Why did you build the robots in the first place?

JBOT: Just all the stuff you have to deal with when you’re in a band, everything from drunk band members to girlfriends to “Oh, I can’t tour because I have a baby now.” So I decided to build some robots to take the place of human band members and see if they would do what I wanted – and they didn’t.

TLC: When did you first know that things went terribly wrong?

JBOT: It was pretty early. I had a horrible coffee-spilling accident with the CPUs when I was making the first two, Drum Bot and Guitar Bot. I don’t know if that’s what made them go against me and be evil, but it was something. As soon as I plugged them in, they captured me. They put a chip in my head and activated this chip as sort of a method of control. It’s called a Biocerebral Chip. It’s almost like being hit with a cattle prod. Not that I’ve been hit with a cattle prod, but that’s what I would imagine it’s like.

TLC: You’ve been captured for almost 13 years now. Are things better or worse overall?

JBOT: In the beginning, it was all torture and bullshit, just constant abuse. The first couple of tours we did, it was just me and the Drum Bot and Guitar Bot. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in the situation where you’re lonely and tired and working really hard, and all you get is people yelling at you all the time, but it gets old fucking fast. But their hatred of me has gotten less over time. I think we sort of have a functionally dysfunctional relationship these days. We’re like an old married couple because we’ve been together for so long.

TLC: Why do you think Guitar Bot in particular is so damn mean?

JBOT: I think part of it just goes down to the instrument. I don’t know if you’ve met many guitar players, but generally – no offense – guitar players are pretty much dicks.

TLC: Do the bots tell you what kind of music to play?

JBOT: They don’t really care what we play. Basically, they rock hard and they’ll rock with whatever we play. And if the music I choose is bad, they just use it as another excuse to rip on me.

TLC: As far as you can tell, is there any way to avoid the imminent robot apocalypse?

JBOT: I think it’s only a matter of time. I think the human race is on borrowed time as it is. It’s not going to be global warming that kills us. I think it’s a tossup between two: either asteroids or robots taking over. The most likely is going to be robots taking over.

TLC: I would think so.

JBOT: Yeah, I’m pretty good with trying to analyze situations with percentages and statistics. I’ve run the numbers.

TLC: If people come out to the show, aren’t we in a way financially supporting this plan for them to take over?

JBOT: I don’t think so. I’m a bad robot builder. That new Japanese humanoid robot – my god, that’s what we need to worry about. That’s the scary part. I think we’re safe for the next five, 10 years. But if you know you’re going go die tomorrow, are you going to cry today or are you going to go out and party?

TLC: I’m going to party with robots.

JBOT: Totally!

*Reprinted from Fly Magazine

As the frontman, mastermind and (presently) the only member of Brooklyn rock band The Honorary Title, Jarrod Gorbel has learned a few valuable lessons about surviving as a working musician. First, don’t sell out. Second, follow your heart. And third, never underestimate the binding properties of the burrito.

A recent evacuee of the major label system, Gorbel has mastered the art of fan relations. One of his best and most engaging ideas has been the auctioning off of “chipotle dates,” where fans can win the chance to grab a burrito with the singer-songwriter when he tours through their town.

“It’s always a surprise,” he says with a chuckle. “You would assume that who would sign up for these contests would be the teenagers, the younger demographic. But now it’s this 25-year-old teacher woman who wants to share burritos with us. It’s funny, but cool.”

Unorthodox, maybe, but Gorbel’s fan-friendly methods are part of what’s kept the indie crooner’s career afloat, despite his former label’s costly missteps. Gorbel founded The Honorary Title in 2003 as an outlet for his folky indie-pop songs. But when the band upstreamed from indie label Doghouse to parent company Warner Brothers in 2007, the major label powers-that-be had a decidedly different kind of sound in mind for the band. Namely, the biggest, most radio-friendly rock songs Gorbel could write.

“I had to put all my energy into these songs that were not my favorite, not the ones that I personally loved. I was trying to be something I wasn’t because I thought it would be a vehicle to do what I want all the time,” Gorbel recalls from a tour stop in Orangevale, CA. “[But] we’d go on tour, and the fans just wanted to hear my favorite songs, the ballads and the more folk Americana-influenced ones. So I said, ‘Fuck it. I’ll just do what I want to do.’”

Fast forward two years, and Gorbel is doing just that. He’s currently touring in support of a new solo EP that marks a return to the ’70s folk and alt-country influences that helped to frame his earliest work. Come early 2010, he’ll put an endcap on those major label years by dropping the band name altogether and releasing an eponymous album he recorded earlier this year with Rilo Kiley’s Blake Sennett.

“It’s scary in a sense, but it’s also a huge relief,” he says of the transition. “Finally I get to do everything I want to do. But then, I am backtracking. From the business outlook, it’s like starting over. But I do things hands-on, just by literally talking to fans in every city that we play. Fans of The Honorary Title, they understand.”

Until the album’s release, Gorbel says, his primary focus is on touring and building his fan base in the most honest and genuine way he can. “And,” he adds, “eating the finest burritos.”