NOVEMBER 2008 ONLINE EDITORIALS
12 Cents for Marvin Turns 12
By Nathan Harper
12 Cents for Marvin, one of Fort Collins’ longest running and most celebrated acts, is having their golden birthday – they’re turning 12 – and to celebrate they’re throwing a party at the Aggie on Saturday, November 22. Joining them will be Judge Roughneck and The Photo Atlas, and though they were tightlipped about what surprises would be in store, fans can expect an evening filled with low, dubbed-out grooves, inspired horn hits and maybe, if the band behaves, some cake too.
But that show is still weeks away - when I caught up with them they were practicing some new tunes for their Halloween show, and between that performance and their birthday bash they’ll have played three other gigs as well, including KRFC’s Live@Lunch on the 21st. Fresh songs, lots of live dates - for new bands taking notes - this is how you stay relevant into your second decade.
Of course being a lot of fun never hurts either - through the years the 12 Cents crew has stayed generally positive on their albums, and are always upbeat at their concerts. The band certainly isn’t ignorant of how messy the world can be, they just know that a good ska show should be an escape, a total experience. And they do more than that too, always providing fans with some great memories of their own.
Twelve years is a long time to be making music, and through that span the almost 30 musicians and performers who have joined/left the ranks of 12 Cents have played somewhere close to 1000 shows together. One thousand shows. A quick bit of math yields an impressive 1.6 shows per week over the approximately 624 weeks they’ve been a band, with most of those shows coming after their lineup coalesced into what it is today around the turn of the century. But that number, 1.6 shows/week, doesn’t do 12 Cents justice - besides the fact that they’ve never played six-tenths of a gig (they always give 100%). At what might now, with some perspective, be seen as their touring highpoint, the band was playing four or five shows a week a few years ago, and sometimes that many in single weekend between festival-slots and solo gigs.
Life has also been happening for the band over those 12 years, and though they try their darndest to keep 12 Cents for Marvin a musical Neverland of sorts where guitarists and horn-sections never have to grow up, the fact remains that a little of the real world has managed to creep in. And yet they persist. Currently the band lives in 3 different towns across two states, and their lead singer joins them via an internet video-phone connection at practices. Despite these obstacles, a sense of joy still permeates when they play.
For the record, 12 Cents for Marvin are Tom Werge, vocals; Hillary Spriggs, bass; Nik Levinsky, guitar; Soren Daugaard, drums; Aaron Spriggs, Theremin/percussion; Greta Cornett, trumpet; John Giordanengo, trombone; and Phuong Nguyen, sax. They are teachers, brewery workers and law-school students. There are myriad side projects, a handful of fun albums, and they’ve road-tripped across the Western US on three tours, once playing 16 shows in 18 days. For remaining original members Tom and Hillary that’s meant a lot of miles logged in the tour-van, and for everybody involved it’s been a chance to collect a bunch of zany rock’n’roll stories.
At a friend’s house after a 2005 show in Leadville, with the after-party in full effect, someone had the great idea that the band should all hop in a hot tub together. Though three people is often thought of as crowd and there are eight people in the group, they all decided to do it anyway. Like all good road stories, exact details get a little fuzzy depending on who’s telling the tale. So while who got in when, and what everyone was or wasn’t wearing may still be closely guarded secrets, fans still know of this notorious event from their song “12 Cents in the Tub.”
And the shenanigans don’t end there. 12 Cents for Marvin is also a band of Cheez-whiz eating contests;k... and, at their 10-year anniversary show at the Aggie, epic food fights – specifically, birthday cake. Though this didn’t leave a certain venue owner too pleased with them, they still got invited back for this year’s celebration, perhaps, as the band mused, because it took two years for them to be forgiven.
They’ve played to thousands of fans, and they’ve played to as few as three. And while many acts would consider a three-person audience somewhat of a disappointment, when that gig is a privately booked birthday party for an eccentric Lake Tahoe home owner, it can in fact produce as many memories as a big festival date, assuming the host is constantly vacuuming during the band’s set. More details on that show can be found in the liner notes to The B-Load, the band’s 2007 album of b-sides and unreleased songs. (Hint: the title has something to do with why their host was a little “out there.”)
At another gig up in the hills - 12 Cents for Marvin are no stranger to the high country - they were playing a venue that had sold a daunting12 tickets before the show. Firm believers that the ska must go on, the band treated it like a paid practice session and rocked out anyway. The band left for a set-break halfway through, and, largely on the merit of their first-half performance, returned to an unexpectedly packed house at which point they really got the place jumping.
Twelve years. “It’s the dysfunctional family you choose,” someone quipped during their predictably chaotic practice session. Vocalist Tom Werge put it into perspective when he admitted that he wouldn’t have believed, in 1996, that the band would still be going strong now. “For us it’s still about having fun,” he said. “There’s no need to quit while we are having fun, and people are still coming out.”