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Johnny Headband By Keith N. Dusenberry | photos by David Dominic, Jr. Dec 6, 2006 REAL DETROIT WEEKLY I could sit here and try to explain Johnny Headband to you. I could tell you about how twenty-something brothers Chad and Keith Thompson grew up outside of Flint, sort of in a world unto itself, one of their own creation, where they made weird music and even weirder home movies, and how those pursuits eventually evolved into the performance art group-come-band-come-multimedia-artistic juggernaut that is Johnny Headband. I could mention how the album they're about to put out - their first full-length LP, entitled Happiness Is Underrated - will probably rank highly on many smart people's lists of the best local records released this year. I could do all of that, but it wouldn't matter. You either get Johnny Headband, or you don't. Maybe "get" is too severe a word. The band members themselves (Chad and Keith, along with longtime friend Rob "RGS" Saunders) wouldn't be brash enough to put it that way. "If you're standing on a street corner and you see an accident, everybody describes it differently," Chad says of the labels others employ when describing Johnny Headband's music, but he might as well be talking about people's varying reactions to the group's concept as a whole. "Some bands, everybody says the same things. I'd rather everybody not say the same things (about Johnny Headband). ... Some people are passionate about what we do and some people could care less. Some people defend us; some people bash us. You can't worry about it too much. "If the concern as a band is, 'Is it gonna go over everyone's head?' or 'Do we have to water it down?' We operate under the policy of 'Less explanation is better; you figure it out.'" More than anything else, Johnny Headband as it is today - the impossible-to-accurately-describe music that sounds like hyper-modern Prince-infused bedroom electro and '80s/'90s basement four-track experiments a la early Ween with a touch of Wesley Willis' earnest energy all at the same time; the wildly weird and energetic live shows that are both spontaneous and heavily rehearsed; the carefully cultivated image of self-referential and self-interested oddness; the consistently funny rock-band-as-corporation Web site videos; the bizarre side project where they don foreign personas and Keith irons clothes on stage while Chad sings - all of this essentially exists as it does because of three things: teddy bear-costumed toddler dance classes, nonlinear video editing and coffee. Chad and Keith fight sometimes, as brothers will do. Over what? "Nothing, basically," Keith says. "Petty bullshit: shoes, pants, drumsticks, man-dannas (male bandannas)." "The biggest thing we fight about is directions to venues," Chad continues. "And we get all-out warfare over sock choices. Like sometimes [Keith] wants to wear full one-piece jumpsuits, and I'm like, 'This doesn't go in line with what we wanna do.' Then he does it anyway." "But it works," Keith explains, "because rules have to be broken. If [Chad's] going to make rules like that, someone's gotta break 'em." "This goes back to our days as three-year-olds and we had to go out on stage because our mom was in dance class, so she signed us up for dance class because we had to go along," Chad says. "So that's where [Keith's] costumes come from. We wore like teddy bear uniforms and stuff like that. I hate that song, the Elvis song ..." at this point Chad starts singing, "'Your teddy bear ...' 'cause we had to do that song." Both the costumes and the surreal stage show aspects of this early childhood routine have found their way into the current group's concerts. "[Johnny Headband] is an extension of performances we didn't necessarily sign up for and have seeped back into our lives," Keith says. "I guess that's what life is, though. You don't sign up for any of the stuff you get cast into, you know?" "It's very similar," Chad continues. "If our parents ever get mad at us
