Tijuana Hercules

Organ Thing of The Day? Where were we? Burning toast and raging against the Arts Council machine, but that’s a Cultivate thing that’s far from the turmoil and where’s my pointy red musical hat, and ” Would the Organ be interested in sharing something about Tijuana Hercules’ new Mini-LP on Friday? This is a little something different from the label and I’m pretty excited about it” said the man from Skin Graft, We’re going to announce it and put it up for pre-orders on Friday, Tijuana Hercules, this is John Forbes’ (the singer and guitarist of Mount Shasta) band.

I guess it is a little different for Skin Graft but then pretty much everything Skin Graft do is a little different. let’s shut up about hats and burning toast and the Annoyance of Arts Council England and cut to the chase, I guess blues is a little different for Skin Graft, it does have that edge you’d expect from Skin Graft though, here’s a taste, full details are avaiable over on the Skin Graft Bandcamp page

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Here’s the press release blurb, I#m off to figure out ho we pay last month’s gallery rent and work out how we can afford to keep this Organ thing flowing

“Hailing from the southern regions of the U.S., John Vernon Forbes has a long and storied history of making music, cartoons, and comical mischief. His illustrations recall the golden-age of animation filtered through an absurdist lens – and this love of days gone by is rendered  with a futurist’s ear in the blues-tinged music he’s been creating for decades.

In Atlanta, Forbes played in Phantom 309 (with Mac McNeilly, future drummer of The Jesus Lizard) and Dirt, before settling in Chicago where he formed Mount Shasta, one of the founding SKiN GRAFT Records acts. Mount Shasta went on to release three albums and a collaborative LP with Japan’s Space Streakings before disbanding.

Forbes then formed Tijuana Hercules, initially taking inspiration from obscure rock, blues, and gospel songs from the ’50s and ’60s. The band later gamma-radiated those threads into something altogether different in the labs of Forbes’s own Frogg Mountain Recording Studio, located squarely within Chicago’s historic meat-packing district.

Tijuana Hercules’s latest releases are a pair of collections that highlight the band’s diversity: Bloodshot Records’ “Six Pack to Go” 7” singles compilation (alongside Deer Tick, Elizabeth Cook, Kelly Hogan, and Guided By Voices’ Robert Pollard) and SKiN GRAFT’s “Chicago VS New York” compilation (featuring The Flying Luttenbachers, Bobby Conn, Cheer-Accident and Child Abuse).

Their new seven song Mini-LP “Evening Dresses” finds the band deep-diving into an oxygen-depriving bouillabaisse of boundary-busting blues, spaghetti-strung grooves, and tangled psychedelic roots music”.

“This is a band that has proven itself to be one tough piece of meat.” – John Vernon Forbes as quoted in New City

And here’s a slice of Mount Shasta

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This is one of the many paintings that feature in te recent #43Artists show from Cultivate, you can view the whole thing here, an on-line show during these locked down times

23: ZORAN CRNKOVIC – ‘Long Play America’, 2019 mixed media on canvas, 60″×30″ (150×75cm)