John Bellows

John Bellows is a great dude from Chicago who rode into town to play a show with Hallelujah!, The Coughs, and The Amoeba Men. After Hallelujah! played, John ran up to the front with a guitar strapped to him in teal green Umbra shorts and a striped shirt and just started wailing on his acoustic guitar with these "can't-stop-looking-and-can't-even-talk-because-you-must-listen" songs. He played and sang by himself, and needless to say, he looked crazy and we were all waiting for him to get kicked out until we noticed his band on his arm that denoted he was scheduled to play. The songs were childish, harshly played, and hilarious, so I still thought he was crazy. He played for a solid 15 minutes with only about five seconds in between songs. The songs were so catchy that while the next band was playing, I was still thinking about his songs.

After he played, we went back to talk to him and he was absolutely sane and normal. I was so amazed by his balls in how he played and acted. We bought his CD, entitled "Clean Your Clocks." On the CD, he has other instruments which takes away from the childishness and craziness of the songs, but they're still pretty damn good and just as catchy with the other instruments.

Here I'm going to post two of the songs he played at Nanci Raygun---they are the ones that stuck with me for the next couple of days, so hopefully they do that for you also.

(John has a website, www.brownstuff.biz where you can get some more of his music, and I highly recommend it.)

-Caroline

John Bellows - Travel On
John Bellows - Bouncing Ball