Surviving Everything, Now!

For a journalist in 2009, covering Indianapolis psych-pop quintet Everything, Now! is about as smart as offering drugs to a cop or buying second-hand uranium in the Middle East. Few, if any, noticed the November release of the band’s fifth full-length album Spatially Severed (technically their 71^st, if one includes aliases and side projects). But the band has gotten their fair share of attention in the last year: some 1500 lawsuits have been filed against the band, most of which involve a large corporation suing the band as a unit or, in some cases, each individual member.

Considering Everything, Now!’s amazing knack for legal trouble, not to mention the current climate of the U.S. Justice System, I have chosen to write this article anonymously, although it is yet to be determined if any editor will be fearless enough to print it. Even mentioning certain brand names or persons has become grounds for litigation.

“Sprite, Dixie Cup, Serpentine brand Sanitary Swabs, and Do Right Man, the Christian comic book hero, all came after us before the album was even released,” claims Drew Deboy, current accountant and former keyboard player for E, N! “Not long after that it was Taco Bell, Nabisco, Phillip Morris, and all we did was mention those brands on stage.”

These are tough times for everybody, including indie rock musicians, but the corporations seem to be working harder than anyone to fight off the end-of-the-decade economic blues. Murray Shtibrick, Everything, Now!’s New York lawyer, thinks the worst is yet to come.

“Nobody is safe from the attacks of these vicious corporations,” he told me when he agreed to meet for an interview in a darkened Brooklyn alley. “I’ve tried to warn all my clients. You’d think using a copyrighted name in an artistic context would be permissible, but the laws are actually set up so that you can be sued at any time for any reason!”

In the words of Paul Simon, “Paranoia strikes deep in the heartland.”

“It’s revenge,” answers E,N! vocalist and primary songwriter Jon Rogers, born Ali Baba Robba, quite possibly an egomaniac, “We got involved in some shady activity, accidentally ran into some jokers named Paulson and Bernanke on a gay porn movie set, where we blackmailed them into giving us some bailout money. When companies started to find out about it, they got pissed. Of course they demonize us, we’ve got all the money they thought they were gonna get.”

“It seemed like a good idea at the time,” says Justin K Prim, the band’s current tambourinist and Idea Man, when asked why the lyrics on Spatially Severed contain so many brand names, “Like cosmic advertising, those names would already be out there, in space, so we just grab ‘em back, like the brand names are just different crayon colors or something for us to draw with.”

Speaking of crayons, Everything, Now! was sued by Crayola in October for describing their music as “Shocking Shrimp Electric Pink,” in a press release, a term which happens to be a registered trademark for a new Crayola color. The band is also being sued by Exavier Wardlaw for using the term “space gospel,” which Wardlaw claims to have invented three years ago, as evidenced on his album Jesus in Outer Space, from which several lines of lyrics on Everything, Now!’s Spatially Severed seem to have been blatantly lifted.

“So they basically steal all this dough from the government, from tax payers, from Wall Street,” professes engineer and Spatially Severed co-producer Tyler Watkins, famous for his work with Weezer and the Insane Clown Posse, “But they didn’t spend it at the studio like you’d expect. They paid me in beans and peyote buttons, and they spent $3 trillion to go on tour of the Moon! No one even lives on the Moon, how can they make any of that money back? Serves them right to get sued.”

Watkins claims that he desperately needs money to help fund a lawsuit in which a tampon company, Queensize Twin Air, is suing Watkins and his business partners for unlawfully using that name (registered by the tampon company in 1982) for their studio, at which Spatially Severed was recorded.

Later this month, the band will appear in court to defend themselves against allegations of a sexual nature from three major labels and six major-indie hybrid subsidiaries. Several band members and associates are laying low, adopting aliases, and wearing elaborate disguises until the trial. Others have gone “clean,” pursuing a righteous path to lessen the impact of whatever sentence may be headed their way at the end of the legal circus.

Everything, Now! drummer and licensed minister, the Reverend Sergeant Daniel Schepper is currently digging tunnels under the fence at the U.S.-Mexico border, for which he is willing to accept the consequences: if caught, he could face a mandatory four years at community college. Bassist and Spiritual Guide Eric Alexander is doing a continuous series of back flips in the air to see how long he can stay in lotus position while spinning. Guitarist and the band’s only native French speaker, David Pierre Carter, has been working on a documentary about a series of mysterious deaths involving a demon-possessed toilet.

“Ya know, it’s like the sixties man,” Carter tells me on the set of Murder Toilet, “Except it’s backwards and upside down. Because, did you know that Bob Dylan met aliens?”

Indeed.

Interested parties can find an extensive list of the lawsuits involving Everything, Now! at the band’s website, www.everythingnowmusic.com or their myspace page, www.myspace.com/everythingnow, where you can also purchase any of their albums or scope out their Moon Tour dates, Earth Tour dates, low-budget videos, and more.

-Speedboat Harvey

ASSOCIATIVE PRESS