To quote Magnum P.I., “I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right…” how does a re-issue of a gimmick get made without getting called a farce? From day one, Me First And The Gimme Gimmes was based on the flimsiest of ideas – taking the staple songs of the contempo-casual elite (including Paul Simon, John Denver, Billy Joel, Elton John, Carole King, Neil Diamond and more) and giving them a more sneering punk rock treatment – that only worked because it was possessed of the twin threats of being well done and really funny on its side. But damn, did it work well and, since Have A Ball first appeared in 1997, a succession of albums have appeared and illustrated that any genre and any artist can get this treatment and still sound good.
Of course, when Have A Ball first appeared, the precedent hadn`t yet been set and people were still pretty skeptical. Recorded on a shoe-string budget, the album was a little soft around the edges – each track trails into a meltdown at the end with singer Spike Slawson repeatedly screaming affirmatively (read: “Yeah!”) – and it wasn’t mixed very well (it was pretty flat) but still, the beginnings were there.
Eleven years and six albums on and the Gimme Gimmes have gotten their approach down to a science. They’ve gone through some wide open spaces (Love Their Country), sat through some really bad movies (Are A Drag), gotten happy on Sixites pop (Blow In The Wind),gotten funky with some forgettable R&B (Take A Break), and celebrated manhood (Ruin Jonny’s Bar Mitzvah) and, each time, they’ve gotten progressively better (and funnier) at it. Still, that first album was the prototype and sits about like the pickle in the proverbial punchbowl; the content is there but the sound quality isn’t. That’s precisely what this reissue seeks to remedy.
Have Another Ball is the re-mastered re-ignition of Me First and The Gimme Gimmes’ debut and honestly, it is the definitive document for the band’s vision. The re-furbished versions of “The Boxer,” “Coming To America” and “Country Roads” now brim with the crunch of raucous, half-in-the-bag punk rockers out to cut loose and have a laugh; Jake Jackson and Joey Cape’s guitars – the things that have always punctuated and played straight man to the band’s arrangements – is crisp and jagged as a hyperactive buzz saw here. At the same time, the rhythm section manned by Dave (Just Dave) on drums and "Fat" Mike Burkett on bass really tries to make these covers sound like genuine attempts rather than tongue in cheek tomfoolery. That’s the single most appealing thing about Have Another Ball; if these covers didn’t have a sort of rubber-faced legitimacy, they’d come off as nothing more than a series of two-dimensional jokes that would have worn long thin by now. But they don’t. Have Another Ball is the punch line fully realized for a gag that never stops giving.
For more information, go to http://www.gimmegimmes.com and http://www.myspace.com/gimmegimmes
