Triplefastaction....RIP, June 1996

"We're so sexy looking," chortles vocalist/guitarist Wes Kidd before busting out with a very vocal laugh.

He's got a lot to kid about, but who knows, maybe it was Tripl3FastAction's sex appeal that inked their deal with a major label. Stranger things have happened. "It's kinda weird," continues Kidd in a more serious tone. "A lot of it had to do with the fact that Chicago was so hip. So there was more of the weasels floating around here. With the Pumpkins and Liz Phair, all the big successes, all the wasels were in town all the time, so it make it easier for them to know who you were. Whereas before, no one came near Chicago unless they had a stopover. [Laughs] Plus, the fact that me and the drummer [Brian St. Clair] had been playing together for so long. And I had been writing all during the time I had been in Rights of the Accused, because I had always planned on doing something on my own. When we got together, things kind of gelled pretty quickly."

After some ten years toiling away in the punk outfit Rights of the Accused, Kidd and St. Clair split for greener pastures. They teamed up with bassist Kevin Tihista, whom Kidd met in a "fashionable clothing store that sold a bunch of patent-leather pants," and added second guitarist Ronnie Schneider, a friend of Tihista's. With a show looming, Tihista offered up the name Tripl3FastAction, a quality apparent in Gold Bond (??), or so he learned on a late-night infomercial.

Everthing seemed to be happening in, well (sorry), triple time. Within three years, they had two indie singles, a deal with Capitol Records and their first record, Broadcaster. A lot for a band with barely time to create a buzz. "Everybody knows where I had come from, around Chicago," begins Kidd with traces of a Midwestern accent, "as for the rest of the world, no one really cares." He laughs loudly.

"I've been playing around for so long, and we had so many songs. It wasn't like we just had the 13 that are on the record. We had, like, 49 songs to choose from, and we were just ready to go. Once we got in the studio, I donŐt know if we were so ready to be in the big rock'n'roll warehouse kind of place," admits Kidd. But he adds, "As far as knowing what we wanted and where we were going, I think we kind of had it under control."

There's no evidence of not being "ready" on Broadcster. It's a mature first effort that shows superb songwriting from Kidd, the main craftsman. "I bring in the basic idea... Sometimes they have a tendency to ruin it, sometimes they have a tendency to make it 300 times better." It's raw and heavy-sounding while also being very pop-radio happy; a quirky guitar record full of "ohhhs" and "ahhhs." Its oddball mix might come form a guy who spent too much time locked in his room "borrowing" from Stiff Little Fingers, Elton John, the Replacements, and even the Beach Boys. Admittedly, it helped that the band employed producer Don Fleming (Sonic Youth, Teenage Fanclub) and mixer John Agnello (Dinosaur Jr.).

While the music on Broadcaster is new to us, some of it is relatively old--for Tripl3Fast anyway. The first single, "Revved Up," was one of the first songs the band ever wrote. Their sardonic wit is evident throughout, from "Don't Tell," a song about a cross-dresser ("I've been known to put on a few little dresses," Kidd kids. "There's a little bit me in there.") and in "Aerosmith," a song about being force-fed music through the radio and MTV. "The whole thing was, like, talking about DGC. There was another one of those gimmicks. Here's a major label, they start up this little side label, to act like they're not a major label, actually put out a few really good quality records with Sonic Youth and Nirvana. Then it just turned into the same old story. Sign anything and everything. You only get to listen to what they're going to let you listen to, and that sucks."