live strippers, 50-Foot Fireballs and the Gestapo: chris Ward finds out how EL MONSTERO is giving cover bands a good name. photos by paul addotta LET’S ROLL AROUND IN old thumbtacks and go ass-first down a water slide. Let’s gargle near-beer with Stephen Baldwin on his patio this holiday season. Let’s sell leftover Todd Akin campaign hats at Lilith Fair. And let’s sell them at a markup. Let’s do anything. Let’s do anything but devote precious ink to a local cover band—that’s what I wanted to tell Eleven magazine. On its face, I have no interest in that article. Do you have any interest in reading it? Even the phrase “local cover band” is total bird flu. But here’s the thing: this will not be a story about a local cover band. A Local Pink Floyd Cover Band, at that. This isn’t even a story about a Pink Floyd tribute band — an important distinction, some will argue. This is a story about one of the weirdest phenomenons to ever materialize on the St. Louis music scene: a homegrown show that outsold Ozzy’s last trip through town, and then raised him six more sold-out shows in a row at The Pageant. It’s about a show christened El Monstero—a sulfurous machine that channels Pink Floyd’s ghost—and why everyone from South City scenesters to ’til-death-dous-part denim-rockers line up each year to celebrate two great American traditions: Christmas and Ball-Shaking Pyrotechnics. And if you want to callously dismiss El Monstero as a “Pink Floyd cover band” without seeing the show first, that may depend on your perspective of what cover music is, what it isn’t, and what it can be. “I enjoy the idea of both cover and tribute bands when it is done well,” says local music fan, and Vintage Vinyl employee, Jim Utz. “Hearing any music in a ‘live’ setting that otherwise might not ever be heard is important. And in a lot of cases the original entity is no longer alive, or performs, so this is the one way to hear a catalog of music performed. The St. Louis Symphony is one of my favorite cover bands.” Some brief background. El Monstero was birthed in the bowels of the snuffed-out Mississippi Nights venue in 1999 by bassist Kevin Gagnepain, out of sheer boredom. Kevin and members of his ’90s alterna-rock band Stir were fresh off a second album for Capitol Records, but going nowhere fast. “You finish recording a record and then [the label] has to get the machine turning and it just takes forever.
So, during that time, we’re like ‘we don’t want to sit around. We don’t want to blow a bunch of money and go out on the road without any support from the label,’” says Gagnepain. “So we just started a cover band around St. Louis. But we didn’t want to be Stir, so we grabbed another guy to sing, and that guy is Mark Thomas Quinn, the singer of El Monstero.’” They also enlisted some of St. Louis’ best musicians, including Bill Reiter and John Pessoni of The Urge, and current members Bryan Greene on guitar, keyboardist Jake Elking and saxophonist Dave Farver.
Jimmy Griffin of el Monstero, 2011.
Gagnepain notes a line in Pink Floyd’s “Have a Cigar” that goes, “We can build this thing into a monster.” And, in effect, that’s what St. Louis music fans did. One annual show grew to two. Word of mouth spread about the monster-truck atmosphere. The nude pole-dancers. The excessive lights and sonic bangs, note-for-note details and keyboardists suspended in mid-air. Three sold-out nights. Four more. Six shows a night at The Pageant, and eventually packed houses at Verizon Wireless Ampitheatre, a spectacle complete with about 100 crew members, an “Animals”-style hot-air pig balloon and The Wall’s menacing helicopter hovering overhead. Then, apropos of nothing, Mayor Francis Slay declared his fanship. In short: Money. It’s a hit. “At the time, [the show] was really fueled by Stir having an audience,” says Gagnepain. “But now El Monstero has its own complete
audience and I don’t think anyone even knows I was in Stir… And we never looked back.” Jimmy Griffin, the David Gilmour to Gagnepain’s Roger Waters, joined seven years into a now fourteen-year stretch, as flawless a guitar player as the city has ever seen with his 40-odd years of head-banging rock locks intact. Griffin’s own early adventures-inmusic-industry-headaches broadly echoes Gagnepain’s: he starred in a blink-andyou’ll-miss-it MTV hit called “I Do You” with ’80s hair band King of the Hill (whose only other claim to fame is a cult video clip of Alice in Chains’ Layne Stayley, smugly mumbling his refusal to play with the band because of the lead singer’s so-called “faggy mustache.” Sadly, that debate still rages for the ages in YouTube’s witless cesspool of anonymous commenters.) Now, Griffin’s music career exists in two spectrums: writing and releasing original, independent music with his band The Incurables and playing in other tribute acts such as “Celebration Day: A Tribute to Led Zeppelin” and Rolling Stones tribute “Street Fighting Band.” “Some people are still like, ‘Eh, fuck it, it’s a cover band,’” says Griffin. “I have friends who are like, ‘Why? What is this thing you’re doing?’ And these are friends I play with in original bands. And I’m like, ‘Have you ever seen it? Here’s some tickets, come down and see the show.’ And when they see it, they’re like ‘HOLY SHIT, man!’” Gagnepain, who also writes and records original music with fellow El Monstero members in Shooting With Annie, echoes that sentiment. “I don’t care what you call it,” he laughs. “I don’t even think about it. El Monstero is just El Monstero. And if El Monstero is just a Pink Floyd cover band, then 13,000 people just came to see my Pink Floyd cover band. And that makes me feel pretty good about it.” “The theatrics are phenomenal. It is a five-star production that rivals any other Pink Floyd tribute band out there,” says Jesse Raya, media and marketing director for The Pageant. “They have the lead singer shoot out of a podium fifteen feet in the air, eye level with the balcony. Nuts. They had children with picket signs march through the Loop, and then members of the band dressed as Gestapo threw them all in police cars. I’m not hating, but Australian Pink Floyd doesn’t even go as far as this.” This is where, dumbfounded, I stop to Google “Australian Pink Floyd.” Apparently, this is a real thing (they even played the Fabulous Fox in November). That band’s site boasts “This act is so good they were even engaged by David Gilmour to perform at his 50th birthday celebration!” (Note: they (Continued on page 24)
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