Who the hell are the Missing Teens, anyways?
The Missing Teens are America’s heroes and the most attractive band of all time!
James Call (lead singer, keytar) is the glorious leader of the Missing Teens, a band that will rise and fall like the house of Rockefeller. He is the son of the phone number guy and a very successful businesswoman in the field of temporary legal staffing. He has over 10,000 wives in the New York City area alone, and is the leader of the Power of the Crystals cult. His twin cousin, Bob Schlemm, is a founding member of Bird-Ass productions, and his other twin brother, the rapper known as Tha Man Who Wud Be King, is a founding member of Da Spooj. James plays the keytar, screams, and sweats a lot. James has also played in the bands The Bosch, Valeze, and immortal far-out cult band German Cars vs. American Homes. His leathern wings spread across the face of rock, condemning all involved to a life of overquantized dance tracks and gated snare sounds.
DJ Pu Yi a/k/a Greg Travis (keytar, sampling) is the last emperor of China, and plays the keytar for the Missing Teens. It is said of him that to look into his eyes is to feel the laments of a thousand generations of widowed mothers, but he’s great at parties. He’s also a former member of German Cars vs. American Homes and owns over 10,000 faberge eggs, every single one containing a rare, unreleased Michael McDonald single.
Spencer Chakedis (guitar, background vox) is the head of Balloon Heaven studios and has played with every single band that has ever existed. His own project, Deep Sound Diver is a virtual who’s who of the not yet famous music world. It is that that Spencer’s laugh can cause dead rabbits and withered crops to spring back to life, but that the glassy stare from his eyes causes children to drop out of school and take up a life on the road. Whether or not these rumors are true, he plays a truly wicked guitar solo. His guitar stylings can be heard on virtually ever single Missing Teens and German Cars vs. American Homes track.
Dave Tirolo a/k/a DJ Puerto Rico (bass guitar) was the entire original cast of Miami Vice, until the decision was made to turn the franchise over to Don Johnson et al. Dave has been with the Missing Teens since near the beginning, and he has the shimmer to prove it. It is said that Dave runs a child-smuggling ring from behind the front of his popular hair product line, but these rumors are NOT confirmed. Dave is also an audio engineer par excellence.
Dan Gottesman (drums) is our drummer. At night, he turns into a great beast and roams the land. But is the beast friend, or foe? It is said you can call him if you play a certain tune backwards on an ocarina drenched in the blood of a demon, but Dan is also very punctual to both shows and rehearsals and this process is generally unnecessary. He is also the drummer for the Ditty Committee, as well as Deva, the girl-fronted DEVO cover band.
James Pertusi (bass guitar) is a small, fiendish man with bright green eyes that are said to lead to another dimension. If he looks at you directly with these eyes, he can trap the dreams of children and the hopes of grown men. Deep within, they battle for supremacy, fueling a nightmarish hellworld of conflict and strife. He also plays bass for the Missing Teens, is in the Ditty Committee with Dan, and co-owns The Kennel in Brooklyn. He is producing the Missing Teens v4.0′s first full-length album, The Power of the Crystals soundtrack.
Dave Schnug (saxophone) is an ifrit, a fire demon from the bowels of Arabia, who is said to have the power to grant wishes. He also is a skilled saxophonist/composer. He lives in Astoria, the happiest place on Earth, and his strange, mystical power is the reason the neighborhood has prospered for so long. Should he choose to depart, those who live there are all certainly damned. Why don’t you go to his website and find out a little bit more about this strange being?
Adrienne Efficiency (triangle, legs that don’t quit) is an attorney but WE’RE NOT TELLING YOU WHERE. She will sue the FUCK out of you if you don’t like our music so DON’T SCREW WITH US, MAN.
Brer Brian (trumpet) is the most powerful, and mysterious, Missing Teen of all. It is said he lives in a series of intracate caves beneath the Earth. What is known for sure is that he an incredibly skilled and profilic musician, and it’s our always our pleasure when he joins us. Why don’t you listen to some of his projects?
What the hell is with the Missing Teens, anyways?
It all began in the summer of 2005, maybe. Or was it the autumn of 2004? Damn. Don’t drink too much, kids! You’ll have trouble remembering these things. Also, write things down! It helps you keep track.
Here’s the long, rambling version of how the Missing Teens came to be.
Let’s go way way back to 1998-ish. James Call, the son of the guy who wrote the phone number song, was going to NYU for acting (terrible mistake). James had been performing music of sorts for a number of years, whipping up sequenced tunes in Cubase VST and then hopping around on stage while the tunes played back over a DAT machine. Fellow acting student Holt “Peugeot Cocaine Richards & Son, the Vornado” Richardson took a liking to these tunes and he flew out to James’ homeland, Marin County, CA, to join him, on the drums, playing over the track, at a very unusual gig at the Ross Valley Freemason Center.
Soon after Holt recruited James into his own fantastic band, The Bosch, with lead singer/songwriter Matt Harrison and bassist Carol Wade. But for whatever reason, that incarnation of The Bosch wouldn’t last forever, although they’d return later in a much more glorious fashion – but that’s a story for a different band website, I suppose. POINT IS, James and Holt decided they’d try to step up the ol’ playing over a DAT machine approach, and thus, German Cars vs. American Homes was born.
GCVAH was managed and largely financed by James’ high school pal and roommate Damian Kalish, a sort of less-famous but more-likeable and less-of-a-dick version of Andy Warhol, who would move back to the Bay Area eventually but continue to function as James’ life coach of sorts, a role which really should be left to a professional pscyhologist.
At first the band consisted of James, Holt, Carol, Carol’s friend Greg Travis (DJ Pu Yi) on keys, James’ friend from Marin Jared Rock on guitar, and second drummer Pete Hale, also from NYU. Over time personnel would shift and change, featuring the fantastic Neill Sanford Kent Livingston on bass, Phil LoGerfo on guitar, and eventually Spencer Chakedis on guitar as well. GCVAH played about 1,000,000 gigs at the Sidewalk Cafe on Ave. A and 6th St., and that’s where Spencer met ‘em. He would go on to produce GCVAH’s full-length album One In A Million, many hundreds of copies of which are still sadly sitting around James’ bedroom.
GCVAH was an awesome band – people said they sounded like Zappa and the Talking Heads; we just called it “FAR OUT” – but sometimes awesome things just sort of collapse, especially if you play hundreds of gigs and never earn a dime, and that’s what happened. DJ Pu Yi went off into the programming ether; Holt went on to revitalize the Bosch; who knows what happened to Pete Hale; Neill went on co-found his own studio and write the soundtrack to “Jesus Camp”; Spencer kept his own band, Deep Sound Diver, running strong; and James, who was dumped by his girlfriend around the same time GCVAH fell apart, was left holding his proverbial (and sometimes literal) dick in his hand.
However, the cycle of life continued, and soon James found himself at City College of New York’s Sonic Arts Center program for audio engineering, a much more solid major choice than acting. There he started writing music with Alex Beck, Roko Djokovic, Adam Reiter, and future Missing Teens members Dave Tirolo and Darren Jones.
After just the tiniest hiatus, really, Spencer got back in touch with James and socked to him the existence of the Art Land bar in Williamsburg (R.I.P., Art Land). Spencer and James began playing together again, some GCVAH material, plenty of new material, in the old old fashion of live guitar and vocals over tracks, this time the DAT machine replaced by an iPod. Thus was Missing Teens 0.5 born.
(also around this time, the band met Mike Weber, genius, and designer of this website. Mike has done most of the graphic design for the Missing Teens over the years, and continues to do so, when he’s not leading a cult, which is really his calling in life. He lives in New Orleans currently)
These gigs went on a bit, and one day, when it was James’ time to play with all the fancy microphones at the SAC program, he had the bright idea to pay drummer Darren Jones $100 and a bottle of scotch to record live drums over some of his sequenced tracks. Darren recorded 2 passes each of 32 songs over a 10-hour period before finally saying, “I’m tired, man.” Shortly thereafter Darren thought he might as well play these tunes live, and thus the first true incarnation of the Missing Teens, v1.0, was born.
Darren, James and Spencer played all over the place for a number of years. Eventually they were joined by Dave Tirolo on the bass and Orange Magic (DJ Pu Yi’s brother, also actually called Greg Travis) on the guitar. Adrienne Efficiency joined the band as “triangle lass” and provided the entirety of the band’s sex appeal. She continues in this role to this day. This was the Missing Teens v2.0 line-up, and they played at the Trash Bar and the Delancey a whole heck of a lot. Darren’s drum tracks, with Dave, Spencer, and Orange’s stylings added on top, as well as the loving horn sounds of the Porn Horns (part of Claws of Paradise these days), would be added to James’ sequences, and thus the first Missing Teens record would be born: Music for Young Adults. It’s available for sale at the iTunes store and on amazon.com! Why don’t you buy it, you jerks? We’re starving over here!
Where was I? OH YES. Missing Teens 2.0 did their thing for a number of years, but ennui began to set in, and Shawn Parow, who briefly managed the band before he realized that was a lot of hard work to do for no money, had a breakthrough and suggested the band “go live”. So live the band went. The iPod was out, guitarist Chris Boylan was in, and the Missing Teens v3.0 was born.
More gigs were played, this time chiefly in the loving and awesome music scene in Astoria, Queens (not enough nice things can be said about the Godfather of Astoria Music & Arts, Justin Finley, and the small but growing empire he’s built/building), but around wintertime of 2009 it began to get hard to book gigs that everyone in the band could, in fact, make. The winter is a harsh taskmistress (I’m assuming winter is feminine) and the band went on hiatus-by-default for a little bit. But then summer arose, and the fourth, and current, incarnation of the band emerged:
Dan Gottesman, drummer for the Ditty Committee, was found on the internet (Darren retired after a heroic record of playing about 100 or so gigs). He brought with him James Pertusi, another DC member and co-owner of The Kennel, on the bass. Also from the internet came the great and mysterious Dave Schnug, on sax. And out of pseudo-retirement came DJ Pu Yi, back on the keyboard-guitar after almost a decade of no’ rockin’. Spencer was back on guitar at this time (Chris was AWOL due to some other gig commmitments. We love Chris though.). With Dave still around, and James of course doing his bit, the Missing Teens v4.0 became the finest two-bassist, two-keytarist band in NYC.
This lineup turned to their most ambitious project yet, the full-length rock opera/motivational seminar The Power of the Crystals, directed by James’ high school friend and profressional director Quin Gordon. Produced by Astoria Music & Arts, POTC debuted in October 2010 to critical, beer-infused acclaim. The band is currently working on the soundtrack album to the same project, which will debut in Manhattan in this year’s Fringe Festival, in August.
AND THUS WAS THE FUTURE OF MANKIND SAVED.
I wish I had time to discuss all the other quality folks who played with the Missing Teens or GCVAH, albeit briefly: Lewis Rapkin, Luis de Betancourt, Tim Brennan, and that one Korean kid who was sick on the bass but fell asleep right before his first gig with us so we fired him, among others. Oh, and, Renee Cole, background singer, and Kerrianne Eames, non-Mike Weber graphic designer. Suffice it to say, we love you guys, man.