An Anniversary
This festive, distorted video was shot exactly 20 years ago at Jacoby’s, a German bar in Detroit’s Bricktown neighborhood. Back then, in the midst of our artistic heyday, we would never have used the term "rebrand," but that's what it was. February 21, 2004 marked the first gig by Great Lakes Myth Society, the band who for seven years prior had operated as the Original Brothers and Sisters of Love (TOBASOL, colloquially).
In early 2000 TOBASOL miraculously secured a label deal with the Telegraph Company, a very cool indie based in mid-gentrification Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Green and unhip as we were, the label's partners saw something in us and did everything in their power to help us succeed. They coaxed us out of Michigan on a few national tours. They booked us at festivals like SXSW and CMJ. They introduced us to amazing people like Stew and Heidi Rodewald. They released our Great Lakes-themed second album H.O.M.E.S. Volume One. They hired publicists, booking agents, and college radio promotors. Despite all this, we were never able to overcome our inexperience, cumbersome name (an in-joke dating back to the early-'90s), or our eccentricity.
We were a weird unruly folk-rock band from a region then known for its garage rock. No one knew what to do with us. We didn't know what to do with ourselves. We loved XTC and the New Christy Minstrels. We played a Halloween show covering the Cramps' entire Bad Music For Bad People album. We played an improv set behind actor Timothy Speed Levitch who was dressed in a baby bonnet. We sang sea chanteys, Appalachian ballads, and elaborate a cappella breakdowns. We played accordion, fiddle, and mandolin. We opened shows for Andrew Bird, Jim Carroll, George Clinton, the Essex Green, the Gourds, and Wesley Willis.
By autumn 2003 we had arrived at an impass. Our violinist Liz was pregnant with her first child and moving to Toronto. The week we finished recording our third and most ambitious album, then titled H.O.M.E.S. Volume Two, the Telegraph Company folded. We soon did the same.
In the latter days of TOBASOL, we had begun printing the name of a fake production company on our posters: “The Great Lakes Myth Society presents the Original Brothers and Sisters of Love.” Now diminished to a quintet with a finished record and no label, we decided to adopt this as our new name. It certainly had more mystique than TOBASOL and better reflected the kind of regionally-influenced songwriting we’d done on the two H.O.M.E.S. albums. We also unified our appearance and bought black suits, opting for a classier, more sober look. I wrote a song about our transition called "Heydays'' and it became the first new Great Lakes Myth Society song.
When an opportunity for a gig in Detroit came up in early 2004 we took it. Despite living only 40 miles away in Ann Arbor, Detroit had always been impenetrable to us. Promoters were completely uninterested in our music so we stopped trying. This all changed at Jacoby's when we met Stirling Silver and Sue Summers, a pair of influential Detroiters who would become two of our staunchest advocates. The unreleased third album we'd recorded as TOBASOL eventually found a home on a Boston label called Stop, Pop, and Roll and was released in 2005 as the self-titled debut of Great Lakes Myth Society. Between 2004 and 2010 we played Detroit more than any other city.