(Photo courtesy of Ben Garcia)
It’s an unlikely twist of fate: Treasure Mammal, the merrily experimental Phoenix-based band of spandex-clad provocateurs, is featured on the same record as spandex-clad provocateur Miley Cyrus.
Treasure Mammal stands alongside 27 guest artists on the new album “With a Little Help From My Fwends,” a cover of the Beatles’ 1967 classic “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” album curated by the Flaming Lips.
The Phoenix-based band features on “Good Morning Good Morning” with Zorch and Grace Potter. The album was released Monday and all proceeds are donated to veterinary-care nonprofit the Bella Foundation.
Treasure Mammal was invited to play at the Flaming Lips’ venue the Womb Gallery in Oklahoma City. Wayne Coyne, frontman of the Flaming Lips, asked Treasure Mammal member Abe Gil to prepare to perform a song of his choice from the “Sgt. Pepper’s” album.
“When Wayne asks you do something, you f***ing do it.” Gil said. “There’s no question. He’s one of my heroes. I’ll do the dubstep, cumbia, rap-rock remix of whatever you want!”
Gil and his producer worked as quickly as possible to put together an arrangement of “She’s Leaving Home” for the show with an electronic reworking of the original track’s string orchestra and Gil’s vocals.
“There was all this excitement,” Gil said. “I’m texting back and forth with Wayne Coyne. I’ve never met him, and he was gracious enough to ask us—I mean and at this point, it was still just for us to cover at the Womb Gallery. But I put all my blood, sweat and tears in the vocals, Ryan Breen did a phenomenal job and we did the show.”
Gil soon heard that the Flaming Lips were putting together a “Sgt. Pepper’s” cover—in line with the Lips’ previous guest-speckled covers of classic rock monoliths “Dark Side of the Moon” by Pink Floyd and “In the Court of the Crimson King” by King Crimson.
“I heard that album the first time I ever got drunk when I was like 18, 19-years-old in Santa Monica, California,” Gil said. “In the background of my dreams and memories from that night. That album was on repeat and I probably heard it 20 times in a row the first time I heard it.”
Gil submitted a studio version of the band’s cover of “She’s Leaving Home,” and though Coyne rejected that track he offered the band the opportunity to work on “Good Morning Good Morning.” The cover of “She’s Leaving Home” survives as a promotional video set in the Trunk Space, featuring the band performing the song to an audience mostly dressed in animal costumes.
Gil and fellow Phoenix musician Ryan Breen worked on and submitted multiple versions of the track with their contributions. The final version on the album includes Gil’s vocals, prominently appearing in a “Main Street Electrical Parade”-esque vocoder-processed harmony at the track’s 1:49 mark.
“They sent us the track, and we overdubbed it with a freak-out psychedelic session,” Breen said. “We sent it off to Wayne and he didn’t end up using any of it, but Abe sent out an audio file of the voice synth and that’s what Wayne ended up using.”
Coyne is slated to appear on a slow jam titled “Manifest Destiny’s Child” on Treasure Mammal’s next album, which Gil said will be released sometime near the end of this year or the beginning of 2015. The new album will also feature Sean Bonnette of Andrew Jackson Jihad, R. Stevie Moore, Becky Lee Walters and Jack Toft.
Along with the new album, Treasure Mammal have plans to play at Night of the Living Fest in Tucson on Nov. 8 and at a show at Lost Leaf on Dec. 12.
Incidentally, Treasure Mammal aren’t the only Phoenicians whose work is on the Heady Fwends album. Visual artist Oliver Hibert’s work adorns the cover, which is a suitably psychedelic illustration of the Tarot card The Lovers with a stylized garden of Eden and God, Adam and Eve each with a giant eyeball for a heas.
Hibert has previously done posters for the Flaming Lips and and the cover for a limited-edition record of a collaboration between the Lips and Tame Impala. He’s currently working on a complete deck of the Major Arcana of the Tarot deck.
“It’s been an amazing trip working with the band,” Hibert said. “It’s cool to be involved and to hear one of the greatest albums ever made reinterpreted by all these cool new bands in artistic way. I think the cover fits with the sporadic sound.”
Contact the reporter at bkutzler@asu.edu
