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- our friends bamboo shoots were on conan freaking o’ brien monday night! they won an mtvU contest where the winner gets a recording deal from epic records. how insane is that? it was about three years ago that i met avir & karl through alan at a new brunswick basement show, and now i’m watching them on TV with goosebumps on my arms. congratulations to avir, karl, ankur & ahmed & shiv - it couldn’t happen to nicer guys.

- i’d been meaning to get down my thoughts on ghosts of pasha’s appearance on this american life down for some time now and bamboo shoots’ recent success brought it back to mind. this is from my livejournal, about two and a half years ago:

nick and chris play in a relatively new and completely unknown band from vermont called ghosts of pasha. nick ran nerdy kid comics records and chris played guitar in clark. they’re convinced that they’re going to be the next radiohead, which is naive when you’re 23, but kind of sad when your in your 30s.

they had two shows last weekend, one at don hill’s and the other at the mercury lounge. a couple of our friends went to the don hill’s show and had a good time but as is normally the case with a travelling unknown band, they were the only people there. steve went to sunday’s show and came back with big news; the show was PACKED! there were screaming girls drowning out the band, singing along with every word, high-fiving chris while he was onstage, people were fighting over cds thrown into the crowd, you name it. and the mercury lounge asked them back THREE MORE TIMES, letting them choose who they want to open for!

this was heady stuff, even for nick and chris! after the show nick wasted no time telling and phoning friends that they will soon be ‘the biggest band in new york city’, ‘the next strokes’, etc. aaron, phil, steve and i were all just flabbergasted; to get that kind of turnout and response defies logic. but good for them, i guess.

as it turns out, GOP were set up by the latest stunt by improv everywhere, called best gig ever:

Agent Lee approached me a few weeks ago with a wonderfully simple idea. “Best gig ever,” he said. “Pick a struggling rock band and turn their small gig into the best show of their lives.” We had already thrown a birthday party for a stranger; why not throw an awesome concert for an unknown band?

check the link for the full story. when GOP found out they’d been had, they flipped out. flame wars broke out, threats were made and in the following months rolling stone & spin had all picked up on the story. in turn, nick & chris started to see this as their chance to make it big. with every interview and every quote, it seemed like they were more convinced of huge and inevitable success. after all, it’s not how you get there but what you do with it, right?

nick (aka milo finch) would take the “they were superstars” part of a quote like “they went to great pains to make the members of vermont’s ghosts of pasha believe they were superstars” and put it on the front page of the GOP website with the rolling stone byline underneath (after a while, nick added a snide disclaimer to this edited quote, saying if RS could edit quotes, so could he). when npr interviewed GOP & IE for this american life, in nick & chris’ eyes it was further fuel for their rocket to stardom when the sad reality is that they’re just a footnote in the larger story of IE and their controversial stunts.

eventually, this american life made its way to television via showtime and the IE/GOP story was in the first episode. the main thrust of TAL’s piece was whether or not certain IE stunts are mean-spirited and demeaning or not (ira glass was leaning towards the former). since BGE was one of the more controversial missions, it was the perfect stunt to feature and casting GOP in a very sympathetic light was necessary in order to even the playing field. asking the question, “what kind of band falls for, if not completely embraces such a hoax?” would have inevitably skewed viewers’ opinions from “this poor struggling band was duped” to “they totally had it coming to them!”

the whole episode has been an often-talked about topic among our group of friends but honestly, i think this beast has been dead, for over two years and counting. any coattail riding that could have translated into any kind of big-time success for them is long gone by now and no one, outside from the people we know, really cares about this anymore. if GOP wants to add an appearance on TAL to their already omission-laden resume, by all means let them.