Show Me The Pink

Show Me The Pink is the most energetic, live-for-today clan of artists and artisians rocking your world today or tomorrow.  Try not to get down with this shit.  Just try.


Chief Magazine: First things first, what are all your names and ages and hometowns?

Show Me the Pink: Well we are all "from" Portland... Eliza Strack, 25,Salt Lake City Utah...  Noelle Archibald, 25, Richmond VA... Shannon Palermo, 26, Atlanta ,GA... Justin Mckenzie, 26, LA, California... Zach Archibald, 29, Canton, Ohio...

That's it. Emy quit the band last night during our show, so now there are five of us.

Oh wow. Can you talk about that? You guys ok? Not to pry too much.

Sure, she is going to spread the gospel of rad America south of the border... Viva Excelente America!  ...In the middle of our set, she threw down her mic, stopped   the show and told everybody she couldn't live the lie any more. Then she started speaking Spanish and grabbed a pink acoustic guitar and sang a song in Spanish as was carried away by the crowd... We were all stunned...

Oh my god. Out of the blue? Will she be a SMTP satellite or her own Emy pink sensation, unrelated to SMTP?
 
No, she is on her own... We are happy for her to have many travel adventures and are all still friends...

Tell me a bit about your childhoods and what kind of kids you were.

Eliza was born into a polygamist family with three mothers.

Did you wear garments, traditional Mormon religious garb, and practice the Mormon religion?

Eliza is definitely not Mormon, I'm a spiritual warrior. I officiated Zach and Noelle's wedding. Justin was a childhood figure skating prodigy. But his family couldn't afford the astronomical expenses of training at five in the morning six days a week with Olympic coaches.

So he dropped the skates and picked up music?

Yes, Justin was in many young bands and then started being a recording engineer. Shannon moved all over the Midwest until she landed in Atlanta where she met her best friend and they parent trapped their parents and got to have their own apartment when they were teenagers. Zach was a "latch key kid" in Texas till his mom got a job running a Unitarian church camp in the Southern California Mountains. Then he split his time between there and... Canton, Ohio.

Sometimes it seems like we were all raised by wolves in our own way.

Yes, America is a quilt of many fabrics. Noelle was raised by hippy parents in a six-kid family was a gymnast and started doing live cable access TV shows at age nine, which would later inspire her to create "Grace Street" a cable access soap opera that was the birthplace of Show Me the Pink. A fictional all-girl band.

You officiated Zach and Noelle's wedding, tell me about the wedding...

We all were part of the nightmare collective... Basically about 15 "artists" all got together and rented this huge old bus barn in the sticks, 40 minutes out of Portland. Out there we built a two-story "pallette palace" with 10 apartments and a rope bridge. Many arts were created there. We had a recording studio, a metal knife forge, raised bed gardens. We had a veggie oil conversion station, a bike shop and bike welding and teaching local youth how to make tall bikes.

Show me the Pink then was Noelle, Zach, David, and Eliza. Later Emy joined up, but we all "lived" (not legal to live at a 24 hour art studio) there, even Shannon. So we spent basically the first six months there making it rad... er at least livable.

---

Were you all playing out at the time?

Yes, we would drive an hour each way to play like six times a month.

Then Zach and Noelle got engaged and decided to have the wedding at the warehouse. So we made the warehouse rad... Friends from all over America came.. All the girls in SMTP are Sprockettes so they did a dance and brought out Noelle. Eliza married us and Noelle's dad lead the raddest Sufi dance ever. Our band practices dances of universal peace! Euromotion, Romanteek and Scream club played...

---

Amazing! Tell me about dances of universal peace. What’s the Sprockettes connection?

No direct connection, but we all explore the effect of dance on consciousness, and as an inspiring force for participants and audiences.

You mentioned inspiration. What's your fanbase like? I know when I saw you guys live I was so inspired I could barely contain myself and had the overwhelming urge to quit my job and run off to join a pack of wild sailors and artists. How do people usually react to your music?


Wow, thanks. Well, our music is pretty catchy and poppy, and I (Eliza) was realizing last night that the number of members in our band is the many who come to see us, because everyone sings along. We like to blur the lines between performers and performance because this isn't about our own ego and success. It's about making the world (here's that word again) radder. For a lot of bands success would mean money and fame, but for us, success would be defined as an impact on our community and the larger world.

Is that the thinking behind the Rad America Tour?

Definitely. The concept of Rad America is about everyone making their one square foot totally tight. No matter what is going on out of your control, you can define the space you occupy. Once you make your square foot tight, then people around you will be inspired to make their sq. ft. totally tight. Eventually there will be that one last person that turns the tides. Our tour was looking for that person to make the minority into a majority. Our tour was about creating and tapping into the existing networks, sprinkling Johnny Appleseeds that would grow in our absence.

I imagine some might think you were trying to tell them that it was more important to change themselves rather than the injustice they see around them. What would you say to that criticism?

You can't begin to tackle outside injustices until you have fully seized your own power from within. We've been on the streets, protesting, getting pepper sprayed, creating opposition. But sometimes that doesn't work. So we focus on creating a counter positive.

Hence the term posi-dance-core. Speaking of that, how do you describe your music to strangers?

We struggle with that. Noelle hates titles and categories in music... but, hold on, we're debating... performance centric booty dance rock sometimes fast, sometimes pretty, with moshy parts. And we got raps, yo.

Tell me about your creative process. How do you go from inspiration to songwriting to performance?

Noelle wrote most of the first album before anyone else was in the band. Now we work individually on creating a root jam and bringing it to the group for embellishment. We have a whole new album of songs in the works. Shannon, Shanzini has been writing a lot lately.

So who do you consider your influences and inspiration? Who are you digging right now?

Ask anyone of us and you'd get a different answer. We get inspiration from everywhere. We all love Japanther. Last night we played with Matt + Kim, Here Comes A Big Black Cloud (Eliza's favorite band) and The Pharmacy. The positive energy was immense.

---

Your live show kind of rules.

Feeling it in public.

Two drummers, two keyboards, bass, trumpet, no guitars, synchronized dancing, occasional prerecorded beats that we rap to. Props, glitter cannons, last night we had 14 beach balls for the beach cruisin' crew song. Costume changes during the set. Motivational speaking. Interactive video screening that incorporates live acting as well as film. (Current season of Grace Street) lots and lots of dancing. It sets a good example.

But what's the Sprockettes connection?

All the ladies in SMTP are also Sprockettes. There are 23 to date. We are a synchronized mini-bike dance team that started for a bike fair and it went so well that we decided to continue it. We are non-professional dancers living out our childhood fantasies. Choreographing our own routines with inspiration from work out videos and fly girls and bmx bikers etc. Our dancers are all shapes an sizes and skill levels. We are trying to break the mold of what a dancer should be. We hope to help people follow through with their own silly ideas.  You don't always have to take a class, or join a group, you can make this shit up.

We recently doubled in size, just in time for our weekend invitational, nov.17-19th. The weekend started with an international bike dance off with two bike dance teams from B.C. Canada. An all female group called the B.C.Clettes, whose colors are red and black. The all male dance team, The Brakes. They were inspired by us when we went up to Canada for a bike event. P.S. our colors are hot pink and black.

It's like Bike Kill for Precision mini-bike spandex dance champs. Hot. Japanther plays this song that starts with a band from Cali. The lyrics are "I wanna wanna be, a pa-aaaa-art of something, revolution baaaaaby" When Ian introduces the song he talks about what they're doing in the song and what we're doing at the shows, creating our own community, doing our own creative thing. It feels like you guys might relate to that.

Do you feel like you guys have a strong community to support your and enjoy your work? What's your community like?

Here's a list of a few that we share an umbrella with: Bike gangs across the country,  veggie-oil bus converters, gypsies, clownpunks, queer activists, environmentalists, parents, children, D.I.Y. anything, artists and musicians, progressive non-profits, grassroots organizers, political activists, bike polo players...

---

So speaking of identifying, there are a lot of ladies playing lead roles in the band it seems, would you consider yourselves feminists?

To an outsider looking in, seeing a bunch of powerful ladies doing stuff, it seems feminist, but we see ourselves as people.  The "f" word can mean so many things to different people.

Can of worms... Sometimes wearing spandex comes with a backlash.

Backlash... tell me about that.
I mean, is there some significance to seeing powerful ladies rocking out, creating their own world?

Dirty is in the eye of the beholder, we're all pink on the inside, sometimes a few people don't get it, it's not all about sex it's about being real, and letting loose.

So as long as we all live in these gendered bodies, do you say you aren't feminists?

We don’t like boxes in general, but we all strive for a world in which all people male and female, or transgender have an equal voice.

So, I was so amazed to see a baby in tow when you swung through NYC last year. What's that like?

Well she wasn't at the show... We had two road nannies with us. They would take turns alternating. One night they would nanny at an off site location, the next sell merch at shows. Starlet had her six and seven month birthday on tour, and she was not super mobile yet, so she was content on long van rides. Now we plan on doing short tours...  Although on the two-month, 50-show Rad America tour she handled the road better than anyone else. It was cool. If she got bored at all in the van she was facing the back two rows of people so she had this constant floating head theatre to entertain her. It is crazy. People have this preconceived notion that when you have children, their life begins, and your "life" is over. But we find that not to be the case. Maybe it is just because starlet has such awesome personality, but being a parent is so much easier than we ever thought it would be.

Wow, that's such an inspiration. Do you think it's a testament to how supportive your community is?

Absolutely. We are not of large financial means. So when we were on the road we relied on people who hooked up shows to also find us an appropriate starlet venue. if we had to pay for motels every night, no way. So we were able to do it only by support of friends and strangers going out of their way to help us out.

So I was wondering, do you all work? How do you survive?

Yes, Noelle is a barista and black market hair stylist and fashion designer. Zach is a chef and sells homemade beef jerky. Shannon just got her RNA certification (nurse). Justin, a jack-of-all-trades, builds the animatronics for haunted houses and works in a recording studio. Eliza works at a clothing/art gallery called Upper Playground. At the end of our tour, we divided up all the money we made, including the nannies and everybody took home $77... for two months work!

We tried to buy food and cook meals for whoever was putting us up.

I would imagine that could be scary as a parent.

It is about as scary as being a parent and not being in a band. On tour, Noelle and me had savings as a safety net, so we would never put our daughter in a situation that we were not prepared for. Last night our band got paid $45, but then when Zach and Noelle got home they had to pay the sitter $30 of our own money. That said, we both grew up poor and don't consider money to be elemental to happiness.

Also, I wanted to ask about Portland. Why do you guys live in Portland? What keeps you there?

In Portland, a lot, a lot of people walk the walk! President Bush didn't call it "Little Beirut" for nothing. It feels like people here spend time doing and not planning, not as much bitching. Also they’re many like-minded parents raising their kids in a manner similar to our own.

You released Velocipedomania early this year. Have you been asked to sign to a major label? Would you?

No we haven't. As with all band decisions, we would consider any interest in our band and evaluate the merits of the specific company and offer. We will NEVER sell our souls for rock and roll. We aren't about to change for anybody or let some "marketing guy” say we should make this song or that song or dress this way or that. That shit ain't us.

---

What's next for you guys?

Writing, playing, having fun. More touring. Possibly a book version of Velocipedomania.

Downloads

01 The Anthem.mp3
Most Wanted Boy In The Room.mp3

Websites

www.myspace.com/showmethepink
www.showmethepink.blogspot.com

Photos

Tod Seelie

---