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Formed: 1981
iSound Site: www.isound.com/green_jelly
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| Green Jell˙ started life as Green Jell-O, a four piece comedy-punk band, in Kenmore NY 1981. It was founded by Bill Manspeaker (Moronic Dicktator) and Joe Cannizzaro, two bored and talentless teenagers from NY who had nothing better to do, so decided to start "The World's Wo |
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| Three Little Pigs
by Green Jelly
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Label: BMG
Media: LP Record
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Green Jell˙ started life as Green Jell-O, a four piece comedy-punk band, in Kenmore NY 1981. It was founded by Bill Manspeaker (Moronic Dicktator) and Joe Cannizzaro, two bored and talentless teenagers from NY who had nothing better to do, so decided to start "The World's Worst Band", as niether of them could actually play anything. Joe (who, after various alias changes, settled on Dunderhed in '93) played bass at the time, and had to have the frets colour coded because he was so useless. Songs would be learnt in the form of "blue, blue, green, blue, red, etc". The band got into clubs for free, drunk they're beer, acted like idiots on stage, and got paid for it! They concentrated on theactrics and comedy at their live shows, rather than actually sounding good.
They started playing shows to punk venues all over New York City, attracting small and curious crowds. They made their performances more and more outrageous each time, and played all new songs so people wouldn't notice if they got them wrong. The gigs involved theatrics, torture, women, and whipping. Club owners brought the band in with the condition that anything goes. In fact, the more ridiculous the act, the better.
In 1984, the band released their first "wreckord" 'Let It Be', the cover and name being a spoof of the Beatles record. The band started to expand and gradually started adopting more members with equally silly psuedonym's, and also started involving stupid costumes. In an attempt to share their act with the world, they took themselves to the only place they knew could advance their career: The Gong Show.
They played on the show deliberately making themselves sound bad, complete with a stupid stage act. It's unclear whether The Gong Show ever did anything for the band, but it certainly gave their self esteem a kick up the ass. They encountered GWAR in 1988, who taught them how to sculpt props and "puppets" out of paper maiche, chicken wire and latex. After that the band never looked back. They started performing with proper stage sets, props and cool latex head gear, making their shows more outrageous than ever before. In 1989, they released their second effort on February 29th records, 'Triple Live Mother Goose at Budokan'.
Things really started taking off from here. But soon, Green Jell-O came to a conclusion that Buffalo was no longer enough to satisfy their feeble little minds. They decided to move to Hollywood to play even more moronic shows and attract the attention of a much larger fanbase. After a while, they were spotted by Zoo Entertainment in 1991. They signed a deal with them, but thought it would be kinda different to promote themselves as a video only band, as they knew people wouldn't buy the music on it's own, so the deal was only for releasing videos. The first creative endeavor for Zoo was the video album "Cereal Killer".
The success of this release was so phenomenal that there was eventually a mass demand for an audio version of the video's soundtrack. The deal with Zoo was re-established enabling them to release audio aswell, and the "Cereal Killer Soundtrack" was released. But fame payed it's toll, for the band were sued by the Kraft Foods company for copyright infringement on the brand name "Jell-O". They changed their name to Green Jell˙ in 1992, and re-released both video and audio editions of Cereal Killer under their new name. In 1993, they released their first single from the album, "Three Little Pigs".
Through some freak incident, the latex covered morons had a massive MTV and radio hit with this song all over the world, and entered the UK charts at what was then the highest debut entry ever recorded (#5). This spawned even more ridiculous record sale figures for Cereal Killer. The record went gold in the US, New Zealand and Canada, and platinum in Australia. The band toured the US and Europe promoting the album for the rest of 1993.
In 1994, Green Jell˙ took their profits from the massive success of Cereal Killer, and built their own full production facility in Hollywood called Green Jell˙ Studios. It is here where they recorded the music and shot the video and produced all the artwork and packaging, etc for their next creation, 333, which concentrated alot more on the musical side of things rather than theatrics, but the video was even more stupid than the last! This spawned the singles The Bear Song (which appears in the Jim Carey film 'Dumb and Dumber') and Slave Boy. In 1995 they toured the west coast, and played a giant rock party in Denver to over 4,000 people.
They released what would be their last single for quite a while in late 1995, which was their duet with Hulk Hogan performing Garry Glitters classic 'Leader of the Gang', which scored them a third Top 40 hit in England. After this, Green Jelly dissapeared... or did they?
After 'Leader of the Gang' was released, members started to leave to persue other interests. BUT, Green Jell˙ never split. By 1998, all the original members apart from Moronic Dicktator had left, Dunderhead and Rootin' being the last ones to go. In 2000, Moronic hooked up with DJ Dumbass/Monkeyman and Karma in Hollywood, which is how the new Jello lineup came to be. The current lineup can be found somewhere on the News page, although Green Jell˙ is renowned for having a high rate of leaving guitarists!
Green Jell˙ are currently working on a whole bunch of new projects including an album, a club, and a new video. They continue to play live shows, sporting a fancy array of new/refurbished costumes and gimmics.
Source: http://www.ihategreenjelly.com/main.html |
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