Exploding TV's
From The Secret History of the Cedar Valley
History (by Chuck Hoffman)
Exploding TVs was the first band I ever played live in. The concept and band name originated with me and some of my friends at East High during my senior year, so the original lineup could be said to have consisted of myseld (Chuck Hoffman, Aaron Pierce, Jeremy Spaulding, and Tom Halverson, and would have probably also had Seth Thomson if he hadn't already graduated and gone off to ISU the previous year.
We had a couple practices at Tom's house, kinda goofing-around jam things, and I was playing bass and coming up with a lot of the riffs to go with Jeremy's lyrics, but I felt like we needed something to motivate us to kick it in to high gear. So I talked Steve-Al at The Garden into booking us a gig there, which at the time seemed a lot easier than I had expected.
When I brought the good news to the guys at school, they promptly quit on me. I started trying to figure out what I was going to do to fulfill my obligation to deliver a show for this gig. I ended up calling a couple acquaintances that I knew played instruments -- guitar player Jon Dennis and Fantasy Kitchen drummer Josh Stewart -- and explaining my situation, and both seemed up for joining my band. Jon brought in his friend Aaron Hoel, bringing me around to his place to meet him, and while his taste was a bit more metal than mine, the guy could definitely play.
With just three weeks until the gig, we started practicing at the Stewarts' home. It turned out that these guys had jumped on the early 90s grunge/alternative bandwagon big time and started introducing covers of popular songs by the likes of Stone Temple Pilots and Pearl Jam. This grated on me a bit, as it conflicted with my conception of the band as a kind of punk rock informed by Joy Division and Sonic Youth, and resulted in some heated arguments.
Nonetheless, come the date of the show, we delivered a sizeable turnout, and a long enough set -- a mixture of their covers and originals that I had written with the "original" lineup, that we filled an evening sufficiently even being the only band on the bill. It went over quite well.
Not long after, I turned up for another practice that I was told would be at Aaron's house, only to receive a phone call there informing me that I was kicked out of the band. Seriously unclassy, but apparently the other guys had booked another Exploding TVs gig and decided to replace me with Fantasy Kitchen's band-leader Jeremy Stewart. I was kicked out of the band I started.
I'm pretty sure the band-name/identity "Exploding TV's" was done away with after that second gig, and I think that lineup of guys disintegrated about the same time. But for a long time afterward, I would be approached every year or so by someone asking me, "Hey, didn't you play in Fantasy Kitchen?"
Band Members
- Chuck Hoffman
- Aaron Pierce
- Jeremy Spaulding
- Tom Halverson
- Jon Dennis
- Aaron Hoel
- Josh Stewart
- Jeremy Stewart
Recordings
I had made a recording of our show at The Garden, however, and released a tape of highlights from it on TapeSNotRecords under the title, "Once And Only Once, It's Exploding TVs!" The tape cover I designed for it had the word "revenge" hidden somewhere in it in large lettering, though exactly how its release constituted an act of revenge is a piece of logic that has been lost to my mind since. No one bought a copy, even after I had placed two of the best tracks on the "Tell Us You Hate Us" compilation.
