Brainiac

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Days before flying to New York City to ink a major-label deal that might have propelled his band Brainiac to stardom, front man Tim Taylor was killed in a car crash. But that’s only the beginning of the story. Rooted in the musical community and history of their native Rust Belt home, Dayton, Ohio, Brainiac left its punk and New Wave brand of indie rock on musicians ranging from Beck to the Mars Volta. Now, more than twenty-five years after the release of its swan song EP, Brainiac—called “the great lost band of the 90s” by Variety—has reunited, finding newfound fame, a celebrity-laced documentary, live shows, and a sense of closure.

Days before flying to New York City to ink a major-label deal that might have propelled his band Brainiac to stardom, front man Tim Taylor was killed in a car crash. But that’s only the beginning of the story. Rooted in the musical community and history of their native Rust Belt home, Dayton, Ohio, Brainiac left its punk and New Wave brand of indie rock on musicians ranging from Beck to the Mars Volta. Now, more than twenty-five years after the release of its swan song EP, Brainiac—called “the great lost band of the 90s” by Variety—has reunited, finding newfound fame, a celebrity-laced documentary, live shows, and a sense of closure.

About the author

Justin Vellucci started writing about independent music in 2001. A staff writer at PopMatters and Spectrum Culture, he's also written for Punk Planet, Delusions of Adequacy and Gannett’s Jetty. He lives with his wife and two children in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Photo by Inbal K. Vellucci

  • Publication date: 5/16/24

    ISBN: 979-8-9891947-0-4

    Format(s): Paperback, ebook

    Pages: 174

    Size: 5x8

    Includes 20 B&W photos

  • "Touching on just about every part of Brainiac’s story, the book does an admirable job tracing the band’s history while analyzing what made them stand out amongst their peers."

    —Simon Workman, The Fire Note

    “Brainiac was the direct descendant of Devo to me, they were that rare combination of avant-garde and backyard punk that is today’s gold standard of indie music, but in their day was at the bleeding edge of an art form still worthy of magazines, discussion and hope.”

    —David Sardy, producer/mix engineer/composer

    "Brainiac was one of the greatest bands of the 90s with an original epic bombastic sound and story worthy of a Greek tragedy."

    —Nigel Harrison, Blondie bassist

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  • Taken from chapter 4, “Ride yourself away, each and every day”

    By 1994, Brainiac already had some serious touring chops and a full-length record under their belt.

    “You tour, tour, tour,” John Schmersal says. “And so, they were still kind of touring on that first record, so to speak. They had done a ton of touring.”

    Within months of Schmersal joining Brainiac, the new guitarist had learned the majority of his parts and was helping to write new material. He also had recorded—with former Pink Lady member Steve Schmoll riding the faders, no less—a song with the group, “Dexatrim.” Simple Solution Records released that song in January 1994 as the A-side of a split single with the band Lazy.

    For the record, though, the first piece of music Schmersal composed for the band was the screeching mic-on-amp “solo” on “Meathook Manicure.”

    “It was the first thing that I wrote that [Taylor] really connected with, that he was like, ‘That’s good!’” Schmersal proudly recalls. “That four-track [recording] ended up getting elevated on Bonsai Superstar. It’s just got that crazy feedback solo at the end of it—that’s just a microphone feeding back and kind of cutting out.”

    Schmersal admits today that, when he joined Brainiac around 1993/1994, he “was really hungry to be a part of the songwriting.”

    “I think Tim quickly realized like, ‘Oh, it’s better not to fight him or whatever about this,’” he laughs.

    Then, as always, Brainiac hit the road and toured some more.

    In 1994, Brainiac—featuring Schmersal for the first time on lead guitar—played in Lexington, Kentucky, with Rodan, who by then were putting the finishing touches on Rusty for Corey Rusk’s Quarterstick Records, a Touch and Go imprint. Brainiac also played in Green Bay, Wisconsin, with Jawbox, then at Dayton’s Palace Club with Shellac.

    They followed Jawbox through Connecticut, Massachusetts, and West Virginia. Then, days before Bonsai Superstar was released, they performed with them again at the Blind Pig in Champaign, Illinois.

    Schmersal, as a child, admits he aspired to do stand-up comedy. That resonated as he took stages each night throughout the US—and in the van between dates.

    “One of the things I realized pretty immediately on tour is it was a great place to try out material and mess around with people,” Schmersal jokes. “So, we would record crank calls and stuff. We would just open up the phone book and crank call people.”

    Onstage, though, it was all business.

    “They were pretty relentless about touring,” says Schmoll, the former Pink Lady musician who sometimes sold merch or tinkered with the live sound at Brainiac shows. “They were very serious about what they were doing. ‘OK, we’re going to make this happen!’”

    Brainiac toured again with Girls Against Boys, hitting San Francisco and Boulder, Colorado. They later joined Shudder to Think and Sunny Day Real Estate in Minneapolis, Milwaukee, and Chicago.

    With the new lineup, Brainiac played Chicago’s Metro again in early December. They ended a busy year with a show at the Black Cat in Washington, DC, on December 16.

    Scott McCloud remembers Brainiac supporting Girls Against Boys on the road a while after the latter had released Venus Luxure No. 1 Baby.

    “I get my timelines mixed up but, soon after that, we started playing shows with Brainiac as support,” McCloud says. “Girls Against Boys was also doing a lot of touring with Touch and Go labelmates the Jesus Lizard, and it wasn’t long before all three bands were playing on the road pretty consistently together.”

    “The point being Girls Against Boys and Brainiac hit it off like a house on fire from the get-go,” he jokes. “They were up for touring all the time.”

    Next up? Another record.

    “It wasn’t like we were a band that hadn’t made a record in five years,” Schmersal says. “But, when you’re that young in your career, I think that it felt like it was overdue.”

    Brainiac trekked back to New York—specifically, Brooklyn—to record its sophomore LP, with Eli Janney again handling engineering and production. (The LP was mixed at New York’s Ward Joe, then mastered down at Ardent in Memphis.)

    There was more of a degree of experimentation while recording Bonsai Superstar than there was on the band’s debut, which had been cut with Bodine just a year or so earlier. Schmersal, a creative force on his own, made his mark early, contributing and writing guitar sections for the track “You Wrecked My Hair.”

    Brainiac also seemed to get a bit of a thrill toying with notions of “found sound” on the new recordings. Shortly before the Brooklyn sessions, Taylor had purchased a weird and somewhat random record—an instructional piece for parrots—in a store in Knoxville, Tennessee. He included some of its voice samples on “Fucking with the Altimiter.” To achieve the preferred effect on the song, Taylor sang parts of his vocals in front of a fan, thus the stuttering.

    “When we went in to make that record [Bonsai Superstar], it was pretty raw and fresh,” Schmersal says. “It was pretty spontaneous compared to anything else that we did in the future, that I was involved with. There wasn’t any time to meditate on what we were doing. I think that things just kept lining up for us and we were just chasing after the carrot as we went.”

    “[Brainiac] was basically, exactly, the band that I would want to be in,” Schmersal adds. “It really was the perfect band for me to join for what I was doing.”