Blitch Bango

Bio

What is a Blitch Bango?

Well, gather around, because an old man is about to speak.

Back in 1922, Blitch Bango was formed as a 17 piece cosmopolitan jug band, led primarily by juggist/vocalist/songwriter Hymie Mandeville. At that time, the music drew upon the essence of washing and kitchen utensils, with a blend of juke and spasm-based musics. Instruments consisted of jugs of all sizes, razor straps, and whatever else was handy and available.

In the late 1940's, when south-pacific-influenced music was just taking off, Blitch Bango became the first jug band to embrace exotica (as it was not yet called), adding bird calls, frog chirps, ape noises, strange percussion, and the band's first stringed instruments (lutes and lyres). Though contemplating a name change to Jugzilla, the release of Martin Denny's seminal Exotica changed Blitch's ideas and they decided to scrap the name change and just bill its rendition of tropo-Polynesian ersatz music as "Jug-zotica."

After exotica music turned out to be just a 1950's fad, Blitch Bango turned its attention on a new thrill: rock and roll. Contemplating but rejecting another name change to The Jug-ernauts (avoiding confusion between itself and a 1980's thrash-metal band), the band finally ditched the jug backbone, picked up electric guitars, and made its first electric music. Fifteen minutes later, the band put down the electric guitars, and decided to take guitar lessons, since no one in the band could play.

Then in 2001, after some 40 years of guitar instruction, some 79 years after the band formed, and the deaths and replacements of all the original band members, Blitch Bango finally released its first recording: Modern Christmas Classics In Various Styles. By this time, the primary band member was B. Mathis, a friendless recluse who lived in a dank school basement.

Over the course of the next 19-odd years, Blitch Bango picked up additional members, and released several more recordings of original material, many of them groundbending internet-only releases. The latest release is the surf and rockabilly spawned Low Tide, proving that Blitch Bango lives topically in the present, but musically in the past, still with all the arrogance and chauvinism of a teenager with perfectly coiffed hair.

The current lineup:

Click Here for Blitch Bango's Inspirations.