Our band, Margaret Explosion, played a Friday Happy Hour gig at the Bug Jar for two years in the late nineties. The band at that time was Jack Schaefer on guitar, Peggi on sax, me on drums and Pete LaBonne on bass. We eventually recorded a cd with this lineup but because Peggi and I were playing with a different Margaret Explosion lineup we called the band on the cd “Invisible Idiot.”
Casey, the Bug Jar owner and bartender, brought in vegetarian food from the India House and Rolling Rock beer was a dollar a bottle. One night, before the band began, I set up a stool, a light and white canvas background in the back room and asked whoever was there if they would like to sit for a photo. I remember not calling it a “mugshot” so that aspect wasn’t overplayed but the setting dictated the pose. I’m thinking about putting some of those prints in the show at RoC.
I was using a one megapixel Kodak DC210 camera that my father bought for me at the Kodak employee camera shop. I brought home about thirty photos that night and took them into Photoshop where I converted them into black & white bitmap photos with a pronounced dot pattern. I created Quark documents to scale and printed tiled pages on our laser printer. The print-outs were shown in the Bug Jar later that year.
Margaret Explosion as Invisible Idiot – “Abstract Express”