“Brother P-Touch” is a song I originally wrote for the Ho Hos that became a flagship number for my last San Francisco band, the Amazons. I share it here with a San Diego twist and a fun anecdote about the power of Web distribution.
When I penned this number around 1993, I was writing about printers for MacWEEK magazine. The Brother P-Touch was and remains a very popular line of label printers. When I first heard the name, I pictured this lecherous messianic figure, kind of a cross between Rasputin and David Koresh, and built the song from there. The chorus leads with the exhortation, “Brother P-Touch — raise your arms!” I don’t think any of my San Diego expat bandmates ever realized I was evoking not only a charismatic preacher but the Penetrators’ song “Nervous Fingers,” during which those of us in the pit would raise our arms and wiggle our fingers.
Indeed, the song (which appeared on the Amazons’ self-distributed 1997 CD) did traditionally elicit some arm-raising from the audience. And it also won a surprising cult following among an unexpected international constituency: sound engineers and other techy types who commonly use the Brother P-Touch to label their gear. (Amazons bassist Jason Brownell helped seed it virally through his own development work for Liquid Audio and later Sony.)
Jason recently told Amazons drummer Todd Barker and me this story: “The other day I was talking to a friend who works for a company that sells technology for cell phones. He was recently in Tampere, Finland, on a business trip when the guy he was visiting walked in with a Brother P-Touch printer. Craig spontaneously began singing the chorus to ‘Brother P-Touch,’ and to his surprise the Finnish gentleman began singing along!
“After a couple choruses with associated arm-raising, my friend asked him how he knew the song. The Finnish guy said, ‘I downloaded it over the Internet.’ ”
Shades of Kraftwerk’s “Pocket Calculator” methinks…I did a funny little recording in Jr High using a telephone keypad…
These days technology to me is tractors and watering troughs…I wonder if I could sample the bellowing of the cows as they await their first feeding in the morning…we could use the chickens clucking as a rythm track and kinda re-mix “Green Acres”…hip hop goes cluck cluck…
I’m a sick man
Patrick Works
King of the Barnyard
I never got the “Nervous Fingers” reference but I’ve always loved the manic quality of this song. Great bass solo too. The Amazons got this wonderfully fresh, portable sound from their acoustic freedom — I hate the term ‘unplugged’, as if it’s just a momentary disconnection — Matthew, didn’t you guys even perform on a bus once or twice?
My first P-Touch (eek) had a dial on it to select the letters, like a tedious direct descendant of those original clicky Dymo I.D. labelers that created the raised lettering through the plastic labels.
Dave Fleminger: We actually spent about a month performing on the Mexican bus as it drove San Franciscans from one performance piece to another. The portability of this lineup was truly liberating (viz. our current discussion of who had to schlep the amps).
With the Amazons, we adhered closely to Jonathan Richman’s dicta that (a) you shouldn’t use more gear than you can carry yourself in one trip and (b) the volume shouldn’t be loud enough to hurt the ears of infants. Indeed, one tactical consideration when creating this band was that Todd, Jason and I could rock out in my living room while I watched my baby daughter sleep.
This song is great… but I hate P-touches. The printout is totally ugly and they get jammed up all the time. We need to bring back the machine that stamps letters in the plastic tape.
Dave Ellison: I liked those old-school label printers, too … The rotating wheel that contained the letters made them look like the USS Enterprise!
A gun that looked like “Star Trek” and also printed stuff? Too cool when I was eight!
These Dymo label embossers rank up there with mimeography in my hit parade of retro short-run publishing tools …
When I was a little kid (maybe six?) I loved that thing and would label everything I could get my hands on: books, furniture, oranges, other labels. … I even labeled the label-maker!
So my mom made the very sensible suggestion that I make some practical labels to remind me to do stuff like brush my teeth.
So I stuck a label reading “Brush your teeth” to the bathroom mirror. And because I didn’t like being told what to do, after a couple of days I started getting pissed at the label for hanging there noodging me about my teeth.
So then I didn’t brush my teeth, just to spite the label.
And then I peeled off the label and threw it away. And then I didn’t brush my teeth, just to spite the memory of the label.
I had a mouthful of cavities by the time I was nine.
Damn label.
Some of my old records (Blondie “Parallel Lines” comes to mind) still have those labels on them. It always takes me back when I pull one of those out of the sleeve….
I miss the Amazons! Are you out there, Jason and Todd?
By the way, Matt, I followed that MACWeek link and I love the fact that you posted the lyrics to Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out” in the middle of your article. Other than that, I didn’t understand a word of the article!
Ray: When it was first rumored that Apple would name its next OS “Mac OS X,” Mac the Knife started lobbying to have the company acknowledge its debt to X the band. This resulted in a lively little relationship with Billy Zoom, who turned out to be a Mac fan himself.
Mac the Knife also started a contest that would award a prize mug to any reader who could send in an eight-track tape of “Metal Machine Music.” (That particular tape never arrived, but we did receive an eight-track deck and a whole shelf of arcane rock classics to play on it.)
Oh, and Mac the Knife ended up pen pals with Harlan Ellison, and he also tracked down a bunch of the original cast members of “Hair” for advice on staging a revival in the MacWEEK offices. Good times!
RE: the Dymo label maker.
As a kid I used to type naughty words and put them in random places. What fun!
My mom was a Dymo freak. She was slightly OCD and organized all the nuts, bolts and tools in the garage, categorizing and then labeling everything with that shiny black tape and embossed white type. There were labels in the kitchen too, on the shelves, like: “spices”, “cleaning supplies” or “snacks”.
Now she uses post it notes.
Matthew: was mimeograph the same as a ditto machine?
Remember the smell of that purple ink? It’s a wonder I got any homework done.
Kristen,
It’s a good thing everything in the kitchen was labeled, or else someone might have confused cleaning supplies with snacks! I think the popularity had more to do with the fun of twirling the dial and crimping letters into the tape than with the labels themselves. Kind of like how popping bubble wrap helps relieve anxiety.
What a fun thread this turned out to be. I have been nostalgic about the Dymo labelers for years, but had forgotten the proper name. And then mimeograph! My mother was a preschool teacher, and somehow we had an old “ditto machine” on a counter in the garage. I guess she made “handouts” for the parents that way, as the particular brand of preschool she was involved in (from 1960 to about 1992) is called “Parent Participation.” It’s gone now, but we had the thing long after the mimeograph era had ended. I wouldn’t be surprised if Ray Brandes remembers it from Town Criers rehearsals in 1987.
Matthew gave me a copy of The Amazons’ disc, and I have to admit that “Brother P-Touch” has an insidious hook. It returned to haunt me only after some time had passed. But like a good pop song should, the melody of that refrain lodges in the brain to filter back in when not expected.
I’d like to own a Dymo labeler--but can you still get the rolls of vinyl tape? I suppose it’s all out there on eBay. Let’s not all go looking at once! The cool factor here is that you can label stuff in your recording studio with it. Home-made “stomp boxes” too. Beats Sharpie on blue tape / masking tape any day.
I love getting turned to new music…even if its “old” I’ve been cleaning the house and put this on…i’m hearing dylan, VU, and violent femmes…at a party that none of them wants to be at…very cool stuff…i’m impressed!
Here’s the Amazons’ favorite portrait: playing the Mexican bus in San Francisco. Even better, we don’t have any idea who the guy on the far right is!