“Brainiac From Dayton, Ohio!”
Revisiting Brainiac Thanks to a Documentary
The short: If you have Amazon Prime and like modern music documentaries, check out Transmissions After Zero, a documentary about the band Brainiac. Their story is shrouded in the death of their frontman, but this gives the band justice in a loving way.
The long: Not long before I graduated high school in the spring of 1997, I was at Fitzgerald’s to see Shudder to Think play. I was a newbie to Shudder. I heard a little bit of them because of their brief run as a “Buzz Clip” band on MTV a few years before. Why I was at the show was because I enjoyed 50,000 BC, especially because of their reworked version of “Red House,” which was originally on their Funeral At the Movies album. That tune was played on the Sunday night specialty show “Lunar Rotation” with David Sadof on the Houston alternative rock station, and I loved it.
I got to the show early and saw Kevin March walk in. I thought he was Shudder frontman Craig Wedren at first (shaved head with facial hair), but some force greater than me prevented me from making a foolish mistake.
I waited to see most of Shudder’s set, and that included watching the opening acts. Skeleton Key, with their unorthodox percussion, made a nice little racket. Their frontman mentioned they had an album out that day on Capitol Records. I had never heard of them. I figured they were doomed because this was around the time a lot of major labels dropped these bands they scooped up post-Nirvana and Green Day. Sadly, that happened, but they stuck together for a little while longer.
I had no idea what awaited me with Brainiac, but boy, they made an impression on me. I had never heard of a band like Brainiac before. Particulars of the show are hard to remember, honestly. I remember how Tim Taylor kept yelling “Brainiac from Dayton, Ohio!” over and over. They were a punk band with keyboards to my high school ears, not knowing the depth of their diverse influences until years later.
Either a week or two weeks later, while watching MTV’s Week in Rock, Kurt Loder reported the sad news that Tim was killed in a car accident. I got a call from a classmate Thomas, whom I saw at the Shudder show, and we were both shocked. The band was about to sign to a major label, but wisely broke up following Tim’s death. Thus, a legacy of a great band — and what might have been — started.
Which leads me to Transmissions After Zero. I had heard about the project in development a couple of years ago. Per the standard of our day with the convenience of streaming, I got around to watching it on Amazon Prime a few weeks ago. At a little under two hours, I watched a great documentary about who this band was.
Tim’s mother and sister are interviewed, as well as the four surviving members of the band, in addition to members of Girls Against Boys, Cedric Bixler-Zavala, Fred Armisen, and Steve Albini. Going beat-by-beat to how the band formed and recorded their albums, all sorts of Brainiac tunes are the soundtrack.
It’s explained how the band almost signed with a major label around the time of Tim’s passing. Might sound harsh and cynical, but the band could have wound up like their friends Girls Against Boys, making a record that moved their sound forward with a bigger budget, but on a major label that didn’t know what to do with them. This was right before major labels dropped a ton of bands because they weren’t blockbuster artists in the late 1990s/early 2000s.
As much as we can wonder what Brainiac could have become, we have this documentary about what they were. A huge influence on those who played in the band and those who loved them (especially with Cedric’s comments about they influenced him as a performer), their legacy is the people who spread the word about them after they broke up.
I’m a music documentary junkie. It’s great there are many docs about 1970s and 1980s bands, but I welcome more on 1990s bands. It’s further proof that the last decade of the century produced quality artists, big and small.