Trip Shakespeare
| Trip Shakespeare | |
|---|---|
| Origin | Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States |
| Genres | Alternative rock |
| Labels | Restless, Twin/Tone, A&M |
| Associated acts | Pleasure, Semisonic |
| Members |
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Trip Shakespeare was an American rock band formed in Minneapolis, Minnesota in the late 1980s/early 1990s. The band included Dan Wilson and John Munson, who would later go on to be founding members of Semisonic.
The band originated when Harvard University English student Matt Wilson (guitar/vocals) teamed up with Elaine Harris (drums), a Harvard grad student in biological anthropology, in the early 1980s. Harris had responded to a notice posted by Wilson seeking "wicked percussion hands."
Wilson and Munson had played together in an earlier band (E Brown), and Wilson had not been impressed by his bass playing, so he didn't want Munson to audition for the new band. "But he came over anyway and played, and he'd improved a lot," Wilson later recalled. "We ended up begging him to just give it a try and stay around."
In 1986 drummer Tim Rowe, who had played with Munson in several other bands, joined the group as percussionist. They performed as a quartet for several months before Rowe left the band during the recording of Apple Head Man to join The Nietzsches with the former guitarist for E. Brown, Jimmy Harry.
Matt Wilson originally proposed that the band be named Kirk Shakespeare, after two of his heroes: James T. Kirk and William Shakespeare. "I think maybe John and Elaine didn't want to be in a band named after Matt's two heroes, so they changed Kirk to Trip," explained Dan Wilson, Matt's older brother, who joined the band later.
In 1986, the trio self-released their debut album. "The first album, Applehead Man, we just put all the songs we knew on there," Matt Wilson later said. One of these was the title track, which described a head being carved from "the brightest fruit...furthest from the road on the apple farm."
With its lineup complete, the band released a follow-up album, Are You Shakespearienced?, on the Minneapolis-based independent label Gark Records in 1988. Recorded live in the studio without headsets, the album featured "Toolmaster of Brainerd," a song that "insanely links dairyland folklore with the enduring rock myth of guitar-hero supremacy." Hailing from "Brainerd where the children go to milking school," the Toolmaster
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