Bio Download:

Tripping Daisy is:  Tim DeLaughter, Mark Pirro, Philip Karnats, Benjamin Curtis and Wes Berggren.   

In 1998, Tripping Daisy gave Island Records chairman, Davitt Sigerson, a new red convertible, and he swallowed the key.  Looking back, the memo announcing Jesus Hits Like the Atom Bomb’s release was likely stapled to the one announcing the termination of Tripping Daisy’s relationship with the label after three albums, including 1993’s Bill and 1995’s I am an Elastic Firecracker.  It’s a shame that Tripping Daisy wasted such a great album on a label that didn’t get it or even want to.  It’s unfortunate that the band wasn’t allowed to give songs as frequently startling as the ones on Jesus Hits Like the Atom Bomb the chance to astonish more people. 

 The songs would/could/should have done just that.  The band’s Island finale was a parting shot that feels like a summer kiss . . . a singles compilation that rode the new wave all the way to the Beach Boys.  From the Bic-lighter pop of “Sonic Bloom”, to the ice-cream-truck keyboards of “Mechanical Breakdown”, to the next wave of “Field Day Jitters” and “New Plains Medicine” radio single followed radio single, but none of them ever ended up there.  “What a travesty that was,” singer Tim DeLaughter says.  “It never even had a shot.  I’m still livid over that whole thing.” 

But the group rebounded, starting its own label (Good Records, which has now expanded into a retail outlet), and releasing last year’s The Tops Off Our Head.   DeLaughter considers it one of the band’s best moments on record.  The disc was comprised of one 22-minute song—loosely organized improvisations, really—divided into seven sections, post-Island full-length.  It was a chance to pick up where they left off on Atom Bomb and run headlong into new adventures.  Less than a year ago, Tripping Daisy was knee-deep in its own future. 

On October 27, 1999, Tripping Daisy guitarist, Wes Berggren, died.  He fell asleep at home around midnight and never woke up again.  He was 28 years old.

 How do you continue as a band after something like that happens?  How do you keep going into the future knowing your friend and band mate won’t be making the trip?  Here’s the simple, hard truth:  You can’t.  You don’t.  You can’t replace someone who was irreplaceable, and you can’t finish the game without all the players.  When Wes Berggren passed away, Tripping Daisy went with him. 

 That doesn’t mean that both Wes and the band can’t live on.  They can.  They will.  They do.  Tripping Daisy, the fourth and final album (on Sugar Fix Recordings/Good Records) the group recorded together, is testament to that fact.  It’s a farewell embrace you feel in your bones for days.

 Recorded by the group under the umbrella of their own imprint, Good Records, and co-released with LA-based indie Sugar Fix Recordings, the disc is the sound of a good band getting better.  It’s a group finding its own voice and singing its heart out.  In a way, it’s fitting that “One Through Four”, a song off the band’s 1992 debut, Bill, reappears here in a slightly altered form because Tripping Daisy is the beginning and the end.  The group’s past and future are summed up in one hour and 14 songs. 

 Tripping Daisy is the Sunday morning hangover after Jesus Hits Like the Atom Bomb’s Saturday night party.  The album is much subtler than Jesus Hits Like the Atom Bomb, detonating in small pops rather than three-guitar explosions.  The band explores the five-part harmonies it only toyed with previously.  “You First” and “I Am Good” are scruffy lullabies, with DeLaughter’s affected vocals wrapping around Berggren and Karnats’ guitar effects.  “Kids Are Calling” is destined to be the summer song of 2000, all la-la choruses and driving backbeat.  Even though all the lyrics were written before Berggren’s passing, even DeLaughter admits most of the songs are almost eerie to listen to now, so prescient are they. 

 One of those songs, “Soothing Jubilee”, features a special appearance by Wes’ father, Don Berggren.  He added the tender, Fender Rhodes melody that begins the song. 

 “Wes’ dad is a phenomenal musician,” DeLaughter says.  “He’s like a classical professor.  He knows everything about classical music, and he can play.  He can play piano and guitar.  He came up there to listen to what we were doing, and I asked him if he’d want to play on that track, and he said yeah.  So I just went in there and started singing the part, and he played it.”

 Tripping Daisy also includes the last song the band ever recorded with Wes Berggren, the album-opening, heart-stopping “Community Mantra.”  As the band says in the disc’s liner notes, “We found it most appropriate placed at the beginning of the journey where we often find interest in stories where the beginning tells you the end.”   

“We had already recorded that song with Wes,” DeLaughter says.  “We just needed to go back and mix it, and then he passed away before we could mix it.  We were already getting ready to work on another record when we’d finished that one, just getting ready to do it.  ‘Community Mantra’ was like the first of it.  That’s what was happening when Wes passed away.  So, we were like, ‘What are we gonna do with this stuff?’”

 “We were kind of in a transition sound-wise at the time of making this record.  Like, when you hear ‘Community Mantra’, that almost sounds like an epic Yes song or something, real prog.  We didn’t know where the sound was gonna go, but it was evolving into something different.  And it happened at the beginning of that record, so it really wasn’t all cohesive but we decided to just keep recording, put it all together, and the see what we had.  And when we came out with this record, it was like, ‘Wow!’  We hadn’t really paid attention to it, and it turned into what it is.  It’s a great record.”

 Five months after Berggren left them, the remaining members of the band are moving on.  DeLaughter is readying a new group, The Polyphonic Spree, and focusing on Good Records.  Drummer Ben Curtis is giving a helping hand to Karnat’s new band, When Babies Eat Pennies.  And bassist Mark Pirro has landed some production opportunities as well as playing with DeLaughter in the above-mentioned project.

 “It’s completely different from anything I’ve ever done, and it’s something I’ve been wanting to do for a while,” DeLaughter says of his new project.  “It’s gonna be more on a symphonic scale, a lot of voices.  Right now, I’m piecing it all together.  It’s going to be interesting.”  And as for the rest of the band, he says, “Everybody’s just kind of finding themselves at this point, musically as well.  Everybody in that band is extremely talented, so each one of them could do their own thing.”

 Tripping Daisy may be the end of one band, but it’s the beginning of four new lives.

tripping daisy website