Spencer the Gardener is a potent ensemble.
Always ready for fun times and incredible live shows.
Music Style Pop/Rock
Musical Influences Violent Femmes, Cake, Latin Playboy's
Similar Artists Cake, Jane's Addiction, B-52's, They Might Be Giants [+]Spencer the Gardener is a potent ensemble.
Always ready for fun times and incredible live shows.
Music Style Pop/Rock
Musical Influences Violent Femmes, Cake, Latin Playboy's
Similar Artists Cake, Jane's Addiction, B-52's, They Might Be Giants.
Artist History
Lulu, if you don't know, is neither a racy woman nor a messy dog. Lulu - Run Away with Lulu, to be exact - is the latest album of Spencer's longtime, come-and-go Santa Barbara-based band Spencer the Gardener. Filled with genre-bending songs melding salsa, new wave, mariachi, jazz, pop, rock, and surf 'n' sunshine - all stamped with Spencer's trademark helium-esque vocals - Lulu marks the band's fourth album and the first since splitting up back in 1998. Spencer the Gardener is once again mowing through California's do-it-yourself music scene.
That's the scene the band almost took over in the early 1990s, when they were touring from San Diego to Tahoe, with big-time sellouts at Slim's in San Francisco along the way. Two albums - The Boy with Two Big Heads and Happiness Comes to My House - garnered enough praise for record labels to take note. But then they crashed, literally, into an oncoming driver who was doing 80 miles per hour on the wrong side of the road near Riverside. Every bone in Spencer's face was broken, the drummer was nearly killed, and the other band members sustained injuries as well.
'Life is filled with ups and downs and everyone tells you that and you say, "Whatever." Well, I never set out to prove that, but I've done a pretty good job.'
- Spencer Barnitz
But no worries, they were playing shows again by 1994, and even released Kiss Me in the Deep Blue Sea. Times weren't the same, understandably, and by 1998, Spencer the Gardener was no more. "People say, and they're right, that your own enthusiasm can take you far," reminisced Spencer over an American Spirit cigarette last week in his apartment, which overlooks the roof of Jimmy's Oriental Gardens, where I first crossed paths with him in 2000. "But my enthusiasm was gone at a certain point because I stopped being able to see the light at the end of the tunnel."
Not that the music stopped. Spencer the Gardener cohorts Nate Birkey (trumpet), John Schnackenberg (sax), Cougar Estrada (percussion and keys), Brett
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