The Loop : The Morning Kennedy Was Shot - Pictures of Things Worth Looking At

The Morning Kennedy Was Shot - Pictures of Things Worth Looking At (2007)
(*couldn't find the album cover big enough, so here's a lovely photo of them by Miss Janet Zhou www.janetzhou.com)

As I've mentioned many times previously, a good portion of my Sundays in college were spent either with local bands or searching online for music from AZ local bands for my show The Basement. I heard hundreds of songs from several dozen (if not hundreds) of Arizona bands, but it's safe to say that The Morning Kennedy Was Shot was one of my all-time favorites.

It wasn't always that way though (let me explain) I knew about some of it's members from their time in the band Not Quite Bernadette, who my high school booked on a show I helped promote my junior year. Their demo kept turning up in my CD pile after I somehow got it from one of the members at Skateland in Chandler during one of the RockNRollerskate days. I really do miss those days, where at any given show you'd go home with 5 or 6 jewel cases and discs with handwritten titles or photocopied inserts. Even to the point that I was doing The Basement, I got irritated if a band just told me to listen to their MySpace. No homie, do some legwork.

That band eventually broke up and they came back together with other members as The Morning Kennedy Was Shot. Their name came up A LOT as I started to become friends with the Dear and the Headlights boys. They would bring them up alongside the band Kirsh is a Monster, and the DATH boys even brought me hand scribbled demos of both bands from their van when they came to play in the studio. I kept getting the bands mixed up for some reason, somehow always thinking one was the other. Kirsh was not nearly as polished, in fact unsettlingly sloppy, therefore I assumed Morning Kennedy was the same way.

And man, was I wrong. A few months later, the drummer Wayne reached out about their EP release for Pictures of Things Worth Looking At. I remember booking February 28th really far in advance for their March 3rd release party at Modified. Again, all I had were the demos, so I wasn't sure what to expect. They came in and immediately the space felt different. This was a band whose music and overall "vibe" created a sense of warmth, and I remember thinking something awesome was about to happen. We played a few album tracks, one of which "The Rooster" jumped out immediately, and the band played a few songs standing in a row in the conference room. To the end of the show, that was one of the best performances I've had.

This was a clearly concentrated effort of songs, although short. They tended to get lumped into a more "jam" genre, however it was clear that, weither they wanted to or not, had an incredible pop knack. "Nice Moves" could have been a huge smash song had they had the resources of say a Passion Pit or Yeasayer, a song that when I made it my ringtone, had several friends asking what it was. The ambiance parallels that of Morning View era Incubus "maybe because they both have songs about floating on rivers) showing that this band had insane mainstream potential. Their live show was pretty great, with four intense personalities commanding the stage.

However, all the potential in the world only works if you're creatively on the same page, and eventually the band dissolved into other projects, such as Coats and Villa. It frustrates me that Phoenix could only offer so much for a band like this, who created what I feel was one of the best albums of that year. However, in going back to the demo CD exchange of the Skateland days, the resources are getting there to get bands farther, maybe MKWS was just that much too early for the trend of music going now, that has propelled bands whose albums are clearly trumped by a record like this.

Since I talk so much about these performances at The Blaze, here's theirs! I was sporting a pretty sweet hat.


And the full band version, which I think captures their personalities perfectly: