My Brother's Band-Project Three

The words have become dreaded to me. “My brother’s band,” words that could take the legitimacy away from the pre-famous Beatles. Seeing Banana Phonetic over and over again, and being more blown away every time by the mixtures of hair raising, face melting sounds, I struggle with the fact that I struggled to get my friends to come see them perform. To me Banana Phonetic is Banana Phonetic. To my friends who haven’t seen, Banana Phonetic is my brother’s band.

I went to Brooklyn New York on Saturday November 20th with my girlfriend Jess and my friend Bubba. Jess knew and had seen Banana Phonetic multiple times before, and Bubba had never seen or met them. We got to Brooklyn around three in the afternoon and met up with Tom, Akhil , Doty, Andy, and about fifteen other friends at a German beer hall. With Brooklyn being the hipster capital of America, or at least the east coast, the beer hall was filled with flannel shirts and fluorescent Ray Bans. The hall was a nice democratic bar with twenty foot long wooden tables allowing people to converse with a number of people at the same time, some of which people had never met. The next three and a half hours consisted of many liter filled mugs of delicious German beer, old friends catching up, and new friends getting to know each other. Along with the buzz from the German beer, talking with Tom and the other band members you could feel another type of buzz around them. They knew the Trash Bar was going to be full later that night, and they were pumped. After spending the afternoon drinking and joking, the band had to go get while everyone raged on.



The pervious time I had been to the Trash Bar there was happy hour from eight to nine in which certain beer and mixed drinks were completely free. The previous time I had been to the Trash Bar, the happy hour killed me. I warned Jess and Bubba about the happy hour and we decided to take a break from seven to eight. We stopped at a dimly lit bar across the street where the was a band playing some decent live music in the back. We sat at the bar, ordered two beers each because they were two for one, and relaxed. I couldn’t help myself from talking about Banana Phonetic’s show we were waiting to see. Jess went along with me hyping up the performance, but I couldn’t tell if Bubba was just entertaining our excitement or was actually excited himself.

Happy hour came and after Bubba order rum and coke and Jess ordered vodka and cranberry, I decided it might be smart to just order a beer. For the next hour the bar filled up with people pounding free drinks, trying to get as many in as possible with some people even double-fisting. By the end of the happy hour I started getting tired drunk. All I wanted to do was sit and the first band was coming on so I went into the back of the bar where the stage room was and sat down. Bubba and Jess came in after. The first band was two men between thirty and thirty-five and I’m being generous when I say they were absolutely horrendous. They were trying to be some kind of Irish folk-tale styled acoustic hard rock band, and it was worse than laughable. I looked to my right and Bubba was scared at this point. Scared that he was going to have to sit through my brother’s shitty band and then tell me he liked them. My ears couldn’t take the misery anymore so I went back to the main bar. I spent the next two and a half hours out there talking and drinking with friends kind of dragging to the end of the night. Playing last is where you want to be as a band, and the bar wanted Banana Phonetic to play last because out of the one hundred people in the bar, eighty were there for them; but I couldn’t sit there and drink anymore, I needed them to go on.




It was midnight and it was finally time. We had been through hours at a German beer hall, waiting for happy hour, happy hour, and three long hours of post happy hour and we finally got to enjoy some original, real music. Tom motioned for me to grab him a beer, which he usually does every time I see them, so I grabbed two beers from the bar and gave him one. He took a throat clearing swig and he was ready to go. At that moment all of the tiredness I had felt the past few hours was gone. You could feel the energy between the crowd and the stage. This is what everyone came to see, what everyone raged for all day, and they rocked per usual.


Seeing Banana Phonetic play is more of an overall experience than just listening to music. A scene infused by alcohol and drugs and the love for music. Looking around at the other people in the crowd rock their loose bodies along with you and the flow of the music; seeing Tom and Doty make eye contact followed by matching head nods saying to each other, “hell yeah.”; seeing Andy and Akhil feed off of the crowd; and ending every show with a Phish-esque jam making your body move in ways you didn’t understand, always leaving you wanting more. As I cheered I felt a tap on my shoulder and it was Bubba. I leaned over and he said, “They’re not your brother’s band anymore.”




Here are a few samples from Banana Phonetic.