Me First and The Gimme Gimmes

By now, everyone knows Me First and the Gimme Gimmes as the all-star-punk-rock supergroup-cover-band that exploded on the scene in the 90’s, and made every other shitty pop punk band’s ironic covers obsolete with their debut Have a Ball. They’ve since tackled almost every genre under the sun, with albums of showtunes, R&B jams, classics from the 50’ and 60’s, pop hits, cheesy mom-favorites, country songs and most recently a slew of songs by Australians for their 2011 EP entitled Go Down Under. Well, never ones to rest on their laurels, the boys from the Gimmes are back with their most ambitious project to date, one that takes them far from the dingy back rooms of suburban roadhouse karaoke bars, halfway around the world to the clean, brightly lit karaoke bars of Tokyo. That’s right folks, Spike, Mike, Joey, Chris and Dave are back and this time shit’s gotten positively Japanese with the latest EP Me First and The Gimme Gimmes Sing In Japanese! And not since American Ninja has Japanese culture been so thoroughly beaten at its own game.

Okay, first things first. The title of the ep is completely accurate in that front man Spike Slawson actually took the time to learn how to sing the songs in real-live, honest-to-pete Japanese. “But wait, nameless shithead writing this bio!” I can hear you say “How the fuck did he do that? Japanese is hard. Did he take an immersion class or something?” No. See, that would be too easy. In the universe of the Gimmes, the way shit works is that bassist Fat Mike (of Nofx fame) calls one of his Japanese friends, who writes out the lyrics phonetically for Spike and then Spike carefully sings them. THEN they get a bunch of Japanese tourists to come into the studio (The Foo Fighter’s 606 Studio to be exact) and listen to the vocal takes and deem them ‘comprehensible.’ The results are Gimme’d up versions of all your classic favorites like Takuryo Yoshida’s “Kekkon Shiyoyo,” Kai Band’s “Hero” and Tulip’s “Kokoro No Tabi.” I know! Right? You haven’t lived til you’ve heard what Spike and the boys do to Kekkon Shiyoyo, boy…believe me. You will hardly recognize it!

Okay, so anyway you get the idea here, right? The Gimmes have already shown the world that they can do just about anything. They’ve sold Neil Diamond songs to punk rockers and reduced a stadium of Pittsburgh Pirates fans to angry tears using ‘Stairway to Heaven’ as their only weapon . They’ve gotten two guys from Lagwagon to play showtunes with gusto. They’ve selflessly ruined a young boy’s bar mitzvah for the pleasure of the listening public at large. They’ve got a guy from the Foo Fighters doing whole tours that don’t feature anyone screaming out for ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit.’ They’ve gotten Fat Mike to not be the most talkative person on a stage. They’ve mastered every single form of pop music in the western world and now they’re taking their Voltron-esque brand of ass-kickery to Voltron’s homeland and showing the world that even in Japanese the Gimmes are speaking the international language of rock.

And they’re not stopping with Japan. The Gimmes are planning on doing ep’s in Spanish, Italian, German and French in the near future, thereby answering the eternal question “is every single culture on earth better if a bunch of drunk bay area weirdos add their own twist to it?” with a resounding ‘YEAH! YEAH! YEAH!”