Free MP3s of
Gwynne & Bambi in
The Pandoras!!
(w/former members of The Pandoras)
Okay, Lynda Kennedy plays lead guitar, sings back up and once in while sings lead. Our drummer's name is Jody Ritacco, she also sings back up, and on keyboards is Lynell Lacei she's predominantly on keyboards but also sings back up and plays rhythm guitar, we switch off. Our current bassist is Bambi Conway.
HIP: I heard you guys were looking for a bass player a couple of days ago, is Bambi the one you found?Yeah, she stepped in. We were actually going to let Bambi play keyboards for us because Lynnell's going to college in the fall but Bambi decided she'd rather play bass. And since there was an opening for that, we said sure because she and I had been playing together on and off for a long time and she's such a great musician and one of my best friends, I've known her for about ten years.
HIP: That's great. How would you classify your music?
It's almost impossible to do that right now but if it were ten years ago we'd be called punk. If it were 8 years ago we'd be called power pop, and nowadays people call us like thrash bubblegum or garage pop, but now if you say power pop, people think of like The Romantics or The Pretenders but we're faster and more powerful than that. More along a kind of Ramones edge, but we're net really punk either because if you say punk then people think of hardcore. I would just describe our music as thrash bubblegum, that's as good as anything else.
HIP: How'd you guys come about your name?Well originally the band was called Boo!, but when all of the original members, except me, had left Boo!, there was no point in keeping that name, but Mad Monster Party is a movie from the late sixties, it's clay animated. It's a parody from all the 30's and 40's horror films. So I figured that everybody in the scene right now is deathly serious about trying to be all spooky, scary, and tough, and so I chose that name because we're kind of a light-weight parody of the whole thing, and there's sort of a 60's influence in there too.
HIP: And what do you think about the music scene in LA these days?
I personally hate the current scene because when I first started going out around the early punk scene, it was a really open-minded, alternative, anything-goes kind of thing and now it's very close-minded and cliquish. It's exactly what I was trying to get away from when I first got into punk.
HIP: Tell us about your influences.Well, starting off with our drummer, she's probably the most influenced by Gina Shock of The Go-Go's. I love the early, early Go-Go's, when they were a punk band. I also like The Bangles, we all like The Bangles and the Go-Go's, except our keyboardist, she's sort of the odd-man out musically, she's into Blondie and David Bowie and some slightly gloomier stuff too. Bambi is into a lot of things like Jimmy Page and Jimmy Hendrix, she's very into the acid-rock guitar heroes, and then Lynda is into The Beatles and The Alarm.
HIP: That's a cool mix. So do you guys have any releases we can grab?
We're going to be putting out a single real soon, in fact we're going in tomorrow morning (7-22) to the studio to finish it up and hopefully in about a month or two it'll be out.
 
Gwynne & Bambi in The Pandoras |
Gwynne in The Negro Problem |
The Pandoras (fronted by Gwynne) |
Original page of Mad Monster Party Interview in HIP Magazine
Photos of The Pandoras found on the net
Pandoras flyer art by Gwynne Kahn