Munkey Juice
Fatty Arbuckle’s Coke Bottle

Munkey Juice is the black licorice of the Twin Cities local scene - you love ‘em or hate ‘em, but you know for sure right away.

After criticism on their last album for being too long and diverse, the group went for hard rock this time - on their 8th (yes, eighth) self-released album, Fatty Arbuckle’s Coke Bottle.

Me? Well, I like it. And I have to admit I don’t like black licorice, so there you go.

Besides the hard-rock tone, the disc really plays out with the breadth of a jukebox, and it’s not hard to tell this group likes their songwriting with a pinch of influence from almost every genre. Granted, it’s not the most refined sound or effortless and there are a lot of well-attempted guitar solos here - albeit unpolished. Favorite tracks include “Intolerable Noise” and “Cobweb Mind.”

It’s a mix of garage rock ranging from Nirvana to Meat Puppets chops with some punk flair mixed in. Is Munkey Juice that band who played your high school prom and rocked so hard you forgot your date in the hallway? Perhaps.

And if that weren’t enough, they’ve also released their third volume of Ten Under Sixty, a collection of 10 tracks clocking in at under 60 seconds each. Believe it or not, most songs are fulfilling tracks which standalone easily, regardless of their length. To-date, the group has 60 of these mini-tracks recorded - the goal is 100. My favorite is “Moses.”

Munkey Juice is Nelson and Robert Heise, who’ve formed the band in 1995, and drummer Stacie Archer. You can see them play March 10th at the Coffee Grounds with Stook.

We sat down with Nelson Heise to get the skinny on the latest from Munkey Juice, what it’s like for a student to call you on the use of an f-bomb and what the hell Munkey Juice means anyway…

Can you tell me more about your project. How did this start?
Well, MJ started back in 1995 when I (Nelson) bought my first guitar and needed a band mate, so I made my brother (Robert) play bass. Between ’95-’02 we did a few gigs and recorded some songs (Early Stuff album) but we were in college at different places. I was playing in a few bands and Robert was doing some open mics. I graduated in college ’01 and was sent to rehab (I needed it), so in the first year of sobriety I had a lot of time on my hands so I wrote a bunch of songs and we would get together and record them and those recordings became the first two records (Munkey Juice, The Error of Love) were we play all the instruments.

I called up an old buddy from college that was in one of my college bands and asked him to play drums, he agreed, so enter Stacie Archer. The three of us recorded the next three MJ albums (Her Absence, Sassy Potato, and Mafia Cornfields) together and moved to Minnesota where I was going to go to grad school. In a “Behind the Music” kind of moment following the CD release party for our album “Mafia Cornfields”, Stacie and I had a fight and ended that formation of the band in the winter of ’04.

By summer ’04 Robert and I hooked up with some friends and started recording a double album, in the process we kind of picked up Dan Kaping as a drummer and Rick Pavlik as a lead guitar player. We put out the album which we called “Music from the Motion Picture: Moscow” a fake motion picture soundtrack, and nobody got the joke. Anywho, we kept playing out and worked out nine new rocking songs and decided to put out a more hard rock album and here we are at “Fatty Arbuckle’s Coke Bottle”.

Rick and Dan have moved on from MJ, and occasionally we play with Stacie (we worked through our past problems). Our next album will be under a different name called The Heise Bros. We’ve been getting to much crap for the name Munkey Juice, but I’ll address that later.

What’s the history behind any of your past albums of note?
I suppose the above answer dealt with some of that, I think the funniest and most thought out album we did was MFTMP: Moscow. It had been floating around in heads for a while to do a fake soundtrack and have movie clips, posters, make a separate website, etc. We got as far as storyline, a couple still photos, a poster and obviously the soundtrack itself. We made up fake credits and all that jazz, and a couple reviewers tried googling the names and wrote about how they couldn’t find any info on the movie.

I thought for sure people would get the joke right away, but apparently not. My favorite reviews went like, “maybe with the movie these songs make sense” or “apparently the director wanted a band that could do both garage rock and folk songs at the same time, otherwise these don’t go together”, etc., etc. I thought it was funny. “Fatty’s” title came from Robert, our silent movie fan.

What’s it like working for a school (what do you do?) while being a musician who isn’t afraid about censoring content?
I am a drug and alcohol counselor for a high school and Robert is a substitute teacher. I think it helps us that we play in a band and work with teenagers, gives us a bit of an “in” factor.

In my line of work there tends to be a little bit more profanity, then say a teacher would face, plus we are talking about issues that aren’t normally addressed in school, so I don’t have much of censorship radar. I use whatever works to connect with the kids. I’m sure it may be different for Robert as a teacher, but I know he has tendency to always speak his mind.

The funniest thing is when a kid downloads one of our songs, or I give them a disc and they comeback the next day and say, “You dropped an f-bomb in that one song”. It’s kind of embarrassing, but I use cuss words when I think they fit the song and I’ll never change that. My dad hates it, but he’s old and likes John Denver.

What’s the history for the Munkey Juice name?
In high school a buddy of mine had what I believe was a MAD magazine with stickers in it and one of those stickers said “Oops, I sipped too much monkey juice!” Well, we laughed, changed the o to u (artistic purposes) and we had the name Munkey Juice.

We’ve had that name for 11 years and it wasn’t until 2004 before reviewers and other people started bashing it, calling it a semen reference. I know it can be that, but we always imagined it as a fruity cocktail. Anyway, we are thinking about burying the name and going by something else when we regroup the band.

The next album will be released under the name The Heise Bros. because we didn’t have just one drummer playing on the album and we had tons of local musicians playing on it, including Stook, who you reviewed a little while back, and it’s more folkie.

Anything else we should know? Upcoming gigs?
Yes, we are devilishly handsome young men that know how to treat a lady! Actually not much else to say, we have tons of music for sale at our website and we are downloadable at iTunes and all those places.

In fact, if you buy a CD we give you a free EP of Ten Under Sixty Seconds (less than minute long songs), that’s part of an ongoing goal to record 100 songs Under Sixty Seconds, right now we are at 60. Also, we are planning on touring over the summer with Stacie on the east coast and we are trying to convince Stook to come along, we’ll see. We are playing an acoustic gig March 10th at the Coffee Grounds with Stook. That’s that, come check us out, you’ll either love us or hate us, that’s the typical response.