December 2003: the month in pictures

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Dateline Tokyo, December 4. Hypnotized into full holiday psychosis by the incessant Christmas music we heard while touring Japan, we lost track of the time and decided to play "Rock N Roll Santa" at our last show of the tour. Oh, that's not even close to true — we love "Rock N Roll Santa" and we play it any time we think we can justify it (or perhaps to be even more accurate, any time two of us think we can justify it to our reluctant third). We asked trusty tour head coach Joe Puleo to scour Shibuya for their #1Annual Gift-Giving Man outfit shop, and find it he did. Here are some shots of us onstage at Tokyo's Club Quattro, distributing Christmas cheer from our dressing-room bounty, and rockin' "Rock N Roll Santa." Thanks to Keiko Hirakawa for letting us use her photos.

We returned home and plunged into preparations for the Onion Christmas Party, held at Northsix in Brooklyn on December 16. Onion readers and New Yorker readers alike may remember their piece about us that ran almost two years ago, and so did we. Top article, that. When they asked us to play, we agreed, so long as they were willing to help us stage our own "disaster," this time resulting in our own horrible onstage deaths. We didn't have to twist their arms, and big ups to all the people who helped us go all Irwin Allen on your ass. We'd list all their names, but . . . we don't want to embarrass them. Yeah, that's it.

The party started with a performance by Jon Benjamin, Scott Fellers and Lumpy, the trio that interrupted their hectic schedule of Midnight Pajama Jams to interview Ira a while back. Lumpy was quite excited about the capture of Saddam Hussein, so excited that he named "We Got 'Im!" as his favorite song of 2003, despite the fact that nobody seemed to recall such a song. But that didn't keep Jon Benjamin and Lumpy from singing a couple of choruses, and it didn't keep Scott Fellers from challenging us to play it during our set. And it didn't keep us from playing it, with special guest Lumpy.

Then it was time for disaster. Light fixtures, real and fake, fell from the ceiling. Speaker cabinets, all fake, dropped too, sending James and Georgia to their bloody doom. David Cross and Jon Benjamin came on stage to calm the panicked crowd, while medics, armed with plastic stethoscopes and real stretchers, ran to the rescue. Ira's speaker never actually fell, causing him to make use of his years of training with Stella Adler (as the late Georgia is being attended to). Then we ascended to heaven, with a quick stopover to the stage to sing one last song. Thanks to modern-day Weegee Casey Kelbaugh for the photos.

For New Year's Eve, we came up with another scheme. Inspired by the classic cartoon "Booby Hatched," we thought we'd come on stage in full-body egg costumes. Then at midnight we could hatch (and launch into Rod Stewart's "Tonight's the Night," just like in the cartoon). We're not here to say it went entirely as planned, but once again, thanks to Eli Whitney's marvelous invention, you can be the judge.

Those that made it all the way to our second set (which started just before 4 a.m., or did it only feel that way) had the pleasure of hearing a version of "Autumn Sweater," featuring Caracas, Venezuela's top comic, Ferecito.

Happy new year.