Thanks again to everyone who came out for this one. We managed to raise $1200 for The Safe Amplification Society. Can’t wait for the 25th Anniversary party…

Oh, and a big thank-you to Gerald Deo for these photographs. He’s great!

The Inbreds were a rock ‘n’ roll duo not unlike, configurationally speaking, our Mint early 90s favourite two-some, Duotang. Mike O’Neill sang and played bass, while Dave Ullrich played drums. They started off in Kingson, Ontario, then moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia. We loved them.

Dave now is deeply involved in Zunior, the digital music store that carries pretty much the entire Mint catalogue. It’s located here — www.zunior.com — if you want to take a look….

Behind Beez is a Pluto photocopied poster (thank you, UBC), as well as a full colour newsprint cub Come Out, Come Out poster that was a better idea in thought than in practice. The newsprint printed beautifully, but it did not last, and faded and degraded very quickly.

Over David’s shoulder is a full colour mini Pluto Cool Way to Feel poster. We had some large 19x27 ones done up — on strangely heavy stock that cracked when folded — and some smaller ones for venues and the like.

David is talking on one of our cobbled-together phones: the handset came from one phone, and the cord came from another — and yes there was likely a similar phone in the office with a white handset and a black cord….

Behind David is the college dorm dream: shelves made from brand new stair tread boards and Dairyland milk crates. We had a few walls like that, to hold the growing number of 7” releases, and CDs, and posters, mailers, and magazines.

Long gone appear to be the strings of Christmas lights and patio lanterns that were strung around the room, finding new life after having been strung throughout the CiTR lounge.

Grant loved City Picnics.

We would have our regular weekly Mint meetings — Bill, Grant, and me — frequently at City Picnics, a long narrow coffee shop/diner with booths and counter seats on one side, and the open kitchen along the entire length of the other side. it was tremendously old school, run by an eastern European couple, the woman serving and the man cooking. It was here that Grant would order his regular — a hamburger absent any accoutrements, “just burger and bun” — and it was also here that was Grant had some rather “interesting” experiences.

As Grant tells the story, which may or may not have a bit of “descriptive enhancement” added to it, there was the time that, when a coffee cup and saucer was placed on the table, a cockroach crawled out. Without a word, the server and Grant made eye contact, and the server whisked away the cup and saucer, and replaced it with a new one. The original may or may not have been put back in the stack along with the others.

And then there was the story — Grant’s best City Picnics gross-out eating fiasco stories always occurred when Bill, he and I were not there meeting; they always occurred when Grant was eating there alone, then would come back with a “You will not believe this….” — about the time the cook DROPPED Grant’s hamburger patty on the floor, picked it up, made eye contact with Grant (eye contact immediately after each horrifically gross episode seemed to be a common occurrence), placed the patty back on the flat top, and explained, in his very strong accent that, I think, had a wee bit of accentual embellishment added for dramatic effect, “The heat kills everything.”

Anyways, our meetings occurred there on a regular basis, all of us jammed into a booth, notepads at the ready, as we reviewed and planned our Mint activities. We would discuss current and upcoming projects — of note was a particularly interesting discussion on the topic of kid champion, the band about whose release Grant eventually wrote in the onesheet he penned, “music to fall asleep to,” “don’t listen to this in the bathtub,” or something to that effect — and bands and tours (our most active bands at that time were cub and The Smugglers).

Alas, City Picnics is no longer; it disappeared a long time ago, and the site now houses Bodwell College.

Randy as a pot-bellied Cub Scout trophy winner, and shirtless Bill at the top of the stairs at his old 19th Avenue house a/k/a “the cub house”. These were sent out to perhaps 800 radio stations, newspapers, magazines, record stores, and writers and Mint pals — the American ones mailing-labeled and postage-stamped in an unused classroom around the corner and down the hall from the venerable college radio station, KCMU 90.3 FM (now known as KEXP) in the Communications Building on the University of Washington campus in Seattle.

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