Max McDonald and Goodnight Gunfight

There’s an old quote from Phil Spector that is something to the effect that he was saddened by the fact that he had reached the age where he had outlived many of his enemies which was a sadness for him because they had defined him. Something somewhat like that has happened to me. People I hate had these bands and artistic projects that appeared to be going somewhere, I check back on it on-line and the band’s been gone for years and the person isn’t doing anything anymore. Phil Spector is now rotting in jail, which is funny because, at one point I was working with a female goth band called Goodnight Gunfight who was tied to his daughter Nicole Spector in New York. I’d known Goodnight Gunfight from Bard College. The details were that Jesse who was the drummer for Goodnight Gunfight had a roommate who had dated Phil Spector and then continued a friendship with Nicole after breaking up, and that Phil Spector was calling the apartment frequently, is what was claimed. I don’t doubt it because everyone in New York seemed to know Nicole Spector. I interviewed them for an article that was never run when I owned a magazine, which didn’t sell, called AeonElectron. They were tied to another band called Lions and Tigers that was also a Bard graduate band because they featured Max “Heel” McDonald on base- that was the son of Ian McDonald of Foreigner and King Crimson. There was a fairly incredible misunderstanding of Joy Division he had. It was not, however, a distinctive one at the time. Arguably Lions and Tigers were shaped more then anything by an impulse to blend in to the crowd. There were so many other bands doing that in New York at that point. Here is his poor music
http://www.myspace.com/lionsandtigersnyc
Fans of Williamsburg music would be interested to know that I’ve been a long time friend of drummer Kevin Shea and I tried to set him up to be Goodnight Gunfights producer because I recall that Max McDonald was hovering around the band, and he might completely fuck everything up potentially. Kevin’s schedule and Goodnight Gunfights did not line up. I gave up working with them, they were really, really obnoxious to work with. I think the misconception some people have is that they screwed me over somehow. That’s actually not true at all. I just didn’t like them. They were a very spoiled little group of young women. If I had been dating one of them it would have been a different deal, but otherwise who would want to babysit a band like that?
Goodnight Gunfight was a waste of time to worry about either way. It isn’t that hard to get a connection to Spector anyway. His PI Tawni Tyndal is a friend of a friend, the lawyer from his first trial Leslie Abramson, now retired, was at the Pellicano trial when I was there doing an article that ended up in Reviewer magazine. His daughter Nicole partied with a lot of people in New York, and the problem would be getting him to talk. He was described as a recluse even before he ended up in jail for murder. The other thing is that Goodnight Gunfight was just not the best band in the world. You can look that all up here-http://www.goodnightgunfight.com. The thing with them musically is that they were not hugely original. They sounded much like gothic bands from the early 80’s but dressed more or less like indie rock hipsters of the last ten years. That was common practice in the 2000’s. Two bands I can think of did that and made a bunch of cash- Interpol and the Rapture. That was kind of also what Lions and Tigers were. But for every band like Interpol and the Rapture there were dozens of bands that did the same thing but didn’t make any lasting impact and failed to graduate out of being small club bands. That a band gets some press in local publications briefly doesn’t mean much of anything in terms of continued success. What is really puzzling about Goodnight Gunfight and Lions and Tigers is to look at the contacts they would have had in the music business. Foreigner is not widely considered a great band but they sold a mess of albums. King Crimson is widely considered an influential and important band. Phil Spector’s crazy and was facing murder 2 charges at the time, but he still had contacts in the music industry as evidenced by the fact his young wife was able to put out her crappy album. Its’ truly amazing that Max McDonald failed as radically as he did. The same with Goodnight Gunfight.
The other things as I’m writing this, not so much Foreigner, but I’m thinking about King Crimson and Phil Spector, none of these little bands from the 2000’s came near the musical ability or imagination of those musicians. Spector was a good musician forgetting anything else about him. That album Islands by King Crimson is a beautiful record-they was bunch of dirty hippies but, again, forgetting anything else about them they were good musicians. If you think about King Crimson and Phil Spector and then think about Goodnight Gunfight or Lions and Tigers, that’s truly an embarrassment.
The degree of failure astounds, and now they're not even doing anything for me to destroy.