Info on Ophur's original duct tape alien show, April 7th, 1999. The story behing the stench by Nick Palazzo. Well what can I say about Ophur's classic original duct tape alien show... It marked a pinacle moment in Ophur History and spawned a small but loyal group of duct tape alien enthusiasts. The idea was sparked when we had a chance to play at Downers Grove North High School's Annual Variety/Talent Show. But since most of us were out of high school, we didn't really know why we were doing it. We decided that the only reason to do it would be to get some exposure with our local high school aged kids, and we figured since we're gonna do it, we might as well make it as memorable as possible. Ophur had just come out of a few months of no shows or activity due to us parting ways with our original bass player, Eric Olsen. So we had time to prep for the show. We called a meeting to discuss some kind of marketing scheme... Hours of debate lasted well into the afternoon when we finally caught on to the idea of not doing something "cool" that would get some people talking and spreading the name Ophur all over the school, but to use High School's own immature gossip and drama to our advantage. We had done the show the year before and knew exactly how it worked and how the environment was set which gave us another advantage. We decided that doing something rediculous and stupid, something so weird and embarrassing that it would get tons of people talking about it the next day in class because of how odd it was would be best. Hence, the duct tape suit wearing aliens from Ophiria were born. First thing we did was experimented with lots of duct tape and old clothes. We used long sleeve shirts and cut them up the center to form the classic Ophur Jackets, and sweat pants for the tight skinny pants. Skinny is funnier, since everyone was so baggy then, we made them as tight as we could stand. Bryn started his suit first since he had such a glorious history using duct tape, and while he was doing that, the rest of us checked out our local "Party City" for accesories. We picked up bug-eyed sliver shades, green shiny foil paper for the bottom of our ship and halloween pumpkin antennae that go on your head and blink with tiny lights inside the pumpkins... We pulled up in Bryn's driveway to see him outside his house modeling his new duct tape suit and as soon as me, Bryan, and Benson saw it, we cracked up extremely hard. We all had a long laugh and then proceeded to TRY and get it off of Bryn, it was made while he was wearing it and was skin tight, so getting out was very difficult. Once it was off, it stayed in the same shape as how it was when we wore it, the duct tape stiffens up your clothes quite a bit... The rest of us finished our suits and modified our one pair of pumpkin antennae by ripping off the pumpkins. We mounted them on top of Bryn's bike helmet and covered it all in glued-on aluminum foil. They seemed to work great so we headed back to Party City to get more. We figured this was a good time for a good field test of our new suits. We wore them into the store and kept absolute straight faces and acted like nothing was weird to see the full true effect. We went in and walked around and were immediately followed by the entire store's staff of about 15 people. They were laughing quietly and chatting for a while, but they were professionals, they must have had experience with this sort of thing because as soon as we turned around and faced them with our straight faces, they all tried to call our bluff. They talked to us with no sort of weird look or attitude like nothing was weird about 3 guys dressed in duct tape suits in a store. Bryn asked the head honcho where they keep their extra "Photon Beam Attenuators" at. He replied, "The what???". Bryn repeated, "The Photon Beam Attenuators! We only bought one pair, but we need 3 more..." and then Bryn just couldn't contain himself, he started cracking up and all of us along with the other 15 or so employees joined in with laughter. He then calmed them all down and sent them back to work and took us to the section that holds our Photon Beam Attenuator/Light up Pumpkin Antennae. They only had 2 pairs left. So we went to Target to look in their halloween section. We tested the suits again in an even more populated and diverse crowd. One old man gave me a look of death for about 5 minutes. The whole store started gossiping, you can hear the news that there was 3 guys dressed in duct tape circulating the store in a matter of seconds... so the results were good. Bryn and Bryan headed to one area of the store while I went in another direction continuing our straight faces. I came upon an old Spanish employee bent over a box of goods seeming to be unloading them onto shelves. He was facing the other direction and never looked at me. I just poked in to his lane and asked, "Hey, do you know where you guys keep your Photon Beam Attenuators at?" Without turning to look at me or even taking 2 seconds to think about what I just said, he raised his arm and pointed westward and said "yeah over in lane 2". I stood there in wonder for a sec and then headed to lane 2 to check it out. I saw all the halloween props in lane 2 and then called Bryn and Bryan over to me. I immediately told them about the old guy who told me where this section was and they of course didn't really believe me, I guess no one will ever know for sure except me, but I swear to Lord Eenok of the Stogulet Forest that it's true! We never found another pair for Benson's helmet, but he was ok with being different. After that we were short on duct tape so we headed over to Home Depot to get more still in our suits. This was our harshest crowd yet. The store was full of testostorone and manly carpenters and plumbers. This is where we got the real long staring "what's yer problem" looks from everyone, I highly recommend doing it. We went in line to pay for our 3 rolls of duct tape and were checked out by this huge 500 pound black employee. He was gigglin a bit and asked us in a funny way since he saw how much we had already used of duct tape on our bodies "Now why would you guys need more duct tape?". We replied, "We are out of toilet paper" and walked out. So, we built the ship out of a large piece of cardboard, more glued-on aluminum foil, and christmas lights. Our plan was to have Bryn crawl out of the bottom and just act weird to people before we all came out so we had a table clothe draping down with an open seem with the reflective green shiny foil paper cut into strips hanging in front of it. Our suits and spaceship were nearing completion, but now we needed some spaceship sound effects for the landing sequence. It was simple.... just go to Bryn's house. He had shown me this weird old vinyl record called "Touch" a while before that which his dad used to play for the kids and they would dance around their living room like aliens to it. The album was made in the 60s or 70s by this guy named Morton Sobotnik. It was a record just filled with crazy weird sounds that were played on one of the first electronic sound fx systems called the "Bucshella Electronic Music System". Yes, please laugh. If you trip on acid, DO NOT PLAY THIS RECORD! You will turn into Satan and eat your brother's armpit hair... and maybe even dress in duct tape or some shit. Anyways, we actually used Bryn's childhood alien dancing techniques for inspiration to make our show even more weird. We had to use the least weird 1 and a half minutes of the record so that it was at least somewhat translatable to the un-Martinized and innocent moms, dads, and kids at the variety show. We hooked up the record player to our recording program on our computer and edited it for the landing sequence. I was the voice you hear saying "Ophur" on the recording, I just pitched my voice up and down to make it weird, and Bryn was the one whispering subliminal messages on it. U can't hear it much on this video, but there at the show, it was so much louder than we actually wanted, hehe. Bryn said something like "Ophur is the awesomest band in the world. They smell like duct tape and look like a rhinosaurus... but it's okay cuz something, something, something..." I forget. Some of the "Ophur's" I said were actually spoken backwards and then reversed to be heard the right way. This was a technique that Benson originally developed to play a prank on Bryn. He practiced saying some words backwards and recorded them and then reversed them and called Bryn and scared him to death one night... Since then, I do it with every band I record for fun while we r in the studio. A tip for practicing is record it the normal way and then reverse it and listen to it and try to say it that way, then record it again saying it backwards and then reverse it, it's good fun! The funny part is that you have to elongate the beginning of the word and then quickly and harshly say the end of the word to make it work right... you also have to pitch the beginning of the word lower than the end of the word when saying it in reverse too, pretty tricky. Cheston mastered saying "Cheeseburger" backwards. I mastered the phrase "Jamie loves Jesus" backwards, which is pronounced like "Sauseege Zayvul EEEmage!", it sounds like you are saying it backwards and with a French accent. So yeah, I was actually saying "rrriffo! rrriffo!" on some of those high pitched "Ophur's" on the UFO intro on the video. Can you spot the not??? lemme know. Benson was definately the supreme master of it though, he perfected it so well that he could actually just think of a sentence and in seconds just blurt it out backwards... keep in mind you have to start with the last word of the sentence too! There are actually a few Ophur shows that Benson mumbled reverse statements into the mic in between songs to, no one knows what things he said, and after knowing him for 10 years, I bet it's really some weird, contraversial stuff. Either that, or it's complete nonsense that tickles the brain. Near the end of the UFO Intro sound fx on the video, it's all fast and weird and we all come out dancing around the stage. During this Bryn was saying something like "Inasaurus Untuskulari... Ineesceemuna" and I was saying "Scoobada, ineescoobada, scoobada!" SO here came the night... it was showtime! The show featured all kinds of talents, including a male beauty contest featuring a DGN senior named Zafar Musharaf who is the President of Pakistan's nephew. If u read in the papers a year or so back about the President coming into our country and into our very nearby suburbs of Chicago to visit relatives which had our government's Secret Service going crazy, it was cuz he was here to visit Zafar's family. (he is currently the drummer in that guy Paul's band that I recorded and played the drums to, dude... i'm so famous now.) There was a talented baton twirler, one of Bryan's highschool crush's singing a mariah carey song with her boyfriend while Bryan cried almost, and a gang of "sistas" doin some authentic ghetto syncronized street dancing/clapping/stomping... We were only supposed to have 5 minutes on stage, so we purposely planned our song to go past 7 minutes without letting the guy in charge know during the rehearsals... yes rehearsals plural, with an "s". So we made a funny jazz intro to the song that Benson can talk during and just say some funny stuff spur of the moment, and a very long ending that ends and then ends again and then ends one more time. The show's staff were definately scurrying about backstage in horror over it, it was so great. Before we went on, we were sitting backstage for a long time as the 2 or 3 hour show went on... we planned on wearing no shirts underneath our open jackets to show our breasts to add to the weirdness, but the guy in charge handed us 4 blue DGN shirts and said that the bigger people in charge said that we can't expose our chests to the crowd. We were pissed. They were so huge and baggy, so we pulled them back and tied the excess cloth in a knot and taped it down with duct tape on our backs under the jackets so they would be tight and showing some belly button. We felt homosexual but felt it was a strong expression of our desire and freedom to show our beautiful male torsos. As we stood there in the back all suited up, me, Bryan, and Benson noticed that our tight pants were really pressing our schlongs down and weren't very impressive looking or life-like. Then we glanced over to Bryn's package and it was huge! I mean, his next to ours was just massive. We panicked and looked all over the floor to find what Cheston would later refer to as "Unitary Enhancement". All we could find was small clear plastic bags full of confetti. We quickly duct taped them to our packages. The guy in charge of the show, who had to be gay (cuz of how he talked), mumbled to us as we were enhancing our manhood that we are not allowed to grab our "packages" on stage. We weren't huge fans of Michael Jackson anyways, so it was doable. So during the show which was filled with about 2 thousand people, a lot of them were screaming the name Ophur in between acts. The news had leeked about our plan it seems from our little brothers and sisters. Our time came, so we set up behind our ship, stage left and handed the extension cord that powered the lights on our ship to some kid, he plugged them in. We heard the 3 hosts announce us and the crowd was going nuts... 30 kids working on the show backstage were running all over the place. Me and Bryan had our spotlights that we were gonna shine through the windows of the ship to the crowd, the ships systems were functioning, engines running, AND... The ship loses power! Suddenly me and Benson are screaming at the kids who knocked the plug out of the wall socket to plug it back in, but they couldn't understand english it seemed. The curtains opened, the sound fx cd started and we had no power. Finally, I used my spot light to find the cord and plug it back in and throw my fist in front of the kids' faces and warned them not to walk here and trip over this cord again or else I would punch them in the nose. They got scared and Benson called them "Stupid Motherf***ers" and me and Bryan of course cracked up. Watching him get mad and say that while behind a tiny window of a cardboard spaceship while wearing an aluminum foiled bike helmet was about as good as it gets. So I got back behind the ship in my spot and we picked up the ship to begin the landing sequence. I noticed that my spotlight was now gone somehow! I yelled to some kids to find it, but Benson pushed me forward and said "Dude, we knew something was gonna go wrong, and there it was, I'm glad it was only that, now go!" Words of wisdom by a very smart man. So we went out and danced like idiots and played a brand new song with our brand new bass player Bryan, it was his first show with Ophur. You can notice how he doesn't move an inch during that show while playing bass, but in the years that followed he became our most animated member on stage. Maybe it was cuz he grew muscles somehow right after he joined our band... how did he get those things in a matter of like 6 months? He was such a skinny twerp before... weird. Our months of hard work paid off... Some tips on duct tape suits... yeah don't use sweat pants under your duct tape, way too hot, we almost overheated on stage and died. Right when we were done, we ran outside and pulled down our pants to cool our butts off in the wind... the passing cars were confused. We still have our suits in a big hefty bag, they are the nastiest smelling things you have ever smelled in your life. The smell of duct tape, sweat, and crusty fungus is actually a proven tranquilizer for rhinosauruses. But our marketing scheme seemed to work. All anyone could talk about when leaving the show was our weird little performance. The next few days, the gossip spread like wildfire throughout the school and we had been officially labeled as the coolest nerds around. We then used the suits again at Cheston's uncle's annual halloween party in Chicago after Cheston joined as our keyboardist. We had to get him up our level, so we made him The Emporor of the Ophirian Duct Tape People. He had a duct tape staff and a king's style crown, with wadded duct tape chest muscle enhancements and a 6 pack. He also had shoulder mounts with spikes and a Batman looking duct cape... hehe get it... duct cape. about 10 other people showed up in various styled duct tape suits and dresses and everytime cheston entered the room we were in, we bowed to him in worship. A couple years later, we came up with the idea for another halloween show to include lights in our suits and more elaborate helmets. We spent months making all new suits with zip up legs and a Bryn-made lighting switcher so our suits and helmets can all turn off and on to the music. Thanks to Bryn's neaighbor Matt for controlling the lights, u rok. You can barely see my helmet on the video of us playing "Dinosaurs and Candy Cats" on our media page, but it was a disco ball and spotlight mounted on my head which actually spinned with a motor and had to be bungee cabled to the ceiling so i could hold my head up, it was.... just another stupid act of many that we did as a band which makes for cool, but... odd memories. The End.