"When you grind through an important job interview, sweat is there. The best sex of your life—you probably sweat.

When I think of my best nights at The Trunk Space sweat is just about always part of it. It’s not at all a cliche to the heat in PHX AZ is unbearable and will cause you to ooze buckets of water. However when you run a business in the wild side of town about half of it comes from the daily fear that you won’t make rent, that a noise complaint will shut you down, the speakers will explode, a piece of art’ll get wrecked, or some idiot will start sh*t and punch you out.

The other gallon of sweat comes from being packed in a too-small room with all your scene brothers/sisters/others sharing an experience that no one else will ever get and may not even understand if they were there.

Like a lot of ideas cooked up by The Good Shows, The Real Coachella was a kind of snarky gag, just trying to take the air out of overdone, elite bullsh*t like a $1,000 concert in the middle of nowhere. Coachella in the desert--that other Coachella--is a worldwide destination owned by right-wing scumbags who spend millions to make billions*. The Real Coachella was a big nothing that for a decade became an absolute highpoint of the AZ DIY scene.

My first thought is to say that the joke of The Real Coachella just got lucky and landed right. The truth is though The Good Shows put a lot of work into it. It wasn’t JUST a snarky gag, but also an elaborate Rube Goldberg Machine where all the parts have to work PERFECTLY to transcend their cobbled together beginnings and become greater than the sum of their parts. And more often than not The Real Coachella was that. If you were capable of withstanding the whole day event chances are you’d have your transcendent experience, both personal and shared.

Maybe you’d just have a good time, and that’s enough too—never underestimate the greatness of just enjoying yourself. You wind up going home purged of anxieties with fun memories in their place, tired, covered in dust, stinking of sweat. Good times."

~JRC, co-founder The Trunk Space

*Please do not ever go to Coachella. 

I think about this a lot and the circumstances that revolved around it.
I was 21-22 years old
I worked 12-15 hours a week as a delivery driver for a pseudo healthy southwest Greek fusion restaurant.
I lived in downtown Phoenix, walking distance from all my favorite music venues, art galleries and coffee shops.

My living situation seemed to change every 4-6 months. First living in a 900 square foot house from the 1920s with 3 of my best friends and a new born baby, we called it the Lime or Lemon house. Then squatting in that house by myself without running water and stealing electricity when the house was foreclosed.. Then moving into a rundown Seventh Day Adventist recovery center with a rotating cast of roommates who were never home and two adorable kittens named Troll and White Lioness, we called this the Sun House. This house didn't have A/C, furniture, pots, pans or silverware but it did have 3 floors and a door that leads to nowhere, (it was great for house shows.) Then I moved into the back of my best friends candy/record store (Sweets & Beats) which did not have walls or privacy of any kind. I shared this living space with my poor best friends and their adorable baby and a very muscular Boston Terrier named Taumpy. I lived there until I moved into the Lime or Lemon House again with my new girlfriend which we rented from the new new owner who ended up being one of the worst people ever (but that's another story)

The point of talking about this is to give context to the type of magical/creative mind set and life we were living which inspired us to constantly create and grow. In 2008 my friends Emily and Elle were trying to think of something they could do to celebrate their child's upcoming 1st birthday and I suggested we organize a comp of all songs written for and about him. Most of the songs were recorded in the Lime or Lemon house where we were all living and some combination of the following people are a part of 11/16 of these tracks 
-Emily Spetrino
-Elle Murtagh
-Tristan Jemsek
-Andrew Jemsek
-Ryan Avery
-Jon Kirby

And it was just such a wonderful period of friendship and creativity and this is just one of the many records we made during this time that only a handful of people have copies of and got to enjoy until now.

Iggy is going to be 13 years old this month and it seems like he has wanted to be a teenager since he was like 2-years old., now hes probably ready to just be an adult. He has always just been so cool for his age, even as a baby, its so funny how often people would see and interact with him and just be like "holy shit, this baby fucking rules!" If you have had the pleasure of hanging out with him, you know its true (or you might be real critical like "psh, he wasn't THAT cool" and if you are that way, you're just fucking lying to yourself)

-Ryan

"Sometime in 2012 an invitation was sent out to DIY musicians everywhere to show their love for muppets and all things Jim Henson Co. related and record a tribute to the beloved Jim Henson.
​
I for one was thrilled beyond belief. Jim Henson was a hero to me growing up, as he was for many other odd ball kids of the 70’s and 80’s. Not only did Jim amaze us with lovable colorful creatures and mysterious and entrancing new worlds, he included extremely well written and catchy music to boot.

This compilation is filled to the brim with 50 beautiful to bizarre interpretations of music from the likes of Sesame Street, Fraggle Rock, The Muppet Show, The Dark Crystal, The Labyrinth, and more."-Davin Abegg (Secret Abilities)

"In one way or another, Jim Henson projects have always been a part of my life, like any big situation that I've dealt with in life. When I learned about death, it was on an episode of Sesame Street when they explained to Big Bird that Mr. Hooper wasn't coming back. A week later, Lucille Ball died and I understood what that meant to have somebody you know die and be gone. A week after that, a woman who took care of me named Linda, to help my mom while she was working and taking care of three kids, had passed up. When is an awkward junior high are The Muppets in It Ain't Easy Being Green was a song that I connected to .when I was dealing with abuse from my dad, a movie that helped me through that was, oddly enough, The Muppets movie helped me through that. This idea of hoping that miracles can happen or things can get better resonated with me, I guess. When I went through a dark, broody stage, teen stage, it was The dark crystal and The Labyrinth. Even when I hitchhiked around the country, I would listen to on Spotify Moving Right Along.

So no matter where I've been in life, Jim Henson's projects have always followed me in essence. Then when I got into making music and saw, at least in the DIY scene, what felt like a considerable sort of Muppet show influence. A kind of vaudeville or variety hour theme that was everywhere. The more I met people in these scenes. The more I realized a lot of us were, in one fashion or other, raised by Henson shows. I thought it would be cool to have a bunch of bands cover songs from Henson Projects, seeing as so many of us had this shared love and appreciation of Jim Henson.

Without Jason Kron's help, though, I would have never got it off the ground. I talked about doing it for years. He got tired of me talking about and was the one he pushed it into a reality. It was my idea, but it was his drive that got it off the ground."-Troy Simons (The Hunger Artists)

"I am so impressed that this compilation got released. 50 songs by 50 different bands, and it made it out. Probably due to both universal love for muppets and Troy Simons’ friendliness. We had been playing shows with Troy and his band for a while, and we were all really excited at the notion of this compilation. Some of the best songs in the whole world are in muppet movies and shows.

Jim Henson inspired me to obsessively make puppets out of trash like milk jugs and discarded packaging as a kid. I was that kid who put on puppet shows for his classmates in 2nd and 3rd grade. Which evolved into dumpster diving to make weird monster puppets and costumes as a kid-brained adult. I think his work is really important, and I owe a lot to him.

I’m really glad that this compilation is getting re-released for three reasons. Troy worked really, really hard to make sure this came to life. But also, it’s a lovely time capsule of Phoenix DIY music in 2012. The magic of that time, for me, was the eclectic friendliness of the bands and the songs, and what better to capture eclectic friendliness than with the songs of the muppets? Lastly, anything muppets has always been about a bunch of misfits staying optimistic in the face of bad times. So there couldn’t be a better time for us to revisit these fun, warm songs than right now."-Alex Benson (Rough Tough Dynamite)