Pitchfork

What would you do for $50,000? For $180,000?? Would you sell your soul to Hummer? How about your music?

"NO" and "NO" were the prompt responses from lo-fi blitz-rockers the Thermals and post-rock trio Trans Am, offered those respective sums last year to lend their tunes to a commercial for the much-despised gas-guzzling giant. It's a feel-good, stick-it-to-the-Man-style story that only came to light quite recently, thanks to an Associated Press story from late last month. Pitchfork caught up with the Thermals' Hutch Harris and Trans Am's Phil Manley to get the low-down on this admirable turn-down.

"I never wanted to put songs in commercials and I still don't," Harris offered in defense of his decision. "So for the offer to be Hummer, it was just obvious that we wouldn't want to do [it] because it's so evil and there's no way we could support that."

"There's no way we'd want anyone thinking about the Thermals having to do with Hummer."

Manley feels similarly: "We just don't like Hummer. It's almost like giving your music to the army, but in a way it's even worse: The army has pretenses of protecting the country, whereas Hummer is just making these pointless trucks for regular people to buy that are completely...useless. They're impractical and wasteful and they embody the wastefulness of our society, I suppose." Besides, the Trans gets way better mileage.

Hummer offered 50 grand for the Thermals' "It's Trivia" (from 2003's More Parts Per Million) and, perhaps ironically, 180,000 bucks for Trans Am's "Total Information Awareness" (from 2004's Liberation). Manley told us Trans Am is no stranger to these dubious but lucrative licensing offers.

"We've been approached by Sony, NBC, Levi's. Those are the big ones," Mans recalled. "We just decided a long time ago that we didn't want to really participate in giving Trans Am's music to commercials...The Hummer thing was definitely the most money we've ever been offered, but it was also the most despicable company."

It's not all as heinous as it sounds, however. "In a lot of instances," Manley remarked, "it's people we know who are actually making the ads, and they come to us because they're fans of our music. They're of the mind that, 'Well, somebody is going to get this money--it may as well be my friends,' but it's a little more complicated than that. In this situation, they're co-opting Trans Am and its album and the image-- everything behind [our] name, you know?"

Manley was quick to add that had he been commissioned to write new music-even for Hummer-he'd probably have taken up the offer. "But it wouldn't say Trans Am. It wouldn't be a Trans Am song. It would just be me sitting in my bedroom smoking pot and making music for Hummer...[and I] could give them whatever throwaway crap."

Original material or no, Harris is adamant: "I couldn't work with Hummer. What would you be making an ad for, a new tank that people can drive down the street? It's just so ridiculous." He added, "I wouldn't be totally opposed to writing original music for something else, but I'd still have to be really picky about that."

Hardly the ideal dance partner, Hummer has been turned down or stood up by everybody from long-defunct post-punkers LiLiPUT (offered 50 grand for "Heidi's Head", according to the AP), to big names Talking Heads and Smashing Pumpkins, to recent indie bands like Four Tet, Caribou, and the Soledad Brothers. Bummer for Hummer, big bonus for your karma payment plan, kiddies.

When not moonlighting as unwitting anti-corporate crusaders, Harris and Manley are still busy earning their bread the fun, guilt-free way. The Thermals, stripped down to just the core duo of Harris and partner Kathy Foster, recently put the finishing touches on their third LP, The Body, the Blood, the Machine, due out later this year via Sub Pop.

"It's almost a concept record," Harris declared to Pitchfork. "It's just a bunch of pop songs again, but it's kind of...a paranoid fantasy about the religious right dicking over this country and escaping from that."

"There's a lot of love songs on there too that are all also kind of paranoid."

Harris and Foster recorded The Body with Brendan Canty (Fugazi) at Oregon City's Supernatural studio. Song titles include "Here's Your Future", "Saint Rosa and the Swallows", "I Might Need You to Kill", and, appropriately, "Product Placement". Once this disc drops Hutch plans to get to work on "a pretty and old-fashioned love song record."

The Thermals will test drive these new tracks on a hometown audience this spring. Their only scheduled show as of right now is at Portland's Doug Fir Lounge on May 27. We recommend taking public transportation to the gig.

Trans Am, meanwhile, have started writing a new record they hope to record this summer in New Zealand and release this fall. Manley himself has been touring and recording with psych-rockers Oneida, and playing with the Fucking Champs, who sometimes sound like an armada of Hummers bull-dozing your house. Expect a new record soon from those upstanding gents as well.