It wasn’t actually the first time Chili’s had gone the jingle route to promote its slow-braised pork ribs, a menu mainstay since the mid-’80s. “So it ran, and we thought that it would go away,” Bommarito recalled. After getting a rather lackluster green light, Bommarito enlisted his production-savvy pal Tom Faulkner to record his vocals and gussy them up a bit, which is presumably when McCoy came on board to sing the bassier bits. Instead, he opted to just write it himself-a task that lasted all of about five minutes-and also shoulder the burden of auditioning it for Chili’s representatives. “I was too embarrassed to go back to my department and give them the assignment, because it was really an awful assignment,” Bommarito told VICE. The restaurant gave them roughly six weeks to come up with a catchy tune that could play in a commercial while pretend patrons enjoyed an order of baby back ribs-the type of “bite and smile” gimmick that restaurateurs loved as much as creatives loathed it. But he couldn’t really say no: At the time, Bommarito was the executive creative director of Austin-based ad agency GSD&M, which had just bungled a Chili’s campaign so badly that it left Bommarito and company “ for a second chance” lest they lose the account. So when Chili’s Grill & Bar asked him to come up with a ribs-focused jingle circa 1995, he wasn’t exactly jazzed at the prospect. “This was a time when really good agencies would send out Christmas cards that would have a blank before the word bells … and when you’d open it up it would say ‘We don’t do jingles.’ That was the feeling at the time, that jingles were the lowest form of advertising,” Bommarito told VICE in 2017. Advertisers looked upon the newly obsolete art form with undisguised scorn. Stars were selling out left and right, and the licensing of preexisting hits had displaced jingles as the industry’s main musical component. “Because I really don’t want to be known as the guy that did the ‘Baby Back Ribs’ song.” “Bite and Smile”īy the 1990s, the American advertising landscape had evolved to better fit the celebrity-centered nature of pop culture. “When the song first started taking off, my biggest concern was, ‘I hope that’s not the only thing in my obituary,’” he told Great Big Story in 2015. But that honor belongs to Guy Bommarito, a former advertising executive with much more ambivalent feelings toward his creation. This cabinet of crazies is best enjoyed uninterrupted front-to-back, so we’ll get you started with Buzzkill‘s album opener that pays tribute to the Commander in Chief of chain restaurants, “Chili’s 45th and Lamar”.With a send-off ceremony like that, you’d be forgiven for assuming McCoy wrote the ubiquitous ditty himself. Buzzkill is easily Trunk’s best record yet, both in terms of content and sonic fidelity. On that note, today Trunk unfurled their latest studio offering, Buzzkill. And although the lyrics and subject matter are about the same level of juvenility (unsurprising considering how old some of these songs are), we’re certainly not complaining about Trunk’s laissez-faire approach to songwriting, which channels the care-free eclecticism of Meat Puppets or The Minutemen. Given, they only made their first public live performance last Fall at Infinite Hellscape Fest, but that set showed how much Trunk’s sound has matured since their 2017 debut GONE AREA. But following Austin’s rich history of sarcastic hardcore punk acts like The Dicks, Big Boys and MDC, Trunk is actually really fun to listen to and honesty incredible live. Look at their song titles or listen to their lyrics and you can tell right away that these five fellas are mainly just goofin’ around. Instead we’re yielding the podium to a group whose last two albums were Trunk’s America and north american practice space. Depending on the general reception of a sitting administration, President’s Day often presents the creative community with opportunities to shed some sociopolitical discourse.
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