Captured! By Robots sounds like Robert Plant being electrocuted and castrated, backed by a teenage speed metal version of Led Zep. The visuals are even better: A skeletal, robotic guitarist dubbed GTRBOT666, made of wire and wood scraps, flails away on a double-necked flying V that appears to have been wired by Spock on acid. A bloodshot, bug-eyed percussion creature made of tom-toms mounted sideways on a pole (AUTOMATOM) towers over a squat-bodied kick and snare with a shrunken head hung above them (DRMBOT0110). A headless, bloody-necked, three piece horn section (HEADLESS HORNSMEN) bleats and thwonks behind it all.
In the center of these animatronic nightmares, bloody entrails hanging out of his white T-shirt, stands their creator, Jay Vance, or JBOT. Although he is technically the robots’ master, onstage he’s their slave.
Vance’s captivity began a decade ago, when he decided to leave musical humans behind and create his own race of automated players. Despite the programming, the ‘bots still have a human side. “There’s also interactive stuff between the robots and me — they yell at the crowd,” Vance says by phone, on the road to a gig in Phoenix. “They call people horrible names — they’re very mean.”
GTRBOT666 is the meanest of the bunch, sounding like an X-rated Donald Duck with rock god ‘tude. “I’m the best goddam guitar player in the world,” it boasts on “Fuck Off.” “I’m the bomb. Fuck off, all you humans. Die! Die! Die!”
Vance won’t name an actual role model for his guitarbot, but says it’s based on nearly every guitar player he’s ever played with. “Guitarists are the worst,” Vance says of the solo-grabbing, string pullers. Give ’em eight bars, they want 16, and a full stack of amps. “And now, I play guitar. So in a way, he keeps me in check sometimes,” says Vance, chortling. “‘Cause I’ll be getting that guitar kind of ego thing, and he’s just so much angrier than me that he’ll just pull me back to my place.”
Vance’s project would seem to suggest a hellish vision of some ‘bot-dominated future. But he says it still beats playing with humans. Democracy not drunkenness is the culprit. Vance played with as many as seven other musicians before and couldn’t deal with the cliques and allegiances that formed within that framework.
“I played in a bunch of bands where the members were drug addicts and ego freaks,” says Vance. “And people say, ‘Oh, it’s about the music.’ And back then, we weren’t making all that much money, so for me it was all about the music and making it as best as we could. And the guys are on stage, drunk as hell. How am I supposed to play with that? You can’t.”
Vance says he’s not bitter anymore. He sounds like a reasonable guy, well-spoken and intelligent, able to look back on his musical past with a sense of humor. He says robots have made him love humanity a lot more. “People do come out to the shows and they do show a lot of love. And that’s what I was missing before,” he admits. “But I still couldn’t play in a band with people.”
“Like if you’re a painter, and you go to the woods, and you want to paint a beautiful woodland scene and you gotta depend on six other guys to bring your brushes and hold the brush while you’re painting, I mean, damn, I don’t want to do that. Picasso never had to do that,” he laughs.
Picasso never had to work with a bunch of robots either. Vance’s artistic vision takes up so much of his time and energy that friends wonder if he’s actually been captured by his creations. “I am,” he says wearily. “This is me. I am as captured by robots as you’re gonna get; I’ve only gotten about 12 hours of sleep over the last five days. That’s captured right there. All my money goes to the robots, all my effort. I lost girlfriends, jobs, pets because of them.”
Vance arrives at clubs five hours before showtime and has another two hours of breakdown time afterwards. There’s ‘bots to repair, merch to lay out and technical tweaking to be done on the three computers he has running in synch. “So I challenge anybody to say I’m not captured.”
For his latest tour, Vance’s challenge is to put out a kinder, gentler vibe.
“It’s a spring tour, and spring weddings are a big thing,” he says. “I thought the people who usually come to see me, it would be a real kick to get married by robots.”
Vance is an ordained minister in the Universal Life Church, an organization that used to advertise in the back pages of Rolling Stone, offering its doctor of divinity degree by mail for five bucks. And he’s always wanted to do a tour of covers, but the ones picked for his wedding gigs aren’t obvious choices. He’s not using Sting’s stalker song, nor the classic J. Geils wedding ode, “Love Stinks.” Billy Idol gets in with “White Wedding,” as does Johnny Cash with “Ring of Fire.” Tom Jones also contributes. Tom Jones? For a wedding?
“Yeah,” says Vance. “‘It’s not unusual to be loved by anyone.'”
By this point in the conversation, Vance has used the term “we” to describe his one-man band several times. They are he, and he is them — or something like that. In this case, it’s not a sign of mental illness, just savvy marketing.
“Oh, it’s we,” Vance clarifies. “When GTRBOT heckles somebody in the crowd, and they heckle back, they’re not talking to me, they’re talking to GTRBOT. It’s we. People aren’t coming to see me. They’re not like, ‘Hey, did you see that JBOT guy? Wow. He’s great.’ It’s ‘Did you see those robots?’ That’s what they want to see.”
Captured! By Robots plays the Milestone; Wednesday, May 3. Tickets: $10. Doors at 8pm. Hellblinki Sextet opens.
This article appears in Apr 26 – May 2, 2006.
