Grasshopper

Grasshopper (born Sean Thomas Mackowiak, May 25 1967 ) is an American musician with the band Mercury Rev.

He has also appeared with Rev side-project Harmony Rockets, his own band Grasshopper and the Golden Crickets, and as a guest musician on numerous other recordings.

Other activities in the late 1980s included working in the video department of a legal transcription company, as a percussionist for the local Buffalo band Sunny in Chernobyl and as a medical research subject: "I did this thing at a medical school where I got paid to take various drugs they were developing. You're in this controlled environment for 3 days and they give you all these drugs then suddenly stop then watch you suffer," he said.

Mackowiak is most commonly known by his childhood nickname Grasshopper, derived from how his family's Polish surname translates into the Polish language - "from where the poppies grow" - and his hyperactive nature as a child.

Grasshopper undertook a BA in the renowned Media Studies program at the State University of New York at Buffalo (1984–1988) where he studied with avant-garde filmmakers Tony Conrad and Paul Sharits as well as Viennese action artist Peter Weibel.

While studying at The University of Buffalo around 1986/87, Mackowiak began to play bass guitar with avant garde group Shady Crady, an embryonic Mercury Rev incarnation which also featured Donahue, a member of The Flaming Lips until 1991.

These formative years brought him into close contact with other members of the Flaming Lips/Mercury Rev sphere, such as producer Dave Fridmann and early Rev singer David Baker, also a media student.

Mercury Rev properly began in 1989, with Grasshopper moving to electric guitar and the band playing along to footage of TV wildlife documentaries.

He later received a master's degree in the same subject at The New School, 1990–1993.

Mackowiak's early years have been colored by a 1991 interview given to music publication Melody Maker, which claimed that he met Rev singer Jonathan Donahue in Camp Sunshine, a reform camp for juvenile delinquents, at the age of ten.

Grasshopper was throwing dead squirrels and rats into a lawnmower when Jonathan met him.

The blood spattered over a watching group of retarded kids and they screamed and yelled.

They yelled, "Now throw the possum in! The Possum! The possum too!"

Muses Jonathan, "When you're younger, these things make a more vivid impression. I remember huge adrenaline rushes as the guts flew and hit people on the legs. I don't know what Grasshopper had done to get in there. He doesn't talk about it much."

The band's first two albums, Yerself Is Steam (1991) and Boces (1993) were intricate yet deafening soundscapes dominated by the feedback-strewn, heavily effects-processed guitars of Grasshopper and Donahue.

The spirit of experimentation was manifested by the band's use of the Tettix Wave Accumulator, a homemade tone generator of Grasshopper's invention.

Boces, remembered by the band as a particularly troubled record, was recorded under the influence of the drug rohypnol.

The band's first UK interview, with the now-defunct Melody Maker in 1991, contained this memorable exchange, reported by Chris Roberts:

I ask Grasshopper's mother, who must be about 50-odd, if she enjoyed the show.

"Oh yes," she beams, "it induced orgasm."

I'm sorry?

"It induced orgasm."

After 36 hours in the vicinity of Mercury Rev, nothing on earth should throw me.

This does.

"Can I take your photograph?"

she asks.

I run away and tell Grasshopper that his band has just sexually aroused his mother.

"Uh-huh," he says, like I've just asked him if he wants a beer.

"She's kinda cool. And she smokes a lotta dope."

When asked by Melody Maker in 1993 what he liked most about the album, Grasshopper replied: "that it's done."

Chaos also manifested itself outside the studio: a legendary, oft-repeated story holds that either Donahue or singer David Baker tried to gouge the guitarist's eye out with a spoon.

The year 1995, however, saw the departure of Rev singer Baker and a radical change in direction for the band, which drew on Broadway, jazz and doo-wop influences helped along by Grasshopper's clarinet.

The album See You on the Other Side, and resulting tour, saw the band virtually ignored.

The reliability of the story is unknown, though the claim to have met in a reform camp was repeated to the NME in 1998.

Grasshopper was born in upstate New York and was introduced to music by his uncle, an Atlantic Records employee who gave him records by John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman and Miles Davis, as well as novels by Jim Carroll.

Growing up close to the border, he was in a range of Canadian radio stations, further broadening his musical education.

In the early 80s, Mackowiak was a member of The People's Front (name taken from the Monty Python film Life of Brian), which played concerts in Fredonia, Dunkirk and Buffalo, NY.

There was a film made of the band but has since gone missing.

The film showed the band in concert and in a mock documentary with the storyline predicting great success not in the US, but "across the pond" in England.

The film ends with a crash that was a foreshadowing of the fate that befell the actual guitar player for the group, Kyle Gaszynski.