Cheer-Accident

Thymme Jones, still a high school student and already an accomplished pianist, spotted a rack of greeting cards marked "CHEER-ACCIDENT" while shopping at a Hallmark store. Cheer-Accident, the band Jones later assembled, has passed through six distinct lineups and lost one member along the way. The group specializes in pop songs built on unconventional chord progressions and has issued numerous albums plus several singles through Complacency, Pravda, Skin Graft, and, beginning in 2009, Cuneiform.

Jones, vocalist Jim Drummond, and drummer Mike Greenlees formed the project during the opening minutes of 1981 at a New Year’s party. The Hallmark memory stayed with Jones, prompting the name Cheer-Accident. Additional musicians contributed to the sessions that produced the debut album Life Isn’t Like That. Greenlees and Drummond departed for other pursuits after its 1986 release. Jones then recruited bassist Chris Block and guitarist Jeff Libersher, two musicians he had met while attending Northern Illinois University in the mid-1980s. From April through July 1988 the trio recorded Sever Roots, Tree Dies at Solid Sound Studios in Hoffman Estates, Illinois, with engineer Phil Bonnet; the album appeared later that year on the band’s own Complacency label. Remaining material from those dates surfaced on the cassette album Vasectomy, also issued by Complacency.

The band next entered the studio with Steve Albini to cut the EP Dumb Ask. Impressed, the English imprint Neat Records offered a two-record contract in 1990. When the first pressed album reached the musicians, Jones found it over-compressed, arbitrarily edited, and riddled with misspellings, leading the group to abandon the deal. Cheer-Accident continued releasing material on Complacency and invited engineer Phil Bonnet—whose prior credits include Will Oldham, U.S. Maple, the Smoking Popes, Bobby Conn, and Eleventh Dream Day—to join as second guitarist. Recording for the fourth album, Babies Shouldn’t Smoke, began in 1991 inside the upstairs room of Chicago’s Pete WAY facility. Pravda subsequently invited the band to contribute a track to its 20 Explosive Dynamic Super Smash Hit Explosions! compilation, resulting in their version of “Theme From Shaft.”

Bassist Block was asked to leave in 1992 after disagreeing about musical direction; Dan Forden took his place. The following year was devoted to recording and to developing the Chicago cable-access program Cool Clown Ground. Albini returned in July 1994 to record the sixth album, Not a Food, finally issued on 19 February 1996. After Forden married in August 1994, ex-Flying Luttenbachers bassist Dylan Posa joined. The Why Album, tracked between 1992 and 1993 and released in November 1994, marked a deliberate shift toward straightforward pop. Posa’s arrival infused the 1996 and 1997 performances with added intensity, while members simultaneously lent their services to U.S. Maple, Dot Dot Dot, Yona-Kit, Bobby Conn, Gastr Del Sol, and Smog.

Cheer-Accident appeared on the split 7-inch His Ass Was His Only Feature with Star Star on the Super 800 label in 1997. That April the band collected five years of work into its seventh album, Enduring the American Dream, its second Pravda release, drawing from sessions held in Hoffman Estates, Streamwood, Schaumburg, and Palatine, Illinois. The following month the group captured the fifty-two-minute piece “Trading Balloons.” A hiatus followed until September 1998, when Cheer-Accident shared a Lounge Ax bill in Chicago with the Flying Luttenbachers and the Bells.

Tragedy arrived early in 1999. Two weeks after a 22 January performance at DeKalb’s Seven Dead Arson and two days after basic tracking for the eighth album, Salad Days, Bonnet died of a brain aneurysm. The remaining members resolved to continue, completing recording and mixing for Salad Days by mid-May. Jones invited guitarist Jamie Fillmore, previously heard on Antje’s Big Open Sky, to replace Bonnet. Once stabilized, the band self-released Trading Balloons as an EP and followed it with Salad Days in October 2000.

Throughout the first decade of the 2000s the group maintained a steady release pace, issuing Variations on a Goddamn Old Man (Pravda, 2002), which drew on mid- to late-1990s recordings that included Bonnet; the comic-book soundtrack Gumballhead the Cat and the stylistically divergent Introducing Lemon (both Skin Graft, 2003); and What Sequel? (Pravda, 2006). In 2009 Cheer-Accident moved to Cuneiform for Fear Draws Misfortune, viewed by some listeners as the decade’s strongest entry from the band.