(Translated from my original Italian text by ChatGPT and Piero Scaruffi)

The band Information of Chris Nelson (guitar), Phil Dray (organ), and Jeff McGovern (original drummer, later replaced by Rick Brown when he formed Mofungo) played their final concert in 1981.

The following year, Dray, McGovern, and Nelson added guitarist Susie Timmons (formerly of Sunset Chorus with Ikue Mori) and performed a show as Ex-Information. Dray and Nelson also briefly appeared in Mofungo. In 1984, the new lineup (with Dick Champ replacing Timmons), having settled in Minneapolis, debuted under the name The Scene Is Now with the single 1150 Lbs/ Treaty Stone, a vaudeville-style nursery rhyme arranged in a "negative" way, using electronic effects and atonal cues.

This group of deviant talents recorded the album Burn All Your Records (Lost, 1985), arranged with trombone, mandolin, Velcro, tapes, pots, pans, and a bicycle wheel. The twenty surreal aphorisms on the album (including Voltaire's Repair To The Organ, Five Cent Shave, and Bugged Wigged Out) are generally catchy and reminiscent of the electronic variety of the United States Of America.

Three years went by before the group recorded another album in 1988, Tonight We Ride. Tony Maimone (ex Pere Ubu) and Will Rigby joined the band. Maimone greatly influenced the sound, which sometimes closely recalls the psychedelic-futurist sketches of Pere Ubu (the instrumental Tofu Golf Course). But more often, an innocent, iconoclastic humor triumphs, freely borrowing rhythms and melodies from Caribbean folk (Moonlight Broil), swinging dance steps and operatic melodies from the 1950s (Digest).

These are "borderline" songs that enter and exit conventional genres, delightfully filled with foreign sounds, showcasing (Big Steam) country phrasing, Hawaiian languor, funky guitar riffs, and rhythm and blues horns; or (California) blues-rock cadences, saloon piano, laughing saxophones, and silly choruses; or (Hepsy Brown) a two-voice country nursery rhyme; or (Tin Roof) archaic Broadway melodies and Buddy Holly inflections with fairground organs.
They can even pull off new wave ballads like Full Fathom Five, sung with decadent spleen at a martial pace and supported by poignant guitar riffs, in which the band manages to incorporate a psychedelic-era chorus and a dissonant interlude without clashing. Nelson has matured as a singer (and stopped issuing Maoist proclamations); the guitar interplay (himself and the lyrical Dick Champ) renews the "acid" glories of Television and Feelies; Dray (former bassist and drummer) has learned to play dissonant organ like a more orderly, discreet Ravenstine, but still with the same penchant for counterpoint; a bebop saxophone (Rigby) occasionally fills the sound with retro warmth. Abandoning Godard and Brecht, who inspired the cold unlistenable quality of their early compositions, The Scene Is Now sail toward unprecedented singer-songwriter pop-rock.

Total Jive is the final testament of their original "dada-pop," full of other harmonic inventions that brush against exotic music (Kid Ory's Nightmare), polka (Bank), and funk (Bunk), culminating in the spectacular Sartre's Acid Trip.