Photo by Kyle Mclaughlin
Mean Motor Scooter
Formed at the beginning of 2015 when bassist Joe Tacke of Spookeasy joined forces with drummer Jeffrey Chase Friedman and guitarist Sammy Kidd of Endless Sky, Fort Worth band Mean Motor Scooter drew its name from a scene in “From Dusk Till Dawn” when Seth Gecko (George Clooney) warns Jacob Fuller (Harvey Keitel) that “the only thing you need to be convinced about is that you’re stuck in a situation with a coupla real mean motor scooters.”
Staying a three-piece band for a little over two years, the band garnered loads of fans in and around Fort Worth, thanks to the reckless abandon they brought to their style of garage rock. One of those fans was keyboardist Rebekah Elizabeth of I Happy Am.
After hearing the original recordings of their first LP, Hindu Flying Machine, Kidd felt the need to add the depth of sound that could only be brought by the Elizabeth’s psychedelic keys.
“I was listening to a lot of stuff that had keyboards in it, like Epsilons,” Kidd says. “There was just a lot of different styles of old garage rock and bands that we derived our sound from at that time. It was just something that I felt that we could really use, and I wanted to experiment with that. Then it just kind of stuck after.”
The band has flourished as a local and national act since, booking shows from here to the Pacific.
“We’d like to go all over the U.S. — the West Coast for sure,” Elizabeth says. “It’s been fun to go out there, so I’m sure we’ll be back.”
Photo by Kyle Mclaughlin
Mean Motor Scooter
It was July 29, 2018, when the band rolled into the DNA Lounge in San Francisco with a merch box labeled MMS on one side and FTW on the other.
Opening for their labelmates, The Darts, in San Francisco, the band experienced the kind of national attention every band craves when hearing a crowd of over 200 people singing its lyrics back to them.
“We represent Fort Worth in everything we do,” Tacke says looking out across the train tracks where Cleburne meets West Berry on the patio of the new bar and music venue The Moon.
“It’s a super tightknit scene, and there’s a lot of talent packed in a pretty small area,” he adds. “We’re all aiming at the same goal and trying to put ourselves out there and promote the city as we go.”
Just a week before Thanksgiving 2019, all of the band’s work was put in jeopardy when Friedman’s health forced the band to cancel a string of shows.
“I was smoking two packs of cigarettes a day, and when you do that, you run the risk of a spontaneous pneumothorax,” 30-year-old Friedman says of the sudden onset of a collapsed lung. “I ended up staying at the hospital for three days. Probably the most barbaric time I ever had was when they shoved the tube down into my chest.”
But the show, as they say, must go on.
Pushing back against his doctor’s orders to stay away from strenuous activity and heavy lifting, Friedman was loading into and playing his heart out for Thanksmas 2019 at Doc’s Records and Vintage the very next week.
Since then, Mean Motor Scooter has been hard at work preparing the release of its follow-up to its highly acclaimed 2019 release TV Baby EP, another five-track EP entitled Mr. Sophistication, whose first single “Aristobrat” can be heard now on Spotify.
The plan is to package the two EPs together to generate interest from bigger labels, but if that doesn’t work out, Mean Motor Scooter is happy to keep revving its engines, making as much noise as possible in Fort Worth or wherever it can get the crowd singing along.
