by JOHNSON CUMMINS

After my deluge of questions regarding Me First & the Gimme Gimmes’ new record Love Their Country, singer Spike Slawson finally stops mid-sentence while answering a dud I lobbed about the recording process and calls a spade a spade: “I don’t know, dude, we’re just a cover band. I guess it’s gratifying doing this for a month or so but at the end of the day it’s just a bunch of covers.”

True dat. But given Me First’s line-up of mall-punk superstars—NOFX’s Fat Mike, Foo Fighters’ Chris Shiflett, Lagwagon’s Joey Cape and Dave Raun, and Slawson with Swingin’ Utters—it’s no wonder Slawson is on a strict interview regimen these days. Taking classics, reheating them and putting them through their punk-rock wringer, MFGG have made mincemeat of R Kelly’s “I Believe I Can Fly,” Billy Joel’s “Uptown Girl,” John Denver’s “Leaving on a Jet Plane” and Styx’s “Come Sail Away,” and although I have never experienced prison rape, I imagine that it would be very similar to listening to their pillaging of Lionel Richie’s sappy sad-sack anthem “Hello.”

After six releases, the band have proved the joke hasn’t gotten old just yet, with their latest record steering their punk-rock pickup truck down dirt roads, on country chestnuts like Lee Hazlewood’s “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” Hank Williams’s “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” and a host of other rifle-rack anthems.

“I guess we’re running out of ideas, and the country thing just seemed to resonate with everybody,” admits Slawson. “I think country is pretty punk rock anyway, really. There is just a sense of honesty and attitude in country music, and the way the songs are put across is a lot like punk rock. Even people like Porter Wagner are like the Negative Approach of his time.”

MFGG’s arguable high water mark was 2004’s Ruin Jonny’s Bar Mitzvah. The aptly-titled record is almost as much equal parts Dada, Andy Kaufman and Living Theatre as it is punk rock. The under-rehearsed band were actually hired for the bar mitzvah of the son of the publishing attorney of Fat Wreck Chords (Fat Mike’s label), with the resulting show being recorded, warts and all. The band limp through amped-up and out-of-tune versions of “Heart of Glass,” “Strawberry Fields Forever” and more, as Jonny’s friends and family offer up just a smattering of applause while the band drunkenly argue between songs.

This crash-and-burn in front of 50 people makes for a hilarious listen, but the band’s joke folded in on itself when they played before a Pirates baseball game in Slawson’s hometown, Pittsburgh. Hired for three consecutive nights to play in front of a sold-out arena of Pirates fans praying for legalized lynching, the band found themselves fired after only the first night.

“We opened up with ‘Stairway to Heaven,’ which in Pittsburgh is really sacred ground. After we finished the song, 20,000 people out of the 35,000 people in attendance started booing us. The booing started off really slow, then got really loud before we went into ‘Sweet Caroline,’ but by that time, they had pretty much drowned us out. In hindsight, it seems kind of cool, but at the time, it wasn’t cool at all. I just felt like I was being punched in the stomach repeatedly.”

With the Sainte Catherines and Dead To Me at le Spectrum on Wednesday, Nov. 29, 8 p.m., $18.50, all ages

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