Game Theory

This page contains answers to questions about Donnette's involvement with the band Game Theory and what she knows about the other bands in which former members are currently in.

Bill McMahon asked several questions...
Hi Bill!

I remember the show at Notre Dame! It was fun!

I brought along some friends from my dorm, and one guy in particular was asking me what your name was, so I told him. Big mistake. He proceeded to yell "DONNETTE" throughout the whole show. I remember you looking at the guy, probably wishing he would shut up.

Any musician who claims to dislike it when people shout his name is lying. If he's not, he should get out of the music business or go into production or something less visible. I also have little patience for musicians who lean around backstage acting world-weary; it's just so pretentious. It's like they're saying: since I am so burdened and exhausted by the presence of my enormous following, my enormous following therefore should be all the more grateful for my presence. To me that's faulty logic though. If a real celebrity is that pooped out and thronged, they just leave. They don't do anything they don't want to do.

I'm wondering how things were with Game Theory at that point. Did Hex come about because of a desire on your part to have more creative input and control?

As for my diminishing role in Game Theory, you are quite correct in your assessment, very astute. Scott rightly wanted to keep control of the band to himself, and I inadverdently kept trying to steal it. When I joined the band, it was with a complete understanding that I was a backup player and nothing more. But it's my nature to try to get things done in whatever way I can, and that's what I did. This brought a lot of success to the band, but had other consequences as well.

Here’s a brief history:

I join Game Theory as a second guitar and to do backing vox. Scott supports me and I manage the band. Now I'm in a band signed to a label (Enigma) with several albums and loads of critical acclaim, but we still can't get gigs! I organize the first-ever band benefit for a public station, KFJC. We draw over a thousand people. Gigs come easily after that for Game Theory in the Bay Area. The other first thing I do when I join the band is to hound the label to make a video. They agree to finance it, and select “Erica’s Word” but I still have to pull the video shoot together. “Erica’s Word” appears on MTV. We record Lolita Nation, and I do a lot of radio promotion for that record. We need to tour it to really promote it. No one will agree to book a tour, so I book it myself, and we tour for two months. I push through another video “The Real Shiela”. Lolita goes top ten in the college charts.

Scott is becoming dissatisfied with sharing so much public attention with me. I think he begins to worry about the way we will be perceived. This is an art band after all, should such a band so prominently feature a blonde chick in a short skirt who wears her guitar slung low? To further complicate things, I know everybody at the record label, I also know all the bookers, I know all the radio people. Scott strengthens his creative control of the band. Now the fun part of playing in a band is slipping away, so I lose interest in the tedious necessity of managing it. But the band’s got a full head of steam now and we get pros to do a lot of the stuff that I did before. I book a short tour of the west. It's easy this time. We make Two Steps from the Middle Ages, and tour it. Steve Kilbey asks me to do a collaboration record with him. I accept, and quit Game Theory. So does everybody else.

Could you give some details about how you and Steve Got together in the first place?

Well, I’ve already told the story of how I met Steve, so maybe I’ll tell about how he decided to work with me to create Hex, his first real collaborative work outside of the Church. Having just completed several tours myself, I knew taht any way of combatting road boredom was welcome and made a couple of compilation tapes for him to listen to on the drives. One song on one of the tapes was ‘Peace & Love’ (popularly known as ‘Blind Man's Penis’) by John Trubee. Funny story behind that song, Trubee sent the goofiest lyrics he could think up to one of those “Put Your Songs To Music” ads in the back of a tabloid magazine. They put it to music and that’s what Trubee put on his record. Totally hilarious song if you’ve never heard it. I also put on a lot of Bowie and other stuff on this tape, and a song my own band (not Game Theory) had just finished, a version of the exquisite folk song ‘Shenendoah’. Steve liked my taste in music he and also liked my voice, but he thought that I was being wasted in my band and in Game Theory. After Church shows on the Starfish tour, he would go to his room and wind down by writing music on an Ensoniq SQ80, and these songs eventually appear on the original Hex record.

Gordon Lapsley

Let's Active supported The Church on the American tour for Heyday.I read that Mitch Easter was a big Church fan,and wondered how Steve [Kilbey] found him.

With a compass? Kidding - Mitch is sweet and cuddly, and Steve got on very well with Let’s Active. I saw the Church and Let’s Active play together in Chicago, they were both great. Angie and I had hung out together quite a bit when Mitch produced Lolita Nation, so she was really happy to see me and suggested I play a song with them. I said sure, ok, just as long as the song has less than three chords. She said sure I know just the one! Then she hesitated and said, uh... uh-oh, the bridge has an oh (she plays about a thousand chords in a row)... well then this part - it’s easy but it looks hard (smiling gamely - plays another slew of chords) ... oh and there’s that other part (a few more chords)... and then the outro goes like this (a flurry of chords). We both looked at each other, rockerchick guitarists for bands whose songwriters revel in frighteningly convoluted work, and laughed. But it was a nice gesture on her part.

Angie did a really incredible piano part on Lolita Nation, on “The World’s Easiest Job”. She woke up from a dead sleep on the couch in the lobby part of the studio, stumbled to the piano and rolled that part out completely improvisationally. It’s worth buying the whole record for that one part. But it’s a great record all the way around.

Was there any talk of Mitch producing a Church album.That would have been very interesting!!

You know, I don’t remember Mitch being suggested as a producer for the Church. You’re right, it would have been a very interesting association. I’ll never forget Shelley telling me that she was gonna love working with Mitch because he told her that he liked the way she played some part, but he wanted it to be “fluffier”. She just thought that was just great - she knew exactly what he meant and fluffier it became. Mitch has a gift for easing tension in any given situation, very important for dealing with the prima donnas that one encounters in his field.

By the way my favourite Game Theory song is You Drive

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And a really fun one to sing. The Loud Family did that song live last time I saw them, and did it so loud that it was possible for me to sing along joyously without being able to hear myself - just the way I used to do it live in Game Theory.

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