Found in the Inbox: Bad Veins Bring a Reel-to-Reel to “Rainbow Connection”

Rive Video Promotion’s campaign for Bad Veins began with a line most bands would never admit: “It was all one glorious accident.” The Cincinnati duo’s take on “Rainbow Connection,” the song Kermit the Frog made famous, arrived as part of The Mess Remade on Dynamite Music, and the story behind the band explains why a Muppets classic fit so comfortably beside their own songs.

A bedroom project that went onstage

Bad Veins started as a low-key solo outlet for Benjamin Davis, a garage-rock veteran and multi-instrumentalist who recorded big, theatrical pop arrangements in his bedroom studio. Then friends asked him to open a show. “When this whole thing started, I was just shooting for the moon trying to get the biggest sound possible,” Davis says in the release. “I never intended to play this music live.”

The solution was “Irene,” a 1973 Pioneer reel-to-reel recorder that plays back the studio layers onstage. Davis’s father, a Vietnam veteran, had kept the machine at home, and Davis first used it as an amplifier for the guitar his father kept behind the couch. His father later gave him the recorder along with his sergeant’s army jacket. That gift shaped the band’s whole look: megaphone vocals, war-torn imagery and a fan community that calls itself the Bad Veins Army.

Drummer Jake Bonta, whom the campaign describes as “John Bonham-meets-Animal,” completed the lineup. The two met on a Tuesday and were onstage in front of thousands by Saturday. By their third gig, they were showcasing for indie labels in New York.

What surrounded “Rainbow Connection”

The release notes call The Mess Remade a 13-track album of “sonic islands,” and Davis describes how songs grow: “Often the songs start off with just me humming over an acoustic guitar, but Jake’s sound is so big that the songs end up being this hellacious ruckus with me experimenting with like a tuba.” Alongside “Rainbow Connection,” the campaign highlights the fan favorite “Kindness” and “I Shut My Heart Down.”

The band’s résumé at the time included tours with Two Door Cinema Club, Walk the Moon, Frightened Rabbit, St. Lucia and We Were Promised Jetpacks, a placement for “Gold and Warm” on the Chronicle soundtrack and an earlier association with Dangerbird Records. The video premiered on The A.V. Club.

Why it was in the inbox

A song about dreamers and believers suits a band that turned an inherited tape machine into a bandmate. Davis puts the band’s connection with its audience plainly: “These aren’t really fans, they’re our friends, and they’ve had such a huge effect on us as people and musicians.”

Listen to “Rainbow Connection”

Release details and quotes from Rive Video Promotion’s campaign for “Rainbow Connection” (Dynamite Music). Official audio via YouTube.