June 01, 2017
The Confusion and the Glory
Like so many of the things we've done over the years, the "Mr T Experience? Nein Danke!" shirt design was a bit of a misfire. A parody of a seemingly ubiquitous anti-nuclear power campaign logo, it seemed funny, slightly mischievous, maybe even almost clever. Once we'd printed them up, though, it soon became apparent that we'd misjudged our audience (or something.) As Aaron succinctly put it: "nobody gets it." (Which was something of a de facto MTX motto. They should put in on my tombstone, really.) Turned out the original wasn't quite as ubiquitous as we'd imagined.
Nevertheless, we persevered in trying to unload them, one by one, to a bemused public. Years and years later, we succeeded in doing so, and turned our attention to other things nobody was going to get. When the band caught a sort of "second wind" in the mid-90s, however, we started to get lots of people coming up at shows and asking if we had any of those "nine dank" shirts. They still didn't get it, generally speaking, but somehow that misfire had become popular as its own discrete thing, completely separate from the thing it was a parody of. Weird phenomenon. So we made more and scattered approximately one zillion of them around the USA and the world. It was one of the more popular designs we'd ever done.
But that was long, long ago. Sounds Radical is doing a limited re-issue of it now. You don't have to get it to get it, just do it now: orders are open through June 12. Celebrate the confusion and the glory.