Formed before the pandemic, 1996 remained a simmering project until live events could resume. This supergroup, featuring Richmond musicians Prabir Mehta (Prabir Trio), Warren Campbell (Dead Billionaires), Britt O’Neil (Shera Shi), Greg Butler (Long Arms), Ross Wright (Wayward Leaves), Ally Khoury (The Northerners), and Jeremy Flax (JFlax & The Heart Attacks), specializes in playing classic songs exclusively from 1996.
Their debut at the final Ghost of Pop in December 2022 electrified the room with GenX nostalgia, evoking a time before Y2K, the Patriot Act, and the complexities of 21st-century politics, world conflicts, and corporate control. In December 2023, a year after that G.o.P. show, I sat with Prabir at Gather downtown to discuss that iconic era and its unique appeal.
TRav: 1996 was an incredibly important year for me and I imagine for you as well. Where were you in 1996?
Prabir Mehta: In 1996, I was a student at Douglas Southall Freeman High School in the Henrico County School District, living in the suburbs in the Quioccasin area near Regency Mall. This was such a big year for me because half the year I was obsessed with checking out every single thing that was on MTV and VH1, and the other half of the year, I was obsessed with listening to everything that was on the radio because I got my driver’s license. So, the second I got my driver’s license, I had a job doing stuff like mowing and babysitting, blah blah blah. Whatever, I bought like a beater old car. From that moment on, it went from TV to radio. But in that one year, I probably consumed more media than I can possibly remember any other year. A lot has to do with the fact that once I got that driver’s license, the first six months were spent listening to the radio and hanging out with friends. And then slowly mixtapes started to appear. And then slowly CD players started to exist in vehicles.
TRav: So, was it a tape deck? And then it was the tape with the cord to plug into the aux out of a Discman?
PM: Of course, I didn’t have a lot of money. So you end up buying a lot of crappy cars that work for X months or a year if you’re lucky. But one of the cars I owned, the tape player [eject] was broken, and so on one side was Blood Sugar Sex Magik by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and on the other side was B.B. King’s Greatest Hits. I listened to those two albums. I mean, I couldn’t even tell you, you know. But I can now when I walk into a bar somewhere and I hear a fraction of a second from any of those pieces on either side, I’m like, “That’s ‘Got My Mojo Working,’ it’s in there somewhere.” It’s locked in, etched in.
TRav: Are any of those songs in your catalog?
PM: I did a couple of B.B. King tunes for a while, and I think at some point, like maybe a Chili Pepper song made it into a cut somewhere. But nothing from that album. No, nothing from that album, but definitely from the B.B. King album. I did a bunch of those for a while.
TRav: Would you bring any of those back?
PM: Why not? I love them. I think B.B. King’s great, and B.B. King is also the reason that I play guitar. He was one of my favorites from the get-go. A lot of people get into things like Jimmy Page or Eddie Van Halen, which to me felt like 6,000 notes a second. “LalaLalalalalalalalalal,” you know? And then you get to B.B. King who’s like, “Bah Buh Doa.” I’m like, “I love that! I heard three notes, and I knew all three of them.” I got really into the simplicity and “to the pointness” of B.B. King’s playing. And it was way more emulate-able.
TRav: Which is why Jimmy Page and EVH were probably inspired by B.B. King.
PM: Absolutely, totally, and they had more time to put in on the “lalalalalalalala”. The first time I picked up a guitar, you know, I obviously couldn’t do anything. But you can still find a couple of those B.B. King notes and be like, “Oh, I think this is how that song starts” or whatever. I love B.B. King and still, I would easily throw B.B. King’s songs into the set still. And, honestly, I love the Chili Peppers. I think Blood Sugar Sex Magik is awesome. It’s such a good album. The stuff before and after it is okay.
1996 was the year that I started playing music with friends at a capacity where we were more intentional. Prior to that, it was like, “Well, whatever, you know, noise.” And it was fun. Like, “let’s be really loud at this part, and then let’s be like, really quiet at this other part.” And then around 1996 is where it became understood that while we were all enjoying what we were doing, we had to get our shit together or we would never play the Battle of the Bands. And then that was the goal. Then we got to the Battle of the Bands and we did not win, but we got there.
TRav: What was the name of your band project at that point?
PM: In ‘96? I believe it was called Blind Side.
TRav: One word or two words?
PM: Good question. Probably two words is my guess. It was kind of the first band that I had with my best friends, you know, Chris, Jason, and John, we were all a unit. We’d hang out every day. We’d exchange all the things we were, like John was really into the computer. He still is. All of us are still into the things we were into back then.
TRav: It’s almost like you were distinct people in development.
PM: I was really into lyrics and where the story of the song was going. And Jason was really into fun, catchy melodies. Chris was really into, “what does it mean?” the kind of deeper, “why are we doing” “what’s the purpose of this” kind of thing. Really bringing purpose to every song. “Yeah, it’s a love song. But why?” John was getting into MP3s before we were. He built our website and he was like, “We’ve got to put the music out. And this is how people are going to hear it.” It took four of us really working together, and it felt like a new family was being forged or something.
TRav: Maybe a Band?
Prabir: A Band, exactly. And so that was the first year that all that happened. And it coincided with, you know, us experiencing some of our favorite to this day music.
TRav: And that was when you were a Sophomore or Junior in high school?
PM: Sophomore and Junior. That summer of ’96, I owe my parents an entire summer of silence, you know, because that summer, the day that school got out to the day school started, my mom and dad were like, “Can you please do yard work?” And I’m like, “After I learn this song.” “Can you please do the dishes?” “After I record the song.” Every day was nonstop music. And I just got an amplifier, my first loud amplifier. That caused a lot of problems at home because, you know, as a 16-year-old, I’m like, “Why can’t I play this at three in the morning?” Now I get it. Sorry, Dad. Sorry, Mom. They were very chill about it, you know, they were very like, “He’s not doing drugs” and “He’s like making art. So just tell him that he can’t make art at 3 a.m.”
TRav: Un-amplified art.
PM: Even the acoustic guitar at 3 a.m., if I started singing it still was… so we had like an actual quiet time put into the house in 1996.
Trav: Instituted.
PM: “The rules”. ‘96 is when rules began in the house, you know, that kind of thing. So, a big year for me.
Trav: What was your favorite song in 1996? Which doesn’t necessarily need to be from that time.
PM: In ‘96, I probably had a new favorite song every week. ’96 was also like I said the first five or six months of ’96, a lot of television. At this point, the Beatles had put out their anthologies. I could go to the library and rent The Who documentary.
TRav: That was VHS?
PM: Yeah. Or I could get the Woodstock footage, you know, on VHS or whatever. Anything that I could get my hands on. I was consuming the old stuff and the new stuff. And then in ’96, VH1 somehow became savvy to doing it all. And they were like, “Here’s Madonna and Pete Townsend’s first solo song.”
TRav: I was looking at that in ‘96, MTV2 launched and Storytellers on VH1. And I think Pop Up Video.
PM: So you get a lot of historic kinds of perspectives. Once I got the driver’s license, it became of utmost importance to go to record stores, with various dates or friends or whatever. As often as possible. That dollar bin at Plan9 is worth more than my college education. I got so much out of that dollar bin, I got hundreds of records. On weekends, occasionally they would have sidewalk sales where everything was $0.10. And I was like, spend $2 and walk home with seven or eight of the greatest albums ever made, ever. I was just able to throw on and be like, “Well, let’s see what this Bob Dylan Blood on the Tracks is all about.”
TRav: Do you still have that library? Are you still adding to it?
PM: I mean, some of them over the years have gone missing; they got borrowed or some got played out of existence. In moving from apartment to apartment or whatever. But the bulk of it still exists. Like the ones that I can’t separate myself from. Joni Mitchell’s Blue, forever will exist in multiple quantities, you know, because that’s a gift I give to people. The Kinks’ Village Green Preservation Society. At any given point, I have to have at least two or three of them. There’s the one I listen to, the one I give away, and just the one that I like to have in case I give one away.
TRav: I’m the same way with movies. I have multiple copies of many different types. The amount of copies of Goodfellas I have is absurd. At some point, I would just get another copy of Goodfellas. “What if my sixth copy is scratched?”
PM: I’ve given away so many albums over the years to bandmates and stuff. Like if we’re playing together for the first time. I remember there was a bassist that was filling in for a little side project that was working on back in the day, and I remember giving him two records and I was like, “These are the two albums that I think you should listen to.” And it was the Beatles’ HELP record and Otis Redding’s Greatest Hits. “Play bass like that.” (Laughs)
TRav: So we can’t define a favorite song in ‘96. Do you have a favorite song now that was recorded or released in 1996?
PM: Again, I mean, there are so many. If I had to spit one out of nowhere, maybe “Virtual Insanity” by Jamiroquai, maybe.
TRav: And that is an incredible freaking song.
PM: Yeah, it’s ridiculously written.
TRav: I have listened to it so often since then. The video is incredible.
PM: Still incredible.
TRav: Jonathan Glazer is absolutely amazing. I watched Royal Wedding by Stanley Donen with Fred Astaire and there’s a sequence where he’s dancing on an ocean liner and there is this shifting, and the furniture is going, and I’m just like, “Is this it?” With Fred Astaire with these things going, sliding, “how did they do that? Is the set moving?” This is also the film where he dances on the ceiling.
PM: Yeah, I know what you are talking about.
TRav: The moving, rotating room, rotating set. But “Virtual Insanity” is an amazing video, an amazing song. And then one of those predictive songs to the world we’re living in that is from 1996. Prophetic.
PM: It’s insane.
TRav: Do you have any plans on adding that to the repertoire?
PM: 100%. We have a gigantic list of songs that we haven’t even come close to yet. Because we’ve really wanted to add all of the vocals that Brit and Ally can do. So we’ve been doing ’96 for about a year now. And we’ve gotten the 1996 “Bro set” down pretty good. And it was time to add more band members. And a greater diversity of songs that we can hit, ranges, harmonies, etc. Building more fun party vibes kind of thing. So right now we’re implicitly focused on getting the two of them the amount of material that we have without them. So that way we can do our two sets and be good with it. And then once that’s done the rest of the year for ’24, we have mapped out like the next like 10 to 12 songs that we need to add. And it’s on that list. There’s so many songs on that list I’m very excited to get in.
TRav: Since my first viewing, which was just about a year ago, at the last Ghost of Pop, an incredible set. I feel blessed to have been there for many reasons. I have since then looked at songs released in 1996. I’m like, “Dr. Octagonecologyst is on that 1996 release list!”
PM: It’s just so fun; you’ve hit me up a lot. The folks that hit me up the most are the people who have done sound for us. Because they’ve seen us at multiple gigs and then they get the idea and they’re like, “Wait a minute, was that one Counting Crows song from 1996? … it was!” So everybody has their favorites from ’96. And again, to me that might work with every other year, but I haven’t seen it work with every other year. So there was some magical “last ship off the planet Mars” kind of thing that was happening.
TRav: Looking at other things that happened in music that year and then in the world, unrelated to the music world, ‘96 was the year of Carl Sagan’s passing and Timothy Leary’s passing. Do you have any thoughts on that duo’s leaving of Earth, “leaving to Mars” and their impact?
PM: I’m sure that having a year where you’re thinking about these two big minds is important. You know, simultaneously you also have the Tupac – Biggie thing. Which are also huge minds. I think in every part of ‘96, there was something happening with important minds, the influence. The media was filled with all that. You also had the Olympics, which aside from the bombing scare, when people talk about the Olympics, I think it’s inspiring because you’re talking about these people that have committed their lives to throwing this clay thing this far…
TRav: Discus.
PM: That’s what they’re doing. This clay disk that is going or whatever they made out of. There was an election, in ‘96 there was just all these things.
TRav: And pre-2000 coming into this new millennium.
PM: Yeah. The awareness of that. There’s this new start that’s going to happen like we started to slowly get the creeping in of the Y2K fear or we slowly started to get the promise of how the year 2000 is going to be better. Meanwhile, you have these very important people either passing or running for office or participating in this rare sporting event that the planet participates in. The economy was doing fairly well. You also had a time period in which hip hop music was so powerful, like the rock n roll stuff is great, alternative rock is great. But really, if you go through the year of 96, it was owned by the Hip Hop industry, you know?
TRav: The recording industry’s ownership of the Hip Hop industry.
PM: Correct. There were just so many things and ‘96 felt new… It’s a new page. 1996 felt very different from 1990.
TRav: Yes. I was graduating high school in ‘96, then started college in ’96 in the split of the year. So for me, it was the end of an era, beginning of an era.
PM: And the undeniable thing, in my opinion, to add to that is that computers kept getting cheaper, And people kept getting them, and it was just like, okay, this is definitely not 1990 anymore.
TRav: For 1990, when I go back and look at artifacts, it is an extension of the ‘80’s. Whereas ’96 is like the beginning of the 2000’s. And looking at the trivia, some of the births of ‘96 are remarkable.
PM: Who are some of the births?
TRav: Jennie Kim of Blackpink, I think was one of them, and I’m spaced out because I didn’t write them down.
PM: Was Taylor Swift 1996?
TRav: I think she is 1989.
Prabir: That’s right, the Album.
PM: There are a couple others, whatever this generation is they are people that are landmarks now.
TRav: Like when you said Tupac, one of the things he did that year that was interesting was he introduced KISS at a reunion show, Tupac introducing KISS in full band makeup in 1996. And they just did their last show this week in 2023. That was bizarre. And the Beatles did their first reunion song. That year, which again, they just did another reunion song this year.
They’re like echo points of ’96 to today on so many levels. There was the Phish Clifford Ball in 1996, which was one of their first big festivals, sleep out campout things, of which was one of the models for all the festivals of today.
PM: Interesting.
TRav: When you get back to what was happening there entertainment-wise…
PM: …the seeds of today. Phish had a huge single in ‘96, the song “Free”. That was all over the radio.
TRav: Yeah. And that was off of Billy Breathes. When I went to Paris in ’97, it was like the spring of ‘97. I went with Billy Breathes and the Lost Highway Soundtrack on tape, those are the albums that are associated with that trip to Paris and London. Now it’s just this Reznor bit or this Angelo Badalamenti bit will just time travel me or that Phish album. Apparently also in ’96, Jerry Garcia’s ashes were scattered.
PM: Did he die that year?
TRav: He died in ’95. But some of his ashes were scattered in the Ganges in the spring of 1996. And then shortly after that, some in San Francisco Bay. So his legacy of passing and then now of course… “is this going to be Dead and Co’s last tour?” or whatever.
PM: That’s interesting a lot of commonalities there.
TRav: 1996 resonated greatly across a lot of different things which is again, part of what made this project launch. Back to your friend who is on the cusp of mp3’s. Do you know what the first digital single was?
PM: No, I don’t.
TRav: “Telling Lies” by David Bowie off Earthling.
PM: Really? Okay, so that is ‘96?
TRav: This is the official note that “Telling Lies” is also 1996.
PM: Okay. So I think that’s fair game. It’s funny as a joke, I was talking to Kenneka on the way to the last gig and the Prince song “1999” came along and I was like, “Yo, ‘96 should cover that song.” Because that song was still very relevant, you know? As you get closer to 2000.
TRav: In 1996, on my birthday, February 14, 1996, Prince was married to Mayte. So there is something. And at that time, The Artist Formerly known as Prince because he was in the contractual Protest era. Now we’re in that era with Bowie and Prince departed which is back to how any singular year can be so precious and ephemeral and then these artifacts, whether they’re music or movies or whatnot, resonate out of time. We were talking about the Telecommunications Act of 1996, and you were talking about how 1996 was part of your political, mental onset. Are there factors that you think contribute to that as the last year before “launching to Mars for Humanity”?
PM: For me personally, I was having conversations with people at lunch tables for the first time about what political things meant to each other, you know, because 9th and 10th grade, not so much for some reason, you know. Middle school, definitely not. Middle school was like all comic books and Miami Dolphins, “GO DOLPHINS!”, that’s only because of Ace Ventura, I have no other affiliations. But you know after watching Ace Ventura and all my friends watch football, I’m like, “I guess the Dolphins”. Anyway, so that was all middle school and early high school was a lot of like, “do you like stuff?” “I like Stuff” awkward making friends kind of stuff. And then 10th grade was definitely like “I learned an A minor chord”. “Cool, have you tried a D major?” or “What do you mean?” And then once the core group of friends have assembled, we know what the A minor is, you know what the D Major is. We already know which Walmart we’re going to hang out at till one in the morning this weekend. What else is there to talk about? “Did you watch the presidential debate?” by sheer running out of things to talk about.
TRav: And coinciding with an election year.
PM: But also just like the political stuff like watching news, like we had assignments from history classes that were like, “watch the news and write about it,” you know, stuff like that.
TRav: When one could still watch the News. Because part of that time was Deregulation and the 24-hour news cycle.
PM: Exactly. Yeah, Launched these 24-hour networks of insanity. But prior to that, we had basic channels up until I was like in 10th grade maybe, and then we had cable after that. I think even cable was like 30 channels or so.
TRav: That’s part of the broadband deregulation of how they could sell that digital spectrum to space. They just gave it to them and anything that was built upon for old radio practice was just done away. 1987 was when the Fairness Doctrine was struck down which was equal time to the two parties. There was a lot of censorship stuff for “decency,” but then a lot of freedom for disinformation.
PM: Even that though, there was a conversation then, the Telecom Act of ‘96 was a lunchroom conversation for us because like Rolling Stone was writing about it, the radio stations were talking about it. Mike Stipe was talking about it on MTV. So it’s kind of like what our heroes were talking about, So it became a topic of conversation.
TRav: And what were some of the ramifications of that to the music industry that made this sort of before or after, lights on, lights off, sort of thing?
PM: I think the people that were probably more close to the music industry, like Mike Stipe, for example, probably have more valid opinions than, let’s say, my friend from English class who just picked up a guitar for the first time because the Act was sold to us as an only positive thing. It was sold to the average person as like, “this is great. This will open up more diversity, more competition, more income, more jobs.” And again, it did to a certain capacity. So we can’t say that it didn’t do that, right. So it did absolutely do some of the things that they told us it would do. It kind of did it. But it also didn’t. You don’t get told the negative consequences because then you’re not going to want to “buy the meal” anymore. So I think our heroes like Mike Stipe and Eddie Vedder and, you know, Puff Daddy even.
TRav: Kurt Loder. We had journalists.
PM: Yeah. He had to be neutral, you know, He just had to report the news. But Mike Stipe could say he didn’t like it, you know?
TRav: And that’s a part of hindsight, Kurt Loder was always the “Stuffed Shirt” when I was younger. But as a music journalist over time I grew to understand what he was doing then. Kurt Loder really did amazing work.
PM: He raised the bar up. Absolutely. So I think some folks who didn’t know a lot about it were like, “what do you mean? My parents think it’s going to be great because X, Y, Z,” Which you know, now that I think about it, it’s kind of cool that parents and kids at the dinner table were talking about the Telecommunications Act of 1996. But I guess they were.
TRav: We didn’t have cell phone’s dissociation.
PM: No streaming, no flat screen TV’s. Yeah. So it was kind of “your city News”. I do remember folks either felt very for it, very against it, or didn’t care. And for us, it was for us music kids. We were like, well, “MCA from the Beastie Boys said this” and “Ma$e and Puff Daddy, (who we don’t even like) said this”, and “Mike Stipe said this”, and all of them were in the music biz, I was kind of thinking we should listen to them. You know, Eddie Vedder and Chris Cornell and you name it, and everybody basically was like, “this will be really bad for local radio.” “This will be really bad for small artists” It’ll be great for the big companies it’ll be great for Michael Jackson. It’ll be great for Pearl Jam. It’ll be great for the people that have already kind of carved out a place for themselves. But it won’t be good for the ladder, that you need to get to the top. The ladder is going to be kind of cut off in two different places. And then instead of ladders, you now have these like ladder islands that you can’t really get to unless you find some magical way to make a leap from this to this. For me at least, my relationship to TV and radio and music and everything drastically changed in 1997, very early in ’97, actually, I remember the onset. I remember when MTV started being like, if you want to see music videos 24/7 go to MTV2, and I was like, “Man, the Real World is like on five times today”.
TRav: And Road Rules…
PM: Yeah. All of that. Singled Out is on. And I was like, “where’s my Weezer music video?” “Oh It’s on MTV2 or it’s on Much Music or it’s on VH1”. To a degree, in ‘97, I remember like there were more options to find music and stuff, but it wasn’t the music that I thought, I really liked. So I just didn’t care. I didn’t pursue the things that didn’t move me.
TRav: In that last Halloween set, there were a couple of songs that weren’t necessarily like “Criminal” which was like, “My God, this is a gift, Thank God I’m hearing this live”, I didn’t get to then.
PM: Fiona is great.
TRav: But then there were a couple of songs which again were more like from the era where I was like, I would have turned that off or changed the channel or not been into. But because it makes me think of who I was in ’96 I’m now like “this is a banger.”
PM: There’s four or five songs in the set that I definitely am like, “I can’t believe I’m playing this.” But when it’s played in the context of the whole set, “I guess we have to do a No Doubt song.” Like that gig, the other song that I thought was funny is “How Bizarre”. That’s a funny song to me because like I remember in ’96, it was like the butt of jokes, right? Like for me, at least, that was like, “What the heck is this song?” It’s about these people driving around and the cops are after them, and they want to get away from the cops. That’s the whole song.
TRav: I never knew that that was the subject of the song.
PM: That’s the whole song about, I was like yeah “it is bizarre. You’re right.”
TRav: So it was a renegade anthem.
PM: When we were putting together this band and chatting about all the options, and I came across “How Bizarre” I watched the music video, and it made me smile, you know, like it was just a genuine smile. Again, I’m not a huge fan, I didn’t go buy the OMC record or anything, but I was like, you know, this song was everywhere in ’96 and it should be in our set. Like I made my peace with it. Or like,”Push” by Matchbox 20, I’m not a big Matchbox 20 person.
TRav: Not at all.
PM: And I’m just like, “whatever.”
TRav: And then now that’s out of its cultural moment from Barbie.
PM: That’s another one of your overlaps right there, but that’s why we put it on the set because we were like, well, “it was in Barbie.”
TRav: Which had one of the most emotionally moving costume interactions in that room on Halloween when two “Fred Durst” were dancing and singing it to each other.
PM: One of those Fred Durst’s is our keyboard player’s wife.
TRav: Fantastic. And that makes it even more magical. It was one of those things where I did not expect that to move me as much as I’ve had to suffer through Limp Bizkit sets once when they opened for Faith No More and then once at the first Ozzfest and I was just like, that’s “not my thing. Please give me Ozzy, I didn’t need to see this part of the future.” But the joy of two Fred Durst cosplayers enjoying a song, it transcends what it is into something of that night.
PM: That was a super fun show.
1996 is playing a free show Jan 19, 2024, at Hardywood in Richmond, VA. Doors 6 pm! Music 7 pm to 10 pm and more shows to come!
Pictures of 1996 from Ghost of Pop 2022 and Halloween 2023 by TODD RAVIOTTA
