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Andrew Beaujon.

COLLABORATORS

Ewa Beaujon,

Rob Christiansen,

Ian Jones,

Jenny Toomey

HOMETOWN

Washington, D.C.

MOST POPULAR

A Raw-Boned June
Valenteen

GREATEST HITS

Angry Canadians
Blue Skies
Dots Per Square Inch
Friends in the Future
One So Black
Teenbeat Theme

ALSO

ANDREW on Twitter

DESCRIPTION

Andrew helped start Teen-Beat with Mark Robinson at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia. He also founded the seminal indie bands Jungle George & the Plague, Scaley Andrew, and Eggs, as well as recording and performing as a solo artist.

Talk Ita> is the name of his current group. An instrumental trio based in Washington, D.C.

RELATED ARTISTS

THA CHEEKY BASTID

EGGS

JUNGLE GEORGE & THE PLAGUE

SCALEY ANDREW

TALK IT

WILLIAM & VIVIAN

Andrew,
(with Norm Veenstra)
at Indie Rock Flea Market
Photo by Kurt Calloway?

Andrew
Photo by [unknown]

Andrew at the Graceland Mansion, Memphis, Tennessee
Photo by Mark Robinson

Andrew's T.B.D. portrait
Photo by [unknown]

ANDREW BEAUJON
Marylebone Station (1996)
7" vinyl 45
[Happy-Go-Lucky]

ANDREW BEAUJON
Across My Bow (1997)
7" vinyl 45
[Neptunes]

ANDREW BEAUJON
Morning E.P. (1997)
12" vinyl 45/compact disc
[Neptunes/House of Dubois]

ANDREW BEAUJON
"Andrew B. Sexin' U in '92"
pencil

FILM

ANDREW ARGUES WITH BETSY ROTHSTEIN

Animated.

BIOGRAPHY

As a co-founder of Teenbeat Records, Andrew Beaujon was a member of Eggs, as well as lesser-known bands such as Scaley Andrew, Jungle George & the Plague, William & Vivian, and Tha Cheeky Bastid. His smart indie-pop songs gained many admirers, as Eggs were a staple in the East Coast indie rock scene in the early 1990s. After the band dissolved, Beaujon was briefly signed to Warner Bros. Records, though the label never released any Beaujon material. Releases followed on Neptunes Records and Happy Go Lucky Records. In 1998, Teenbeat released Beaujon's A Raw-Boned June, an eclectic eight-song mini-album. The album's intimacy was captured at Beaujon's home in Brooklyn, New York. In early 2002, he founded Tha Cheeky Bastid, performing at a Teenbeat Records Festival in February of that same year. The band was featured on Teenbeat's annual compilations in 2001 and 2002, while working on their first full-length disc.

- Stephen Cramer, All Music Guide

ANOTHER BIOGRAPHY

"The self-loathing of teens is never seen as such at the time," chirps Andrew Beaujon. "Most folks mistake it for rebellion. I'm trying to make a living on that."

The son of Belgian and Finnish immigrant parents, Beaujon's past reads like something out of the pages of a modern-day Lewis & Clark diary. Born around 1967 aborad a makeshift sailing raft somewhere in the St. Lawrence seaway, Beaujon's childhood follows the fate of his luckless parents and their search for work as translators for tongue-tied traders along the American frontier of Canada. Daunted by a lack of need for their skills, the Beaujons traveled south, settling in Oak Park, Illinois - birthplace of Ernest Hemingway - after a stint in the Cardiff, New York, peddling conceptual tours of the legendary giant there.

Spiritually confused as a boy as a result of his family's involvement in an Oak Park group he describes as "unquestionably a cult but full of very nice people," he eventually saw his way clear when his ears were opened to music by a "chaplain" there. With other boys, he fell in love with the songs of the I.W.W.'s little red songbook of labor hymns.

By age 16, Beaujon (pronounced BOW-zhan) had grown more compelled by anthropology than by music. Seventeen days - he remembers counting them down - after finishing Thor Heyerdahl's "Kon Tiki," the chonricle of a 101-day sea voyage from Peru across the Pacific to the Polynesian islands, Beaujon attempted to replicate the voyage in spirit. Settling for a lone companion despite his intention to secure five, he and childhood mate Will Oldham (of Palace and "Matewan" fame) set sail eastward from Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, destined to reach the White Cliffs of Dover. A more mature Andrew reflects on the event: "I was very caught up in teh beautiul symmetry of having been born afloat and becoming a man by sailing the Atlantic in a primitive vessel. We simply couldn't get offshore."

Offered a scholaship to attend the University of Michigan's "Experiment in Finance" undergraduate program, on the merits of an essay chronicling his adolescent voyages and S.A.T. scores alone, he couldn't decline. "I hadn't even finished high school and here I had a scholarship. I went." Four years in Ann Arbor nearly straightened him out.

Out of college, Beaujon hooked up with discount brokers Young and Whiteman and took a corner office in the firm's Washington, D.C. office. His career in finance went from promising to lackluster, in tune with his dissatisfaction with the unpalatable rhetoric of teamwork in corporate culture. Beaujon said goodbye to investment banking in 1989 when he was faced with an uncomforable ultimatum in the form of a multimillion-dollar merger that rode on his willingness to perform karaoke with representatives of both firms. "I drew the line there," he recalls.

After six months of unemployment, Beaujon picked up a job as a piano tuner in Brattleboro, Vermont, despite having never played. But as a man with perfect pitch and eagerness to scrape up in the residue of a discarded optimism, he began to get back in touch with the artist he had abandoned through tuning.

Volume could be written about Beaujon's musical history - from his solo work in 1993 to his years creating the incandescent sound of legendary outboard-rock outfit Eggs. But while the music has changed, the ethos has stayed the same: Don't look at me, I don't look at you.

"The dawn of every new era is signaled by the radical behavior of an ornery core of proselytizers and a subset posse of radical haters of hate or more likely, haters of themselves," explains Beaujon. "To discourage the young from rocking is akin to warming your hands between your legs on a cold day . . it looks ridiculous and it doesn't work."

Critics have charged that Beaujon underestimates the power of rock, that with his public outbursts, he's unwittingly biting the hand that feeds. But like a disgruntled investment banker muttering to himself over a free lunch plate of salmon steaks and french-cut peas, Beuajon - and the many who adore and understand him - insists that rock is merely his current instrument for making a buck, "like a jackhammer to a jackhammerer."

Troubadour Beaujon's musical influences as varied as are the colors of the godforsaken sky: The Great Space Coaster; Ben Cramer, the Dutch Master of the Tearjerker; grunge; and the book of Leviticus. So great, in fact, is Beaujon's adoration of Leviticus that one dares not mention in his presence that it's universally considered on of the "skipable" books of the Bible.

A reporter from "Details" magazine recently learned this the hard way. When during the interview, the reporter poked fun at Beaujon for his having spoken with such conviction about Leviticus, Beaujon lost control of himself, arguing assertively - the "Details" reporter lamely said "flailing about" - that Americans still stood to learn a great deal from the book. What is clear from all of this is that Andrew Beaujon is an optimist, surely aware that Americans prefer watching "Over The Top" to reading Homer. But he's willing nonetheless to suspend his disbelief enough to put it all up on stage.

A prolific writer, Beaujon is already at work on his next full-length album, a political manifesto with a working title of "And Gaza Makes Three," due in the spring of 1999.

- Jahn Cranner, Hoboken, New Jersey

DISCOGRAPHY

SINGLES

Marylebone Station
Across my Bow
Morning

ALBUMS

Valenteen
A Raw-Boned June

COMPILATIONS

Extremism...
Teen-Beat Fifty
Indie-Rock Flea Market Part 2
1998 Teenbeat Sampler
1999 Teenbeat Sampler
2001 Teenbeat Sampler
2002 Teenbeat Sampler
2003 Teenbeat Sampler

BOOKS

Body Piercing Saved My Life

ALSO

Teen-Beat Business Cards
Teen-Beat House
Full Teen-Beat Moon
Teen-Beat's 12th Anniversary
Teen-Beat's 13th Anniversary
Teen-Beat's 15th Anniversary

RELATED

Eggs
Jungle George & The Plague
Scaley Andrew
Talk It
(as) Tha Cheeky Bastid
William & Vivian
Andrew Beaujon and Women in Rock

SONGS

Across My Bow
Andrew's Theme (The Best That You Can Be)
Andy
Angry Canadians
Blue Skies
Defenestration
Ebenezer
Little Wings
Three-Finger Salute
Dots Per Square Inch
Every Time We Say Goodbye
Feeling Relatively Good
FFV in NYC
For Gigi [as Tha Cheeky Bastid]
Friends in the Future [as Cheeky Bastid]
Groovy Feeling Inchoate
Horse Girl in the Passing Lane
I Never Cared for You
Initials K.K.
Marylebone Station
Money on You [as Tha Cheeky Bastid]
One So Black
Orinoco Flow
Packaging Deduction
Snowglobe Hearts
Teen-Beat Theme
Truer Than the Wheel
The Twist of Separation
Underpants Sam