Road Warriors: Renminbi

This case has "corruption" written all over it.

We just got off the horn with SMV, the impossibly pleasant keyboardist from Renminbi. Their name should sound familiar, as a couple of weeks ago, we raved about the brooding post-rockers’ new self-released Surface EP. We’ll be talking a bit about them in the coming days - regarding their relationship with Andrew WK (weird, we know), their connection to Sonic Youth, the tragedies that have struck the trio in recent years and much more.

But since we have some breaking news, we wanted to tell you all about it first: Renminbi just got their car back from a tow pound in Chicago. Which means that it must have been towed. Which means there’s gotta be a good story here. So naturally, this calls for another edition of “Road Warriors.”

When we spoke with SMV, she breathed a sigh of relief, climbing back into the vehicle. Fortunately, the New Yorkers - who played Chicago last night - don’t have a gig this evening. Their next one is tomorrow night in Toledo, Ohio, which means they’ll have plenty of time to make the trek east.

“It happened at the right time, if it had to happen,” SMV admitted.

So here’s what happened: Unbeknownst to them, Renminbi parked their car in an illegal place overnight and woke up this morning to discover that the car - which contained a considerable amount of gear - had been towed.

“We’re staying with a friend here in Chicago, and he’s had a lot of friends parking in his lot, and he’s never had any trouble,” SMV said. “They’ve never been towed or ticketed. But apparently there’s been a change in policy, and now you have to have a sticker in your window, and we of course didn’t have that, didn’t know about this, so they towed us overnight out to this lot.”

Tows usually cost a couple or few hundred bucks … so what was the damage?

“It was actually supposed to be $170, but our friend reamed out his landlord for not telling him about this change in policy with the sticker, and he was able to get the tow pound to cut it in half,” SMV explained. “So we’re only going to end up paying $85, which is not bad at all.”

Wait, how is that a landlord can influence the cost of your car being towed? Are we missing something here?

“We’ve been talking about the same thing, actually,” SMV confessed. “We think there’s some backdoor deals going on. It seems to be a racket. It’s a private towing company. It wasn’t towed by the City of Chicago, and it seems like there’s some kickbacks going on here. Like, the landlord has this tow company target her place and remove cars, and then they probably give her a cut or something. This is our conspiracy theory.”

We’re pretty sure Renminbi weren’t actually in Russia or Mexico, since SMV’s cell phone had a U.S. area code and seemed to work OK. But we smell corruption.

Stunningly, this was actually the first car tow for the band, even though they’ve been around for six years. But SMV was taking it in stride.

“I think every tour always has some crazy-ass ‘fail’ story that happens. So this is our Chicago ‘fail.’ ”

Stay tuned for more from Renminbi.

Posted Thursday, July 16, 2009 by korzeck