In June of last year, the British radio remix duo that calls itself 2 Many DJs released its long-awaited debut mash-up album, which consisted of several dozen fairly famous songs by people as diverse as Lou Reed, Salt'n'Pepa and Dolly Parton laid end-to-end and on top of each other for a full hour of postmodern party music. Amid the mayhem was a catchy little ditty called "Danger! High Voltage" by the Wildbunch, a group that, until 2 Many DJs got ahold of their single, no one outside of Detroit had ever heard of.
The Wildbunch is no more. They are now Electric Six. The band changed its name when "Danger" was rerecorded for XL, one of England's premier indie labels, who brought the band across the pond and signed them. Assisted on backup vocals by another Detroit-London commuter, Jack White of The White Stripes, the song eventually went to number 2 on the British charts.
For a group of 30-year-old musicians who'd been confined to the Detroit toilet circuit in one form or another since 1996, this chart success should have been a supreme rush, but the rush turned out to be of a different sort. After E6 released their debut album, "Fire," last spring, half the band up and quit.