John Wilkes Booze devoted all of 2002 to their Five Pillars of Soul project: a set of CDR EPs dedicated to Tania Hearst, Marc Bolan, Yoko Ono, Melvin Van Peebles and Albert Ayler. Their new record Telescopic Eyes Glance The Future Sick is the culmination of years of intense study of both halves of the MC5: ”Black To Comm” and ”Kick Out The Jams.” Singer (and nephew of a Zero Boy) Seth Mahern speaks after a nice lunch in Eugene, Oregon, and later predicts a total shift in human consciousness by 2012.

What pillars of soul didn’t make the cut?
John Cage, Sun Ra, Jim Jones–
As in People’s Temple?
It’s just a really interesting story to try and unfold–was he a CIA op or somebody really seeking a utopian lifestyle? And why did it go down that way? About six months ago, a friend of mine gave me a CDR of the last moments at Jonestown–it’s Jim preaching and all these people screaming. I only listened to it once–it’s kind of too much. And he’s from Indiana where we grew up, too–that’s part of our interest in him. He was successful there because he had one of the first interracial churches in Indianapolis. And a year before the Temple left San Francisco, the mayor named Jim Jones man of the year.
Who else was on the list? Richard Pryor? Philip K. Dick?
Pryor was on there. Don’t know about Dick, but I’m sure someone from the band wishes he was on there. The list was pretty long, but we whittled it down really quickly. We started with Melvin Van Peebles and then we found out he was coming to town. We got to meet him and we gave him the first copies of the CDRs.
Was he into it?
We never heard back. He’s kind of a recluse.
What did Patty Hearst say?
We were afraid she’d come down on us. She’s got access to a ridiculous amount of resources, so if she was bored and thought we were making fun of her, maybe she’d sue us. She definitely knew we were doing it because when it came out, John Waters ordered a copy. It was weird: when we were recording that one, it was when all those SLA people came out of hiding. One had been in South America for fifteen years, and as we’re writing and recording, they suddenly… we kind of got creeped out about it.
But it’s kind of nice to get that kind of subtle cosmic support.
There’s definitely a lot of universal consciousness that people don’t give a lot of credit to.
A lot of bands barely have any kind of consciousness.
That project was most of our lives for that year. I’d read anything I could find about all these people. It started to fry my brain.
Death by Albert Ayler.
Yeah, and then I’d switch to listening to nothing but T. Rex for a month.
How’d you come down after that? A lot of Herbie Mann?
A lot of rural blues.
What’s the story of the new record?
We’re trying to get a lot more free–worry less about song structure and more about the feel of the music-to let it take us where we have to go. We’ve been immersed in the music of Sun Ra and Father Yod–he’s had a commune in LA and he started like the first vegetarian restaurant in the country there in the 1970s. He was like 70 years old and he died in a hang-gliding accident. They had this band and they just jammed out and recorded it-some of it’s the best music I’ve ever heard. It’s just really exciting to kind of let yourself go to whatever ghosts are in the room.