Download: Animals & Men “John Of The Sword”

(from the s/t EP available now from Convulsive!)

Courted by Adam Ant—a relationship from which they politely withdrew when he suggested hiring a studio band to re-record their songs—and noted by John Peel, Animals & Men were positioned to take whatever version of fame and fortune the first wave of U.K. post-punk had to offer. But when the big boys came calling, they turned around and walked back to their tiny mining town in the grasslands, where they stayed with their unreleased tapes until good ol’ Hyped 2 Death re-presented them to the world. Encouraged by the release of retrospective collections, A&M have not only reunited but restarted as a working band, releasing brand new, extremely ferocious songs like “John of the Sword.” They’ll play their first-ever U.S. shows this month. Founders Ralph Mitchard and Susan Wells speak now from their living room, where they play in war paint with the door open while the neighbors marvel. They will perform at the Smell Thursday. This interview by Chris Ziegler.

As young punk kids, you had a zine called Stranded in the Jungle and you got to meet Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. What’s the first thing you say to Screamin’ Jay when you’re six inches away from him?
Ralph Mitchard (guitar/vocals): We basically bribed our way into the dressing room. There were these Welsh teddy boys in there and they kept saying things like, ‘Screamin’ Jay! Screamin’ Jay! Have you ever met Jerry Lee Lewis?’ I asked him if he was back playing R&B now and he went crazy and said he’d never stopped playing R&B! He sort of chewed me out.
So could you say that Screamin’ Jay Hawkins … screamed at you?
RM: Well, yeah—that’s true. He made me feel about three inches tall. I sort of went exit stage left—pursued by a bear, you know?
When you started the band, you said you deliberately wanted to be obscure—like the 13th Floor Elevators or the Velvet Underground. What’s so attractive about the rock ‘n’ roll netherworld?
RM: I don’t know. It’s funny because the very first song we ever recorded was the song ‘Render Us Harmless,’ which is complaining about the music industry. We started out with this idea that we were going to be abused. We were quite cynical—but we were actually quite right because record companies that were interested in our first single saw us as being like Altered Images or the Undertones. It’s not like we hate those bands or anything, but it suddenly became evident that we were going to become caricatures of ourselves. Unless you’re really desperate, that’s not a very interesting possibility.
Why did you already think you’d be abused?
RM: We just spent a lot of time beating ourselves up. When we’d play gigs we’d beat ourselves up afterward. It’s just part of our nature. We’re not comfortable having praise heaped on us. We basically turned down a Peel session. He called us and asked if we’d like to do a session, and we told him we’d prefer he listen to our new stuff before saying yes or no to that … but he didn’t really think it was any good! If we’d just shut up and taken the thing and run with it, we would have had a Peel session.
What was the most important thing about the band to you? The thing you’d never let get watered down?
Susan Wells (vocals): We always kept our integrity, I think. I always kept my clothes on.
Didn’t one magazine offer you coverage in exchange for sexy photos?
SW: Yeah—we could have gotten on the cover of Sounds if we’d made some comment or done some photograph. I think the fact that Ralph and I are in a relationship always gives us a backing. We just say, ‘No, we don’t want to do this. We don’t have to and we don’t want to.’ You just realize if you’re not going to play the game, you’re not going to get the exposure, so you think, Well, is it worth playing?
You convinced a bank to give you a loan to put out your ‘It’s Hip’ 7”. How do you get a banker to pay for a punk record?
SW: In those days, they were just keen to get you signed up for loans and things. If it looked fairly viable, they’d do it. I mean, they got their money back.
Did they?
SW: Well, we paid the loan back. Whether we actually made the money back, I don’t know—but we definitely paid the loan back. I mean, you have to.
So when the record didn’t sell, you threw almost all of them in a dumpster?
SW: Well, yeah—quite a few of them. We needed the room.
Everybody who reads this will be spasming in pain because they’d love to have one!
SW: That’s real life for you.
RM: There are so many stories of people tipping their life’s work into a dumpster. At the time it didn’t really seem like anything because it was kind of a failed record, really. John Peel only played it, like, the once. We got to see Yo La Tengo do a cover version of it a couple of years ago. That was pretty weird. In a massive auditorium where people sat down. It was very surreal. At the time it just seemed like a bad idea that had been received badly. Having this suitcase full of unsold singles was like having something laughing at me.
Did you miss the suitcase ever?
RM: No, we brought the suitcase back. Just the records we got rid of.
In your liner notes, you say the band was based on exploring interesting combinations—like Chicago blues with punk or Link Wray and the Shangri-Las. What ideas did you have that you never got to try?
RM: The last thing that Sue and I recorded in the early 80s was with a local rockabilly band. We got this idea that we wanted to do rockabilly so we recorded ‘I Ain’t Never Worryin’’ and ‘The Man With the Spiked Toed Shoes’ with a rockabilly band. We were called Red Hot and the Sans Culottes. The idea was that we would all dress in French Revolutionary fashions and have a guillotine and things like that. We were going to make a video with the guillotine and people roaming about in Revolutionary gear. It was the mid-80s, I suppose. We got as far as recording the record.
Did it ever come out?
RM: No, it’s still knocking about. One day it will see the light of day.
How many of your ideas have been proved correct by now?
RM: The idea of mixing punk and blues was one of our ideas, and it’s kind of slightly to our sadness that John Peel didn’t really like it—but he really liked the White Stripes. Kind of in a way we could have done that … but on the other hand, we didn’t. I think we were definitely some of the earliest people to think about the idea of mixing punk and blues.
What’s something that seemed like a mistake or missed opportunity then? But you realize now you dodged a bullet?
RM: The whole Adam Ant thing was best that we didn’t do it. At the time he was sort of manipulating us—saying we should be called something else and that we should do this and that we should do that. We were desperate but we weren’t that desperate. That was kind of a good near miss.
So what made you say, ‘No, we’re not going to do it!’
RM: It goes back generations, really. That’s a funny thing. My grandfather was a miner and in a general strike they had to go back and he said he’d rather eat grass than go back and my father was a Labour politician and he had all these crazy principles about never wanting to be in management. We always had this thing ingrained in our family history. It’s the same with Sue. Her father’s always been very eccentric in his work choices. It’s part of our heritage to be sort of awkward, I suppose. There are lots of incidences in our family history that show people turning away from licking the lollipop.
Did you see that mirrored in punk? Is that part of what brought you to it?
RM: Yeah, of course. Initially it seemed like a really great grassroots thing. We used to organize our little punk evenings and everybody would come from the surrounding towns and villages. We’d play records and pogo and talk to each other. Everybody would bring their records along and be, like, ‘Yeah, you should play this one.’ That was fun. And you’d sort of meet the types of people from the neighborhood that you’d normally be fighting—but because you’re sort of unified by punk, you’ll be friends.
When did that seem to disappear?
RM: There was sort of this element that a certain amount of our original punk friends got into—that sort of violence, wearing the Nazi armband … It was originally a unifying philosophy but it became, like, ‘These people over there … ’ Factions started to happen. And then things like mod came along and two-tone and it became subdivided factions of factions.
I feel like you were always looking for something independent but still somehow unifying and diverse at the same time.
RM: Part of my musical background is that if somebody’s doing something really good, eventually someone will come and knock on your door and say, ‘Yeah, we think that’s cool. Can you play this university?’ Taking the long view, we’re pretty happy with the way things have been. We thought that might happen, you know?
You thought that even back in the 80s?
RM: Yeah, I think so. Before punk I was a mad blues aficionado and it was all about field trips and recording things and obscurity. That was part of our ‘what we mean’ sort of thing. If we’d have moved up to London, which would have been the obvious career path, we think we would have become just another band, I suppose. In some ways, it’s tempting to do that—to become metropolitan like everybody else. But on the other hand it’s also quite tempting to be the band that didn’t go to London and get put through the sausage machine. In some ways it’s a risky business, but obviously it sort of helps us. I mean, we used to go to London quite a bit when we were being our most musical but we never, ever really wanted to live there.
Is there a lasting, positive effect of punk that’s still around? What good things were accomplished from 1979 to 1982?
RM: Personally, I think it’s the idea that it doesn’t have to be technically brilliant. It’s sort of bad to be doing something that’s two-thirds brilliant. If you take poor old Poly Styrene—you know, we’ve been mourning Poly Styrene—‘Oh Bondage, Up Yours!’ … you can’t polish that. It’s like a moment of genius. If people can avoid trying to polish things that don’t need polishing and just get them out there and have fun with it, I think that will be the thing. Sometimes it’s nice to see the stitching and the construction lines because it shows how you do it yourself.
In that live video of ‘John of the Sword,’ is that your own living room you’re playing in?
SW: It is. It’s our front room where I am now. We were going to play on the patio but it rained so we all had to move indoors. We lived in a long row of houses with gardens in the front so people were in the gardens. They were watching but they were standing under the trees in the gardens so they couldn’t really quite see us. They could hear us.
Do you have war paint on?
SW: Face paints, yeah. It’s the opposite of putting on a lot of fancy makeup and thinking, ‘Look how gorgeous am I.’ Now, I realize I’m not a pretty young thing. I am who I am—so I just let myself look a bit more interesting sometimes.
Have your kids ever complained that your band is too loud?
SW: No, no—they wouldn’t dare.

L.A. RECORD PRESENTS ANIMALS & MEN WITH WOUNDED LION, DUNES AND KIT ON THUR., JUNE 30, AT THE SMELL, 247 S. MAIN ST., DOWNTOWN. 9 PM / $5 / ALL AGES. THESMELL.ORG. ANIMALS & MEN’S NEVER BOUGHT, NEVER SOLD IS OUT NOW ON MISSISSIPPI AND ANIMALS & MEN’S SELF-TITLED EP IS AVAILABLE NOW FROM CONVULSIVE. VISIT ANIMALS AND MEN AT MYSPACE.COM/ANIMALSANDMENTERRAPLANES.

Illustration by Alice Rutherford

In the preface to The Order of Things, Foucault recalls Borges’ description of a ‘certain Chinese encylopedia’s’ taxonomy of fauna (a. belonging to the emperor, b. embalmed … ) as a magically humorous interpretation of reality. Such is the interpretation offered by the Museum of Jurassic Technology. Founded and directed by David Wilson since its nomadic inception in ‘84, the Museum of Jurassic Technology needs not distinguish history from fantasy. Wilson’s collection investigates the whimsical with as much ardor as the technical, the old wive’s tale with as much nuance as the astrophysicist’s process. A walk through his Museum leads one from micro-miniature to 3-D, stereoscopic to X-ray, model to map to taxiderm— instilling within visitors a sense of wonder that endures far beyond the Museum’s doors, turning Culver City into another Borgesian Labyrinth. This interview by Drew Denny.

David Wilson (founder/director): The museum has been around since about 1984 but for five years it was quite interim, which is to say it traveled from place to place—pretty much any place that would have us. We’d take exhibits in the back of U-Haul trucks and cart them around to various kinds of civic centers or museums. At the very end of 1988, it was getting harder and harder to move all that around, because we kept adding more and more exhibits. We finally decided to bring the people to the museum rather than continue to take the museum to the people. We were only given about a one-year lease at that time because they were going to tear the buildings down. But we thought there was no possible way we were going last one year, so we thought a one-year lease would be fine. But it turned out that at the end of one year, they didn’t tear down the buildings, and then they said we could stay another year and then another year until after we were there about five years. In about 1993, we just kept adding more and more exhibits and we had a bursting at the seams and then discovered a door in the wall that we didn’t even know was there. We asked this wonderful person named Philip Lomeyer who managed the buildings what was behind that door, and he said, ‘Funny you should ask—it’s another 1600 square feet. Would you guys be interested?’ Those people were actually a forensic laboratory, and they had just shipped their billing department off shore. Until that time, I was supporting the museum almost entirely myself through working in the film industry doing model and miniature quality control kind of work, but that started to all change very rapidly. In the exact same month that Phil offered us a new space, I essentially quit my job—or my job

quit me—and all of a sudden I was gainfully unemployed. We asked him how much it was and it was another thousand dollars a month and we were barely making the thousand dollars that we had already, so we said, ‘Sure! We would love to take it!’ So we took it and went into this crazy economic tailspin that’s lasted pretty much until right now.

What changed?

About ten years ago—more maybe—Phil came to us and said, ‘You gotta leave now because they’re gonna sell the buildings.’ ‘We can’t leave. It’s not like we set up some pedestals—we’re totally built into the space.’ And he said, ‘Well, what if it cost you a million a dollars?’ Which to us was just like saying it cost a billion dollars! But we just started down the path and we raised enough money so that we and the Bank of the West own the building. Nobody can kick us out now!

Did getting a MacArthur Fellowship help?

The MacArthur was great. That came in 2001—it was actually a really dark period. I remember I was sitting with Kelly Coyne, the administrative director at the time, and we were trying to figure out how we were gonna get through the month. I got this call on my phone, and I was not always the best about taking calls, but I was like, ‘You know, what the heck! I’ll take it.’ It was this guy named Dan Socolow. He said, ‘Are you alone?’ ‘What do you mean ‘am I alone’?’ ‘Are you sitting down?’ He played it out and went through this whole thing. It was great because we were really just scraping by. That wasn’t the answer to everything, but it sure helped and it allowed us to gain traction. There were five years where we had for the first time ever enough money to do what we should be doing, and we did quite a bit of building during that period. We did the whole upstairs of the museum—the theatre and the tea room.

How exactly did you build into the space? And who keeps the videos and the sounds and the holograms all running?

It’s just us. There’s nobody here but us chickens. The exhibits are done almost completely these days by a woman named Eva Hausam and myself and the larger scale construction … we all do some of each, but the other player in that is a wonder person named Oswaldo Gonzales who has been with us for fifteen years—who actually also essentially built the Center for Land Use Interpretation and built the Velaslavasay Panorama.

What’s the relationship between the museum and CLUI?

Cordial cooperation. Matt came down in the really early days of the museum. Somebody that was working for the museum got a grant to work here for a non-profit, but essentially was already working for us. He couldn’t work for us so he contacted Matt, who co-founded CLUI, and said, ‘I would like to work for you for a year, they’re giving me money to do it.’ I said, ‘Well then, I’ll just come down there.’ We gave them this office space and then they turned it into an exhibition space, and then after a while it became apparent that it was working pretty well. We feel their mission is substantially different then ours, but they’re so sympathetic—and wonderful people. When we bought the building, we made sure that they bought a one-eighth share of the buildings so that they can’t leave—which is what we wanted.

What’s the relationship between the museum and Noah’s ark?

I don’t know what kind of relationship we have with Noah’s Ark—with Noah. In the really early stage of the museum it occurred to us that Noah’s Ark was the first and most complete museum of natural history ever compiled. It had to have two of everything in existence and everything that was to continue to exist—except fishes, I guess. They were fine in the flood. That is a model for us of a real encyclopedic kind of museum. In a lot of ways we are just a smaller version of a lot of other wonderful museums in this country. But the thing that sets us apart is that we hark back to that idea of an encyclopedic museum. We don’t want to just limit ourselves to ethnography, we don’t want limit ourselves to the history of art—we want to be able to delve into interlace all kinds of interests. Whatever strikes our fancy, we can follow up and research and put into the vault.

When and where is the Lower Jurassic?

The Lower Jurassic is a geologic time period that was some 200 million years ago. All geologic time periods are actually—well, I don’t know about all, but many—including the Jurassic—are name after a location. The Jurassic was named after the Jura mountains. Now evidence of that era can be found anywhere.

Do we still name time periods after location and space?

I think we’re done naming time periods.

What do you find particularly compelling about the Jurassic?

That’s a complicated question. Why is that name this somewhat embarrassing title of the museum? But the actual real reason is that in the earliest days of the museum a friend gave us a large donation of artifacts that came through her family to her. In that were many fossils from the Jurassic period. When we came to name the museum, we wanted to acknowledge that first contribution. Without that we would have never really reached the critical mass that it took to make us an institution.

I always interpreted the name as a metaphor.

There are overtones. We like to—in our hubris—imagine that there are overtones to most everything we do. We have a motto, which you never see actually which is ‘Ut Translatio Natura’ which essentially means ‘nature as metaphor.’ For us, almost everything in the museum can be considered nature, if you consider human kind and all of our doings ‘natural’—because if that’s not natural what is? But the common thread through all the exhibits is that we are drawn to phenomena or historical occurrences that can be read on multiple levels—that can be read metaphorically or at least hint at overtones or suggest other things.

What exhibits in the museum are still most exciting to you?

You always are drawn to what you are working on now. Although you can’t say anything without its opposite being true as well, so I love some of the older exhibits. We’re currently working on an exhibition based on a fellow named Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky who was a very early envisioner of human space travel. It’s turning out very nicely and we’re very excited about it. That’s kind of my current affair. My roots were in motion picture, and we started this project of making movies for the theatre about a decade ago now. We’re just now working on our fourth film which is called A Book of Wisdom And Lies, and it was all shot in the Republic of Georgia last fall. We shot it in 3-D. We used a lot of stereoscopic in the exhibits over the years, but we’ve never really shot a film stereoscopically. This one we did.

What’s your relationship to that part of that world? You have the tea room and the Soviet space dogs and now this film.

I know how it happened, I don’t why it happened. The interest in Eastern Europe came originally from our exhibition of the work of Hagop Sandaljian, the micro-miniaturist. He was from Armenia. He immigrated to this country. While doing the major exhibition of him in the mid ‘90s, we wrote a catalogue. A fellow named Ralph Rugoff—he was a writer in Los Angeles for a long time and a really wonderful guy—wrote the catalogue essay. He did great research for it and discovered another living micro-miniaturist because Hagop had just died before we did our first exhibition of his work. Ralph said that there was a living micro-miniaturist living in Kiev in the Ukraine. And so he and I in a very unprepared and unprofessional way got on a plane and went to Kiev and somehow managed to get into the country and managed to get an interview with this guy who was really remarkable. Later we made a film that kind centers on an interview with him—that fellow’s name is Nikolai Syadristy. And since we were so close, we thought that we would go to St. Petersburg because we had always heard a great deal about it. That was in the 1990s and things there then were very different from how they are there now. It was an amazing place. We had the name of one person in the city: a woman named Olesya Turkina, who was a curator at the Russian state museum. We looked her up and she became kind of an almost instantaneous very good friend. In order to amplify that friendship, we undertook this series of motion pictures. A trilogy of three films that ended up having their roots in the Soviet space program, in Soviet astronomy and Russian yearnings for the heavens, in a way. It is wonderfully interesting material and we’re not done with it yet. We’re still working in those areas. For me when I went to both Ukraine and Russia, I just couldn’t believe it—it just felt so wonderful to me to be in those places. It is such a kind of parallel world. I grew up in the 1950s and ‘60s when those were the most forbidden places on the planet. You are drawn to those places that are most forbidden to you.

And then you get to do the space dog exhibit.

We actually took those dogs last fall back to Russia to do an exhibition. That was an amazing experience. It was harrowing and we almost didn’t get them into the country. We had terrible customs issues. We’d have to take these beautiful paintings back to L.A., where the dogs come from—it was really complicated technically in terms of paperwork. But once we got them into the country it was just beautiful. There’s this space museum in St. Petersburg that’s not a huge fancy museum. It’s quite humble, but charming—in the middle of the city in this place called Peter Paul Fortress, which was the place all the czars are buried. It was for many many centuries the center of Russia. Right there in that complex is this little space museum and the dogs were displayed so prominently there—people loved them! The astronauts of the past—the cosmonauts—came to see the paintings.

Whose dog is that in the tea room?

If it has long hair and is enormously graceful and prancing around it’s Tula. Tula belongs to Nana Tchitchoua, the woman who sits in the corner and offers you tea.

I went to the museum on Friday and when I got up to the tea room the dog was lying on one of the cushions. A couple of kids came up and I heard one of the kids ask, ‘Is it real?’ By the time you get upstairs you can’t tell what’s real.

More than one person thought he was stuffed until he moved.

I just thought that was a good way to sum up what happens inside of your museum— suddenly the line between fiction and reality becomes very blurry. Do you aim to muddy the distinction between myth and history and fact and fantasy in the Museum of Jurassic Technology? Do you even believe in those distinctions?

That is a big question. It’s actually in a funny way not something we think about so much. Werner Herzog speaks sometimes about ecstatic truth. I don’t know how ecstatic we ever get, but I think that that is a lot of what we are drawn to. There is a kind of truth that is maybe truer than fact. That’s what we keep our sights on. That’s what we’re interested in maintaining and focusing on. The truer than true.

THE MUSEUM OF JURASSIC TECHNOLOGY AT 9341 VENICE BLVD., CULVER CITY. OPEN THUR. 2-8 PM AND FRI.-SUN 12-6 PM. SUGGESTED DONATION $5. MJT.ORG

Download: Yo La Tengo “Periodically Double Or Triple”

(from Popular Songs out now on Matador)

Entire island ecosystems arise, corrupt, decay and disappear within the generous lifespan of Yo La Tengo, the New Jersey three-piece who reinvent endlessly what an independent American rock band is supposed to do—play Flamin’ Groovies songs in heaven, for instance. Guitarist/singer Ira Kaplan speaks very early in the morning. This interview by Chris Ziegler.

Is that Onion article about the record store clerks dying at the Yo La Tengo concert when the roof collapses the pinnacle of everything that’s ever been written about Yo La Tengo?
Ira Kaplan (vocals/guitar): That was pretty great. It’s hard to imagine anything else that was written about us once you bring that one up. I don’t know if you heard the story but we played at a party for The Onion later that year. They asked us to play at their Christmas party and they offered us some money, but there was no way it was going to be the amount of money that we normally get paid. We told them, ‘Look, we don’t do everything based on the dollar sign—we don’t even care about the money. What we’d like to do is re-enact the story—that’s what we really want.’ So what we ended up doing was we tweaked it some. It took a bit to convince them but then we really got into it and dived in. We ended up setting up fake rigging on the stage so that late in the set all the power and the PA flickered and then the fake stage rigging collapsed on us and killed us. And we had six people dressed as medics—with really hackneyed white coats and those reflector things—run in with stretchers and carry us off dead.
This is colossally elaborate. This actually happened in real life?
Ira Kaplan: Yeah, and it was so elaborate that I’m not even done yet. Then we changed into angel costumes and returned and played one more song.
What song does Yo La Tengo play in heaven?
Ira Kaplan: We decided to do the Flamin’ Groovies—‘You Tore Me Down.’
What’s it like getting ready for those legendary covers marathons on WFMU?
Ira Kaplan: It depends on the year because there was one year we were out of town—I guess we must have been at SXSW or something—and we went straight from the airport to FMU because the scheduling. What that mostly does is it kind of reminds us that we are capable of playing a lot of songs that we’ve never thought of playing before and it reminds us also to watch each other. One of the big things about doing that is to try to know when to stop—you don’t have to do all three verses.
Which also applies to life in general.
Ira Kaplan: That’s one of the attractions of doing this—it reminds us there’s a lot of life lessons in it.
How well does the Yo La Tengo experience serve as a microcosmic analogue for the entire human experience?
Ira Kaplan: I think that’s for other people to, ah …
People have asked you that way too much.
Ira Kaplan: Yeah, that’s right.
What are the legal procedures necessary to play and release an Electric Eels song?
Ira Kaplan: I don’t know how serious a question that is but one of the things about covering songs is you can record and cover any song you want on a record. You don’t need permission, you just have to pay for it. And it’s not a negotiable rate. There’s just an established rate of what it costs to cover an established song. The only thing you can’t do is if you’ve written a song that hasn’t ever been recorded—then the writer maintains the right of how it’s first recorded but after that you can cover it as long as the royalty is paid.
So they were helpless before you?
Ira Kaplan: We got a nice email from Brian McMahon—we were very impressed. There’s been a lot of the artists who’ve been ‘immortalized’ on Fuckbook that have contacted us. We’ve heard from Richard Hell and we’re friendly with the Flamin’ Groovies, but it’s pretty cool. We heard from a guy in Florida who did a version of ‘What’cha Gonna Do About It’—we didn’t know about it until he wrote to us, but it’s been a perk we weren’t expecting. We keep hoping every day that Felix Cavaliere will be sending us e-mails, but so far not yet.
How satisfied are you with the way that Yo La Tengo has made your fondest rock ‘n’ roll dreams come true?
One of the questions that we do get asked is, ‘Who would you like to play with and what haven’t you accomplished yet?’—stuff like that—and we tend to just sidestep it. Obviously, when we do the Chanukah shows and we actively seek out people to play with us there is some kind of planning involved, but I will say completely that when we recorded Fuckbook we weren’t at all thinking, ‘This way the Electric Eels will write to us.’ Things like that just kind of happen without thinking about them—it’s great.
What’s the significance of having a sculpture made of human bone and trinitite from the first atomic bomb test on your album cover?
Ira Kaplan: Trinitite? I don’t think I looked that far into it—I don’t even know what that is. We didn’t delve that deeply into it to be completely honest. We were just so taken by the image and we stopped reading after ‘human bone.’
Two of the 20th century’s biggest gifts to the world were rock ‘n’ roll and the atomic bomb—can we make a connection between the two?
Ira Kaplan: I wish I could say yes and it’s one of the reasons I wish that I didn’t have to do interviews sometimes. I think that’s one of the best things about being obsessed with—well, probably anything—but in my case and probably your case, being obsessed with music. It sets the mind racing and the aspect of the interview process that short-circuits that is a pity. The idea that you’re making that connection is amazing to me and it’s too bad that I have to come along and say, ‘Nah, never thought about it.’
We can use this interview to generate some mysteries if you want.
Ira Kaplan: I’m still connected to a lie detector, so the best I can do is be evasive.
You’re lucky you’re not connected to a nuclear device.
Ira Kaplan: Yeah.
So what do you think is the biggest connection between rock ‘n’ roll and the threat of nuclear war?
Ira Kaplan: Wow. I can’t—you’re three hours earlier, it’s too early for me to answer that. I don’t know. It is an interesting thing when people look back on that time. It’s funny how that aspect of it—how scary it must have been living and really believing that nuclear annihilation was around the corner. It does make me look at the fury with which people deal with each other today and think, ‘Man, you have no clue.’ And the thing that’s so frustrating is that most of those people—I’m a proud member of the left wing, so I’ll focus my ire on Fox News right now—but those people are old enough to know better. And it’s frustrating to look at these people who really know that things are so much better right now in that regard and to just rile people up the way they do is pretty sad and dishonest.
Stan Lee says do all your artistic work standing up and that way you won’t get a potbelly. Do you agree?
Ira Kaplan: We do quite a bit of our work standing up.
That’s where I assume you get your trim physique.
Ira Kaplan: Exactly right. You can’t tell because the stage is so high, but we’re actually all on treadmills while we’re performing.
What key are your treadmills in?
Ira Kaplan: As big Terry Riley fans, we’re in C.
Do you have any special insight into the American economy through the lens of Yo La Tengo?
Ira Kaplan: Sometimes it’s hard to tell because we’re only seeing it through our eyes. We just finished a tour and …
Were people no longer throwing hundred dollar bills at you?
Ira Kaplan: The serious answer is that attendance at the shows wasn’t as good as it had been the last time we’d gone out. Now that could be because people are less interested in seeing us or it could be because the economy is changed. We get some data but we’re not quite sure how to interpret it. We naturally want to blame the economy and not our dwindling appeal.
So as the Republican Party’s fortunes fade, so fades Yo La Tengo?
Ira Kaplan: We’re fighting against it—fighting the tide.
We’re having a minor staff debate about ‘Pass the Hatchet, I Think I’m Goodkind.’ Is that a nod to Black Randy or Eddie Bo?
Ira Kaplan: Luckily, it doesn’t have to be one or the other.
What does it say about me that I thought it was Black Randy?
Ira Kaplan: Well, you don’t hear me saying, ‘Who?’

YO LA TENGO WITH ENDLESS BOOGIE ON THUR., OCT. 15, AT THE AVALON, 1735 N. VINE ST., HOLLYWOOD. 7 PM / $22.50-$25 / ALL AGES. LIVENATION.COM. YO LA TENGO’S POPULAR SONGS IS OUT NOW ON MATADOR. VISIT YO LA TENGO AT YOLATENGO.COM OR MYSPACE.COM/YOLATENGO.

Download: The Raincoats “Lola”

(from the self-titled album reissued Tuesday on Kill Rock Stars)

The girls in the Raincoats have covered the Monks, but didn’t originally know the Monks possibly because they were so much like the Monks—formed perfectly from nothing and destined to disappear too quickly and leave anyone who discovered them later wondering how they’d ever happened in the first place. (Like Kurt Cobain, who wrote about them in Incesticide and helped get their albums reissued on CD.) Johnny Rotten famously called them the only band that didn’t make him throw up and that can’t be anything but true, even today. They play their first-ever Los Angeles show on October 11 at the Part Time Punks fest. This interview by Kevin Ferguson.

I see a lot of similarities between the Monks and the Raincoats. Odyshape is such a unique record with no context. People have barely started ripping off the Monks now and how long will it be before the Raincoats? Twenty years?
Ana da Silva (guitar/vocals): It’s strange you say that because a friend of mine just said that to me, and I kind of thought, ‘Actually, I don’t really know anything like it.’ I’m not saying we’re more original than anybody else, but it was our own thing. We tried everything, so it came out sounding quite different. I think you could kind of see that they’re all Raincoats songs, but they’re also very different among each other because we always tried really hard with each song to just try something new and explore things—find room for all the ideas that we had.
Did that hurt the band dynamics later on?
Ana da Silva: They were always difficult! Everybody was always bringing in new ideas. Obviously, that’s always a bit hard to take for other people—when you come in saying ‘You know, I have this idea and it’s different from yesterday.’ The rest of the band has to kind of get around that together with you. There was no problem with writing songs, really. I always found that the most fun. You put something from here, something from there, and everybody brings their own little bit different to somebody else. We never thought you got to a point when things sounded really good, because we never thought it was really finished. Still to this day, if we have a rehearsal for two hours before a gig and we haven’t done a song in two years we’ll still change something. We felt that the music was still alive, and you can always add something else into it if you like it.
Do you think that quote about you guys breaking up because of too many influences is bullshit?
Ana da Silva: I don’t think it’s the influences that are the problem. It’s where you want to go with the band that was the problem eventually. Some members were keen on going in a more palatable way—kind of going away from where we had started—and maybe the other members didn’t like that. That’s true. Like east African music into the Raincoats—to me that didn’t seem to make too much sense. And I think some people wanted to have some kind of more mainstream success. I felt that there was sort of a will to maybe compromise with certain things and I wasn’t keen on that. It just got very difficult.
What’s the most important thing you learned on stage?
Ana da Silva: Concentrate, and don’t drink! I drank one time—just a couple of drinks—and then I couldn’t remember the lyrics. I thought, ‘I’ll never do that again!’ We didn’t really know how to play well—that’s what Gina meant when she said we learned how to play on stage. But we weren’t the only ones. It’s just that there are lots of bands—men don’t usually say that about themselves. In fact, we had a classically trained violinist in our band! Yes, Gina learned to play after we decided to have our band and only a few months after we decided to have a band, we had our first gig. I kind of knew a little bit of guitar—I knew chords but I couldn’t play solo or jam with somebody else. We were ropey, to say the least, but we concentrated on the rehearsals. Instead of learning how to play things really well and getting tight, we just kept changing and changing all the time. I think that’s why she said that we learned to play on stage, because we didn’t know—especially her! She didn’t know how to play. We rehearsed a lot, but it was more creating than getting tighter. We’re still not tight, after all these years.
Do you ever find yourself trying to sound less ‘professional’?
Ana da Silva: No. We just try to do our best all the time. We never did that much practicing at home to get really good at it. We don’t try to sound worse than we already do. That would be terrible! I don’t think tightness is a desirable thing necessarily. It’s just having a lot of ideas and making the music sound good. I think music has to have pleasant things: melodies, harmonies, rhythms, noise and silence … all those elements. To me, music is a really big thing—there’s many possibilities. And that’s the most important thing. Much more than being tight. Of course, nowadays people are used to very tight music because of computers and drum machines. I think there’s room for that kind of thing, but for us it’s more what feels right and comfortable.
What’s the weirdest noise you’ve ever made on your guitar?
Ana da Silva: I don’t know, it’s just the way it sounded. We did the first album at a studio on Barry Street. Maybe it’s the sound of Barry Street!
Do you remember that Johnny Rotten quote about how the Raincoats were the only band that didn’t make him puke?
Ana da Silva: Yes! Is it just the Raincoats or does he mention another band?
Just the Raincoats.
Ana da Silva: We were having this debate with each other: ‘Did he say just say the Raincoats or did he add Delta 5?’ We wondered if we were forgetting somebody else. We were having conscience problems!
How did it feel when he said you were the only good band left?
Ana da Silva: We were really happy. He’s always somebody I’ve respected. I also heard one time that David Bowie said that he really liked us. But I didn’t hear it myself, so I can’t really be sure of that.
Da Silva is a Portuguese name, right?
Ana da Silva: It’s where I’m from! I had been here before for a month one time and I really liked London. I had just finished university and I didn’t know what to do. I just got into a plane and came to see what it would be like, and then it went from there. I didn’t have a specific reason, I just came, worked in a restaurant, and then I decided to study art. That’s when I met Gina—we decided to form the band.
I read a quote from Gina: ‘When I came to London, I had about four albums with me. I had a Prince Buster album, I had Sgt. Pepper’s, and I had a Melanie album, I think the first one. And I had Toots and the Maytals’ Funky Kingston.’
Ana da Silva: I don’t think I brought anything with me, actually. I came with a very small suitcase. I think I brought some cassettes? They were compilation cassettes that I had made, sort of. One of the first albums that I bought after I was here was Horses by Patti Smith. I heard it at a party of a friend—I thought, ‘God, I’ve never heard anything like this before!’ I asked who it was, and they said it was this woman Patti Smith. Next thing I knew I went and bought the record at the Rough Trade shop.
What was it like the first time you played in America?
Ana da Silva: It was great! Going there was great and New York was the most amazing thing. It was a bit like a dream place—so different than anything I had ever seen. You see all that smoke come out of the street and you think, ‘God, I’m in a kind of film!’ But I’ve never been to the West Coast. I never thought I’d go with the Raincoats because we don’t really exist as a working band anymore. I’m so happy that we’re going to San Francisco and Los Angeles and Portland, and I think we’re going to New York as well.
The Raincoats are really different from your solo work—you use a sequencer for most of your solo material and the Raincoats are way more loose.
Ana da Silva: It’s a completely different way of working. You just put the notes there, press play, and then it’s done. I used a sequencer, yes, and now I’m using a computer. I’ve learned how to deal with Logic Pro—it’s a bit of a nightmare but I’m there now. But when I play with the Raincoats, I play mostly guitar and sing. It’s a very different thing. They don’t even cross over.
Just an entirely separate region in your brain?
Ana da Silva: Probably! My hands!
Do people really cry at Raincoats shows?
Ana da Silva: I haven’t personally seen that but I’ve known because people have told me. I’ve cried a couple times—certain songs more than others. I just remembered—when Kurt Cobain died we were doing a gig in New York. We didn’t know he had died because we were in the van going to New York and then we were on stage doing sound check. The person from Geffen was there and he told us. During the whole performance when I was singing my songs, I just kept relating certain lines to what had happened. He used to really like ‘The Void.’ I knew that the audience was feeling a great loss because of him dying and all that. It was a very, very emotional gig. I didn’t cry though, because I was determined not to even talk about it.
Did the Nirvana-era fans treat you any differently from those in the ’80s? What about your fans today?
Ana da Silva: We had quite a lot of respect from people of our time—like Gang of Four and the Slits. Lots of people liked what we did. We didn’t feel isolated in that way. I didn’t know Nirvana’s music when I found out that he was a fan—I heard that later. I was really, really thrilled when I heard it! I liked his stuff and what he carried on doing. We reissued everything on CD, which we wanted to do. These records haven’t been available for a long time—they should still be available. That whole generation and the riot grrrl movement as well—they seem to have been quite inspired by us. I suppose that all those bands during that era seemed to like what we did in that way. Suddenly you think it was worth doing because it’s still having some kind of impact.
Do you think the Raincoats sound feminine?
Ana da Silva: I think they do. We didn’t think of anything like that though. It was just a group of women together playing music. But then we started thinking, ‘Is there something female about this?’ And I kind of think there is. It’s very difficult for me to say and I’m not into a lot of theory and things but I think there is. It’s up to you as a listener though. Do you think we do?
I’m not sure I can say one way or another because the band is so unique. There’s nobody out there to compare the Raincoats with.
Ana da Silva: The other day, for instance, I was listening to Blur. They were playing—I don’t know—Glastonbury or something, and I was thinking, ‘This isn’t even man’s music, this is lad’s music!’ It’s boisterously masculine, a bit like people in the pub singing together or at a football match and they all go, ‘Ahhhhhhhh ruuuuuuuhhhh!’ To me that sounded really male, and our music is female. I guess because it’s by females. Our manager is female. When we recorded we had men producing. At the time I don’t know if there was a woman producer out there even. Any group is a sum of the members of that group; we were four women. There’s characteristics, you know, when we all sing together—it’s just like a bunch of girls singing in a playground!
Do you think it’s different to be a woman playing music today than before?
Ana da Silva: Not enough in my opinion. People sometimes feel very—I don’t know—scared, I think. You need to have a bit of cheek. For any art you need to have a bit of … you could call it courage or cheek, whatever. Just go for it! I think maybe women are a bit more scared with not being very good at walking into a shop and buying a guitar. But a lot of men I know feel the same way—they go into a shop and they feel completely frozen because of the way they play. I think it’s rubbish, really—it’s horrible!

THE RAINCOATS WITH SECTION 25, MEDIUM MEDIUM, KID CONGO POWERS, THE JAZZ BUTCHER, ABE VIGODA AND MANY MORE AT THE PART TIME PUNKS FESTIVAL ON SUN., OCT. 11, AT THE ECHO, 1822 SUNSET BLVD., ECHO PARK. 3 PM / $20-25 / 18+. ATTHEECHO.COM. THE RAINCOATS’ SELF-TITLED LP WILL BE REISSUED ON KILL ROCK STARS ON TUES., OCT. 13. VISIT RAINCOATS AT THERAINCOATS.NET OR MYSPACE.COM/THERAINCOATS.

Download: Os Mutantes “Anagrama”

(from Haih out Sept. 8 on Anti-)

Os Mutantes decided everything was possible and tried to prove it across a set of albums that were national classics at home in Brazil but which never even made it to the States until a foreign exchange student accidentally left her copies with the boys in Redd Kross. Low End Theory resident and Blank Blue guitarist Nobody (Elvin Estela) speaks with Mutantes co-founder Sérgio Baptista about helicopters, honesty and the brand-new Mutantes album Haih.

What I love about your new record is that it doesn’t sound like you guys are trying to recreate your old sound—it just sounds like you picked up where you left off.
Sérgio Baptista (guitar/vocals): That’s definitely what I was really wanting to do and I was very happy that I could do it in terms of being able to be faithful and honest to our legacy and not looking back in any way—no way. We are in the 21st century and we are different people now and it’s very important for us to be honest and play what we feel. I think we were very blessed in being able to do something I consider is honorable to our legacy.
That’s an incredible approach to recording, especially for a band that hasn’t put out anything in a while. This is a perfect addition to your discography—it doesn’t stand out as ‘the modern record.’ It’s definitely just a timeless record.
If you don’t put yourself in danger of being spit upon, then you are not really alive. Then it’s just going to be a mock. And we owe so much to the people and the kids and everybody that we have to at least open up our hearts and souls the best way that we can to be naked in front of them and let them look at us. Now we are different—we are fatter, we are older—but that’s who we are. That’s how Mutantes would sound now and I think with all the flaws and wisdoms that came with age—I think that’s the most important thing that you have to do as a producer or artist is basically to just assume all of it and be ready to expose yourself. That’s basically what an artist has to do.
Put their balls on the line.
For sure. That’s what we always did and it’s what we’re doing.
What’s the point of art if there’s no risk involved?
Exactly—it would be sad. I think it would be like spitting in the place where we eat. We are able to see how important these people are and how much we owe them. What we can do is be as completely honest as we could and put our hearts the way they are.
You talk about being a lot older but your voice hasn’t aged a bit—what’s your secret to eternal youth and voice?
I’m not older; I’m younger for a longer time. You cannot lose your child inside. If you let your child die then you are in trouble.
I wanted to ask about this urban myth about your guitars—you had a fuzz guitar with each individual string going to its own fuzz pedal?
Yes. All the electronics are inside of it.
Each string had its own processor?
Yes. When I was with my brother and Rita only, all the job of texture and solos came down to myself. I had to fill in all the sounds and I had a need for sound. We lacked harmonies and I wanted to be able to play chords with fuzz, but if you play a chord with just one fuzz you have intermodulation and you have a bad sound and you cannot get the chord clean. So I spoke to my brother who was building the stuff, and he said the only way I can do this is to do one pickup per string and then through a fuzz individually and mix all of them together and I said, ‘OK, let’s do it.’ So we did it and it sounded great.
I saw Mutantes in L.A. in July 2007 and my favorite part of the show was when you were pretending there was a helicopter above the audience with the guitar.
All improvisation. It was basically the sewing machine pedal that I used on ‘Bat Macumba’ but in a different manner. It normally was mechanical but then we made it possible to use digitally. It was impossible to use that thing more than five minutes because it was connected to the engine of the sewing machine.
It was actually running through a real sewing machine?
Oh yeah. The guitar was coming in and out of it. With the axis of the engine and how you could vary the speed, he would cut open the sound of the guitar extremely fast and this would create several different harmonics and things that make that crazy sound. It was something that was not practical, so now in the digital era we were able to produce this in a way that it is possible to play with it. So I’m using a lot of it in the record.
Did you ever think of manufacturing and making it widely available to the world?
Yes, definitely. The name is Green Devil. Because the sewing machine was green.
I would definitely use a Green Devil pedal if you ever put one out.
I’ll do my best—definitely. So you think I should go for a helicopter again?
You haven’t done it since that show?
No. Ok—I’ll do it again.
I thought it was hilarious. I kept looking back, I was like, ‘Man, this is the greatest showmanship right there.’ You should have been the guy making guitars for kids in the ‘60s—we’d have a lot cooler stuff like sewing machine effects pedals.
Yeah—twenty years before Ovation we were using a piezo on the bridge. If you hear any of those songs like ‘Dia 36,’ that crazy sound of guitar that sounds a bit like an acoustic—it is a piezo electric.
‘Dia 36’ is one of my favorite songs by you guys.
I think it was one of my best lyrics. It was from an American guy who came here and I made the lyrics.
Who was the American guy?
It was John something—God, I don’t remember. He was a crazy guy—like albino, like the brothers Edgar and Johnny Winter.
And he was the original writer of the song?
He was—when we played, he just entered the stage and he was totally out of his mind and he was screaming and it was great. It was really amazing. I think he wrote the song on a dulcimer and I really loved his song. I got it and I wrote the lyrics for it and it was great.
To me you guys are one of the premier psychedelic bands that ever existed—I really think that it’s amazing that thousands of people today can relate to a psychedelic band from back then. What do you think that says about psychedelic music from that era? In history, it might be seen as a flash in the pan because it was only five years of music. But so much came out.
It’s amazing for us because we didn’t know that we were psychedelic or anything like that. There was no psychedelia at the time, at least not in Brazil. The first album came out in ’68 and there was no drugs involved in any of the albums.
So to you guys, you weren’t making psychedelic rock—you were just making whatever you wanted to make?
Yes. It is amazing that it fell on the slot. The way that we used to gather information was like a kaleidoscope in pieces and then from the flower power, we just got the flower not the power. We didn’t even care about the power—we just loved the flower. You know the girls and the free love and all the beauty and the colors and the music—we didn’t realize it was Vietnam behind it.
In America it was definitely about the protest, but for English bands it was more about the girls and the flowers. What bands from across the world were influencing you guys down in Brazil?
Everybody. Sly and the Family Stone for sure. Beach Boys, Mary Ford and Les Paul, Jimmy Smith, all the operas. We had a huge and very big spectrum of music which we drank from. Like Sarita Montiel from Spain and all the mariachis from Mexico. We were into everything—all the cats, Barney Kessel, the Ventures, the Shadows, all of them.
And it all combined to create what you wanted?
Oh yeah—take my solos. They were very Ventures-oriented at the beginning. I think the great thing about it is that all the record companies and all those people were into the music. The money came much later. Nobody was worried about being a star or selling a billion dollars in records. I think people were just making music from the heart and the honesty that we had in doing this—I think that’s maybe what draws people to listen to us.
Do you think that people can make music from the heart again today?
Oh, for sure. We’re doing it. I think this new album definitely. There is no thought behind it—this is just the music playing the way it came to us in terms of inspiration and everything. There is no gimmick behind it.
You said you always had a need for sound—where did that come from? If you guys weren’t doing psychedelics like the English bands, what drove you?
I think it probably came from NASA. I was raised with like the X-15 and the X-2 and knowing all the names of the cats—like the guy who broke the sound barrier. All those things were so important for us. I heard the Sputnik—we put on the shortwave and listened to the ‘bleep, bleep, bleep’ and it was an amazing era. All of this—the technology were so much in our veins, and all these things were happening so we always were connected to it. Especially because my brother was such a genius and proud of making all this stuff.
So it was space and the technology of the time?
All the science and technology and all the avant-garde things that were going on at the time. There was Picasso and all of this was influencing us a lot. Modern art and all this was a must for us. I think that was translating to sounds.
How long did it take to record this album?
It took about a year. We took our time—we didn’t want to rush everything. Especially because of everybody’s schedule and the bunch of things that everybody was doing and of course the beginning of the year was very had because Arnaldo left the band and we took our time.
What does the name mean?
It’s a Shoshone language. It means ‘raven.’ I was passing this crow in France and trying to get its picture and I got his picture of him looking at me looking like he was saying, ‘Get ready ‘cause you’re next.’ He was pissed with me. And I got the crow photograph and I was watching a movie about the Clark expedition and the Shoshone thing—I’m very involved with this area because it was such a magical place in America. I started to know of Nevada as such a great state. You go to Las Vegas and you forget the Strip and all the mountains are so magical and you have the fantastic lake and you go thirty miles to the other side and there’s snow—then you’re in the desert. You can feel the Indians there. You can feel the energy of America—which was great. I saw the documentary about the Clark expedition and there was this girl who I don’t remember her name—Sacajawea? She was very important symbol for women as an endeavor or entity and she saved the journals of the expedition and she was the one who guided the expedition—which was great. And so I started fooling around trying to get a name in Shoshone and I found a dictionary on the internet of Shoshone. I wanted to do like ‘Lightning Crow’ but the lightning word was like ten words together—it was huge. I couldn’t even pronounce it, so I just had ‘crow.’
You would have had the longest album title ever if you used the whole thing. Almost longer than Devendra Banhart’s first record.
Yeah—probably.
The most amazing thing about your show last year was that it was completely sold out—but your records were never released in America when they came out.
It was something that was really amazing to me, too. When we played in 2006 at the Barbican and one month after playing there we booked about 8 shows in America in the most brilliant places like the Hollywood Bowl and Fillmore and the Pitchfork Festival in Chicago—and we hadn’t played one note. That was really amazing. Now having all these things happening and playing in America and having so many people that are involved with us, it is something that makes you very happy and humble about it because you know that it was so spontaneous—it’s a beautiful thing to see.

OS MUTANTES WITH DJ NOBODY AND BUYEPONGO ON FRI., AUG 28, AT THE ECHOPLEX, 1154 GLENDALE BLVD, ECHO PARK. 8PM / $28-$30 / 18+. ATTHEECHO.COM. OS MUTANTES’ HAIH RELEASES TUE., SEPT. 8, ON ANTI-. VISIT OS MUTANTES AT MUTANTES.COM OR MYSPACE.COM/OSMUTANTES.

Stream: The Old 97′s “Four Leaf Clover” (f. Exene Cervenka)

(from Too Far To Care on Elektra)

Rhett Miller and the Old 97’s have probably seen Dallas from a DC-9 at night on several occasions, and they return to earth when whim and inspiration combine to release albums of distinct and considered country-style rock ‘n’ roll. Miller—who is opening for his own band with a set from his new solo album—speaks now about writing a song while little children shriek all around him. This interview by Thomas McMahon.

So you guys had a greatest hits album come out a few years ago. How did that feel?
Rhett Miller (vocals, guitar): Very weird! Very weird. But it’s OK—I feel if you have a greatest hits album come out and you’re still relatively young, then you’re doing something right. I think we live in an era where there’s still such a premium placed on youth, but I think less so maybe than in a long time—I think people are willing to stay with you for the ride through a few years. But it’s nice. The record itself and the way it was put together and the liner notes by Robert Christgau and stuff—it was very cool. It’s very nice to have that out there. But I worry way less about that than the actual ‘record’ records.
How did you get Christgau to do the liners?
They had a shortlist of people that all seemed very obvious to me. Nobody bad, but one guy that had reviewed us in Rolling Stone when Too Far To Care came out had given us kind of a bad review—well, not bad, but just incredibly lukewarm. And this was from one of the editors of No Depression, and it was like a real judgmental kind of review. Like, ‘It’s too loud for country, and it’s too country for rock.’ I’m like, ‘What? When did your rules become the rules?’ And they wanted him to write the liner notes, and I was like, ‘No way, man.’ It’s not like I’m holding a grudge against every reviewer that’s ever given me a bad review; I just remember that one hitting a little too close to home in the very early days. And I remember Christgau having written some really nice but—more importantly—really intelligent things about what we do. So when they said, ‘Well, do you have anybody better in mind?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, Robert Christgau.’ He’s only the best rock critic in the world. I’ve actually really made a point to read fewer reviews and just not try and be in the loop very much. I used to get a Google Alert so I would know anytime anyone blogged about me or said anything. And eventually I realized I was really just making myself crazy. It’s like, ‘Why am I doing this to myself? It’s hard enough to shout down the voices in my own head. Forget about the random people on the Internet.’
Do you find songwriting easier or more difficult now than you did in your early days?
It’s different. Everything’s kind of different. The main difference is logistics. Now I’m a dad with a couple of kids. And I work really hard—I play a lot of gigs. And so there’s a lot of stuff that fills up my time. So I’ve had to learn to write songs in a crowded room. I used to be very precious about where I was able to write a song. I used to convert, like, little closets under stairs or places like a garage. I’d have to find these places and be very secretive about it. Now it’s just wherever I can do it, man. I’ll sit in the middle of the living room with the kids going insane and write away. Nobody’s listening to me anyway.
I don’t know how you can do that.
Do you have kids?
Yeah, a 2 ½-year-old and a 1-year-old.
We’ve got a 5 and 3. It gets easier. Once they get out of diapers and more into, like, rational human thought, it’s a little easier. Not much. My daughter was just throwing a fit right now because we didn’t have the right treat in the house. I’m like, ‘Well, you’re getting a treat anyway.’ But whatever, you know. Just life.
It seems rare for a band to have been together for as long as you guys have—more than 15 years now—with no line-up changes. What’s the secret?
Murry and I have been playing together on and off forever. But it took me a long time to flesh out the rest of the lineup and find bandmates that felt right. There’s a lot of dudes out there, and a lot of different egos. That’s the hard part, man—all the egos. But once you find the right guys, it’s just a matter of … I think one thing that really was good for us was sharing publishing like we do, where everybody gets a cut of the songwriting. A lot of bands, the drummer doesn’t get any money off songwriting just because he’s a drummer. And that’s a big reason bands break up. Because the lead singer will be driving a Mercedes, and the drummer will be driving a Ford Focus or whatever. We don’t split it completely evenly, but almost. And I think that’s been good for us. And also I think it’s served us well that we haven’t had huge breakthrough success. I mean, it’s nice that we can go pull a thousand or two thousand people in most every city, but we’ve never had to have the public burning out on the sound of us. I remember we were on the label with Third Eye Blind at the time, and I wouldn’t want to trade places with those guys.
Murry said in an interview last year that he didn’t think you guys had had a real rehearsal since ’95. How can you get away with that?
That’s a good question. We did a run of dates at this famous old punk rock club in Hoboken, N.J., just last week—a four-night stand at Maxwell’s. And over the course of those four nights, we only repeated ‘Timebomb’ during any of the nights. So we played about 90 total songs over the stand. And we did have to have long sound checks for that. We won’t call them rehearsals, but they were long sound checks. That was about as close as we’ve come to having a rehearsal in a long, long time. It’s just that thing—it’s like we’ve gigged so long, and our songs are not super complicated. So once you get to a certain point, if you’ve played it 200, 300 times, you’re not going to really ever need to rehearse it again. Not to mention that pretty much every night, I have some sort of band dream—where I’m on stage with the band. You know, that’s got to count for something like a rehearsal, right? In my dream, I’m playing the songs. So it’s kind of a rehearsal. But our stuff is pretty straightforward, you know. It’s classic American songwriting. You know, there are some tricks here and there, but it’s pretty straight. And that combined with the fact that I don’t think any of us in the band or in our fanbase get really hung up on us being technically perfect. I think there’s something to be said for spontaneity and a little bit of a raggedness to our sound. I don’t think anybody begrudges us that.
Both with Old 97’s and solo, you’re on smaller labels now after being on a big label for a while. How is it different?
Well, Shout! Factory is part of Sony. It’s funny, though, because really Sony now feels like one of the indies. I mean, not exactly. They’re still working with big, big massive artists, but there’s just not that many of those anymore. And everybody has to work so hard just to figure out ways to get any attention in the marketplace and break through. It’s kind of nice. There’s an exciting element to being back in a sort of prehistoric situation with rock ‘n’ roll. And I think it’s got to be good for music. And in the end, it’s got to be good for those labels, too, because the people that ran those labels in the ’90s made such a huge mistake in ignoring the Internet and the inevitability of file sharing. And now, here we are. They’re having to kind of start over from scratch. Kind of a good thing, because I think that they appreciate artists who have built up a following over the years. You know, it would be so hard to be starting out right now. If you have a fanbase of 100,000 or 200,000 people, you’ve made their job pretty easy right off the bat.
When you make a solo album, do you make a conscious effort to do something different from Old 97’s?
Oh, yeah. Well, I don’t even have to try. I mean, there was the one I made in high school, which was the first record I ever made. That was produced by Murry, and he played bass on it. So in a way, it wasn’t even exactly a solo record. But the ones I’ve made since then have all been about giving a space for the songs that the band has rejected—the songs that don’t fit with the 97’s. And so the definition of the solo album is its otherness. It’s the idea that, here, this is all the stuff that’s in my head that I can’t find room for within the confines of this democracy.
And with the new solo album, you worked with the same producer as the latest Old 97’s album?
Yeah, Salim Nourallah. And we’ll work with him again for our next 97’s record. I kind of see no reason to stop. We work so well together that I just feel like I should strike while the iron’s hot. That’s sort of why I’m impatient to get in the studio again with the 97’s, too. We’re in a better space than we’ve been in years and years and years, and we found sort of our dream producer.
There have been a few songs that you guys have redone. Two songs from Hitchhike to Rhome, ‘Four Leaf Clover’ and ‘Doreen,’ ended up on later albums. And then ‘Question’ from Satellite Rides was on one of your solo albums. What makes you want to take another crack at a song?
There’s always a different reason. ‘Doreen,’ when we recorded it, it was like bluegrass and a little more laid back. Then it became our set closer—the big rock song that we ended every show with. So we just made a decision that we wanted a version of it on Wreck Your Life that represented more of what it had become: very electric sounding instead of acoustic instruments. And then with ‘Four Leaf Clover’: I had written a song that later appeared on [solo album] The Believer, ‘Fireflies,’ during the Too Far to Care writing sessions with the idea that Exene Cervenka would sing the harmony on it. And I brought it to her. It’s this real Tammy Wynette-George Jones kind of classic country song. So when I brought it to her, she said, ‘Rhett, you know I don’t sing like that.’ I said, ‘God, now that I think about it, you’re right. You don’t, really.’ So I said, ‘What do you have in mind?’ And she said, ‘I really love your song ‘Four Leaf Clover.’ How about something like that?’ And I thought, ‘Well, “Four Leaf Clover” appeared on a record that only sold like 2,000 copies.’ Or, actually about 10,000, but still. And I was hoping that the Elektra debut would sell a lot more, so I figured why not revisit it and do something totally different? Make it a duet instead of what it was. And then ‘Question,’ I wrote that in the studio basically when we were making Satellite Rides, and the producer walked by while I was just playing it, and he said, ‘Don’t move. Don’t move.’ And he brought over mics and set them up and just recorded it like that: just one vocal, one guitar, live. But it’s great. I mean, that song has gotten more usage on TV and in film, and people seem to connect to it more than any song I’ve ever written. So a few years later, I decided that I wanted to take another crack at it—maybe flesh it out a little bit, give it some instrumentation beyond just one guitar and one vocal. So I tried it. That was really more for me. That was just kind of a whim. I wanted to hear one of my very favorite songs I’d ever written with Jon Brion playing organ on it or something.

THE OLD 97’S ON WED., JULY 8, AT THE HENRY FONDA THEATER, 6126 HOLLYWOOD BLVD., HOLLYWOOD. 8 PM / $22.50-$25 / ALL AGES. GOLDENVOICE.COM. THE OLD 97’S BLAME GRAVITY IS OUT NOW ON NEW WEST. RHETT MILLER’S SELF-TITLED ALBUM IS OUT NOW ON SHOUT! FACTORY. VISIT THE OLD 97’S AT OLD97S.COM OR MYSPACE.COM/THEOLD97S. VISIT RHETT MILLER AT RHETTMILLER.COM OR MYSPACE.COM/RHETTMILLER.

Download: The Vaselines “Son Of A Gun”

(from Enter The Vaselines out now on Sub Pop)

While there are certainly some ‘80s bands out there that should call it quits and put their leather pants in a museum, there are also a few making a natural comeback. If it weren’t for Nirvana, perhaps the Vaselines would have never played again, or maybe it would have taken another decade to revive the Scottish twee-pop band from its slumber. But Eugene Kelly and Frances McKee are back with advice on how to grow up. This interview by Daiana Feuer.

What was the reason for the Vaselines’ breakup?
Eugene Kelly (guitar/vocals): Me and Frances McKee were a couple and we split up. We talked about trying to continue the band but it just didn’t seem like it would work. The thing is, the distribution company had gone bankrupt. The record label had no money to release any more records and weren’t in any rush to sign us for another, so it seemed like the band had come to its natural end. I saw Frances a couple months after we split and then we kept bumping into each other. And then Sub Pop were interested in releasing Vaselines records in America so we had to discuss that, and every so often someone would want to use one of our songs so we’d have to talk about it. So it was always a connection through the Vaselines. I’ve always said it’s like the child we never had. The Vaselines child is 21 now and it’s at the age where we can put it back out into the world now.
Did it come as a surprise when you began hearing about your own band in the ‘90s from Kurt Cobain?
The band had split up by the time Nirvana mentioned us in print. Suddenly there were fans in America listening to our records. I remember reading in one of the music papers here—The Melody Maker had a piece about Mudhoney on tour in America. It mentioned that Nirvana were playing Vaselines songs. It was surprising how the rest of the world could have gotten our records. Our records had only been released in England.
What prompted you to start playing together again?
Right about this time last year, Frances phoned me that her sister was working on a charity concert for orphans in Malawi and did we want to do a solo performance and maybe do some Vaselines songs? And I suggested why don’t we try and make it a special night and play an electric set? I’d been playing solo shows for a while and I’d gotten so sick of playing acoustic guitar on my own. I really wanted to get on electric. Then Sub Pop contacted us about playing their 20th anniversary show so by luck we thought we could make that happen as well. After that, we came back from America and thought, ‘Well, let’s see what else we can do.’
Are you writing songs together?
We’ve written five songs already. We’ve been playing two of them in our sets. We’re going to try and record now probably in Glasgow. We just sound like the Vaselines! We came up with the songs pretty quickly, and that’s the way we used to come up with songs years ago. The distinctive sound that Vaselines songs have is in the simple melodies—it’s got to be sort of quite catchy and not very long songs either. A lot of people have said the new ones sound like they could have been on the old records. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.
Did the Molly referred to in ‘Molly’s Lips’ ever contact you?
I think she died a few years ago actually. She probably didn’t even know the song was about her. She probably never even heard it. She couldn’t Google it back then.
If you had to write a song right now, what would you write about?
Making dinner. Having a bath. I’m writing a song now called ‘I Hate The ‘80s’ We don’t mean old people—we just hate the 1980s. It’s been such an ‘80s revival right now. It’s a revival of the things that were terrible at the time that inspired the Vaselines to form because we wanted to make rock music rather than electric pop and new romantic music. A lot of the ‘80s weren’t that good. People are looking back as if it was a fantastic time but we were there, so we can comment on it.
Of all the decades in your lifetime, were the ‘80s your least favorite?
Most of the ‘90s was pretty shit. I wasn’t doing much in the ‘90s. The ‘80s was great for the Vaselines and for me and Frances. We had just finished school—entering the world as adults and doing what we want. I think musically the ‘80s had a lot of terrible music as well as some great music. But every decade is the result of the people in that time responding to the music two decades before it. So, in the ‘80s I was listening to music from the ‘60s and ‘70s. And it’s the same now. The people in their 20s are into the 80s. Which is why the Vaselines can exist again. There’s an audience for it that wasn’t around in that time that are interested in it.
What advice would you give to a 20-something-year-old artist?
Do what you want. Do your own thing. Some advice is good but listen to yourself—your own ideas. Try not to be put off by people. Keep doing what you’re doing. What we’ve done as Vaselines—people kept telling us we were terrible, but we kept having fun. You’ve got to enjoy what you’re doing. It’s not a competition—you’re on your own. Don’t try to compete with anyone. I think in your twenties you feel inspired by the world around you. Everything seems new. And when you get in your forties, it’s hard to think of good things to write about and aspire to. There’s other things to deal with. You get a bit burnt out at middle age. It’s kind of hard to get really inspired.
What’s good about being in your forties?
Not much. It’s overrated. I think I prefer to be in my twenties. But you’ve got to make the best of it. The good thing about being in your forties is you’ve got a confidence you couldn’t really have when you were younger. You know if what you’re doing is good and if you should continue doing it.
Do you still think there are surprises in your future?
I think it’s all going to be surprises and that’s how it should be. We didn’t even know what we were doing with the band at this time last year. And then suddenly we’re in a large venue in Glasgow and it’s such a shock and quite sweet. I am enjoying the fact that everything is sort of new. We’re going to see what comes up.
Where did the Vaselines name come from?
It was because Frances used a lot of Vaseline on her lips. She was always carrying some around with her. Somebody suggested it and we had struggled with a few different names that didn’t really work. And also it started with the letter ‘V.’ There weren’t too many bands that start with that letter. I can think of the Velvet Underground, the Von Bondies. I can’t think of any more. Some of the other names were really terrible. A lot of them involved strawberries because Frances was obsessed with strawberries. The Vaselines was much better than the Strawberry Somethings.

THE VASELINES’ ENTER THE VASELINES IS OUT NOW ON SUB POP. VISIT THE VASELINES AT SUBPOP.COM/ARTISTS/THE_VASELINES.