Download: The Polyamorous Affair “Eastern”

(from Bolshevik Disco out this summer on Manimal Vinyl)

The Polyamorous Affair make bolshevik disco-pop in a mossy compound in Los Feliz and emerge only to teach kindergarten, play shows or get snowed on. They have an album due on Manimal and co-founder Eddie Chacon used to be in a band with Cliff Burton. This interview by Dan Collins.

It’s nice to interview people at 8:30 PM and not AM! Are you guys night owls? You’re probably jetlagged from your tour of England.
Eddie Chacon (production/vocals): We’re definitely jetlagged, man!
Sissy Sainte-Marie (vocals): And I think I caught swine flu today, too.
Did you eat some infected swine? Or get it from the air blowing around airports?
Sissy: I think I just got it from the 24-hour news.
There’s a rumor going round that you are married.
Eddie: It’s actually amazing being in a band with your wife because we just work on it 24/7. We don’t really have to go to a rehearsal space. Even though we try to take a break from it, it’s almost impossible. We always somehow wind up coming back to what we’re trying to achieve with the band.
Sissy: And we can always work in the studio. It’s right here at our fingertips, at any moment when we get inspired. We don’t have to wait for other band members show up or not show up.
When you guys play live, though, do you have people backing you?
Sissy: We have a DJ and a live visualist.
Eddie: De Ja Francois is the DJ and Mr. Cocoon is the visual artist.
You guys are very visual! I love the video for ‘Babayaga.’ It’s really witchy and disturbing. Sissy was doing such a creepy dance! Do you have a background in dance?
Sissy: No, not at all. This really great choreographer named Dola Baroni—she choreographed that for me. She was very patient. She was a very good teacher, because I have no rhythm—no coordination. And I had to do that dance in 33 degree weather, and I was wearing close to nothing in the middle of the night, and I had to replicate the dance three times perfectly to get the triplicate shot. And I think I had to do it about a hundred times.
Eddie: And then it started snowing! It was in the Angeles Crest Forest, and then it turned out to be the coldest day of winter. We totally got rained out, and it was a low-budget video, and that was like a really big deal.
Sissy: We had to schedule a second night, but it turned out great! All’s well that ends well.
Who wrote that song?
Eddie: Everything we do is 50/50. We work around the house and toss ideas around. Often things come together by osmosis. I’ll be in the studio, and Sissy will be in another room, and she’ll come in and throw something down. We’ll just get inspired by each other.
Sissy: I was inspired by the Grimm fairytale ‘Hansel and Gretel.’ In Russian, ‘babayaga’ means ‘witch.’ I liked the way that word sounded in that song. Lovers go on vacation, and they were living a life of decadence, and I think they both died. And the ghost of the little girl doesn’t know that she’s dead, and she thinks that she’s still alive and he’s dead.
The same thing happened to me! How did you guys decide to make this kind of music?
Eddie: The initial brainstorming happened when we were staying in Denmark a couple years ago with some friends of mine. At the time, we were really getting into John Lennon and Yoko Ono and reading about David and Angie Bowie, and we were getting into the mixed media idea—of how Yoko Ono brought this whole different artistic direction to John Lennon when they got together because she was already sort of a famous underground artist.
Sissy: We were inspired by this book called Still Lovers about people and their Real Dolls. We originally wanted to make a doll the artist. But they’re really expensive! When we first started performing live, and I was so nervous and stiff, so many people would tell me, ‘Aw, you’re just like a little doll on stage!’ I can be this icy robot puppet vampire love doll. Like a replicant from Blade Runner.
What was your career before you guys met?
Sissy: I was a school teacher, and I still am. I was teaching third grade, and now I just substitute—so it’s a different grade every day. Today I taught kinder.
There was a band in L.A. called Third Grade Teacher, where the singer really was a third grade teacher. So you’re not the only one.
Sissy: No, no! We all have our double lives, I guess.
I feel like in 1975 or something, or even ten years ago, somebody could have a career and be sort of a middle-class musician. Not everybody was rich, but some people could do okay. Now either you’re totally rich or you have a day job. Is this something new?
Eddie: I absolutely think this is something new, but there’s also something great that comes from it—that you don’t really need a big fat record company anymore to reach the public. You can put out your own material and distribute yourself.
Are you saying that Manimal Records isn’t a big fat record company?
Sissy: Ha ha—they’re well on their way!
Eddie, your career has been wildly eclectic. You started off in a metal band with Mike Borden from Faith No More and Cliff Burton, then you worked with 2 Live Crew, then had sort of a soul band in the early nineties with Charles & Eddie, then worked behind the scenes with acts like the Neville Brothers. And now you’re doing this. It kind of boggles the mind!
Sissy: His talents know no end.
Eddie: I just do music. It sounds kind of trivial, but I just have a passion for music and just continue doing it no matter what. I just kind of follow whatever I’m obsessed and into at the time.
What do you think Cliff Burton would say if he could see the Polyamorous Affair?
Eddie: We’re doing a sort of electronic disco thing, so he probably would want to beat me up.
Have you ever considered going back and sampling your own back catalogue since you have the rights to it?
Eddie: You know, I haven’t! Paul, the owner of Manimal, was asking me if I’d be interested in doing a version of ‘Would I Lie to You’ with Alexandra Hope. That was the first that I’d really thought of that. A few years ago, a friend of mine was making an indie film, and he wanted to use seven of my songs, but at that time I was a Universal Music Publishing songwriter. And I couldn’t even let my best friend use seven of my songs for his movie, and I thought that was very frustrating! In the olden days you were kind of a corporate entity, and you didn’t even really own yourself—and now you might be like more of a mom-and-pop business where you’re kind of a smaller entity, but at least you own the rights to yourself and everything you’re doing—which gives you a lot more freedom in the long run.
You have a song called ‘Whoever Controls the Groove Controls the World.’ Is the inverse true? Does the Skull and Bones fraternity at Yale have a lot of groove?
Eddie: Ha ha—no, it’s about Clear Channel!
They have the groove when it comes to billboards.
Eddie: My God—we were just in England, and we were meeting with a PR company, and she was talking about Clear Channel owning everything over there, and I was like ‘My God, I had no idea it was a worldwide thing.’
Speaking of which, Eddie, I wanted to ask you about Scientology! You dabbled in it eight or nine years ago—do you have any deep dark secrets that could get L.A. RECORD in trouble?
Eddie: I didn’t get to the point where I found out about the space ship! I was actually studying with a legendary acting coach—Milton Katselas—who has since passed on. He taught a lot of really big movie stars, and there were a lot of Scientologists in that class—like Giovanni Ribisi and Jenna Elfman—and I just got to be friends with them. And I was like, ‘What the hell, I’ll take a couple of introductory courses and see what it’s about.’ But like with all religion, what you get for free is the essence of what it’s really all about.
Was there a part of you that was like ‘Isaac Hayes is in this religion!’?
Eddie: That was probably the coolest thing about taking my two little introductory courses! I was just coming down from the fourth floor of the little celebrity tower and the elevator door opened, and he was in the elevator, and I walked in and I got to have a little chat with him! He’s been my hero ever since I was a little boy. I went to see him at the Circle Star Theater as a child when he was Black Moses, wearing the full-on gold chain vest!
Don’t you guys have a song that’s all heroic quotes about stars and circles and space time?
Eddie: ‘Like Animal.’ The wormhole video.
Sissy: That’s just a dialogue for the video—that’s not in the song.
Eddie: We always make fun of each other that we’re a bit like Grey Gardens, because we live in a compound in Los Feliz hills, and we really just work in a bubble. We were kind of making fun of that when we made the ‘Like Animal’ video.
Sissy: Crazy hermits living in a state of decay!

L.A. RECORD AND MANIMAL VINYL PRESENT THE POLYAMOROUS AFFAIR WITH BLUE JUNGLE, ALL LEATHER, HALLOWEEN SWIM TEAM AND MAGICK DAGGERS ON THU., MAY 14, AT THE ECHOPLEX, 1154 GLENDALE BLVD., ECHO PARK. 8 PM / $10 / 18+. ATTHEECHO.COM. THE POLYAMOROUS AFFAIR’S BOLSHEVIK DISCO RELEASES THIS SUMMER ON MANIMAL. VISIT THE POLYAMOROUS AFFAIR AT THEPOLYAMOROUSAFFAIR.COM OR MYSPACE.COM/THEPOLYAMOROUSAFFAIR.

Download: 60 Watt Kid “2012″

(from the self-titled full-length on Absolutely Kosher)

60 Watt Kid is a three-piece that has no laptops, 80-odd effects pedals, no bass, and a helluva lot of creative energy. Dan Collins interviews them after a grueling practice, on a hot night in his yard, around a smoky chiminea. A lhasa poo stands guard.

So you’re wearing shorts! Is your practice space hot?
Dylan Wood ( drums and tazers): It does get pretty hot in the practice space.
And you guys are working on an album?
Derek Thomas (guitars, analog synth, samples and electronic soundscaping devices): Yeah, we just finished recording, so we got to get it turned in, in probably like four months.
Dylan: And we’re playing Murufest on Friday! It’s the biggest Long Beach house party! Every year. It’s like free beer, free barbeque, like everything.
Long Beach has a pretty happening little scene nowadays. Did you ever play on the boat?
Derek: The Queen Mary?
Kevin Litrow (guitars, analog synth, vocals, harmonica, samples): No, they had a boat where they did punk shows. We were still in San Francisco at that time.
And now you’re based here. Dylan, you weren’t part of the San Francisco chapter of 60 Watt Kid?
Dylan: No, I just joined the band six months ago or something. This guy I know told me about them back when I was still in high school, so I went and saw them at this house party, and it was like the best thing. I was so stoked on them! And they told me they didn’t have a drummer anymore, because they were moving down here, and I was like, ‘Dude, here’s a CD I made you guys.’
Derek: He drew this really nice drawing on the CD—on paper that he’d folded—and after all the effort he put into making it, I felt like I should check it out. I put it in, and I was like ‘Oh, this is a 60 Watt Kid CD.’ Cuz he like did a five minute loop of ambient shit right before he came to the show. I thought it might have been some of our shit, and then I was like, ‘Oh, this is Dylan’s shit!’
Kevin: We love Dylan. He’s so great.
Right now Dylan’s petting my dog, Ozzy, so I have no complaints.
Dylan: He just sat at my foot and was ready to receive!
I’ve found he likes certain types of music, like Joni Mitchell, and The Point soundtrack too. Nilsson. Have you guys been down to the Silent Movie Theater to see bands score live soundtracks? Would you consider performing something like that?
Kevin: Totally. I already did a couple shows at Echo Curio that were just soundtracks to some films, a film I did by myself and did a live soundtrack to it.
I interviewed ADULT. a few months back, and they made their own Suspiria-esque film and toured doing that as a live score.
Kevin: The Books, too! They blew me away. Because they made all their own film and edited it. They had the headphones, and were in sync with the cellos and everything. It made me cry.
Let’s talk about phones for a second. I saw you at Fuck Yeah Fest last year, and you had all kinds of phones on stage. You don’t do the phone thing anymore?
Kevin: We are going to get the phone thing back.
Derek: The phone thing is ‘on hold,’ ha ha!
When I saw you that one time, you literally called somebody, for reals, during the song, right?
Kevin: I called somebody. And Derek projected a call to the audience. The song is called ‘Every Day There’s Something Special,’ and in parentheses, ‘Hold on, I gotta take this call.’ It’s kind of like, we can recognize all the special things in the world, but everybody’s always on their cell phone and they’re not recognizing that because they’re taking time out to get on the phone. There could be a shooting star and they’re missing it, or some guy driving off a cliff!
Was there ever a time when people thought the show was over because you were all on the phone?
Derek: Our old drummer once got up and went and ordered nachos at the food stand while we were in the middle of that section. It started going into a comedy thing, where it was going away from music.
Kevin: It was starting to get corny.
It seemed like you have all kinds of instrumentation: lots of keyboards, guitar, effect boxes. It looked like you had 80 different little things up there.
Derek: I got an old vocal robot pedal, that was used in the original Star Wars, and Brian Eno used it a lot, and I used to play my guitars out of that sometimes. And it makes it sound like rhino-sauruses and elephants having wars in the jungle and screaming and screeching. I tend to trade out and buy a bunch of stuff. We try to take our equipment and use it in one way for a couple months, and then we’ll switch it around and trade pedals, and put them in different orders, and have totally different sounds. Because you can do so much with only a few pedals. I’ll trade If it’s really expensive, and I don’t use it, then I’ll just sell it back.
What’s something where you thought ‘This is going to be the most amazing thing! It’s going to make our band turn a corner and do this new thing,’ and then it sucked!
Derek: I got the new analog Prophet that was like $2000, and I never plugged it in, and it was too much, I think.
[At this point, the old wooden folding chair I had left in the rain collapsed and nearly snapped Kevin’s finger off when he tried to save himself from the ground. A lawsuit against Ikea is pending.]
Oh shit, did your finger get cut?
Kevin: It got crushed… and cut. Actually, do you have some ice? It’s like burning from… being smashed. I’m sorry, it’s just that I play guitar with this finger.
Oh, no problem! I’m frequently injured by friends and neighbors, so I’m prepared. One sec. [Our interviewer runs to get an ice pack, then returns.] Sorry about that. Is this the worst injury you’ve received with this line-up?
Dylan: Last time we toured, first stop, I slammed Kevin’s hand in the door, and he yelled out a belting scream!
And now I hurt his hand, too! Do you think in a past life, you stole something in a bazaar in Marrakesh and had your hands cut off or something?
Kevin: You know, what’s really weird is that my friend had a dream that I put my hand in the blender and cut off all my fingers!
Oh my God! It’s almost like the reality is worse, because it’s slowly but surely happening instead of all at once!
Kevin: She looked it up, and supposedly the blender means you’re blending a mix of stuff into your fingers, so it doesn’t mean all bad.
Dylan: I got totally owned in Oakland because I didn’t pay for this bag of chips in this grocery store, and when we got back my favorite sweater was missing! It’s like, karma was owning me!
You guys are telling me about committing crimes, on the record even! Have you ever been involved with Scientology?
Kevin: I’ve walked over there once, but I didn’t go in. You can get detoxes, ha ha!
Dylan: My best friend Sean went over there, and the lady was like ‘Now you can know the truth about Scientology, and it doesn’t involve aliens!’ And he just walked in there, and the first thing he saw was a huge statue of an alien playing chess with a caveman.
Kevin: That should be the cover of our album! Actually, we have a cover. A painting that my mom did of these three little flowers with a blue sky behind it.
What’s the meaning behind the title ‘We Come From the Bright Side?’
Kevin: You know, the good side of the force. Luke Skywalker.
Mark Hamill?
Kevin: Yeah, Mark Hamill. Not the new shit.
Do you think there’ll come a point in your career where you have a trilogy of albums that suck, and then a trilogy of albums that are awesome?
Kevin: I hope that doesn’t happen.
Dylan: That has to happen!
Do you think there’s safeguards you can put in place to prevent a slide into mediocrity?
Kevin: It’s weird. There’s bands like Radiohead, that slowly progress in their own sound. And there’re bands like the Pixies that just wouldn’t do that. They keep their sound like forever.
I’ve got to crack more into the alchemy of your sound! There’s a really solid way that you guys do songs. But from an outsider perspective, looking at all the gear that’s lying on the floor, I don’t know how to describe it! How do you guys start writing songs? Do you start with a riff on the keyboard, or do you build songs around the drums, or what?
Dylan: We’ll just start something, one of us, and it just progresses.
Kevin: …or Derek writes a guitar part at home, or I write a keyboard progression, and show them. Every song is different. We’re open-minded and free to do what we want.
Has anyone ever brought in a song where the other two are like ‘That’s not a 60 Watt Kid song?’
Derek: There are songs sometimes. We tried to work with Ableton Live, a program that bands try to use to do live looping. It was not our sound. It was obvious. We’re kind of glad we don’t have computers. We don’t have anything pre-looped except a few things. It’s just better that we use real instruments.
Kevin: It’s organic. We try to bring music into it so it’s not electronic music. It’s not robotic. That’s fine for that type of music, but for us, we want to bring an essence of some energy and feeling into it, where it goes out to the crowd, bounces around the walls.
It sounds like if I were to take a list of what 60-Watt Kid is not, one thing would be ‘robotic,’ another would be ‘preset…’
Derek: Being robotic is okay…
Kevin: We haven’t found a laptop program that we’re gonna use live, is what we’re trying to say.
Derek: A lot of bands that we like are moving in the direction of that. And the definition and quality is really good. But at the same time, you want to watch people perform. They sync up the loops, but… we use pedals, but none of them sync up, so matter how in time they are, they go out of time. So we like to do ambient loops against stuff.
Dylan: I’m really glad we don’t use the laptop. It’s just fun to loop live.
But you guys use samples, though.
Derek: I have some vocal samples from an old record, a child’s story book record.
Kevin: It’s called ‘The Story of Growing Up.’
Dylan: I sample my bells live, before every show, and then during the show manipulate them.
Have you ever thought a three-piece wasn’t big enough?
Dylan: Kevin will only let us be a three-piece.
Derek: We were thinking about bass and low end, but some songs Kevin’s the bass, some songs I’m the bass. I don’t think you miss the bass. For the album, we didn’t have anybody play bass.
Kevin: I’ll loop a keyboard drone, and it’ll be bassy, and we’ll play two guitars through it, or whatever. I think it makes our sound, actually.
Do you have a mental shortlist of bands who don’t have bassists, who you feel a kinship with?
Kevin: I think the Doors—Ray Manzarek is classically amazing. There’s so many bands that don’t have bass, which are like guitar and drums, like the White Stripes, more like noise rock or garage rock. I don’t relate us to that, because there’s more orchestration going on.
Dylan: We try to make it sound really pretty.
But have you ever done a song where you’re trying to sound like demons?
Kevin: We have a song, ‘Pressure,’ that’s kind of demonic. Sounds like complete hell.
I feel like all your songs are about the grander things. Do you have any songs about girls?
Kevin: I like to write about stuff that’s more about catching the time and the moment, what I see around me. I don’t like to write songs about breakups, unless I’m going through a breakup. The reason half those songs are about my mom is that she just passed away, and she was dying for the last two years.
Dylan: I really like the way Kevin writes lyrics, because he’s really good at capturing, and in performing too, the state of things when they were happening.
Is there a certain type of girl that’s like the 60 Watt Kid groupie?
Derek: We haven’t met her!
Good! A herpes outbreak could really curtail your tour plans, and we wouldn’t want that!
Kevin: We could write some songs about it.
It seems really sucky for artists right now! It’s because everything has to be given to the public for free! It’s liberating, but at the same time, it’s scary. In 1979, you could be in a punk band and still sell 700,000 albums. What do you think are the pitfalls of the times we are in?
Dylan: It’s a bummer to not be able to create all the time, if you’re going to give it all out.
Derek: That’s the downside—that you’re not going to make money, which is bad! But you can get your music out there, and be noticed.
Dylan: Also, with music, and technology, and the media, the sound doesn’t come out of one place. Now a more mainstream band is… killing the genre before it gets born in a way.
Do you think as musicians, you’re like, ‘Fuck, we need to get a more level playing field as far as radio is concerned,’ or are you like, ‘Fuck it, radio is dead’?
Derek: I think everybody’s dead right now. But I think it’s a cleansing time right now, with the economy, and the swine flu…
Kevin: We all have to shit out the toxins, and then we all start out fresh and new. We’ve all got morals again, and there’s love in the air, you know what I mean? People start realizing, ‘Oh shit, we ARE starting to lose money,’ and family starts getting more important. Working together and helping people out. People start to get a heart a little more… or not!
I can’t wait for that to come true. Is there anything else I didn’t ask that you wanted to answer that I didn’t ask?
Kevin: You could ask us if aliens do exist.
Do aliens really exist?
Dylan: They play fucking chess with cavemen!

60-WATT KID WITH AVI BUFFALO AND TIME OF WOLVES ON TUE., MAY 5, AT THE ECHO, 1822 SUNSET BLVD., ECHO PARK. 8:30 PM / FREE FOR 21+ / $7 FOR UNDER 21 / ALL AGES. VISIT 60-WATT KID AT MYSPACE.COM/60WATTKID.