The Thinking Fellers are number one!
B = Brian Hageman A = Anne Eickelberg M = Mark Davies H = Hugh Swarts J = Jay Paget
Interview by Franz Kuntz and Bob Boster, October 1994
Are there any food-related band stories? Foods you would associate with the band?
B -- There's bingus, which is a cake thing you can find in Montana. It's become a sort of theme on this tour. Binguses and Hitler and cows...Cow. Singular.
A -- And the general term snack. It's like an exclamation, a reaction to something.
B -- We went to New York for CMJ and these stewardesses were dropping bags in our laps. They went up and down the aisle going "snack...snack...snack..." Jay and I looked up at her and asked what it was and she just said "snack!"
H -- Really contemptuously.
B -- There's also butterbars, which have worm eggs in them. You eat the bar and the worms become full-size almost immediately in your stomach, then they rip your intestines out. You end up with your innards out all over the place...people just love it.
M -- Then there's the crahamburedge, which is what it sounds like...it's an affirmation.
B -- An undeniable truth.
H -- Burger King has a croissanwhich, so it's a bastardization of that and it just mutated into croissandwich...and then to croissandwedge...and croihamburej.
B -- So you could say, furthermore, crohambwej.
H -- That's really when you're in a situation when something is self-evident.
M -- And then a related subject would be the ham sandwich.
H -- That's another theme of this tour. We noticed that Brian's sleeping bag has this little pocket on it, and it looks like it's about ham-sandwich size and we thought that's what it's for -- a ham sandwich.
B -- After that, we also discovered on this tour that those ham sandwich pouches are sort of a universal thing. If you just look around you'll find they're on almost everything, even on the outsides of planes where you'd have to have a screwdriver, something to pry the sealant loose, to get at the ham sandwich.
Does the sandwich scale itself to whatever it is?
(discussion, confusion)
B -- Piano key or guitar pick ham sandwiches are really tiny but the one on a plane would just be a regular size.
H -- The ones on jogging shoes would be regular-sized.
A -- And the ones that are on top of writing implements would be regular sized. It'd be hard to write...
B -- The ham for the running shoes has a little mustard lip that keeps the mustard from scooting off out of the side.
A -- That's not even bringing up the geronautically designed self-gravitating rump-roast suit.
H -- That's more a fashion statement than a food statement.
M -- There's cheese kegsers which is popular in the Ohio/Pennsylvania region.
H -- The eerie region of the country. It's a mozzarella stick breaded and deep-fat fried. So we call that the cheese-tease county when we're up around Cleveland.
(universal pause...breathing...later...)
Are you surprised by all the positive response to the new record?
A -- Hell no I'm not surprised by that. It's about time! ...Matador tells us it's getting a lot of play but we're still in this void while we're on tour. We haven't seen many reviews of it yet.
H -- We've been doing a lot of interviews where people have asked us about the new record.
B -- It's the first time we got a tour that was properly timed with a record release. This time we've been doing songs that've never been done on the road before.
A -- And people know them.
B -- They're singing along with us in front of the stage.
Do you think your songs are getting more singable?
H -- That could be it, that's what people have been telling us. The word I've been hearing a lot is "commercial." I don't quite get that.
A -- Just depends on how thoroughly or deeply they listen. Soundwise we get better at working in the studio because we've been working in that one studio almost the whole time. (Greg Freeman's Lowdown Studios.)
B -- It was recorded on the same equipment as everything else.
(strong>I'm always pleasantly surprised when anybody whoŐs doing anything to stretch the boundaries at all gets a really good response. Is there a sense that you're doing something out there, past the boundaries of normal college rock and that you're drawing people out with you?
M -- (rambling, deep thoughts)...I don't know if we've succeeded or not. There is a mixture of things you can grab on to and stuff that's harder to figure out. Some bands that are really extreme and far out the average person is not even going to listen to.
A -- Like Borbetomagus.
M -- With what we do they might hear something they can get a hold of and then after a while start to understand some of the weirder stuff.
B -- That's kinda a pointed thing about our records. Some of our friends who are in bands who are really...inaccessible, you know, they're going to be playing to the same people over and over again. ItŐs sort of a closed thing. And when we do records, I really like the fact that some of them have accessible pop sort of things...(but) I would really like to help champion the idea that there's no minimum recording quality or song-structure statutes that you have to follow. People say that home-recorded improvised stuff isnŐt songs and I would like to help kill that.
Does this consciously affect how you work or is it more the music you make just happens to come out of the group?
H -- The stuff we go into the studio with is pretty much what comes out.
B -- Everything that we end up in the studio with generally starts the same way that something we recorded on a ghetto blaster would. We decide to carry some things out and put lyrics on them and structure them.
H -- With tracking in the studio, a lot of times the Sony will come out a lot different, because you have to move things around a lot in the mix because sometimes different instruments' frequencies will overlap and you have to work with that.
B -- Some of the songs on this record, like "Cup of Dreams" was probably one of the more difficult songs we've ever done, and it comes out sounding really smooth and it flows along, and I really like that...
Do you find yourself having to relearn songs after you recorded so you could play them live?
A -- Yes, we did that before we left for this tour.
J -- There's also the possibility of learning them another way, too.
Is the band your job right now?
H -- At the moment, it is.
J -- We can pretty much support ourselves on the road. It's just a matter of how many times you can play a particular city before you wear out your welcome.
You played here twice one summer and it was great.
B -- See, a lot of places aren't nearly as receptive as Chapel Hill. Last night we played in Richmond to about eight people, so that's the other extreme. We were talking to some people from Baltimore that said there's not really any radio that would play something like us so they have to write Matador to get our records.
But you're actually getting played on a commercial alternative stations...
B -- Maybe for the first time...
A -- I just immediately assume that what that means is that we're getting played at some special Sunday 3 am show.
Have you played outside the US much?
H -- Not much. We went to Europe earlier in the year. Hardly anyone knew who we were and when we got up and played they were even more confused.
B -- A lot of people came to see Seam and had to watch us first.
Have you played with bands that you felt were really good matches?
H -- Sun City Girls, that tour we did with them two years ago.
A -- We just did three shows with Pavement and I thought that was good. A lot of kids in the audience who'd never heard anything like what we're doing so it was new for them.
Would you have a bigger inclination to move "out there" at a show at home...like not playing pre-planned songs?
H -- We talked about that. One thing we want to do is a night of all covers. We also talked about doing more improvisation, maybe going under another name, but we haven't done either yet.
B -- It's nice to get out from under the big promotions/club/bar scene too. We played one party last year and it was a lot of fun. We got to unwind and play until we couldn't play anymore. We go through a transformation when we play that long. It comes to the point where you can do anything and everyone's willing to go on together.
We were just talking about this beforehand, regarding jazz, especially free jazz. Nobody plays hard live. It probably has something to do with 8 pm sit-down shows.
B -- Sometimes it's really hard to get that kind of thing going. It doesn't matter how big an audience is there and what they paid. One could still do off-the-cuff things like that. The atmosphere makes it harder, especially if we're hurried.
the end
Back to Stay Free! #10 (the food and sex issue)