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-Management
-Shawn Conner
Standing by the soundboard last night at the Commodore, I had an unobstructed view of Gaslight Anthem‘s setlist. “American Girl”? The Tom Petty song? Really?
Indeed it was. If people were expecting Bruce Springsteen allusions from the admitted fans in the band, the ringing cover that came—in the middle of the set, no less—of an early hit by Gainesville Florida native Petty let us know that Gaslight Anthem isn’t beholden for its classic-rock-fuelled sound only to their fellow New Jerseyite.
I went into the show liking, but not flipping out over, the band’s latest, That ’59 Sound, and left a fan (clutching a vinyl copy of the album, no less). The quartet’s performance fed off the sold-out crowd, and matched it in energy; my only complaint was, as lean and tight as the show and the guys in the band are, and as much as I admired the way Brian Fallon could make his neck vein pop out as he sang “The Backseat”, 20 minutes could have been shaved easily from the set. But that’s me, and my short attention span.
The Heartless Bastards whipped up a storm of their own. Frontwoman Erika Wennerstrom easily has one of the most arresting, powerful voices in rock ‘n’ roll, and seeing/hearing that mighty voice come out of her diminutive frame is one of life’s pleasures for a rock fan looking for the real thing; the band—Dave Colvin on drums, Mark on guitar, Jesse Ebaugh on bass and, for the title track from the new record The Mountain—rocked out along with her, achieving a few moments of transcendence, particularly in the last half of the set. Could the 6.5 per cent alcohol content of the Phillips IPA, as well as Wennerstrom’s great songs, have had something to do with this?
After soundcheck, I had a chance to cadge a beer from the band, and to talk to Erika, an Ohio native, about the Greatest Rock ‘n’ Roll Band Who Ever Rocked, Dayton’s Guided by Voices:
EW: I’ve seen ‘em a ton of times, back from the Bee Thousand lineup. They used to get so… I mean, they’d always get wasted when they play, but it used to be a total trainwreck. I don’t know how it was across the country, but the old GBV shows were total wrecks. But their albums were amazing. Eventually they’d go through different lineups and they’d still get wasted but they’d get through a set really tight, and play like a three-hour set and sound great. But the old days, yeah. They were a big inspiration.
SC: There probably wasn’t a lot happening in Dayton at the time…
EW: Actually, the Breeders were doing really well. They’d done “Cannonball” and that whole Last Splash album, and Kim Deal had done the Amps right after that. Do you remember Brainiac?
SC: I remember an album cover, and that one of the members was killed in a car accident.
Jesse Ebaugh: Tim Taylor.
EW: Yeah. They’d just toured with Beck overseas, and that week [of the accident] were getting ready to sign some huge deal. So for a town the size of Dayton there was kind of a lot.
SC: Now you’re in Austin, which is a total music town.
EW: That’s not really why I moved there…
Mark: Everyone asks her that…
EW: I split from a 10-year relationship and I needed to get out of town. And I have family and friends there, my management’s there, and Mike McCarthy, who produced the record, is there. He’s from Cincinatti [Ohio] originally, also.
SC: I heard Spoon [whom he's also produced] calls him “the Wizard”.
EW: Do they? I heard Tail of Dead calls him the Wizard…
JE: He’s hysterical. He’s got the greatest wardrobe.
EW: That was Mike’s idea to put the pedal steel on “The Mountain”. Coincidentally, when I called Jesse up to see if he’d be into coming down and playing in the band, it happened he’d be learning steel. Then when Mark came into the band we were like, why don’t you guys trade.
Jesse: And I get to play it every night. Which makes me happy, like a kid.
EW: Yeah. I started it ["The Mountain"] way too fast during sound check.
SC: Well you stopped it toward the end.
EW: That was looping issues.
Dave Colvin: That stuff, that’s from playing it so much. We have these minute, microscopic views of where the tempo should be. I don’t know if people out there notice it or not.
SC: I’ve had sound and tempo detection issues since seeing My Bloody Valentine in 1994.
Thanks to Stephanie H at Outside Music, Justin at Fat Possum, and Lauren the tour manager for helping make this happen. Also, if you happen to be in the vicinity of Lauren’s Heartless Bastards merch table at some point during the rest of the tour, do her a favour, and don’t ask which CD you should buy—just buy ‘em all.
This past Sunday (April 5), I came across a “playlist” in the New York Times by Natasha Kahn, aka Bat for Lashes, mentioning Telepathe. From her words (“really sexy and innovative and sounds like Prince on an acid trip…. it’s beautifully polished but also lo-fi. Their songs are like early Madonna and Bananarama”) to the group’s MySpace page, and I was immediately enthralled; I didn’t hear the artists mentioned by Kahn so much (though any reference to the great and holy Bananarama automatically gets my google alerted) in the Brooklyn outfit’s layered, atmospheric sound, but caught nods to the Cocteau Twins and Electrelane.
Four days after reading about the band for the first time, I was on the phone with Melissa Livaudais, one half of the duo along with yoga instructor/ modern dancer Busy Gangnes, as she walked around Brooklyn. Later this month, Iamsound Records will release Dance Mother, Telepathe’s debut full-length (following two EPs), before the band embarks on an extensive tour of Europe and North America.
-Shawn Conner
Photo by Andreas Laszlo Konrath
SC: I was intimidated by your outgoing message: “Don’t leave a message, I never listen to my messages. Text me.”
ML: Oh no, don’t be intimidated.
SC: Did you have any idea about the New York Times plug before it happened?
ML: No, we had no idea, it was crazy. I’m psyched about it. I couldn’t believe it.
SC: Now, I’m having a hard time figuring out where you’re at in terms of releasing your debut…
ML: The date is like… I think it’s actually April 12, 13. I’m embarrassed I don’t know the exact date!
SC: One of the tracks I wanted to ask about is [the six-minute-plus space-rock travelogu] “Trilogy: Breath of Life, Crimes and Killings, Threads and Knives”. That one’s really out there. Did you get into a weird headspace when recording it?
ML: Kind of. What happened was, Busy and I built a home studio in this room in our loft, and we got this program called LogicPro, and just started recording in our bedroom. That was one of the first songs we did. We put a lot of work into it. It was kind of claustrophobic, and there was no heat in our loft.
SC: Is it hard to bit of a struggle for bands, even living in Brooklyn? Is it pretty expensive?
ML: Yeah, but we found a way to make it work. It wasn’t ideal but we definitely consolidated everything in our lives to be able to play and write and rehearse. I think it’s a lot easier to get to the point of being able to do it that way—it’s like hustling, it’s part of survival. Either you can figure out a way to do it, or not. Or you can be really rich and your parents pay for everything.
SC: You guys aren’t trust fund kids?
ML: No, no trust-fund kids.
SC: So it’s just you and Busy in the band now, right? Have you found a way to capture all the sounds you want onstage?
ML: Yeah, actually. For the first time ever. We just had about two solid months off after touring, and then we were like, “All right, we have we to make this work.” We sequenced our entire live set. We played some things and sampled them, and we separated all the tracks. There’s a lot of flexibility with dropping things in and out. It was really laborious—I would say sequencing the record and making it live the way we wanted an audience to hear it, it took really long days for two months.
SC: But not as laborious as trying to get along with, or teach, new band members.
ML: Yeah. Now it’s so much fun. It is really kind of weird. It makes sense to us because we played and wrote it. It’s kind of stressful saying, “I know this doesn’t make sense, but the guitar part doesn’t come in on the one-beat.”
SC: I imagine when you guys play live you work up a pretty good dance groove.
ML: Yeah, definitely. When we first started doing it, people were like, “What the fuck?” And then once our stuff went to blogs and got on the Internet, all of a sudden people were singing and dancing to our songs in the front row and we were like, “Whoah, oh my God, it’s working.” And so for our record release party, because Busy is also a choreographer, and she’s been working with this friend of ours Megan Byrne, who’s done stuff with David Byrne, we’re going to have three dancers onstage with us. ‘Cos like Busy and I, we have a lot of stuff to do. Unfortunately, it’s all behind a table of electronics, so it’s not that entertaining. But we got some projections together and some really amazing , hot choreographed dancers onstage. From there, we’re gonna make YouTube videos of the dancers. Each song will have five movements to learn, and then we’re going to try to organize dancers to perform with us in each city we play.
SC: How did you meet Busy? At one of her yoga classes?
ML: No, we had a mutual friend, Emily. When I was in this band Wikkid there were three electric guitarists and we were like all we need is a drummer. Then Emily said, “My friend Busy really wants to play drums.” I was living in this huge monster loft where we practiced in my bedroom, and I actually had this spare drumkit I’d put together from random drum parts left in the loft by random people living there. And then Busy showed up and played, and that was the first time we met.
SC:Was this shortly after you moved to New York from New Orleans?
ML: Yeah. Which was really lucky in my opinion. I know that a lot of people, when they first move to New York, and they don’t have the kind of experience, they can get really depressed. But I moved here and I felt liberated. I didn’t have money, I’d just dropped out of school, I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life. And then things just kind of worked out.
Telepathe’s North American tour dates include:
06/02/09 Cambridge, MA @ Middle East Upstairs
06/03/09 Montreal, QC @ Il Motore
06/04/09 Toronto, ON @ El Mocambo
06/05/09 Chicago, IL @ Empty Bottle
06/06/09 Minneapolis, MN @ 7th Street Entry
06/09/09 Vancouver, BC @ Biltmore Cabaret
06/10/09 Seattle, WA @ Chop Suey
06/11/09 Portland, OR @ Holocene
06/12/09 San Francisco, CA @ Bottom of the Hill
06/16/09 Costa Mesa, CA @ Detroit Bar
06/17/09 Phoenix, AZ @ Modified Arts
06/19/09 Austin, TX @ Emos Jr.
06/20/09 Denton, TX @ Hailey’s
06/22/09 Baton Rouge, LA @ Spanish Moon
06/23/09 Atlanta, GA @ 529
06/24/09 Chapel Hill, NC @ Local 506
06/25/09 Washington, DC @ Rock and Roll Hotel
06/26/09 Philadelphia, PA @ Johnny Brendas
07/31/09 Jersey City, NJ @ All Points West Festival
The songs on the Ting Tings‘ debut might sound like happy-go-lucky pop, but listen to the lyrics and you’ll definitely hear an edge, if not a chip. It’s a holdover from the two musicians’ previous experience with the music industry, when Katie White and Jules De Martino were part of a band called Eskiimo. After that group split, the vocalist/guitarist and drummer, friends dating back to pre-Eskiimo days, almost gave up on music for good. But the two licked their wounds, wrote some songs, threw a few promotional parties, and eventually pressed their own copies of a single, “Great DJ”.
The breakout success last year of that song, as well as “That’s Not My Name” and We Started Nothing, the (Sony) debut, has made the Ting Tings one of those unlikely stories that makes even the most jaded pop music fan sit up and take notice. Here’s a band whose tunes—not just catchy but smart and sassy—just about everyone likes. The chemistry between White and De Martino, meanwhile, has made the live show a must-see. De Martino called from a St. Louis tour stop, and answered our questions, kind of… but he definitely talked.
-Shawn Conner
The Ting Tings at the Mod Club, Toronto. Photo-Jessica Beach.
SC: How has the show changed as the two of you have become more adept at playing as a two-piece?
JDM: We’ve been signed to a major record label and obviously we have all these opportunities to go around the world and play all these gigs, these opportunities that open daily. But we like to keep things very much in hand. We do our own artwork, we produced our own album. The two of us onstage have an enormous amount of energy. It’s something about the energy we have that makes us feel fulfilled when we come off stage. I think the worst thing about this industry is when you start feeling unfulfilled, whether or not you’re earning any money. Selling records, going around the world, and people start saying “you can do this advert, it’s going to bring in so many thousands of pounds, and someone’s offered you this, you can stay at the penthouse suite.” It’s really easy to go, “That would be really good.” But it’s one of the decisions we’ve made, we’re a pop band but it’s kind of run like an indie band. We do everything ourselves. Sometimes that frustrates labels or the management, because they want you to be this huge thing overnight.
SC: When you started out, you were just traveling around in Katie’s Mini, right?
JDM: That’s right. Now we have a tour bus, and seven people who travel with us. Katie has a guitar tech but that’s because most of the day we’re doing promo and we don’t have time to set up. They [the crew] are really an integral part of what we do. They’re great people. Katie’s got a female guitar, she was adamant about that. Obviously in this business when you go to crew it’s all men, sitting on the bus burping and farting. So she was adamant about getting a girl to come on tour with us. She [the guitar tech] is kind of more of a boy than a girl. She lifts really heavy stuff.
SC: You had an unpleasant experience with the music industry before signing to Sony with the Ting Tings.
JDM: The last time, it went wrong in many ways. In fact it inspired semi-consciously a lot of the material we wrote lyrically. A lot of people think these are out and out pop songs, which they are, but they are written about our past experience. “That’s Not My Name” is about feeling invisible, not being heard. When we were signed as a band [Eskiimo] before, the first thing they [the record company] projected—we had a lot of talent and were making some great music—was how far Kate would go in the sense of men’s magazines, revealing herself and being sexual. I remember clearly we sat at the meeting, and she’d put together some ideas, because she’d done fashion design, and they literally pushed that aside, and focused on how raunchy Katie was prepared to be. As if the only thing we wanted was to get a record deal. I remember looking at Katie and she had her middle finger stuck up and I was thinking, “Oh no. She’s lost it.” But she was like, “Fuck you guys, I’ve spent three days putting this scrapbook together and you haven’t even looked at it. All you’ve done is come into this meeting thinking I’m gonna go in these trash magazines.” I remember we got back on the train back to Manchester, and the other members in the band were going “Katie, you’ve got to be more diplomatic.” And I was like, “No, not at all.” And two-three weeks later we got a call saying we got dropped.
SC: Obviously that experience made you determined to call the shots, from where you tour to the artwork to the merchandise.
JDM: We’ve done some wild stuff with our merch, especially when we started. We had white T-shirts and pots of paint, and we were doing our own merch after the gig, and we’d sign the T-shirts or tell people to put them on and throw paint at them, or put handprints or footprints on them. I studied fine art, and Katie got involved with a lot of fashion design students in Manchester, and she got fascinated by fashion. So she was cutting her own clothes. The funniest thing, when we broke through, there was a Vivienne Westwood dress that came through for her to wear to an event. And I was like, “Wow, that’s incredible, it’s worth a fortune, God you’re so lucky.” I’m the drummer, no one ever gives me designer stuff. And I went out and when I came back to the studio and she’d cut it to pieces. She’d put on all these little teapot doilies on it. At the time I was like, “You’re a fucking crazy bitch. You should’ve put it on eBay.” But it did look good. And that’s what she’s always done. We still try to do that. Those wallets, it takes ages to make one, we get a guy in London to make them. We’ve just said when you’ve got time, make them. We did a party in Manchester recently, and it turned into a huge paint fight. My drum kit and the guitars got covered, and they look just phenomenal, like something off the first Stone Roses record. That’s what we love doing, is having a connection with the audience, getting a reaction. We have two T-shirt designs at the moment, designed by a Swedish girl. We ran a competition, we want someone to come up with a great T-shirt. So we commission her. She started a website now, designing T-shirts. SHe was just a student. We love that, it’s so much more refreshing than going to a company that designs T-shirts.
SC: You’ve got the one album out, and bunch of remixes and a few live tracks. What would you recommend if I had a few extra bucks to download some additional Ting Tings music?
JD: Definitely Calvin Harris remix of “Great DJ” , it’s amazing. And there’s a Tom Neville remix of “That’s Not My Name” that’s good as well.
SC: What about the Live in Soho tracks?
JD: That’s just a bloody record label thing.
Adaline’s recent brush with actor Robert Pattinson from the Twilight series (the second movie is being filmed here in Vancouver) at a local nightclub drew thousands of people to her myspace page. An online source found the Vancouver singer’s Twitter post about the encounter and, 40 hours later, she found herself a genuine internet phenomenon, with her online tunes picking up 23,000+ plays.
What we want to know is, where the heck was Pattinson? We were at the same “party” (and we use the term loosely) at the Vancouver nightclub Richard’s on Richards and the closest thing we saw to a celebrity was Nickelback’s Chad Kroeger, standing outside the bar and chatting to some musician types. Oh well, this will teach us to ignore teen vampire flicks in the future.
Anyway, guttersnipe caught up with Adaline to talk about her Pattinson experience, and the sudden burst of Internet fame—the good and the bad—that has followed.
-Shawn Conner
SC: What the hell happened?
A: Well, I played South by Southwest and CMW [Canadian Music Week], and everyone kept saying I had to get on Twitter. And I was like, do I really need one more social network? And so the funny part about the whole Twilight thing is, I picked up the book on the way to South by Southwest in the airport, and I remember thinking, “Oh, I can’t read this, it’s so pop culture.” But I read it on the plane and made everyone around me uncomfortable because I was breathing heavy. It’s a pretty sexy book, especially for young adult reading material. So I was pretty happy about that. So I read it, came home, and of course wanted to watch the movie. So I watched the movie. And, coincidentally, I started my Twitter account right after. And then all this weird stuff started happening. I was joking around with the editor of the Edmonton Journal, who’s a fan of the movie, about how the lead guy and I were vampire soulmates, just poking fun at myself and just being a crazy girl. A few days later I get a video added to the Toronto Star website, and the one that plays right after mine—and there are thousands on there—is of Robert Pattinson. Haha, that’s pretty funny, I thought. Then, the next day, a Vancouver commuter paper published a feature on me, and there was a story on him on the facing page.
So, a few days later I’m hanging out at Richard’s on Richards and he’s standing right there, on the balcony, just hanging out. I recognized him right away. And then I was like, ‘That’s crazy.’ Because my Twilight experience was only a week old. He was just chatting with his friends, and there were some people trying to take pictures, and he was like, ‘I can’t take pictures tonight.’ I got the sense he wasn’t allowed to take pictures. So I just went up to him and said, “Hi, I’m not interested in a picture, just wanted to say hi and that I really love the movie and I know you’re just a regular person, so I don’t need anything from you.” Then he gave me this hug, and was like, “You’re the first person to say that all day.” So that was fine, but it’s not like my world stood still. It was a nice experience but I don’t really get starstruck easily. I’m always meeting people, that’s kind of what I do. This is the part that’s crazy; at 4:30 in the morning, I post on my Twitter site—and I have maybe 10 or 15 people following me, and just wrote that I’d met him, and went to bed. And the next morning, I’ve got like a 100 messages in my inbox. And I check my myspace page and I’ve got 3,000 listens. This is at 9 a.m., so it had to have been between 5 and nine. Then I find this online source saying he’d been sighted by a talented Vancouver indie artist, and it had a link to my myspace page. By the end of the day I’d had 13,000 plays and hundreds of messages from all over the world. I wrote a blog about it, and as soon as I published it, dozens and dozens of Pattinson fan club sites posted it everywhere. It was all over the Internet. And then the blog started coming in. My messages were really positive, but some people thought I was lying, some thought I was trying to leverage myself on his fame. And I’m sitting there going all I did was put up a Twitter post.
For an older interview with Adaline, click on Pages>Adaline interview.
In the second part of my interview with Paul Hornschemeier, the Chicago cartoonist chats about his three-city Pacific Northwest tour, his “Nighcrawler Meets Molecule Man” story for Marvel, and exposing his girlfriend to the sordid underworld of comics fandom.
-Shawn Conner
SC: So what kind of things are you going to be doing on this tour?
PH: I try to mix things up a little. This tour is short enough that it’s going to be different in every city. This’ll be the first time I’ve done this, but basically I’ve taken an excerpt of Mother, Come Home, sliced up the panels and removed the text, and I’ll be reading the dialogue. That’s about the only good way to read comics to people. For The Three Paradoxes, we did a puppet show. I’ve seen people do things like a slide show with comics, and using different voices, but that wouldn’t feel appropriate for Mother, Come Home.
SC: You were the colourist on Omega the Unknown, which I thought was a great book, especially coming from a mainstream company like Marvel.
PH: It got a little pocket of attention, but I think it flew under the radar. It’s funny, I go into [comic] stores, they see my name on a credit card, and they always say, “We really like that Omega book. It’s one of our best sellers, we’re always telling people ‘Read this, you’ll like it.’” It’s a weird sell, because people wouldn’t necessarily know about Jonathan Lethem if they didn’t read novels. Mainly the reason I worked on it is I’m friends with Farel, and a fan of Jonathan [Lethem]‘s writing. And I got to work on Gary Panter’s stuff too. [Panter did the cover and some interior art for an issue.] I just had to colour it the way I thought he would colour it. After, I was basically checking my email inbox waiting for the rejection, for them [Marvel] to tell me that no way they’re going to go with this, that it’s off-register and psychedelic. But I think by that point in the series they’d thrown up their hands.
SC: Now, what’s this story you’ve done for Marvel, “Nightcrawler Meets Molecule Man”?
PH: I liked the Bizarro books that DC did, I thought hat [letting alternative comics artists tackle the DC universe] was a really good idea. I don’t know what they’re going to call the book, but my story is basically a philosophy and physics rant, with Nightcrawler and Molecule Man having this intense conversation about free will for four pages, which is what we were given to work with. I had two different Spider-man stories completely written and scripted, but they were too long to fit into four pages. I kind of doubt those’ll ever see the light of day.
Molecule Man.
SC: Any superhero skeletons in your closet?
PH: I will say I’m not into the superhero world, though I loved that Batman manga book. That, and the Fletcher Hanks book [I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets]; both kind of showed where superheros could have gone, where they were going for awhile. It’s like you take Nirvana, and three generations down the road you get Creed. They’ve chucked all the good stuff, and now everything’s gritty Frank Miller type of stuff.
SC: This of course leads to the movie version of Watchmen…
PH: I thought Eric Reynolds kind of nailed it on the Fantagraphics blog: it’s like seeing somebody who really loves a song doing that most faithful rendition of that song and still just fucking it up. It was very faithful to the aesthetics and look of the book. I think the major thing was, I didn’t care. While I was reading the book I cared, and I think it moves really well. I’m glad they took all that pirate crap out of the movie. It does help the book as a pacing device. Otherwise the book would move a little too quickly. I think the main thing too was that I was watching the movie with my girlfriend, who had no experience with the book, and I was thinking about what she was making of these characters, and what this must be like for the average person coming in who hasn’t read the book.
SC: Your girlfriend is joining you on tour?
PH: She actually hasn’t been to any comics events, ever. She works at the Museum of Contemporary Art, so when we kiss each other goodbye in the morning, she goes off to the museum, and I go upstairs and work on comics. On this tour, she’s going to get every single kind of experience, the art gallery [Charles A. Hartman] in Portland, the convention [Emerald City ComiCon] and after-party in Seattle, the comics store [Lucky's] in Vancouver.
SC: Hopefully some people will be in costume in Seattle to really give her the full effect.
PH: I was looking at the people attending, who the guests are, and there are too many big name guests for there to not at least
be someone in costume. In 2001, in the wake of 9/11, I was at a convention in Baltimore, the least populated convention ever, and the most fun I’ve ever had at a convention, there were even people dressed up at that. There are four people there, and half of them are dressed as Thor.
SC: You’ll have to take her to the San Diego Comics Convention.
PH: Yeah, it’s one of those things. I tell people you have to go at least once. The major mistake I think people make, and that I made the first time, is going every day for long periods of time. You’re in San Diego, so there are other things to do. But it’s everything about pop culture happening at once. My first year I went I was at a table the whole time, every single day, and the problem with the convention is, it’s everything possible in the emotional spectrum turned up to 11. A little kid is in the most beautiful innocent state when he sees someone dressed up as Batman, and then you’ve go the guy dressed as Batman trying to push everyone out of his way, and some 40-year-old guy trying to realize part of his youth by buying this gun that goes with that action figure, and the guy selling it to him for three times what he knows it’s worth, and that’s like within a three-foot radius. But like I said, if you’re going to go, just pop in for an hour or two, and then get out.
Paul H. appears at the following to promote the release of the new Fantagraphics hardcover edition of his graphic novel, MOTHER, COME HOME:
April 2, 5:30-8:30PM: CHARLES A. HARTMAN FINE ART, Portland
“Paul Hornschemeier: Cloistered in Crowds” First Thursday reception
and book signing
134 NW 8th Ave. • hartmanfineart.net
April 3, 6PM: LUCKY’S COMICS, Vancouver
Book signing and author talk
3972 Main St. • luckys.ca
April 4, All Day: EMERALD CITY CON, Seattle
Appearing at the Fantagraphics Books tables
Seattle Convention Center • emeraldcitycomicon.com
April 4, 7PM: FANTAGRAPHICS BOOKSTORE & GALLERY, Seattle
A book signing and Emerald City Con after-party with Stan Sakai &
Jaime Hernandez
1201 S. Vale St. • fantagraphics.com/bookstore
Winnipeg-based singer-songwriter Romi Mayes recently released Achin In Your Bones. The disc follows a long and storied life/career that includes five years living on Vancouver Island and recording “Hand Me Down World” for a Guess Who tritube record, Guess Who’s Home. Like her previous album, Sweet Steady Somethin—which earned her a Songwriter of the Year Award from the WCMA—the disc was produced by cowboy pop vet Gurf Morlix (Lucinda Williams is among his credits). Via email, and while completing a Western Canadian tour before going off to Italy in April, Mayes shares with guttersnipe’s Winnipeg correspondent eugene osudar the trials and tribulations of roots-rock recording.
eo: How many songs did you write for the new CD?
RM: I had about 18 songs going into the studio and then 11 made the album… when we were in the final mixing process I decided to pull one from the album so we ended up 10.
eo: What are some of the stories behind “the stories of the songs”?
RM: Each one has its own story, situation, reasons… a lot of them come from first person, firsthand experience, and others are just inspired by people I have met along the way.
eo: Inspirations/happy coincidences/happy discoveries while recording, anything of special note to/for you…
RM: I loved working with Gurf again… it was good to have more of a hand in the production this time around. I trusted my own
musical sensibilities this time around more than we worked on Sweet Somethin Steady. I also played a lot more electric and lead guitar on this album than i ever have in the past. It was nice to see my skills catch up with some of my musical sensibilities.
eo: When did you decide you wanted Gurf Morlix to produce?
RM:When I was looking for a producer for sweet somethin steady I had talked to a few other producers but I just wasn’t finding the right chemistry. A past dobro player of mine, Dan Walsh, suggested Gurf, so we sent him pre-production material and some past albums… he called me within a couple weeks and we had a great talk about music and we both knew then that we had some serious mojo and that we were going to work on the album. This time around was a no-brainer since that time Gurf and I have toured and played and listened to music and stayed close friends. I think he’s one of the best producers I have ever heard.
eo: Are some of the songs old songs/or are they all/mostly new?
RM: Almost all of them were written in 2008… I was having kind of a dry spell with writing and then suddenly a whole lot of them poured out and then I knew it was time to make a new album.
eo: I seem to recall The Weber Brothers backed you up at Candor Books and Music one time? Was that what led you to ask them to join you on tour as your band?
RM: The Webers are world-class. We had been talking about this for the last few years… we all wanted to tour together for sure. I’m so lucky to have them with me for these tours. I will try to keep them as long as humanly possible. They are the cat’s ass.
eo: Do you love italy? Tell me about you and your Italian friends…
RM: Italy is the most amazing place in the world. They are warm and inviting and they love wine at noon. What more could you ask for?
Paul Hornschemeier’s 2004 graphic novel, Mother, Come Home, impressed readers, critics, and awards jurists (it was nominated for a Harvey, Ignatz, and Eisner) with its understated—in terms of both writing and art—story of a father and son grappling with absence and grief. (The story was originally published in Hornschemeier’s comic, Forlorn Funnies.) The Three Paradoxes, the Chicago-by-way-of-Ohio cartoonist’s follow-up, was more formally ambitious in its use of several stylistic techniques and layered storyline. In the first of a two-part interview, Guttersnipe talked to the 32-year-old artist about these projects, his family, and his (now defunct) indie-rock band Arks. In part two, we discuss his work as a colourist on the Jonathan Lethem-penned Omega the Unknown for Marvel, a Marvel “indie project” anthology, his upcoming Pacific Northwest tour, and why everyone should go to the San Diego Comicon at least once.
—SC
SC: Is this going to be your first time in Vancouver?
PH: It’s my first time ever going to Vancouver. I’ve only been to Canada twice—Toronto and Winnipeg. I mean, who doesn’t go to Winnipeg? I worked for a printing press there in Winnipeg for two years, I was their representative in the U.S. I was going up there to meet with people, also because one of my books was being printed up there.
SC: Do you remember which part of the city the printing press was in?
PH: The cold part.
SC (laughs): Right, the cold part.
PH: It was late October, and already snowing. I thought Chicago was cold, but Winnipeg—much colder.
SC: What’s happening with Arks?
PH: It is deceased. That band is no longer with us. We released our full-length album in late 2007, maybe…? I don’t remember, my brain has turned to mush. Basically, the band split into two separate bands after that. I wanted to do weird different things, and that was not the general idea… the band, I sort of wrote most of the music, and found myself writing one kind of song over and over again. That kind of bored me.
SC: In your comics, the two that I’ve read, anyway, you’re expanding your techniques.
PH: In those books, I’m switching the way I’m drawing and bouncing around different styles to represent different things. It’s the same thing with music. I’ve never understood why you would do everything with one method. I mean, I kind of come from a science background—my whole family is a very nerdy science oriented group of people. You don’t solve every problem with the same equation. I feel that’s bad science, but it make for bad art too.
SC: Can you tell me more about your family background?
PH: It’s science and law: my parents are lawyers, my mom’s also a judge. My father has a degree in biology but he went into law. My older sister’s an astrophysicist. It’s a very dumb family. We just sit around and consume copious amounts of cola and talk about the virtues of American Idol. Nothing against American Idol… I’ll get some backlash from Vancouver American Idol fans.
SC: We have our own Canadian Idol.
PH: A competition to see who can garner the most beaver pelts. That was always the running joke when I worked with the printing press, I’d be talking to people and they’d be like, “So what would the price be in Canada,” like the conversion was some crazy thing that couldn’t possibly be understood.
SC: We still have the barter system up here. Paper money, what’s that?
PH: So I mean my family, I don’t know. We tend to be an over-thinking bunch, hence the overly intellectualized comics I produce.
SC: You studied philosophy in university?
PH: That’s what my degree is in. I mainly studied philosophy, but I was principally interested in philosophy of physics and cognitive psychology, more the math and science side of philosophy and logic.
SC: That’s a little more apparent in The Three Paradoxes, but philosophy also seems to be part of Mother, Come Home.
PH: In the beginning of the book, some of my logic notes are used as the background. The last name of the family, Tennant, is from my symbolic logic professor.
SC: Obviously, Mother, Come Home isn’t autobiographical.
PH: There are elements of it that are from my life and from my father’s life. It’s sort of a combination of a lot of things. I’d been engaged to a girl and that hadn’t worked out. I was examining what was going on with my life, and coming to the realization my parents were getting older, and that one of them is going to die first, and these people I’ve always known as a unit, one of them would be without the other, and what would that be like, combined with some other things. There was a moment in one of my classes with that professor I mentioned where he was talking about being on safari with his wife, and they had taken this anti-malaria medication and she had had a completely adverse reaction to it and was basically on the verge of death, and he just kind of lost it in the middle of class at one point, but in this couched-in-logic, still-trying-to-hold-on-to-some-semblance-of-control way. He was talking about the Center for Disease Control, and how they had done this testing and how they had paid attention to doing a double-blind experiment so he was talking about it in those terms, but at the same time you could see the undercurrent which is, “I’m going to lose the person I love and there’s nothing I can do about it.” That had a huge affect on me, because I saw something of myself in that, which I think is more expressed in The Three Paradoxes—my attempt to try to control the chaos that is life, or get your hands around all these different variables that are beyond your control.
SC: And you don’t have the luxury of coming from a broken home.
PH: No, I just come from a history of chemical imbalances. We’re just nuts, other than that we’re completely well-adjusted.
SC: I was looking on your blog and you’re obviously excited about the movie adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are, and then I thought that must’ve been an influence on the lion mask Thomas wears in Mother, Come Home.
PH: I hadn’t thought of that. I didn’t realize until the last five ten years how few people, like Maurice Sendak, Edward Gorey, Charles Addams, and Jim Henson, really influenced me. I didn’t realize how many of my favourite things were Maurice Sendak stories, and likewise with Jim Henson—I didn’t necessarily put together Sesame Street with The Muppet Show and The Dark Crystal. But I think the lion mask was principally influenced by a store my mom and I would drive by when I was a kid, and it would have masks in the window at Halloween. I never got any of them, but it was a nice memory with my mom.
SC: What’s the difference between the Fantagraphics version of Mother, Come Home that’s just been published and the original Dark Horse publication?
PH: Just production value-wise, it’s superior. I kind of saw the book as hardcover originally, that’s what the cover design was based on. It’s just closer to what I had kind of envisioned originally. As far as changing anything, I might have corrected a couple of errors. But if you go back and start changing stuff you’re going to end up with the first three episodes of Star Wars.
SC: So it’s not the Mother, Come Home Absolute edition.
PH: Right, there won’t be any deleted scenes. The only thing that changed about the book was, the very last line in the original comics [Forlorn Funnies] was a totally different line. My editor pushed me on that. Being a typical stubborn ass of an artist, I was resistant to it at first, but then I spent some time thinking about it and came up with a line I think is way better.
(Part II of the Paul Hornschemeier interview includes way more mentions of superheroes.)
Ndidi Onukwulu’s 2008 album The Contradictor was a stunning leap forward from her debut, which was pretty good itself. On The Contradictor, though, the Britannia Beach-based singer mix of blues, jazz, soul and pop really came together, while always staying a step ahead of easy pigeonholing. Guttersnipe talked to Onukwulu, whose father is a Nigerian-born percussionist, about looking exotic while growing up in smalltown BC, her recent forays into acting and beauty contest judging, and the problems with kids today.
-Shawn Conner
SC: Growing up in smalltown BC and being pretty exotic-looking must have been cause for some angst.
NO: Uh, yeah. Interior Canada, period. Having some melanin in your skin makes for a bit of a life. A pretty isolated life. Which is strange. But people are people, what can you do. When you look a little bit foreign they get funny around you.
SC: I guess that serves you well for your songs—it gives you the right to sing the blues.
NO: It does. That’s the thing. When people talk to me at the blues and say, “Oh, you’re so happy.” Well, I wasn’t always happy. A. B, have you been to Interior Canada? When you go and stay in smalltown Canada for a year, talk to me then.
SC: Is there some sense of satisfaction returning to these place and being onstage?
NO: It’s weird, I don’t know. It’s a different thing. I mean, I haven’t played in these areas before—I mean, I’ve played around Nelson, and that’s just fun. It’s full of health food, good times, and hippies. So it’s pretty happy. But the other places I haven’t played. I know in Invermere I’m sure to see a whole bunch of faces I don’t recognize, but that I did at one time.
SC: You’ve recently added a couple of things to your resume, actress and judge. Tell me a little about your role in Nurse.Fighter.Boy.
NO: I played a singer, which isn’t much of a stretch, and got to sing one of my own songs. It’s a whole different world; it’s a world that’s fun. You get to play make believe, but make it real.
SC: Do you think you have natural acting talent?
NO: I don’t know. But I’d like to try. I’d like to maybe study over time. I’m sort of a one-track woman, though. I believe whatever your strength is, you should really push that, and the other things you could be kind of okay you should investigate and learn about, study and then try.
SC: And judging the Vervegirl competition?
NO: That’s pretty fun. I get to look at young Canadian faces and pick the ones I think represent our country. It’s a great opportunity, I like that the magazine is trying to promote self-esteem in young women. I feel like youth in general, particularly females, have it twice as hard now as it was for me growing up. And itas hell. I can only imagine what they’re going through. This magazine’s trying to build an outlet for women to look at themselves and feel proud, no matter what their size or shape or ethnicity.
SC: Why is it harder now than when you were groing up?
NO: When I grew up, mind you I was in isolated communities, but there was money for sports teams, there was money for theatre and music in school. Now, the focus isn’t really on that. Extracurricular programs are practically nonexistent, so where do these kids go? They go to the mall, they get into gangs, because there’s no place to go. At least I had a bit of a network. I did go to about a million different high schools and schools, but I grew up at a time when there was money put into schools for extracurricular. And it saved my life. I was spending time doing things, rather than ruminating on terrible feelings burning through me. When you’re going through puberty it’s honestly hell. You know this.
SC: I still am going through puberty.
NO [laughs]: It’s a hard hard time. Nothing’s working. Today’s society, though it’s completely falling apart, there’s still this mass consumption mentality put on these kids. Female figures in today’s entertainment world are terrible. There are hardly any respectable role models for young women. It’s just kind of awful, it’s apalling—women are being forced to exude this sexuality prematurely. Boy, if I pulled that stunt when I was a kid—well, I wouldn’t have.
SC: You sound like me: “Kids today, boy.”
NO: I know, it’s so weird. I love them and I want to help, which is why I’m part of this contest. There are organizations I work with, as my profile rises, I’m able to more attention to—scholarship programs, literacy outreach programs. So I’m doing my best not to be so “kids today,” but it’s hard.
SC: Are you in touch with your RCMP step-dad?
NO: No, not so much.
SC: I thought he must have an opinion on this Robert Dziekanski court case*.
NO: He’s retired. I can give you my opinion, growing up with an RCMP officer. I don’t think he was the best example of a good clean common-sense officer. I’ve had a few run-ins with RCMP and it’s a very individual thing. I have mixed feelings. I understand the need for police, and appreciate them when they’re helpful. But giving that much power to an individual is a very tricky thing. You don’t really know how that person’s brain and ego really workds. Like some of the things my stepfather would do and say… He was in traffic, which is kind of why we were in small highway towns. And he would purposely pull people over who weren’t really doing anything, and give them a ticket to make a quota, and I know a lot of cops did that. On the flip side, there were always three or four really amazing RCMP officers who were really proud of what they did, and were pragmatic and rational. In moments of extreme crisis, massive accidents or hold-ups, they would never did what those four gentlemen did. I mean, that’s pretty disgusting. They’re four large cops, he’s one man. It goes back to the idea, you give people this false sense of power, and some will exploit it.
SC: And none of this would be coming to light if someone hadn’t been walking by with a videocamera.
NO: Of course not, and that’s the amazing thing about technology. As much as I am kind of anti-technology, people can’t get away with things anymore.
SC: Does it bug you when you’re performing and everyone’s taking pictures on the cellphones?
NO: No, not at all. It’s necessary. I understand it’s part of life because we’re so Internet-based. The more that goes on the intenet, the more people can see. It’s very bizarre. Whatever happened to the days of traveling minstrels?
SC: I think those days are over. Then again, when society crashes, minstels might be back in vogue.
(Ndidi Onukwulu plays the Biltmore Cabaret in Vancouver March 11.)
*Four RCMP officers tasered a panicked Dziekanski five times at the Vancouver International Airport, resulting in the Polish immigrant’s death.
The former “smoothie/bagel god of UC/Berkeley,” Robert S. Ensler dropped out of real life in his mid-4os and became a professional impersonator. In the first part of my interview with Ensler, we talked about his career portraying Dean Martin and Donald Trump at corporate gigs and in nightclubs. In this second installment, the Las Vegas-based entertainer discusses his online retail business, which includes offloading collectibles such as Rat Pack Zippo lighters and the Gemmy line of animatronic dolls of Dean Martin, James Brown, Ray Charles and others.
-Shawn Conner
SC: So what can you tell me about the animatronic dolls?
RSE: Made by Gemmy, they came out in, what, 2004 I think? And they were made out of spit [laughs]. They had a lot of problems. They [Gemmy] sold these things all over the country. They blew ‘em out real cheap wholesale. All the major department stores sold the Dean Martin one. All the others were secondary. They had a Rocky Balboa, two Bring Crosbys, the Ray Charles, the Three Stooges doll came and went so fast—they’re worth a ton of money now.
SC: I saw the James Brown [which sings "I Feel Good"] on amazon for $160.
RSE: The trouble with all these animatronics is, the mechanism that controls the mouth—unless they’re in a hermetically sealed environment—disintegrates, and then the mouth no longer moves. Literally, almost everything I have at this point, the mouth doesn’t move. I bought some from this one distributor last year, he was selling them for $40 including shipping. I was selling them for $80, so I bought a whole bunch.
SC: What was the last order you got?
RSE: I got one a couple days ago. For the Dean Martin.
SC: That’s the only one you have left?
RSE: Pretty much. I’ve got the 20” Dean Martin, then I’ve got the 12″ Christmas Dean Martins—the mouth doesn’t move, and it’s a one-song version. They’ve been sitting; I don’t care if I don’t sell them. Eventually I know I’ll raise the price, and I’ll still sell them. The Dean Martin Christmas doll is a rarity. The 20″ Dean Martin, it’s extremely hard to find. I just hoard them. They’re collectibles. It’s like the Rat Pack Zippo lighter. I bought a large quantity of these. Limited edition, 3,000 brass and 3,000 in chrome, they retailed for $40. I was selling one or two a month. I don’t care, I’m not going to lower the price. I eventually popped them up to 60 dollars and 80 dollars and eventually to 140 dollars. I searched the web, and the last retailer selling these things stopped selling them, and that’s when I popped them up to $140. And I was selling a few, now and then. A nice return on my investment.
SC: What’s the story on Gemmy?
RSE: Gemmy is mostly into inflatables now. They’ve gotten away from animatronics. They used to do the fish one [the Big Mouth Billy Bass]. Then everybody else ripped them off. Five years ago was when I bought most of my inventory. I bought a whole bunch of Dino and Rodney Dangerfield dolls. I still have those. There was an I Love Lucy one too. Wasn’t much of a seller for me.
SC: Do you have any idea of how many were made?
RSE: Ahhh… of the Dean Martin dolls, when I talked to the manufacturer, they wanted to sell me a whole container of them. Hundreds, or thousands, would have cost me $25,000 to buy a whole container. Didn’t have that kind of money. Wish I had. They made a lot of the Dinos, and a lot less of everybody else. I think Dean Martin was the number one seller for them. As an aside, I gave one to Dean Martin’s son, Ricky. He hated it. He thought it was too much of a caricature of Dino. That was one of his first comments to me, he didn’t like it. He wanted a real legitimate doll, like a Barbie Frank Sinatra doll.
SC: Has he seen your [Dean Martin impersonation] act?
RSE: I don’t know if he has.
SC: Do you have any gigs lined up?
RSE: Yeah, next week, and another coming up. I get a lot of strange inquiries, because I own a lot of websites for real movie stars that never had anything on the web.
Why are you trying to do this thing about Gemmy?
SC: I’ve been fascinated since I bought the James Brown. And then researching on the Internet led me to you.
RSE: I’m a unique personality. My kids cannot figure out what kind of profession I’m in, ‘cos I don’t have a normal job.
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