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Music Preview: Who's next? How about the Mooney Suzuki

Friday, March 21, 2003
By Ed Masley, Post-Gazette Pop Music Critic 

The Mooney Suzuki -- Mike Miles, Graham Tyler, Sammy
James Jr. and Augie Wilson -- write music for mods.

When Sammy James Jr. was putting the Mooney Suzuki
together back in early '97, he had no way of knowing a
new generation was about to learn that rock 'n' roll
could rock with the abandon of his favorite band, The
Who.

And had he known, he says, he never would have rocked
the way he does.

"We started doing it," he says, "to differentiate
ourselves from everything else that was going on. We
didn't want to be an East Village band that, you know,
was indie-rock but had a little bit of electronic hip
and had a Built By Wendy guitar strap and just a
little bit of everything. We thought it was this
sloppy unfocused morass of mediocrity that was going
on and our response to that was to do something to
distinguish ourselves from everything else. So
obviously, if we thought that within five years it
would be what was the norm, we would have done
something else."

So is he disappointed, then, to see his own "Electric
Sweat" get picked by a major in the wake of all the
hype surrounding the rock 'n' roll revival of the
bands whose names begin with "The" and end in "s"?

We never said the dude was stupid.

"Not at all," he says. "Because the hype will go away
and we'll still do what we like to do. I love making
music. I love performing. We love having the band as a
creative outlet for everything that we do, whether
it's performance or visual arts or music. And whatever
creative field you're in, if you're gonna endure a
career over your lifetime, sometimes what you're doing
is going to be in the mainstream, sometimes it isn't.
If you love what you do, it shouldn't make a
difference."

Carrying on a tradition you could trace back -- with
the music on "Electric Sweat" -- to the British
Invasion, the men of The Mooney Suzuki met at
art-school. 

Different art schools, but the point remains.

And that experience has shaped the band as much as
"Live at Leeds" has shaped the huge guitar sound on
"Electric Sweat."

"We've always looked at the band less as a band," he
says, "and more as an art project of a band.
Everything we do is very deliberate and thought-out
and planned. I didn't start writing songs until I
learned about composition visually at art school. I
always played guitar and tried to learn songs that I
liked and tried to come up with riffs and stuff, but
actually putting a song together didn't come to me
until I learned visual composition in art school and
applied it. Then, I started thinking of ideas like
motion and context in a musical sense. That's how
we've always approached the band, like a
performance-art re-creation of a rock band."

They even studied concert footage, both their own and
all their favorite bands.

"We'd tape our shows and watch it and be like 'OK,
that [isn't very good], you can't do that anymore. Oh,
that's awesome, you have to do that some more.' And
you know, we'd watch movies together -- 'The Kids Are
Alright' or 'Let There Be Rock' or any of those Jimi
Hendrix documentaries and just be like 'That's
awesome, somebody's got to do that tonight!' I mean,
we're fans and our band is a way for us to celebrate
what we love about what we love."

And part of what they love is imperfection. James
re-recorded a solo on "Electric Sweat," in fact, when
he realized there were no wrong notes.

"Well," he says, "you'll have an L.A. session
guitarist who'll record something and do punch-ins
endlessly to get that sweet note, the sweet spot of
that bend to that lick that they're trying to do ...
and it's just your definition of what sweet is." 

Imperfect though they were, at first, they had some
trouble getting booked.

As James recalls, "We couldn't get a show at a regular
rock venue, at the bars and clubs that indie-rock
bands and everything else that was going on were
getting shows at. But we started playing this mod
night -- this '60s pop night in New York. And mostly,
they'd play records and they'd have one or two bands
play. And at the time, you could only get one or two
bands doing that kind of music to play. We used to
play it a couple times a month. We couldn't get a gig
at the Black Cat in D.C. or the Middle East in Boston,
but both of those cities, we learned, also had mod
nights and because the mod community was in touch with
each other, you would switch gigs with the other mod
bands on the other mod nights and we'd go up and play
some bar in Boston where the mod kids were having a
fashion show and had a DJ and wanted to bring a mod
band from New York and we'd do the same thing in New
York, bring Boston bands down. And that's how we
started touring up and down the East Coast."

How mod is it, though?

"This used to be a main topic for interviews when we
first started off," he says. "And I mean, if you're
talking about the mod movement of the '60s, certainly,
we draw a lot on the same musical inspiration from
both what the original mods were listening to, which
was American R&B and soul, and the original mod bands
-- The Who, the Kinks, the Rolling Stones and what
have you. So certainly, British Invasion guitar music
and American rhythm and blues and soul is a huge
influence on us, so in that instance, you could get
away with saying there's a mod element to what we do.
But on the other side of the coin, we wear leather
jackets, and that's not very mod. That's more a rocker
thing."

It's also more a "Live at Leeds" thing than an early
Who-on-mod thing -- on "Electric Sweat" at least.

" 'Live at Leeds' was a definite reference point for a
lot of the stuff we did on 'Electric Sweat' because I
had gotten these Orange amplifiers and they had such a
huge sound that we were thinking of an outdoor
festival vibe for a lot of the album," he says. "But
yeah, I love most eras of The Who. And we have a lot
of material that was more that poppy jangly early Who
stuff. That's more kind of where we were at in '98
when we were playing primarily those mod clubs. It's
funny because I was writing music for the audience. I
was thinking 'Well, alright, these kids dress like
they walked out of 'Quadrophenia' and want to listen
to a band that sounds like The Who,' which happens to
be the band that was the reason I started playing
guitar. But then, you read about The Who and that was
exactly what they did, too. They deliberately created
music for that audience. So it's kind of like a double
way of emulating The Who."

Considering the bands they choose to emulate, it's
more than just a little odd that The Mooney Suzuki is
a reference to Malcolm Mooney and Damo Suzuki of Can,
a German electronic group.

But James is a fan. And the name is a joke. Or was a
joke.

"It started as a joke," he says, "when the band wasn't
really what it is and I was just kind of playing
around with whoever would learn some of my songs and
do a show. And we were coming up with various names
and I'm a big Can fan so we named it that for a little
while and before you knew it, clubs that didn't return
my phone calls would call me up and say 'Hey, are you
guys the Can band? Do you want to play?' And we were
getting write-ups in Time Out New York. When you're
struggling to get rolling in New York, you want to
take whatever advantage you can and so if you're gonna
get extra opportunities and extra acknowledgments just
because of the name. ..."

Of course, they also got abuse.

With a laugh, he says, "People would come to the show
just to tell us they thought our name [was really
bad]. I was like, 'OK, you know ... you paid to get
in.' "

For those who were thinking of paying to get in
tonight, consider this advance warning from James. He
recently told a reporter that fans "can expect to be
buying a new wig chin strap because at the show their
wig is going to launch off and rip the wig strap into
shreds."

And that, my friend, is rock 'n' roll.


=====
-Brian in Atlanta
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http://www.thewhothismonth.com
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