Recently, I had the chance to speak with Sam, the guitarist, vocalist, and sometimes key striker for the local Grunge act "The Mouth-Boat. After hearing of this band, I had to find out for myself what it is that makes this band tick. Here is part of our discussion:
VINCE: How did this particular band start up?
SAM: I am a pretty stressed-out, anxious guy in general, and I never really had an outlet to let any of that out. Plus, I hadn't been in a band in a few years, and I was getting really antsy to start something up. I decided to start a grunge band, initially, with Goldwyn (drums) and Jon somehow ended up being recruited to play bass. I'd played in bands with each of them in the past, and we're all friends, so it meshed well...and gave me the opportunity to beat the fuck out of a guitar and scream my head off at the same time. It's pretty good stress release. After a couple of attempts at Nirvana and Mudhoney covers, we dropped the grunge thing and started writing our own stuff, which turned out to be really weird, and a lot more aggressive than any of us expected. We're all pretty quiet, so I think people are often surprised at how loud the band is.
VINCE: What are you major influences?
SAM: It's REALLY varied. Goldwyn and I originally got the idea to start the band because of a mutual love and nostalgia for the early-90s Seattle stuff we loved in junior high, but we had progressed onto radically different stuff in the 10 years or so since. I'm heavily into reggae, dub and soul, Goldwyn listens to a lot of indie rock and weird noise stuff, and Jon tends toward really chilled-out, groove-heavy music. A lot of the influences, though, were kind of discovered in a backward way. We'd be playing a song and we'd sort of realize hey, this sounds like Fugazi or Helmet or something, even though that wasn't the original influence behind the song. People who have heard us have made comparisons to bands like Sonic Youth, Mudhoney and the Minutemen – all of whom have influenced at least one of us (I'm a big Mudhoney fan) – but we haven't realized it until people brought it up. Big Black is also a huge influence on me, particularly. We all sort of discovered free jazz around the same time, and we definitely owe a debt to Sun Ra. The Sun Ra influence can definitely be heard on a lot of our noisier songs, and especially in my ridiculous piano playing.
VINCE: What sets your style apart from everything else that's out there?
SAM:I guess we're different in the sense that we don't write conventionally-structured songs. With a few exceptions, we don't really have hooks in our songs, and a lot of our stuff is pretty open-ended as far as improvisation is concerned...kind of like a jam band, but with a focus on making hideously discordant noise. Also, I think our lyrics are pretty weird. They're obscure, but not in a lame "I'm trying to be artistic" kind of way. Usually I'll just sing whatever comes into my head on the spot, so there's very rarely any kind of rhyme scheme or even much of a structure to them...just sort of "here's some words. Stick 'em in here." That kind of lyric writing tends to work well with the looseness of our songs. If we decide to go off in a weird direction, we don't have to worry about fitting the lyrics into any kind of new pattern, because the lyrics are just another piece of the overall sound, rather than something more important. Also, I have to give credit to the other guys here, because although I've been playing guitar for a long time now, I'm not that good from a technical standpoint. A lot of what I play in the Mouth-Boat is just straight-up noise, so I need to rely on Jon and Goldwyn to keep things melodic and keep things on track. A few people have called our music bouncy and dancy, and that's entirely due to the rhythm section. I basically do all I can to destroy the songs, while they keep everything musically interesting. If they weren't so solid on their instruments, it would just be a huge mess.
Plus, we have a giant robot mascot.
VINCE: Some of your music is short, sweet, and to the point...is that the point?
SAM: It's not on purpose. We just like to play fast, and we don't see any reason to waste people's time. I work as a reporter, so I'm used to writing things concisely, without any superfluous information, so that probably contributes...but for the most part, our songs have a lot of changes in them and are, at times, fairly involved, but we just play as fast as possible. Brevity is the soul of wit, as they say. On my end, a lot of the quickness comes from listening to bands like Big Black.
VINCE: What is the band doing in the next 6 months?
SAM: We're recording a second tape in the very near future. We already have one out, and there's really no reason to wait around before doing another one. That's kind of the plan – as soon as we have new songs, we'll put 'em to tape. That's cassette only. I'm a pretty serious record collector, and I've never been fond of CDs. I love cassettes, though, so I'm hoping we can encourage kids who like our music to dig up their old tape decks and put them to use again, because we have no plans to release anything on CD. Eventually, we'd like to do a 7", but we need to raise a lot of money before we can even consider it. So far, we've been releasing things independently...it's all DIY. A good friend of ours has been handling the cover art and our show posters (plus she made the big "Everything Is Happening" flag we hang behind the drums at shows), and the tapes are all dubbed manually and everything is put together, photocopied, cut out, folded, etc. by us. We have recently been in talks with a DIY label in Finland (Shitsuck Records) that has a similar setup as far as tapes are concerned, so they'll be releasing a combination of our previous tape (Everybody Shimmy!) and the new one we're working on now...so the Mouth-Boat will have music available in Scandinavia, which is pretty cool. We're also looking to do as many shows as possible, and to perfect our stage show. We have a lot of props, and it's going to take a lot of work to avoid looking jumbled on stage.
