since i seem to be getting a lot of visitors these past few days, i guess maybe i’ll give you kids a little treat. i’ll whet your appetite for the book by sharing a snippet of the jeff mueller interview. it’s about 10 pages long so far and i’ve only done the first 45 minutes of a 3 hour interview. so far i think the title is going to be “skimping on the tab with jeff mueller” this is your reward for actually showing you care about a stupid fool like me.
JM: So you were in Louisville for two or three days… How was Tim?
EL: Tim… Tim was kind of cool…
JM: Was he kind of quiet.
EL: [nervous laughter] Yeah a little…
JM: Yeah!!!
[laughter]
EL: I mea- I didn’t… I was skirting around saying that. But what I heard from everyone who knew him was that he was a great guy, a fun guy, a lot of fun… And I went over to his house and like, I was sitting there ringing the bell and no one answered, he comes downstairs kind of quietly and wispy you know, he’s kind of floating through the house… We went upstairs and sat in his studio and we spoke for maybe forty minutes and it was just like… long pauses and really thought out– but short — answers.
JM: Yeah, yeah.
EL: So… it was totally cool to meet him but at the same time I was begging for something good.
JM: Yeah I know. For me, he’s one of my favorite people in Louisville. You know, we rarely see each other. We lived together for a few years.
EL: Stephen probably gave the best interview because he’s…
JM: He’s a journalist.
EL: Yeah, he knew what I was looking for, he’s been involved with the culture for so long.
JM: He really means well. He does a lot of positive stuff for the city. His energy… and trying to pursue positive things. He tries to write about things he really believes in, in a way that’s…
EL: He’s very passionate
JM: Sometimes some of his writing is like, “Oh my God dude, you need to relax.” You know? A review or an article or something that doesn’t have an ounce of shittiness? Or… I’m skeptical of a review that’s full of shit without a shred of positivity? I read some things and I’m like, “Do you just hate this so much? Why are you writing about it if you hate it so much?” [laughter]
EL: When I was waiting for him I picked up this weeks edition and I was reading it and there was like, he wrote a couple things and it was so transparent what he liked and didn’t like and the language was vastly different from one piece to the next.
JM: Yeah
EL: You could tell that maybe it’s his prerogative as a journalist.
JM: Fortunately for us he writes pretty favorable things about us. Some better than others.
EL: He said he really loved talking to Jason when he did the five questions.
JM: Oh yeah. Jason said one of the… Did you happen to see it?
EL: No, but I have a copy in my car. He gave me like 10 back issues to read.
JM: Jason said one of the most intensely harsh things in any interview — the biggest bummer — oh, God… But so poignant and completely direct? The fifth question was,”Is there anything you want to talk about preceding the Kentucky Derby events that are about to ensue?” Because, in Louisville…
EL: it’s huge
JM: It’s pretty much this week long massive party where everyone gets shlitzed. It’s just a drunkfest and the natives kind of, bury their heads in the sand it’s so insane. Uh… so Stephen asked this question very pointed like, “Is there anything you want to add?” And Jason said, :Only that we’re at war and I would like everyone to remember that there’s people in Iraq that are dying.”
EL: Wow!
[laughter]
JM: Something to that effect, you know? Because… and all through our tour we try to… Shipping News as an entity tries not to incorporate too much political ideology or content in the music that we write. I mean we’re definitely well, somewhat grounded in what’s happening in the world but at the same time if we have the opportunity to get it in there we’ll try to fit it in… and Jason just hit it so hard [laughter] it was pretty cool.
EL: Were you approached about Forecastle or did they come to you or what?
JM: Actually it was pretty intense how we… We’re not a very pursuant band. We don’t normally go after a lot of shows or things like that. Our shows are so spotty? Uh, and often people will have to write to us continually in order to get us to even respond. For the past three years Kyle’s dad has been sick, and he just passed away like two weeks ago, but um, for the Forecastle thing… JK had written to our booking agent four times and to Touch and Go a couple times, and then he wrote to me once and I said, “Well I’ll think about it.” Cause, it seemed like it’s a pretty cool thing.
EL: The only reason I mention it is because it’s so deeply rooted in political activism and talking about Jason’s remark made me remember it.
JM: Nah, it wasn’t like that. It was just being asked to do it and agreeing. I think it’s going to be cool and great to play it.
EL: In your time growing up in Louisville, what was the experience like? The generation that’s there now seems to revere a lot of those bands dating back to Crain and Rodan and Slint… so I was wondering what it was like back in that era?
JM: I suppose at the frontend of Slint, and even now, throughout whatever national or international acclaim they’ve garnered, that’s always been a happy aside. Music has been just a means to show myself and my friends and my colleagues what I’m doing. In Louisville, certainly at the end of the 80s and at the beginning of the 90s there was a certain amount of… really frenzied energy when everyone was doing something and it wasn’t really about getting out of the city as much as it was about doing stuff in the city. Kind of like: Louisville exists in a place where it’s three or four hundred miles away from any other major music area. So we kind of lived in that. On that island. And, I think that has carried through to where we are now, because that style of working, it’s not really about getting good or bad press or about having a big or small audience, it’s about just continuing and existing. So before I was involved in music and I was going to see music, Crain was probably the most influential band for me. Cause I lived with John and Tim and they practiced in my house. Being there and seeing that happen was such an inspiration for me. Seeing them work, practice, three or four hours a day three days a week or four days a week, working really hard to make something solid or good was a really positive experience for me as far as exploring my own creativity. And that holds true for, bigger than a handful of other bands kind of brewing at the same time. And you know, Slint is Slint. It’s a three-legged monster that kind of rambles on and on and on and on. One of my favorite bands and another enigmatic subterranean creature. Them being somewhat friends of mine, I had that version as my inspiration as well. It’s like, well here’s this band [Slint] doing all this stuff that I never see and that’s making all these things that I feel really positive and good about… and then there’s this band Crain working all the time and I get to see the process… But yeah really more than anything at the onset of music for me it was just about watching everyone else do stuff.
EL: And that pretty much inspired you to start with Rodan?
JM: Yeah! Rodan was a rap band before it was a rock band. We were a rap band who was trying to make it rock. It had no element of rap whatsoever. We were recording and like, we had a Portastudio Tascam 8-track MK2 cassette deck that we recorded all these rap songs on and um, [laughter] we thought, “What are we going to do with this?” you know? We can’t really play this music… [laughter] because it’s completely insane and completely unrehearsed. It was like a collage of stuff and then when we tried to make it live we were like a totally different thing. Vibrant and powerful, I suppose. We let it become what it was.
